»t4lA THE UNIVERSITIES' MISSION 3U TO CENTRAL AFRICA. DELIYEEED AT OXFOKD, By EDWARD STEEEE, LL.D., MISSIONARY BISHOP. LONDON: HARRISON, 5 9, PALL MALL, rioohsflltr to cT^e Qurrn anb i.^J. ^t prince of J®alts. 1875. THE UKIYERSITIES' MISSION TO CENTRAL AFRICA. Tt sometimes happens, that somethmg we have never seriously thought about suddenly presents itself to oui* minds as an old duty long neglected. Some such feehng flashed across many minds Avhen Dr. Livingstone came home from his first long jom*ney, and told us that all the southern part of Central Aiiica, about which we had known nothing and cared nothing, was really the home of many nations, sittmg still in darkness thi'ough our neglect. He laid his great discoveries before us as a nation and a Church, and specially before our Univer- sities, concluding his great speech at Cambridge with the prophecy of himself — so lately fulfiUed — that he should return to Africa, wliich he had made his second home, and die there while still engaged in his great work of discovery, leaving it, as he said, to the Enghsh Church as represented by her Universities to see that the door he had opened for Christianity and for civihzation should never again be shut. Tt was impossible to resist such an appeal, and so it was determmed to send out a mission as worthy as possible of the senders. Missions had till then, as a rule, grown up out of individual interests, and so we had seen them first planted as Congregational bodies, dependent merely upon the inchnations of those who found the funds, expanding after awhile into something of a Pres- byterian system, and when so large that we were ashamed a2 to leave them without fall organization, crowned at last with an Episcopate. It was clear enough that in Apostolic times the Apostles themselves Avere the great preachers, and they ordained assistants for themselves as need arose. Our own home theory has changed within memory. We think of a bishop now as the pastor of liis diocese ; he used to be thought of as the ruler of his clergy. On the theory of fifty years ago, he was the last wanted thing in the diocese ; according to Apostolic doctrine he was the first. So it was determined that this Mission should bcp 5 Rev. C. Alington, made the same offer, and so we set out. We went by mail to Cape Town, and luckily found a man-of-war going up the coast, which landed us at the mouth of the Zambezi. There we met worse news still. Another clergyman and the surgeon of the Mission had died, and the rest were all ill. Dr. Livingstone's party had fared no better. The Doctor himself was dangerously ill ; and Mr. Charles Livingstone and Dr. Kirk were gone down to Kilimane with a party of other invalids, including one from the Mission. As we Avent up we found Mr. Proctor so ill that I thought, when I saw him, that he could never have reached England ; and Mr. Rowley had orders from Dr. Mellor to leave the country without delay. Thus the first Mission party had melted away and disappeared like water poured on sand. It was clear that, Avithout great care, no Mission could hope to maintain itself. The first necessity for a missionary is, that he should live ; and it had been proved abundantly that that might be difficult. It was far, however, from being the only difficulty. When Dr. Livingstone fii'st visited the country south- east of the Lake Nyassa, he found it densely peopled by men who had many of the arts which go with ci^dlization flourishing among them. They smelted then own iron- stone and made their own tools and weapons ; their pottery was useful and its forms often elegant ; they grew then own cotton and wove their own cloth ; their baskets were so good that they habitually carried then- native beer in them. It seemed that they wanted little to make them worthy members of our great community. When we arrived in the River Shhe all was changed. Roughly speaking, we found there no people and no food. War and famine had swept over the country, mauy were dead, many had sought a refuge elsewhere ; some had died by violence, some had been carried away as slaves. The few people who remained would have welcomed us for our own sakes, but very decidedly objected to our eating up any part of their little stock of food. Already the Mission had suffered severely for want of communication, and now the only means of communication with our depot at Cape Town — the men-of-war calling at the mouth of the Zambezi — ^had ceased. It was very clear that Cape Town, some three thousand miles away, with no means of transport to or from it, would not do as our point of support ; we must either tln-ow ourselves entirely upon the Portuguese, who were already beginning to make spoil of us, or we must altogether reconsider our position. One asked oneself naturally where do these people get their European goods from? where are the merchants, who could send us supplies in the ordinary course of their trade ? We then heard, almost for the first time, of Zanzibar. The Portuguese settlers supplied none but their imme- diate neighbours, not even the people on the Upper Shire; all the rest of