Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

BLACK MAN = BLACK MANNERS 437
of the forest." What splendid evangelists these wandering
Nimrods make 1
Take
an instance. An elephant-hunter
gets soundly and profoundly saved, so at once God claims
his witness far afield. His elephants, of course, claim his
presence out there too. Away beyond the edge of
cultivation he goes, following up the spoor of his elephants ;
dipping down into gorges, skirting precipices, sinking into
bulrush bogs
"To preach as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men."
Then he comes back to tell us all about it at our
Saturday night prayer-meeting, a weird tale of the lonely
bush and the stately goings of our God. It would test
the most skilled in mental acrobatics to explain away
such personal intervention of Almighty God to and for
that hunter of His. " What will prayer do for you ?
laugh his old hunter chums. ^ "All that God can do for
me," is the royal reply. The misses as well as the
hits are all reported as occasions for praise. And his
favourite Bible proof is that " the Lord preserveth man
and beast." Listen to his quaint exegesis preserveth the
man when He grants a hit, preserveth the least when He
grants a miss ! That is to say, locked up in the custody
of this one verse you have all the fates and fortunes of the
hunter and his prey : God for the man, yet God for the
beast— yea, God all and in all.
But one flash reveals the diamond. And this exhorter
in the prayer-meeting soon gets to close quarters with his