Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Historical Sketch of the Missions of the American Board in Africa
In contrast with the natural productions, human beings in Africa are of low types. The various races show the marks of centuries of degradation. Nothing is too low to worship. Slavery is the most ancient inheritance of the country. The chief coast trade for ages was in slaves; and systems of brigandage were organized all through the interior to supply the market. Polygamy of the lowest, loosest kind is universal. For an ox or two the husband buys ills wife, and for a string of beads the mother has sold her child into bondage. The frightful prevalence of cannibalism was checked by the greater value of the vic tim for the slave market than the table. Everywhere woman is the animal of all work, and in many tribes modesty in personal exposure is almost unknown. The traveler beholds young women dabbling in the creeks, innocent of clothing and of scruples.
Yet all that was forbidding in Africa has not repelled the missionary, nor prevented his success. More than twenty different Boards have planted stations in this moral waste. They have found the people highly susceptible to religious in?uences, wherever rum, war, and the slave trade would permit those in?uences to act. They reckon some forty-seven thousand communicants at the present time, l many of them, however, in churches that do not make conversion a condition of church membership.
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