tropical Africa goes to Zanzibar. More and more the conviction grew upon us that the heart of Africa was to be found there. Now all the world has found it out, but when we first heard of it its trade was a secret in the hands of a few American and German merchants. Dr. Livingstone had fondly hoped that the Zambezi might become a great highway of commerce ; and so, in spite of its dangerous bars, it may some day be. When it is, we shall hope to use it, but meanwhile we had to go elsewhere. Bishop Tozer was unwilhng either to leave the Shire without an effort, or to plunge into an untried country difficult of access, where he might destroy the last hopes of the Mission by settling his party in some spot, which should promise health and give disease. We made our experiment on the Marumbala Mountain, where we found a freshness that seemed like a breath from home, and yet after awhile all the old African sicknesses began to fasten upon us. At last he determined to make his way to Zanzibar, and renew the attack from thence. Let us pass in review some of the difficulties a Mission such as ours has to encounter. In the first place, we had no guide to the languages of the people with whom we had to deal. Many people think of going out to preach to •the heathen, without at all considering the long, long study, and the many, many blundering efforts they must make "before they will be able to say any thing at all that the people they go to will understand. There are many who never really master the language, and therefore can never do their work as it should be done. In a new country the difficulty is so much the greater as grammars and dictionaries would have made it less. Many can learn by the help of books who would have made but little way without them. The chmate and its dangers were known to us only too well, and if a Missionary cannot hope to five long enough to be able to speak the language clearly, how can the work go on? The wisest counsel seemed to be to give our first attention to the effort to tram up native workers, to whom the climate, if not congenial, would not be deadly, who could live in the houses and subsist on the food everywhere procurable, and who could speak to the people not only in their own language, but accordmg to their own modes of thought- — a matter of great importance and scarcely ever within the ability of any foreigner. Another difficulty which had led us to seek for some accessible base of operations hes in the fluctuating, uncer- tain state of everything African. People gather round a chief who is able to protect them, he dies and they are scattered. A marauding tribe sweeps over a broad stretch of country and for the time it hes waste. Two years of drought will depopulate any district. Constant petty wars and the slave trade, which is both their effect and cause, render everything unsafe and uncertain. No one dares to save lest he invite a plunderer ; no one can tell whether he shall reap his crop, whether he shall be allowed to eat it, whether he may not lose his home and family, whether he 8 himself may not be made merchandise of, and forced to march away for hundreds of weary miles to be sold at last to men of another speech and colour, where everything will be strange to him, and his master will regard him as a mere beast of burden. One effect of all this is that when the harvest is got in, all feast upon it and expect to starve a httle before the next is ready ; if rain is scanty and no harvest comes, they must either die, or scatter away to look for food elsewhere. Then as to the slave-trade — when a trader comes to a village, the chief wishes for his calico, his beads and his gunpowder, how is he to get them ? If he has ivory, well and good, but probably he has none. What he does is to look round for a village with which he has an old feud (and there are sure to be plenty such), and then if he is strong enough he sets upon it and plunders and bmms it, and hands over some of the captives as the purchase money for what he wants. If he dare not attack his neighbours he sells some of his ov/n people, and the heads of families claim and exercise the right of selling their members. It is not true that there are caravans fitted out for the ex- press purpose of slave hunting. The Arabs say that the Turks and Egyptians do send them, but, however that may be, the Arabs do not. They generally travel, how- ever, with a large party, and carry arms to defend them- selves. They thus become a power among the petty chiefs, who sometimes hire them, and sometimes in effect compel them, to take part in their wars, and there is httle a trader can carry away in payment except slaves. When you add that many of the traders and their followers are quite ready to kidnap any people, and especially any children they may meet with at a distance from immediate help, one can see how slave-gangs come to get formed. A slave may often be bought in the interior for two yards of calico, when he reaches the coast he is worth perhaps five pounds, if he can be got to Arabia he will sell for fifty. No wonder that the trade is pursued