The missionary returning from Africa is often asked what is the religion of the people?  If an exact man, he will answer, “I don’t know.”  And how can he know when the people themselves, even the princes and priests, are ignorant of it?  A missionary of twenty years’ standing in West Africa, an able and conscientious student withal, assured me that during the early part of his career he had given much time to collecting and collating, under intelligent native superintendence, negro traditions and religion.  He presently found that no two men thought alike upon any single subject:  I need hardly say that he gave up in despair a work hopeless as psychology, the mere study of the individual.

Fetishism, I believe, is held by the orthodox to be a degradation of the pure and primitive “Adamical dispensation,” even as the negro has been supposed to represent the accursed and degraded descendants of Ham and Canaan.  I cannot but look upon it as the first dawn of a faith in things not seen.  And it must be studied by casting off all our preconceived ideas.  For instance, Africans believe, not in soul nor in spirit, but in ghost; when they called M. du Chaillu a “Mbwiri,” they meant that the white man had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe.  They have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for awhile and perishes like the memory of the little-great name.  Hence the ignoble dread in East and West Africa of a death which leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation.  Seeing nought beyond the present-future, there is no hope for them in the grave; they wail and sorrow with a burden of despair.  “Ame-kwisha”—­he is finished—­is the East African’s last word concerning kinsman and friend.  “All is done for ever,” sing the West Africans.  Any allusion to loss of life turns their black skins blue; “Yes,” they exclaim, “it is bad to die, to leave house and home, wife and children; no more to wear soft cloth, nor eat meat, nor “drink” tobacco, and rum.”  “Never speak of that” the moribund will exclaim with a shudder; such is the ever-present horror of their dreadful and dreary times of sickness, always aggravated by suspicions of witchcraft, the only cause which their imperfect knowledge of physics can assign to death—­ even Van Helmont asserted, “Deus non fecit mortem.”  The peoples, who, like those of Dahome, have a distinct future world, have borrowed it, I cannot help thinking, from Egypt.  And when an African chief said in my presence to a Yahoo-like naval officer, “When so be I die, I come up for white man!  When so be you die, you come up for monkey!” my suspicion is that he had distorted the doctrine of some missionary.  Man would hardly have a future without a distinct priestly class whose interest it is to teach “another and a better,”—­or a worse.