CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mr. Brown's successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of
man. He condemned openly Mr. Brown's policy of compromise and accommodation.
He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield
in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.
He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed
in slaying the prophets of Baal.
Mr. Smith was greatly distressed by the ignorance which many of his flock
showed even in such things as the Trinity and the Sacraments. It only showed that they
were seeds sown on a rocky soil. Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He
should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord
Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To
fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamouring for signs was a folly of
everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life--to drive the
crowd away from His church.
Within a few weeks of his arrival in Umuofia Mr. Smith suspended a young
woman from the church for pouring new wine into old bottles. This woman had allowed
her heathen husband to mutilate her dead child. The child had been declared an ogbanje,
plaguing its mother by dying and entering her womb to be born again. Four times this
child had run its evil round. And so it was mutilated to discourage it from returning.
Mr. Smith was filled with wrath when he heard of this. He disbelieved the story
which even some of the most faithful confirmed, the story of really evil children who
were not deterred by mutilation, but came back with all the scars. He replied that such
stories were spread in the world by the Devil to lead men astray. Those who believed
such stories were unworthy of the Lord's table.
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten
for him. Mr. Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. The over-zealous