eagerly, and therefore no wonder that petty wars are rife every- where in Africa, and that regular commerce can scarcely find room to develop itself. When we found ourselves at Zanzibar we saw the out- come of this trade, and how its victims reach the end of their jom-ney. It is impossible to exaggerate the evil things done on the journey, and the waste of life seems all but incredible. Nor is it ended when the coast is reached, for one slavedealer told me himself that he had had on the coast a caravan of two hundred, which all died before they found a purchaser. Indeed, when one used to see a cargo of slaves landed, it often seemed more wonder- ful that any should survive rather than that all should perish. No sight could fill one with a greater horror of the slave-trade than to see those poor broken creatures, scarcely able to walk, and some even left at the Custom House until it should be seen whether it w^as possible for them to recover before the dealer would pay the duty for them. Now, thank God, these scenes are to be seen no longer, but they w^ere of daily occurrence Avhen we first found ourselves at Zanzibar. But in this very evil God brought to us our oppor- tunity. We thought to train up young Africans to be the teachers of their countrymen, but what African w^ould trust his child to a European ? In Africa, everything bad is white, just as it is black in England. Every w^ord one says is looked upon wdth suspicion. The more one pro- fesses benevolent intentions, the less one word of it is believed. So settled is the belief that white men must be selfish and treacherous, that sometimes the thought comes over one — is it possible to do anything for people who seem incapable of understanding that there can be such a thing as real goodness ? But w^hen one thinks more deeply, one sees that such a prejudice arises not from ignorance but from knowledge. A3 10 It is not that they have never seen white men, or Enghsh- men, but that they have. But what have they seen ? First, there came the Portuguese, who swept the country of ever}' thing they thought worth the carrying away. After them came people little thought of here, but very well remembered there — the English pirates, who came to prey upon the Portuguese commerce, and they left no honourable memory of Englishmen and Christians. After them again came slave-dealers of every nation, and the most eager of them our own countrymen, all professing the utmost benevolence, seeking only to get the people, and most of all their children, into their power, and then they fastened them below and sailed away. When one thinks over all this, so far from the suspicions one is received with being a reason for abandoning our work, they are in themselves the strongest reason for perse- verance. Here is an evil name that has been most justly earned, a long series of evil doings which have to be atoned for. Surely an Englishman and a Christian cannot rest under such a burden as this. What one can do is to assist to wipe out these reproaches, and to show these nations that all Englishmen are not either pirates or slave-traders, and that Christianity is something better than a hollow name. What if one life and another should be lost in the endeavour ? How many African lives have been lost that English planters might gather fortunes and found families ? We may surely spare one for a thousand of our victims. Only on the spot could we truly estimate the work and feel its sore necessity. Here was a work for us to do to live down these suspicions of our motives, and we have done it. Now our Government had had for many years a treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar forbidding the export of slaves to Arabia, and English men-of-war were cruising on the coast to intercept the slaving vessels. The traders' usual course was to take a pass to some place within the Sultan's 11 own dominions, and pay the customs duties, and make a present to the Sultan's favourite to prevent awkward enquiries, and then showing the pass so long as it was of any use, they made the best of their way to Arabia. But sometimes the trader was too greedy to pay the customs, and sometimes, instead of buying the slaves ho stole them, and then the Sultan remembered his treaty with the Enghsh, and seized and burnt the vessel, and took the slaves and divided them as presents among his friends. Now, just this happened when Bishop Tozer first arrived in Zanzibar. The Sultan had seized a dhow, and Colonel Playfair, the then Consul and a good friend of our Mission, suggested to him that it would be a graceful act to give some of the boys into the charge of the Bishop, who had just been to pay him a complimentary visit. So he gave us five boys. These were the begiiming of our Zanzibar schools. Now, if you can imagine yourself standing opposite to five little black boys, with no clothing save the narrowest possible sti-ip of calico rormd their middles, with their hands clasped round their necks, looking up into your face with an expression of utter apprehension that some- thing much more dreadfal than even they had experienced, would