7 MAY 1864, Page 2

The Bishop of Niger is to be a black man,

the Rev. Samuel Crowther,—the first pure negro ever elevated to the episcopal see, though very -far from the first true African, witness the great St. Augustine. His life has been a stirring one. He was born fifty years ago in the Yoruba country, one hundred miles from the Bight of Benin, when his name was Adjai. In 1821 he was carried off by a Mahommedan tribe, exchanged for a horse, again exchanged and cruelly treated, and finally sold as a slave for some tobacco. He was captured by an English man-of -a ar in 1822 and landed at• Sierre Leone. He was baptized in 1825, when he unfortunately changed the characteristic name Adjai to that of Samuel Crowther. He accompanied the first Niger expedition, came to England, was educated at the Church Missionary College, Islington, and ordained by the Bishop of London. He went on the second Niger expedi- tion in 1834, and wrote, it is said, a very able account of it. He has translated the Bible into Yoruba, has been active in missionary work at Akessa, and is, says the Globe, from which we borrow this account, a strong though temperate Evangelical. No doubt the African Church has always inclined towards a predestinarian, if not an antinomian, view of Christianity. Mrs. Crowther is also a negro, who apparently retains her native name of Asano. Why native Africans should ever take imitative English names when they become Christians is not easy to see. If the African genius is not to be Christianized, we shall get nothing but a parasitic Anglo-Saxon Christianity out of them.