Page 2 Advertisements Column 1

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2598, 4 September 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

A BLACK HOLY FAMILY. 1 A colporteur, delivering a missionary address before a Manayunlc Sunday school, displayed a number of pictures and images of the Holy Family. “Here is a Holy Family for export' to China,” he said. The children laughed, for the Mary of the group was a Chinawoman., with dwarfed feet and slanting eyes; Joseph was an old Chinaman, with a long, thin moustache and a queue; the sacred Infant had the flat nose and oblique eyes of China. “Here,” said the colporteur, “is a Holy Family for the Congo people.’;' The children laughed again. Mary was now fat. and black, with woolly hair; Joseph was a stalwart black warrior. a spear in his hand, a girdle of feathers about his waist; the /Infant, too,-was black. “Our Holy Families for missionary use,” the colporteur explained, “are always made in the likeness of the people they are to go amongst. Those simple people would be estranged by a white Holy' Family. Only this sort shows •them the Deity’s real kinship with themselves.”