surely come upon them, now that they had fallen into the hands of the dreaded white men, you will feel our work somewhat as we felt it. And then, hoAV are you to speak, or they to answer? You have not one word in common. Yet these are the Missionaries of the future. When one tells his friends in England, that our plan is to educate native Missionaries, people say, it is a very good plan, and no doubt in a few years we shall see great results. But when you come to begin with the actual pupils, you will see that it is not a work of a few years, but rather, as life is in AMca, of several hfe times. So, having no other way at hand, we began to teach them their EngUsh alphabet, and to read our common school reading cards. We found them sharp enough, and soon 12 began to make some way towards a mutual understanding. Then we added others from vessels taken by the EngHsh men-of-war, and a few brought to us by then friends. Our plan was not to bring in such numbers as that we might be overwhelmed by a mass of heathenism, but to try to give a Christian tone to our first scholars, and then to bring in a few, time after time, so that they might catch the rising spirit. Thus our school grew on, and soon we were joined by some Jady helpers, and a girls' school was formed after the same manner. It was not long before even the natives perceived, that our boys had an air and a bearing such as their old companions never had. It was their Christianity beginning even so soon to show itself, as sound religion must, in their ordinary speech and bearing. We had taught our children that white men might sometimes be trusted. They have told us since that their impression was, the first night they spent in our house, that they were meant to be eaten. And so the town thought generally. But some four or five years after, several boys came to us in the same way from the Sultan, and they told us that they had often seen us walk- ing with our boys, and longed that some accident might give them a place amongst us. So we had done something to redeem our English character. Thus we went forward with our work, and you will understand how it was that the year or so I had volun- eered for grew to six, before I fomid himself at liberty to return. But then I brought home a grammar and dic- tionary of the language, and several parts of the Bible translated, and other helps in our work, that they might be printed in England —for the language was my part of the work, as the school was Bishop Tozer's. Every year's experience showed us more and more clearly the advantage of our having chosen Zanzibar as our head-quarters. It is the great meeting-place of India, Arabia and Africa. The Indian trader is impressed by 13 finding here, in full activity, the Christian ]\Iission,s he had heard so much of at home; and he, the moneyed man of the place, is eager that his boys should learn in our schools, and will recommend us to his factors and debtors, which are wherever trade is. Then the Arab, away from his old traditions, deeply impressed with the greatness and general good faith of England, is glad to hear more about the Gospel than he could hear at home ; and I know that many copies of our Scriptmes have gone far away into the interior of Arabia, carried by Arabs as choice presents to their home friends. But the great advantage of our position at Zanzibar is, that what we do there echoes throughout all central Africa. If we had settled only on the Lake Nyassa, our translations would have had a value only for one tribe, and, wherever else we might have gone, we could have done nothing without acquiring a new language. But here we have Avhat is really one of the great languages of the world, known more or less all round the great sweep of the Indian Ocean from Ceylon to Madagascar, and known everywhere in Africa. Dr. Living- stone wrote to me frmn the far interior, that at his furthest point he found it the best means of communication, and I hear that Cameron charmed the merchants on the shores of the Tanganiyika, by readmg to them the Swahili stories printed by our Mission. I hear that there is a plan now to found a mercantile missionary station up the Shire, and that, after eleven years of consideration, our Scotch friends see their way to attempt something. If any one can do it, they can, and it is my earnest wish to do all I can to help them. It would have been madness on our part to have attempted to open the river alone, but noAv it seems as though a new way were really making for us. I can- not hide from myself the many difficulties which have to be overcome. I can only say, that so far as I can help in overcoming them, I shall be heartily glad to do so. Neither Bishop Tozer nor I have ever lost sight of tlie old country, 14 though I should refuse to thhik of our work as limited to any one special spot, when all Africa has to be evange- lized. I only ask you now to remember that " Living- stonia " depends for its hope of success upon its communi- cations through Zanzibar, and has become feasible only by the attention drawn to that great centre of trade by so many