Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1896 — The Afrikander Puritan. [ARTICLE]

The Afrikander Puritan.

The Boers know the Bible, if they know nothing else of what is called literature. They are probably the only remaining homogenous people on the globe whose reading and whose intellectual aliment are purely Scriptural. People who have lived among them in South Africa all agree upon this characteristic feature of Boer life. They are essentially a Puritan nation, and they maintain a strictly theocratic community, such as the good men who founded Plymouth and Boston fondly hoped to preserve on Massachusetts Bay. Among them, people who stay away from church or who profess indifference to religious teachings and observances are wholly unknown. Of course, young Afrikanders stray away from the flock in ever increasing numbers, but until they go away they conform with the rest of the rules of pious behavior. It was, indeed, more for the purpose of preserving their young people from demoralizing contact with the lax and irreligious “outlander” than for any other reason that the Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State have twice “trekked” northward, leaving the place in which they were born and all their possessions which could not be carried along and faced the privations and risks of unknown and savage wilds. At all hazards, they were resolute to live their own lives and to keep their children undefiled by contact with the evil thing called civilization.—New York Times.