The most superstitious of men, they combine the two extremes of belief and unbelief; they have the firmest conviction in their own tenets, whilst those of others flow off their minds like water from a greased surface.  The Catholic missioners laboured amongst them for nearly two hundred years; some of these ecclesiastics were ignorant and bigoted as those whom we still meet on the West African Coast, but not a few were earnest and energetic, scrupulous and conscientious, able and learned as the best of our modern day.  All did not hurry over their superficial tasks like the Neapolitan father Jerome da Montesarchio, who baptized 100,000 souls; and others, who sprinkled children till their arms were tired.  Many lived for years in the country, learning the language and identifying themselves with their flocks.  Yet the most they ever effected was to make their acolytes resemble the Assyrians whom Shalmaneser transplanted to Assyria, who “feared the Lord and served their graven images” (2 Kings, xvii. 33-41).  Their only traces are the word “Deus,” foully perverted like the Chinese “joss;” and an occasional crucifix which is called cousa de branco—­white man’s thing.  Tuckey was justified in observing at Nokki that the crucifixes, left by missioners, were strangely mixed with native fetishes, and that the people seemed by no means improved by the muddle of Christian and Pagan idolatry.

The system is at once complicated and unsettled.  There is, apparently, the sensus numinis; the vague deity being known as Nzambi or Njambi, which the missionaries translated into God, as Nganna Zambi—­Lord Zambi.  Merolla uses Zambiabungu, and in the vocabulary, Zabiambunco, for the “Spirit above” (Zambi-a-npungo):  Battel tells us that the King of Loango was called “Sambee and Pango, which mean God.”  The Abbe Proyart terms the Supreme “Zambi,” and applies Zambi-a-n-pongou to a species of malady brought on by perjury.  He also notices the Manichaean idea of Zambi-a-Nbi, or bad-God, drawing the fine distinction of European belief in a deity supremely good, who permits evil without participating in it.  But the dualism of moral light and darkness, noticed by all travellers,[FN#25] is a bona fide existence with Africans, and the missionaries converted the Angolan “Cariapemba” into the Aryo-Semitic Devil.

Zambi is the Anyambia of the Gaboon country, a vox et praeterea nihil.  Dr. Livingstone ("First Expedition,” p. 641), finds the word general amongst the Balonda, or people of Lunda:  with the “Cazembes” the word is “Pambi,” or “Liza,” and “O Muata Cazembe” (p. 297) mentions the proverb, “Ao Pambi e ao Mambi (the King) nada iguala.”  In the “Vocabulario da lingua Cafrial” we see (p. 469) that “Murungo” means God or thunder.  It is the rudimental idea of the great Zeus, which the Greeks worked out, the God of AEther, the eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient, “who was, who is, and who is to come,” the Unknown and Unknowable, concerning whom St. Paul