circumstances, among which our settlement there has a right to claim a place as one. And so our work went on. Year after year, Bishop Tozer cast longing eyes toAvards the far interior, and planned journey after journey which were not to be. We were urged by people at home to go off to the " healthy highlands" which exist in people's imaginations, and, so far as experience goes, nowhere in Africa. If we could only have found them, we should never have stayed a day any where else. We made and have maintained one experi- ment among the mountains which come down to the coast nearly opposite Pemba, where there are no swamps and should be no malaria, and the higher ranges, with their broken covered swells, reminded Mr. Ahugton of the Scotch hills more than of anything else he *had seen. There, as far up as we were allowed to go, he planted our station at Magila. It has been maintained as well as the men we had to send have been able to maintain it ; it has been surrounded, but not touched by wars, much has been pre- pared, and seed has been sown in many hearts ; so soon as I return, we shall put fresh vigour into our work and hope for the harvest. But these years were the deadest time in the late history of our English Missions, few volun- teered, and climate and overwork, and perhaps somewhat of inexperience and imprudence, claimed remorselessly their victims. The cholera came down upoj) Zanzibar and swept away, as it is said, ten thousand of the townspeople. It was a time of intense anxiety. Mr. Fraser, the most saintly perhaps of all our helpers, under whose care Magila was showing fair fruit, was taken from us by it. The 15 most able of our native scholars (George Farajallah) died, and the constant care and watching, redoubled, when after ha^dng seemingly left the town, the cholera doubled on its old track and returned, told very severely upon Bishop Tozer's already enfeebled health. It was then that I resolved to go out again, and this time I resigned my English living, and rejoined Bishop Tozer just before our second great calamity, the hurricane. We are out of the ordinary line of hurricanes, they seldom come at all so near the equator, and in Zanzibar none had been ever heard of. However, one came, before the ship that had taken out Miss Tozer and myself returned, and left that ship the only floating thing in the harbour. A hundred and fifty native vessels, many of them loaded ready for then* voyage to Bombay, w^ere broken up into splinters. All the Sultan's fleet were w^recked, the Euro- pean ships were all driven on shore, and one German vessel disppeared wdth all her crew. The poorer houses in the town were all blown and washed down, our own houses lost then- top roofs, and had most of the windows blown away, the sea walls, which protected the front of the houses in the town, were all blown down : while in the country, the clove trees, the chief source of wealth, were aU kiljed, and for other trees, we had on our land at Mibweni (300 cocoa-nut trees the day before the hurricane, and 19 only the day after. Then followed a period of great depression. All the Europeans fell ill ; I had myself the worst attack of fever I have ever experienced; our children were so sickly that we lost in that one year as many as in all the nine before it, even including the cholera. Bishop Tozer's health broke; down altogether, and Mr. Pennell died. It seemed as though we were come to the last extremity. Little by little, however, we began to revive, and then came the event which will be a turning point, not only in the history of our mission, but in that of East Africa — I u mean the embassy of Sir Bartle Frere. England had heard of what Livingstone had seen, and so many others had described, and the nation was moved to do something. At the first the Arabs refused to make any change. As they put it, their fathers had had slaves, and their grand- fathers had had slaves, and Ishmael had slaves, and Abraham had slaves, and society was inconceivable without them ; so there must be slaves, and if so there must be a slave trade. The Sultan, as we call him, holds no legal position in the state, but is merely the strongest chief, who repre- sents the whole body to the outer world so long as he does not offend his great men ; so that, as he truly said, without their consent he could do nothing. So Sir Bartle left the work to another messenger — the English Admiral — who came down with six men-of-war, and the French sent two, and the Americans one, to show that we were all of a mind. And then the Arabs had another meeting, and looked out upon the ships, and some said they would go back to Arabia, but at last they agreed it would be best to sign anything the English wanted ; so the treaty was signed. It put an end to all juggling with passes, by forbidding all carriage of slaves by sea, and it ordered the closing of all the open slave markets in the coast towns. Thus a very heavy blow was dealt to the slave trade in East Africa ; what its whole effects may be we have not yet had time to see, but they are great already. Sir Bartle Frere did not confine