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Great Missionaries; A Ser. of Biographies
Great Missionaries A Ser of Biographies Author:Andrew Thomson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1862 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: JOHN THEODORE VANDERKEMP. 1747-1811. JFRICA is the laggard in the onward march of the human race. We see her coming up far behind, sable and wounded, in the great procession of tribes and peoples, to civilization, power and happiness. Geographers have sought to account for this by the very shape of the African continent, which, in the comparative want of peaceful bays and navigable rivers which carry the adventurer with ease and speed far into the interior, presents few of those inlets for commerce and facilities for intercourse, which form the grand features of Europe in the map of the world. She is doomed by this fact, they tell us, if not to isolation and exclusion, at least to a hireling's place in the family of the world. Physiologists again, of a certain school, have asserted the essential and invincible mental inferiority of some of those races which cover the larger portions of Central and Southern Africa, and have pronounced all experiments at elevation, by whatever means, as next to hopeless; some interpreters of inspired prophecy have spoken and written as if the divine curse on Canaan kept Africa spell-bound in long cycles of ignorance and sorrow; and the more philosophical class of historians and ethnographers have remarked, that while vast tracts of Asia retain the fragments and traditions of an earlier civilization, and have never intellectually approached the lowest scale of degradation, many of the African tribes have so sunk through countless ages of depression, and have so lost the very rudiments even of natural religion, as not to retain any notion, however dim and perverted, ...« less