168 
VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. 
CHAP. YI. 
there is any change in the purpose of the supreme authorities, 
as the following message or order is said to he read every 
fortnight to the troops when assembled on parade at the 
capital. 
(i If any baptize (viz. administer or receive bajitism) I will 
put them to death, saith Ranavalomanjaka; for they change 
the prayers of the twelve kings. Therefore search and spy, 
and if ye find any doing that, man or woman, take them, 
that we may kill them; for I and you will kill them that do 
that, though they be half the people. For to change what 
the ancestors have ordered and done, and to pray to the 
ancestors of the foreigners, not to Andrianampoinemerina, 
and Lehidama, and the idols that sanctified the twelve kings, 
and the twelve mountains that are worshipped; whoever 
changes these observances, I make known to all people, I 
will kill, saith Ranavalomanjaka.” 
The reference made to the usages ordained by their an¬ 
cestors, and to the praying to the ancestors of the foreigners, 
explains to a great extent the grounds on which the abandon¬ 
ment of the religion of the country, and adopting the Christian 
faith, are regarded by the Malagasy as crimes of the greatest 
magnitude. Their own religious creeds teach them to regard 
the spirits of the earliest ancestors of their rulers as among 
the chief objects of religious homage, and hence also a sort 
of sacredness is supposed to belong to the reigning monarch 
as descended from their gods. In most of the public speeches 
to which I listened the sacredness of the queen’s person was 
declared, and she was represented as exercising power over 
life and property by virtue of such descent and supposed 
sacredness. Thus their ideas of religion add a sort of sanctity 
to their loyalty. And as they infer that the religion of 
Christian nations rests upon a basis similar to their own, it 
is asserted, and probably believed by many, that the su¬ 
preme objects of Christian worship were the ancestors of the 