himself to his negotia- tions with the Arabs, but he examined the country for him- self; and, amongst other things, he came and looked over our establishments. He found our boys and girls growing up, and some of them already teaching their fellow Africans (two are at this moment acting as chaplains at our two great schools). Some of them were working our printing- press, which was then issuing a set of Swahili school books, some at work as carpenters, some at work on the land, and some gone out to places in the town. He 17 Avatclied them at their play, and saw how joyful and Enghsh-like their play was. He found, too, that we had smoothed the way for any European to speak and write Swahili, the great coast language, both readily and cor- rectly. We printed for him some of the papers he required, and he told us that, so far from having any cause for de- pression, we had good reason to be proud of what God had enabled us to do. Thus new heart came into us. But then, when one feels that one has done something, there naturally arises a longing to do more. The first thing which suggested itself was the desire to do for the adult slaves what we had been doing for the children. Now the Arabs say of our efforts to suppress the slave trade, that we are in want of hands for our sugar plantations at Natal and Mauritius, and, being strong at sea, we find it the cheapest plan to take then- slaves and send them to work for our planters. What is done, is far too much of tliis sort; to take an Afi'icanaway to a strange country and apprentice him for a term of years to an Englishman, for whom he will be compelled to work much harder than he ever would have worked for an Arab master, is the strangest possible way of giving him his liberty, yet tliis is what we do. It is a reproach to our Enghsh government that we give five pounds a head to the men-of-war's men for every slave seized by them, and then refuse one penny for the benefit of the released people. Children, infu-m, sick, whatever they be, no schools, no refuge, no hospital, not even a temporary allowance, scarcely even food. No wonder the Arabs dis- believe our talk about philanthropy. But what the State will not, the Church must do ; and I should be ashamed to hint even that this Church of England was not rich enough and liberal enough to do all that is required. Many individuals, many congregations, many schools have come forward to help us in om* work for the children by maintaining each one or more of our 18 orphan scholars. In like way for the adults— -we must feed them, and clothe them, and mamtain them until they get strength and heart enough to work for themselves. An Arab always reckons the first year of a new-come slave as a loss. At first body and mind are so broken that there is not strength if there were will, nor will if there were strength. We must teach them to trust us, and we must try to set, not the body only, but the spirit free also. Nothing yet has ever uprooted slavery except Christianity. Nothing else will destroy it in Africa. Nothing else will destroy it in a man's heart. You may knock ofi" his fetters, but ships of war and soldiers can never make him really free. Just as the outward life of an African is full of fear and uncertainty, so his inward life is all fear and uncer- tainty too. The East Coast Africans are not idolaters; they all believe in God, but they think of Him as too great and too far off to care individually for them. Their whole thoughts are full of evil spirits and malicious witch- craft. A man gropes his way through his life, peopling the darkness round him with fearful shapes, and on the continual look-out for some omen, or for some man who, as he supposes, knows more than he does of the invisible world, to give him some faltering guidance. His life is dark, his death is darker still. His friends dare not even let it be known where his body is laid, lest some evil use should be made of it. No man in the whole world has more need of inward strengthening and comfort, and no man in the whole world has less of it. To talk of giving such a man what he wants most, by getting a few years of work out of him, and then sending him adrift among the dregs of a colonial town to die, as he very, very often does prematurely, of some disease engendered by the change of climate, is surely ignorance, or folly, or worse. If, on the other hand, we can give him a new home in his own land, in which his freedom will be assured to him, and he will be taught lovingly to use it as a Christian, 19 and so in the very face of his oppressors to be a living witness of our charity and our faith — a Christian freeman instead of a heathen slave — then we need never fear that our motives ^^dll be misconstrued, or our good intentions perverted. It was with the thought of founding such a home that Bishop Tozer bought our land at Mibweni, and when we began to recover from the effects of the hurricane I bought more; and Mr. West, out of his own means, added more, and we have now the beginnings of our Christian village of freedmen there, not more than fifty perhaps as yet, but waiting