168 VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. chap. vi. there is any change in the purpose of the supreme authorities, as the following message or order is said to be read every fortnight to the troops when assembled on parade at the capital. “ If any baptize (viz. administer or receive baptism) I will put them to death, saith Ranavalomanjaka; for they change the prayers of the twelve kings. Therefore search, and spy, and if ye find any doing that, man or woman, take them, that we may kill them ; for I and you will kill them that do that, though they be half the people. For to change what the ancestors have ordered and done, and to pray to the ancestors of the foreigners, not to Andrianampoinemerina, and Lehidama, and the idols that sanctified the twelve kings, and the twelve mountains that are worshipped; whoever changes these observances, I make known to all people, I will kill, saith Ranavalomanjaka.” The reference made to the usages ordained by their an cestors, and to the praying to the ancestors of the foreigners, explains to a great extent the grounds on which the abandon ment of the religion of the country, and adopting the Christian faith, are regarded by the Malagasy as crimes of the greatest magnitude. Their own religious creeds teach them to regard the spirits of the earliest ancestors of their rulers as among the chief objects of religious homage, and hence also a sort of sacredness is supposed to belong to the- reigning monarch as descended from their gods. In most of the public speeches to which I listened the sacredness of the queen’s person was declared, and she was represented as exercising power over life and property by virtue of such descent and supposed sacredness. Thus their ideas of religion add a sort of sanctity to their loyalty. And as they infer that the religion of Christian nations rests upon a basis similar to their own, it is asserted, and probably believed by many, that the su preme objects of Christian worship were the ancestors of the