 rewards from the eager missionaries.
Accordingly they said of them: 'They are good people, they gave us
food when we believed and looked sorrowful.' A father whose son was
dangerously ill, after having had recourse to various angekoks, took
counsel with an old and experienced one 'as to whether he should not
seek help from the priest at the Colony;' whereupon the old man calmly
answered: 'You may do as you please; for I am of opinion that the Word
of God and the words of skilful angekoks are equally powerful.' This
gradually became the general opinion; and as it fortunately chanced
in several cases that the Word of God seemed more effectual than that
of the angekoks, it was natural that some should let themselves be
baptised. The example once given, there were plenty to follow it,
especially when distinguished hunters led the way.

But if the Greenlanders nominally went over to Christianity, they held,
and still hold in a greater or less degree, to their old faith as well.
It was at first very difficult to convince them of the falsity of the
grotesque inventions of their angekoks. When they were reproached with
their credulity they answered simply 'that they were not in the habit
of lying and therefore believed all that people said to them.'

That they were not absolutely simple-minded, however, in their
acceptance of all that the Europeans told them, seems clear from this,
amongst other things, that when some Greenlanders could not get Niels
Egede to swallow their assertion that 'they had killed a bear on Disco
which was so big that it had ice on its back that never melted,' they
said: 'We have believed what you tell us, but you will not believe what
we tell you.'

To show what a little way below the surface Christianity has gone,
and how some of them, at any rate, still understand baptism, I may
mention that some years ago in North Greenland a catechist (a man who
has received a theological education, and supplies the place of the
clergyman in his absence) baptised not only his parishioners, but
also his puppi