’In every village there is a Sala Goro, a place for cooking, which only those who have “gazed at the sacred symbol” may frequent.  Food cooked there may not be eaten by one uninitiated, or by women or children.  The path to the Sala Goro is never trodden by any woman or matanomorous ("eye closed").  When any ceremony is going on the whole of the precincts of the Sala Goro are sacred.  At no time dare any woman eat with any man, no husband with his wife, no father with his daughter as soon as she is no longer a child.

’Of course such a system can be used by us in two ways.  I say, “You have your method of assembling together, and you observe certain customs in so doing; so do we, but yours is an exclusive and selfish system:  your secret societies are like our clubs, with their entrance fees, &c.  But Christ’s society has its sacred rite of admission, and other mysteries too, and it is for all who wish to belong to it.  He recognises no distinction of male or female, bond or free.”

’Some of the elder men are becoming suspicious of me.  I tell them plainly that whatever there may be in their customs incompatible with the great law of Love to God and man must come to nought.  “You beat and terrify matanomorous in order to make them give, that you may get pigs and native money from them.  Such conduct is all wrong, for if you beat or frighten a youth or man, you certainly can’t love him.”

’At the same time I can’t tell how far this goes.  If there were a real ceremony of an idol or prayer to it, of course it would be comparatively easy to act in the matter; but the ceremony consists in sticking a curious sort of mitre, pointed and worked with hair, on the head of the candidate, and covering his body with a sort of Jack-in-the green wicker work of leaves, &c., and they joke and laugh about it, and attach, apparently, no religious significance to it whatever.

’I think it has the evil which attends all secret societies, that it tends to produce invidious distinctions and castes.  An instinct impels men to form themselves into associations; but then Christ has satisfied that instinct legitimately in the Church.

’Christianity does meet a human instinct; as, e.g., the Lord’s Supper, whatever higher and deeper feelings it may have, has this simple, but most significant meaning to the primitive convert, of feasting as a child with his brethren and sisters at the Father’s Board.

’The significance of this to people living as more than half the human beings in the world are living still, is such as we have lost the power of conceiving; the Lord’s Supper has so long had, so to say, other meanings for many of us.  Yet to be admitted a member of God’s family, and then solemnly at stated times to use this privilege of membership, strengthening the tie, and familiarising oneself more and more with the customs of that heavenly family, this surely is a very great deal of what human instinct, as exhibited in almost universal customs, requires.