Colenso and Missionaries.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3549, 11 May 1880, Page 2

Colenso and Missionaries.

Mr Archibald Forbes, the well-known correspondent of the London Daily News, has written a letter to The Edinburgh Scotsman, in which he says:

" I regard missionary enterprise as simply a gross impertinence; and did I chance to be a straightforward, selfrespecting heathen, I would kick the interloping missionary who should come canting aroond me, seeking to pervert me* from the faith of my fathers. It seems to me that a man who finds himself occupying the inherently false and illogical position of a missionary should at least aspire to such credentials as speaking the truth in secular matters might furnish him with. My experience of missionaries is that they are mostly liars; some because of a mixture of simplicity and unctuousness, others out of sheer reckless unscrupulousness. To the latter category belongs the interesting Eev. MrDe Witt, who, soon after Isandlwana, palmed off on the publte a bogus description of the battle as an eye*witness, which he could only have been had he been gifted with the faculty of seeing through two ranges of hills.

" I hare been to Bishopstowe, and it was the only place in South Africa where I found Kaffirs living ia decency. There is no polygamy among Bishop Colenso'i blacks, neither, ia there any drunkenness* But certain virtues do exist among them, thanks to the dear old bishop's training —honesty, cleanliness, intelligence, truth* fulness—aye, and culture. He has a printing press, worked entirely by Kaffirs, and I have in my possession a volume printed at Bishopstowe, of which the compositors, the readers, and the casemen were as black as your boots. " Contrast this with the so-called converts of the foreign missionaries in Zululand. All of the latter who were worth their salt behaved like gentlemen when the king to whom they owed allegiance got into trouble, and took service under him against the whites. The 'wasters' loafed and drank about the Natal villages. Thfe oolonial proverb is that ' a Kaffir Christianized is B-Kaffir spoiled,' and there is much greater truth in this than in most of the utterances of the colonists."