8, and Col. iii. 11. Many nations
have been inspired by the Old Testament, but few indeed are the
instances in which any has paid regard to the New.]

CHAPTER XXII

MISSIONS

The strength and vitality of a race, and its power of holding its own in
the world, depend less on the quickness of its intelligence than on the
solidity of its character. Its character depends upon the moral ideas
which govern its life, and on the habits in which those ideas take
shape; and these, in their turn, depend very largely upon the
conceptions which the race has formed of religion, and on the influence
that religion has over it. This is especially true of peoples in the
earlier stages of civilization. Their social virtues, the beliefs and
principles which hold them together and influence their conduct, rest
upon and are shaped by their beliefs regarding the invisible world and
its forces. Races in which religious ideas are vague and feeble seldom
attain to a vigorous national life, because they want one of the most
effective bonds of cohesion and some of the strongest motives that rule
conduct. It may doubtless be said that the religion of a people is as
much an effect as a cause, or, in other words, that the finer or poorer
quality of a race is seen in the sort of religion it makes for itself,
the higher races producing nobler religious ideas and more impressive
mythologies, just as they produce richer and more expressive languages.
Nevertheless, it remains true that a religion, once formed, becomes a
potent factor in the future strength and progress of a people. Now the
religious ideas of the Bantu races, as of other negroes, have been
scanty, poor, and unfruitful. And accordingly, one cannot meditate upon
their condition and endeavour to forecast their progress without giving
some thought to the influence which better ideas, and especially those
embodied in Christianity, may have upon them.

Neither the Kafirs nor the Hottentots have had a religion in our sense
of the word. They had no deities, no priesthood, no regular forms of
worship. They were, when Europeans discovered them, still in the stage
in which most, if not all, primitive races would seem to have once
been--that of fearing and seeking to propitiate nature spirits and the
ghosts of the dead, a form of superstition in which there was scarcely a
trace of morality. Hence the first task of the missionaries who came
among them was to create a religious sense, to give