The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1928, Page 83

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

83:

and live. Of course, the ordeal usually resulted in
the death of the victims. In one instance several
hundred persons were forced to take this poison at
one time, and from such wholesale administration
the deaths of most of the victims took place.

The crime of infanticide was found in Old
Calabar in ghastly proportions. The birth of twins,
especially, excited every instinct of fear and cruelty.
The woman that gave birth to twins was disgraced
for life, and she was compelled to. throw the chil-
dren into the forest, where they were left to die.
In one town in Old Calabar no less than five hun-
dred infants were sacrificed in one year. Rev. E.
Deas, of the United Presbyterian Mission in Old
Calabar, refers in a letter to the existence of, can-
nibal markets where slaves were sold for food and
writes that he himself had shortly before saved
two sick women from being eaten by their fellow-
creatures. A Catholic missionary writes: “Every
moment men, women, and even children passed me,
one with a human leg on his shoulder, others carry-
ing the lungs or the heart of an unfortunate Kroo
boy in their hands. Several times I was offered
my choice of these morsels dripping with gore.”

The-Coming of the Gospel.

Work was begun in Old Calabar by the United
Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1846. The
three pioneer workers of this mission lived to see
every one of the inhuman customs referred to above
a thing to be abhorred by the same people who had
once observed them. Polygamy, too, was sternly
met at the church-doors of Old Calabar, and slavery
was frowned down and, in the course of a com-
paratively short time, abolished.

In 1845 one of the chiefs of Old Calabar died.
According to custom, many living people were put
into his grave to die with him. To-day a grandson
of that chief is an elder of the Christian Church;
and every morning, with the open Bible in his hand,
he leads his family in worship. Rev. J. J. Fuller,
a missionary, relates the following: “One morning,
looking across the river, I saw many people dressed
up in all their war dresses in canoes and brandishing
their swords and spears. I took my glass. and
looked and found that the decorations on the bows
of all those canoes were nothing else than human
heads. I went to the chief and said to him, ‘What
do you do such cruel deeds for?” He looked very
much astonished that any one would ask him such a
question and said, ‘What deeds?’ Pointing across
the river, I said, “Look yonder. What about that
row of human heads on your canoe? Why do you

do such cruel things? They are not right.’ The-
chief replied: ‘You people come to this country and
live here, and you claim to be good people, and that.
is true enough; but do you tell me that when I die,
my sons are going to put me into an empty grave
alone and no one with me? And when I said,.
‘Yes, he looked at me and said, ‘You are a fool.’
Then all his sons came up and asked, ‘What is the
matter, father?’ And he repeated to them our con-
versation: ‘This man, who has come to live in our
country, says that when I die, you boys will put me
into an empty grave, alone, with no one with me.”
Then the sons looked at me and grinned savagely,

An African Chief after Conversion.

and then they looked at their father and said,
‘Father, do not believe him. He is a fool, and he
is a foreigner. What does he know? Let him:
alone.’ And yet—mark it!—that same chief
lived on till the custom of burying living people
with the dead was completely abolished. In his
own town, about fifty yards from his house, stands
a little chapel, and the preacher in that chapel is
none other than one of his sons, who is preaching
the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Power of Divine Grace.

We can but feebly realize the difficulty which
the early missionaries in Old Calabar had with the
dominant social evil of unrestricted polygamy. But
God’s grace also here proved its might. Rev. R. M.
Beedie could write, thirty years after the Gospel had