personality, too high and too remote for interference in human
affairs, therefore not addressed in prayer, never represented by
the human form, never lodged in temples. Under this "unknown God"
are two chief agencies, working partners who manage the business
of the world, and who effect what the civilized call
"Providence." Mbwiri here becomes the Osiris, Jove, Hormuzd or
Good God, the Vishnu, or Preserver, a tutelar deity, a Lar, a
guardian. Onyambe is the Bad God, Typhon, Vejovis, the Ahriman or
Semitic devil; Shiva the Destroyer, the third person of the Aryan
triad; and his name is never mentioned but with bated breath.
They have not only fear of, but also a higher respect for him
than for the giver of good, so difficult is it for the child-
man's mind to connect the ideas of benignity and power. He would
harm if he could, ergo so would his god. I once hesitated to
believe that these rude people had arrived at the notion of
duality, at the Manichaeanism which caused Mr. Mill (sen.)
surprise that no one had revived it in his time; at an idea so
philosophical, which leads directly to the ne plus ultra of
faith, El Wahdaniyyeh or Monotheism. Nor should I have credited
them with so logical an apparatus for the regimen of the
universe, or so stout-hearted an attempt to solve the eternal
riddle of good and evil. But the same belief also exists amongst
the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger.
Captain William Alien ("Niger Expedition," i. 227) thus records
the effect when, at the request of the commissioners, Herr Schon,
the missionary, began stating to King Obi the difference between
the Christian religion and heathenism:

"Herr Schon. There is but one God.