only your approval and your liberality to expand into its due proportions. Then again, Avhen we found that the old slave market in Zanzibar, the last in the world, was to be used no longer for its old abominable purpose, for what should it be used? The evil spirit was driven out, what spirit should dwell there? The Enghsh State had done its part, it remained for the Church to do hers. What place could be so appropriate for the preaching of the gospel of liberty as this, where liberty had been so long un- known? So our good friend, West, came forward and purchased it for God. There is now the church, already showing its fair proportions, and the schools already filled with scholars, and the hospital waits only for English alms to build it. We did not begin to raise the material church without laying first the foundations of the true Church. I began my vernacular preaching in the old slave market, and soon the room was filled to overflowing witli listeners, and the tracts and papers we were able to print were eagerly snatched from my hands. Africa is ready, if only England be ready too. Look on the two pictures — rows of men, women, and children, sitting and standing, and salesmen and purchasers passing in and out among them, examinmg them, handling them, chafiering over them, bandying their filthy jokes about them, and worse scenes 20 still going on in all the huts round ; and then, on the same spot, see instead the priest and preacher, the teacher, the physician, the nurse, the children crowding to be taught, the grown men coming to hear of God and Christ, the sick and suffering finding help and health. Look at these two pictures, and is it not a blessed and a glorious change, and is it not worth a life to have made it possible ? But all this is only on the very edge of our work. Bishop Mackenzie's grave is some three hundred miles inland, and he only touched the coast regions. Beyond and beyond lie nation after nation, until the mind is over- whelmed by the vastness of the work before us. How are these nations ever to hear the good news we have to tell them ? The first starting of this Mission seemed a great andertaking, but its scale was altogether inadequate to the work. We want such a Mission to each of the great nations, and why should we not send one? Because Englishmen are poor '? Or are English Churchmen too fewl Be it so, then here are our native scholars — the cheapest and the best helpers that we could have for this work. Some of them are now preaching and catechizing, some are busy in our school work, and many more would be able to help in our inland Mission. My plan is to cut up our work into manageable portions. I think we may take it for certain that we have not to do with broken fragments of tribes, or with little petty groups of people isolated either by distance or by language one from another. There seem to be nations of, it may be, several millions each, speaking the same language and occupying countries which are to be measured by hundreds of miles in either direction. Our East Africans are not nomads, dwelling in a Avilderness or a desert, but settled cultivators who would gladly remain for many generations in one place. Each of these nations ought at last to have its own Church, and its own bishop and clergy. As our pre- paration for this, we propose to send up first a small party 21 of a few men of good judgment, to make acquaintance with the chiefs and look through the country, to find the healthiest, most accessible, and most central spot on which to make our chief settlement. As Africa is now, we shall have to fix the site of the fatm-e cities, as the monks did in England, and the English missionaries in Germany. People will soon gather round us, and, if we choose our place well, there they will remain. First of all we will set up a great central school for the people of that language, and then whilst preachers go out from it to reach every part of the tribe, we will send up, as they can employ them, artificers and workmen who will teach 1he natives all that our civilization can give them. Thus a centre of hght and life will be formed, and from it that whole people may be enhghtened. We have such a centre begun at Magila for the Shambaia. We are forming a party to go up and work amongst the Yaos, the Achawa of the early days of the Mission, who hold now all the country, in which Bishop Mackenzie made his first attempt. Between the Yaos and the coast we have one great nation, the Gmdos, who are for the present altogether disorganized by the ravages of the Maviti. We must try to plant a station amongst them, and then the Zaramos and the Zegulas near the coast, the Nyassas and Bisas on the other side of lake Nyassa, and the various tnbes up to and beyond the Nyamwezis, all and each are ready to receive us, and would gladly have us amongst them. But how is such a work as this to be done ? It is a question which you and I can very well answer if we will. The question is not how — but who will join in it. We have had hitherto four or five workers, we want twenty or thh-ty at the very least. We have raised