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book as this: a few months ago, however, I tore them up, as they were not 
wholesome literature, and perhaps I should have been flogging a dead horse 
in laying bare to the public this awful accumulation of Cant, when I knew such 
cant to be as strongly condemned as I can condemn it by missionaries of old 
standing, and when I began to see so many signs of its rapid disappearance. 
Missionary work in British Central Africa, believe me, has only to tell the plain 
truth and nothing but the truth to secure sympathy and support. Let the 
societies cease to humbug the people, let them tell frankly of their trials, their 
sorrows, their disappointments, as well as of their successes, and the sympathy 
created by the truthful picture which will then be rendered of the great struggle 
against spiritual darkness and savagery will be far stronger than the limited 
support which is accorded in sectarian circles, when the vulgarest and coarsest 
instincts of the unlettered Christian are appealed to by the aid of stupid 
falsehoods, lies of that worst kind which are usually founded on a substratum 
of truth. 
The second complaint against missionaries is on the score of their arrogant 
demeanour. Some of the average European pioneers are not, I am sorry to 
say, very creditable specimens of mankind. They are aggressively ungodly, 
they put no check on their lusts; released from the restraints of civilisation and 
the terror of “ what people may say,” they are capable of almost any degree of 
wickedness ; but the missionary is too apt to assume that all new Europeans 
with whom he comes in contact are of this class, and that because they do not 
belong to a mission they are necessarily wicked men ; and he shows this so 
plainly in his manner that the result is naturally a reciprocal suspicion and 
dislike on the part of the stranger layman. There is an undoubted tendency 
on the part of missionaries to hold and set forth the opinion that no one ever 
did any good in Africa but themselves. That they have done more good than 
armies, navies, conferences and treaties have yet done, I am prepared to admit ; 
that they have prepared the way for the direct and just rule of European 
Powers and for the extension of sound and honest commerce I have frequently 
asserted ; but they are themselves to some extent only a passing phase, only 
the John-the-Baptists, the forerunners of organized churches and settled social 
politics. It is their belief that they hold an always privileged position, that 
they are never to fit into their proper places in an organized European com¬ 
munity, which causes so much friction between them and the other European 
settlers or lay officials by whom they are gradually being far outnumbered ; nor 
are they always ready to recognise that there is some credit due to the 
missionaries of commerce as well as to the missionaries of religion ; that the 
savage man cannot live decently by faith alone; that he must have something 
to occupy his mind besides religion, and that unless his attention is drawn to 
hard work and to gaining money in an honest manner, “ Satan will find some 
mischief still for his idle hands to do.” 
Now let me leave off preaching and try to give my readers some idea of 
what missionary life is like in Central Africa, always from the point of view 
of the lay traveller and dispassionate investigator. 1 
Try, reader, to imagine yourself in the position of some weary man travelling 
in Central Africa on Government business, or as a pioneer trader, or engaged in 
1 To do this I find myself obliged to quote to some extent from an article on Missionaries which I 
wrote for the Nineteenth Century Review of November, 1887, but which, though ten years old, still gives 
what I believe to be such a faithful general picture of the average missionary home in Central Africa that 
in some passages I find it difficult to describe the same in other language. 
