Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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The exiled Englishmen who founded the Northern States of America, though they might wipe the dust off their feet against the land they left, did not cut that land wholly out of their affections and sympathies. A Government party, dominant for the moment, had made it impossible for them to continue their own form of worship in peace; but in the land they left, half their countrymen were bound to them by the closest ties of spiritual and intellectual sympathy, and were a party so strong as soon to become dominant. It was not England and its people who expelled them, but a step-motherly Government. Therefore they founded "New England" and clung to the old.

The Huguenot ancestor of the Boer left a country in which not only the Government, but the body of his fellows were at deadly variance with him; in which his religion was an exotic and his mental attitude alien from that of the main body of the people.

To these men, when they shook off the dust of their feet against her, France became the visible embodiment of the powers of evil; her rule was the rule of Agag, whom the Lord should yet hew in pieces; her people were the children of Satan, given over to believe a lie, and her fields were the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which in judgment the Almighty would yet rain down fire and brimstone; a righteous Lot fled from them in horror with all that he had. To these homeless fugitives the Europe that they had left was as the "house of bondage." The ships which bore them to South Africa were the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord their God, in which He bore His chosen to the Land of His Promise. As the Huguenot paced the deck of his ship and saw the strange stars of the Southern Hemisphere come out above him, like Abraham of old he read in them the promise of his covenant-keeping God:—"To thee and to thy seed shall the land be given and they shall inherit it. Look up and see the stars of heaven if thou canst count them: so shall thy seed be for multitude; like sand, like fine sand on the sea-shore. And when thou comest to the land that I shall give thee, thou shalt drive out the heathen from before thee."