Fearful indeed is the impress
of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more
fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When
wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against
light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been
scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the
world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its
remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one
spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that
expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has
been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have
dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus
after a while have been wholly lost.
Moffat, in his _Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa_, gives
us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most
significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in
savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the
disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that
word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre
tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is
above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the notion
of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea
corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language of
the present generation, although here and there he could meet with an
old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his youth
to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply
significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so-
called rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous
ghost, of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.
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