According to Fathers Carli and Merolla, Pope Alexander Vii. sent twelve to fifteen Capuchins and apostolic missioners, who baptized the King and Queen of Congo and the Count of Sonho.  Between A.D. 1490 and 1690 were the palmy days of Christianity in Congo-land, and for two centuries it was more or less the state religion.  After this great effort missionary zeal seems to have waxed cold, and disestablishment resulted, as happens in such cases, from unbelief within and violent assaults from without.  Under the attacks of the Dutch and French the Church seems to have lost ground during the eighteenth century.  In A.D. 1682 the number of propagandists in Sonho fell from a father superior and six missioners to two (Merolla).  In A.D. 1700 James Barbot found at Sonho only two Portuguese friars of the Order of Bernardins.  In A.D. 1768 the Loango Mission was established, and in A.D. 1777 the fathers were followed by four Italian priests sent by the Propaganda for the purpose of re-christianizing Sonho.  Embarking at La Rochelle they entered the Nzadi, where one died of poison, and the survivors escaped only by stratagem.  Christianity fell before the old heathenism, and in 1814 we find the King of Congo, D. Garcia V., complaining to His Most Faithful Majesty that missioners were sadly wanted.  Captain Tuckey’s “Expedition” (A.D. 1816) well sets forth the spiritual destitution of the land.  He tells us that three years before his arrival some missionaries had been murdered by the Sohnese; the only specimen he met was an ignorant half-caste with a diploma from the Capuchins of Loanda, and a wife plus five concubines.  In 1863 I found that all traces of Christianity had disappeared.

These reverends—­who were allowed to dispense with any “irregularity” except bigamy or wilful murder, and “to read forbidden books except Machiavel,”—­took the title of Nganga Mfumo[FN#35]—­Lord Medicine-man.  In the fulness of early zeal they built at S. Salvador the cathedral of Santa Cruz, a Jesuit College, a Capuchin convent, the residence of the father superior, maintained by the King of Portugal; a religious house for the Franciscans, an establishment for the Bishop and his Chapter, and half-a-dozen stone churches.  All these edifices have long been in ruins.

Father Cavazzi da Monte Cuccoli, Denis de Carli, and Merolla, themselves missioners, have left us ample accounts of the ecclesiastical rule which, during its short tenure of office, bore a remarkable family resemblance to that of the Jesuit missions in South America.  The religious despotism was complete, a tyranny grossly aggravated by the credulity, the bigotry, and the superstition,—­I will not say of the age, because such things are of all ages, but of the imperfect education which the age afforded.  There was no improvement, but rather a deterioration from the days of Pliny.  One father tells the converts that comets forbode ill to the world.  Another describes a bird not much unlike a sparrow, at first