In Monsignor Jules Moury, vicar apostolic in charge of the Roman Catholic mission in the Ivory Coast, frankly despaired of the future of the church in the neglected French colony. The priests of the Missions Africaines de Lyon had arrived on the Gulf of Guinea in and after more than fifteen years with the help of brothers and sisters from two orders had expended a number of lives and much charity to build a chain of eight major stations along the eastern coast of the Ivory Coast.
But they had yielded a slim harvest of only 2, baptized souls, and the tribal peoples along the coast were clearly not turning to the Light of Christ. Space is lacking here for exposing the external means which Divine Providence has used for the accomplishment of His merciful designs.
I must thus limit myself to exposing the effects. In , when missionary methods and their effectiveness were discussed at the international conference at Le Zoute, Belgium, Dr. Edwin W. Smith, former missionary to Rhodesia, wryly remarked:. The man who should have talked at Le Zoute about preaching to Africans is the prophet Harris who flashed like a meteor through part of West Africa a few years ago. What was his method? The first two are well known through their writings, their work, and much that has been written about them by their interpreters.
But of the African Harris, who left no writings except a half-dozen short dictated messages, the legacy is written only in the historical consequences of his work and ministry; the perspective of seven decades is most helpful in understanding it.
In the Gold Coast, Methodist missionaries and African pastors were divided in their appreciation of the man about whom they knew practically nothing, save that he had earlier related to the Methodist church in Liberia.
