Otherwise, your preconceived notions are almost sure to totter to their foundations; and nothing is more annoying than to have elaborately built-up, delightfully logical theories, played ninepins with by an old greybeard of a black, who apparently objects to his beliefs being classified, docketed, and pigeon-holed, until he has had his say.
After all, when we consider their marriage restrictions, their totems, and the rest, what becomes of the freedom of the savage?
As with us, as Montague says, 'Our laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from Nature, proceed from custom.' I have often thought the failure of the generality of missionaries lay in the fact that they began at the wrong end.

Not recognising the tyranny of custom, though themselves victims to it, they ignore, as a rule, the religion into which the black is born, and by which he lived, in much closer obedience to its laws than we of this latter-day Christendom.

It seems to me, if we cannot respect the religion of others we deny our own.

If we are powerless to see the theism behind the overlying animism, we argue a strange ignorance of what crept over other faiths, in the way of legends and superstitions quite foreign to the simplicity of the beginnings.
To be a success, a missionary, I think, should--as many do, happily--before he goes out to teach, acquaint himself with the making of the world's religions, and particularly with the one he is going to supplant.

He will probably find that elimination of some savageries is all that is required, leaving enough good to form a workable religion understanded of his congregation.
If he ignores their faith, thrusting his own, with its mysteries which puzzle even theologians, upon them, they will be but as whited sepulchres, or, at best, parrots.
GLOSSARY Bahloo, moon (masculine).
Bibbil, poplar-leaved box-tree.