ly
rooted in Kafir life. A visitor from Europe is at first surprised to
find how seriously they regard it, and asks whether the example of the
worthies of the Old Testament does not make it hard for them to refuse
baptism to the native who seeks it, though he has more than one wife.
The clergy of the Church of England, however, and those of the French
Protestant Church--and I think other missionaries also--are unanimous in
holding that, although they may properly admit a polygamist as a
catechumen, they should not baptize such a one; and they say that the
native pastors hold this view even more strongly than they do
themselves. Polygamy is so bound up with heathen customs, and exerts, in
their view, so entirely baneful an influence upon native society, that
it must be at all hazards resisted and condemned.[70] One is reminded of
the Neoplatonic philosophers, the last professors of the Platonic
academy at Athens, who in the sixth century of our era sought an asylum
from Christian persecution at the court of Chosroes Anurshirwan, in
Persia. They forced themselves to tolerate the other usages of the
people among whom they came, but polygamy was too much for them, and
rather than dwell among those who practised it, they returned to the
unfriendly soil of the Roman Empire.

The missionaries, and especially those of the London Missionary Society,
played at one time a much more prominent part in politics than they now
sustain. Within and on the borders of Cape Colony they were, for the
first sixty years of the present century, the leading champions of the
natives, and as they enjoyed the support of an active body of opinion in
England and Scotland, they had much influence in Parliament and with the
Colonial Office. Outside the Colony they were often the principal
advisers of the native chiefs (as their brethren were at the same time
in the islands of the Pacific), and held a place not unlike that of the
bishops in Gaul in the fifth century of our era. Since, in advocating
the cause of the natives, they had often to complain of the behaviour of
the whites, and since, whenever a chief came into collision with the
emigrant Boers or with colonial frontiersmen, they became the channel by
which the chief stated his case to the British Government, they incurred
the bitter hostility of the emigrant Boers and some dislike even in the
Colony. To this old cause much of the unpopularity that still attaches
to them seems due. Unpopular the