Mr. STANLEY made a fresh, clever, and interesting speech at the breakfast given in his honour yesterday by the Baptist Missionary Society. There was much humour and likewise much good common sense in the speech. Mr. Stanley said he did not pretend to speak eloquently, "although he did pretend to be able to think as eloquently as anybody could speak."
It happens not uncommonly that a man who is very eloquent, or at least very glib at talking, concerns himself little about any preliminary process of thinking. There was, it seems to us, something of genuine eloquence in Mr. Stanley's description of the life of a missionary in Africa, of the work he has to do, the food he has to put up with, the scanty amount of encouragement he gets, or could possibly get, and the trouble he has to keep his courage, his patience, and his willingness for toil always disciplined up to the necessary pitch. Nothing could be more reasonable then the advice which Mr. Stanley gave as to the manner in which a man ought to manage his physical resources in a climate like that of Equatorial Africa. Over-exertion and the consequent reaction, the endeavour to carry on life under unfamiliar conditions exactly as it had been carried on under familiar conditions -- these are some of the mistakes that African explorers and African missionaries new to their work are fatally apt to make. Mr. Stanley said, and no doubt with perfect accuracy, that the climate of Equatorial Africa is not half as dangerous as that of many parts of the Southern States of America. Indeed, we should not be inclined to limit the comparison to the Southern States of America. In some of the States not southern, where there is a summer as fierce as that of Syria and a winter as cold and cruel as that of northern Russia, the mere contrast between the seasons must make itself intolerable to weakly constitutions. "We are all a little too apt to believe in traditional descriptions of climate and atmosphere. At one time the civilised world regarded Equatorial Africa as a region of burning sand and unendurable tropic heat -- the arid nurse of lions and snakes. It is hard for some people to shake off even yet the traditional impression bequeathed to generation after generation to ancient geographers and fanciful books of pictures. Mr. Stanley describes the territories with which he is familiar as places unhealthy indeed for these who attempt to inhabit them on impossible conditions, but healthy enough for any one of moderately good constitution who knows how to temper his way of living to the exigencies of a new climate.
Daily News, May 29, 1885
The Volunteer Manoeuvres
The Congo Valley
Table of Contents
Miracles of healing - Christian Miracles or Healing
History of Russia: Christian Versus Barbarian
History of Japan: Early Christian Martyrs
The Jesus of History
The Assyrian Origin of Devil Worshippers
The Christ Of Dogma
The early history of Constantinople