hitherto some £2,000 a year, we want £10,000 for such work as we ought to do. I do not think that money will be wanting where work is actually doing, but I mean to leave the raismg of money entirely to those in England, who desfre the good of Africa. I 22 have very much more upon my mind than I can well attend to, of actual Mission work. I shall render a full account of how all moneys are spent, and will take care that they are made to go as far as possible ; but I will not accept the post of head collector, or attempt to organize a scheme for supporting the Mission. If we are starved for lack of funds, the fault will lie with those who stay at home, and not with those in Africa. Every one whose heart is touched is, by that very fact, bound to help and gather help. The Propagation Society will receive money for us, and those who write to me in Zanzibar will have an answer. I do not ask people to help me, I ask them to feel the call from God to do something for Africa, and by me, or by any other agency they like, to do it. I know that men and money are wanted for home work, so they are most certainly, and they are already on the spot in abundance. There are five millions of churchgoers in England on the lowest computation, with an income perhaps a hundred times as large. One is utterly ashamed to suggest that these are too few or too poor to do what wants doing in England. But foreign Missions have suf- fered from an utter unreality in their supporters, as well as in the Church at large. One looks at a large meeting, and one sees a number of people who all say that Mis- sions are good, and that they are glad that men and women should be found to employ themselves in them. But if a son or a daughter, a sister or brother offers to go, every machinery of entreaty, of threat, of endearment, is at once put in action to stop them. Does a person of any capacity volunteer ? Every one says, " You must not go, you are useful at home, you are wanted here." And then with strange iaconsistency, people turn round and say, what a very inferior lot of men missionaries are. We are an inferior lot, but we have put your stay-at-homes to shame ; and, poor as the instruments have been, their work has been great and glorious. But what are you doing 28 when you keep back your friends and relatives ? You keep them back from God. You keep them back from a life of usefulness. You keep them back from a glorious death. You keep them back from a high place in heaven. You rob your own family of a special honour. You do what in you hes to maintain the devil's kingdom un- touched, and to stop the progress of the word of God. I have stood by the death-beds of those who had given their lives to this great cause, and I have been obhged to ask myself whether it were worth the sacrifice. And I know that it is. Compare this life and death ^^th that. When I first left England some of my friends bemoaned our parting as final, and so it was, not because I had died in Africa, but because they died at home. One spends his whole life in trying to defer the inevitable end, but it comes. Another fives for eternity, and his life is as God T\dlls. We know that brave men are not in more real danger in a battle than cowards are, and so it is in life. But be it other^dse. If God calls us away, how much better to go from the midst of his work than to have no tale 1 o tell save that of having lived for oneself and lived for oneself in vain. We shall never have a healthy action of the Church nntil foreign Missions take their place among ordinary employments, and a young clergyman thinks his education incomplete until he has seen something of the Mohammedan and the heathen. No one thinks now that taking secular work in India means expatriation for fife, and there is no reason Avhy Church work should be any exception. I do not mean as a Missionary Bishop to cut myself off from the warmest interest in all that goes on at home, and I hope that our Mission may be fed by a continuous stream of young men who are determined to venture something for the sake of the Mission itself^ and who are ashamed to subside into a country living, or an easy curacy, until they have proved their manhood in their master's cause. 24 And now I must draw to a close. We have a con- tinent to work upon, where chaos still reigns, both in the social and the spiritual world. We have the reproach of ages of cruelty and neglect to wipe out. We have the key of the gate of heaven, and millions are waiting for us to open to them. Christian men and women, come your- selves and help them ! If you cannot come, seek out and send your best and dearest, that their glory may be yours. If you have money, give it ; and that not in little driblets, but as God has given it to you. Don't wait to be can vassed, but canvass others yourselves. Above all send your hearts with us, and, as you stand in spirit on the edge of that great continent of darkness, do for it with all your might whatever the whispers of God's Spirit may suggest. HARRISON AND SONS, PRINTERS IN ORDINARY TO HtR MAJESTY, ST. MARTIN'S LANE, -Mm- WW. 1 \^ m- M ~i^\ ^f\.