If there is a ‘problem’ of adapting or accommodating African rites and beliefs to Christianity, it is one to which missionaries best know the answers. Students of primitive people are better employed in saying what does happen, rather than in speculating as to what might or should happen. The problem posed in theory, in which abstract African rites and beliefs encounter an abstract Christian teaching, can scarcely be the problem which has to be answered daily in practice. This impersonal encounter between two abstractions then becomes a very personal encounter between two people, one Christian, one pagan. Each is held to his religion by something more than the arguments he could produce for it; while the Christian may sometimes find himself nearer to the pagan than his arguments against him suggest. The difference between them makes for uneasiness, if only because it will not remain constant. Christianity and paganism, in the abstract, have a clear line of division, beyond which they are not required to meet on equal terms. A Christian and a pagan, two individuals, cannot so easily remain each on his own side of a formal division. They are bound to feel the strain of sometimes seeming to belong to different worlds, while at other times belonging so palpably to the same. I think that to try to find common ‘human’ ground between them is to misconceive the difference. This common human ground, in so far as the expression means anything, is given, in the first place. Christian and pagan are not like two slices of bread, one spread with butter and the other with margarine. To start to look for common human ground—human which is neither human-Christian nor human-pagan—is to reject what is immediately there. It is at once to make the relationship between Christian and pagan into a problem, not a relationship.