course of evolution, the law of variation bids a new prophet arise.  The priest must needs be to preserve the world from the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued, tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human advancement.  It is the priest’s duty to preserve the old and to hinder the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is.  The founder of the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers:  “Let us all think in the same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible,” and it is reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he would always repeat “no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic, not even in grammar.”  In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.

But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby beyond the life of each generation.  The mental sloth in which the Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation did not become a heritable defect.  But apart from the question of the possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the civilised European in his different surroundings.  That these problems are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a difference of content, not of difficulty.  The mental strain involved in leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in maintaining his civilised existence.  In the all-surrounding air of superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,—­and very deep cunning it sometimes is,—­so deep, indeed, that the intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious ways thereof.  Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation, prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning of the primitive African’s daily campaign against the forces of darkness with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have courage, firmness of will and self-control