Major von Wissmann, lately German Commissioner in East Africa, writes
to the Berlin Post to state that he thinks the Catholic missionaries will be more successful in Africa than the Protestant. Their ritual appeals more clearly to the imagination. of the heathen. Moreover, the priests work harder, and have no scruple about buying slave children to bring up in their faith, a practice of which Major von Wissmann entirely approves. It seems to us doing evil that good may come, every child bought being a premium on slave-stealing. The Catholic missionaries are very devoted, and may have as much success in Africa as in South America, but we rather doubt the attraction of their ritual for Negroes. MahommedaniSm, which so strongly attracts them, has no ritual at all ; and if the Negro mind thirsts for ritual, the Catholics ought long since to have converted the coloured population of the United States, who take to exaggerated forms of Methodism. We wish, however, that some partially cultivated Negro would tell the world what it is in religion that his countrymen seek, fetichism being radically different from Asiatic or European pagauisms.
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