Forty Years in South China | Page 7

to
unjoint this alliance. God will not any longer let her suffer mortal
ailments. The reward of righteousness is ready, and it must be paid. But
what a tearing apart! What rending up! What will the aged man do
without this other to lean on? Who can so well understand how to
sympathize and counsel? What voice so cheering as hers, to conduct
him down the steep of old age? 'Oh' said she in her last moments,
'father, if you and I could only be together, how pleasant it would be!'
But the hush of death came down one autumnal afternoon, and for the
first time in all my life, on my arrival at home, I received no maternal
greeting, no answer of the lips, no pressure of the hand. God had taken
her.
"In this overwhelming shock the patriarch stood confident, reciting the
promises and attesting the Divine goodness. O, sirs, that was faith, faith,
faith! 'Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory!'
"Finally, I noticed that in my father's old age was to be seen the beauty
of Christian activity. He had not retired from the field. He had been
busy so long you could not expect him idle now. The faith I have
described was not an idle expectation that sits with its hands in its
pockets idly waiting, but a feeling which gathers up all the resources of
the soul, and hurls them upon one grand design. He was among the first
who toiled in Sabbath-schools, and never failed to speak the praise of
these institutions. No storm or darkness ever kept him away from
prayer-meeting. In the neighborhood where he lived for years held a
devotional meeting. Oftentimes the only praying man present, before a
handful of attendants, he would give out the hymn, read the lines,
conduct the music, and pray. Then read the Scriptures and pray again.
Then lead forth in the Doxology with an enthusiasm as if there were a
thousand people present, and all the church members had been doing
their duty. He went forth visiting the sick, burying the dead, collecting
alms for the poor, inviting the ministers of religion to his household, in
which there was, as in the house of Shunem, a little room over the wall,
with bed and candlestick for any passing Elisha. He never shuddered at
the sight of a subscription paper, and not a single great cause of
benevolence has arisen within the last half century which he did not
bless with his beneficence. Oh, this was not a barren almond tree that
blossomed. His charity was not like the bursting of the bud of a famous

tree in the South that fills the whole forest with its racket; nor was it a
clumsy thing like the fruit, in some tropical clime, that crashes down,
almost knocking the life out of those who gather it; for in his case the
right hand knew not what the left hand did. The churches of God in
whose service he toiled, have arisen as one man to declare his
faithfulness and to mourn their loss. He stood in the front of the holy
war, and the courage which never trembled or winced in the presence
of temporal danger induced him to dare all things for God. In church
matters he was not afraid to be shot at. Ordained, not by the laying on
of human hands, but by the imposition of a Saviour's love, he preached
by his life, in official position, and legislative hall, and commercial
circles, a practical Christianity. He showed that there was such a thing
as honesty in politics. He slandered no party, stuffed no ballot box,
forged no naturalization papers, intoxicated no voters, told no lies,
surrendered no principle, countenanced no demagogism. He called
things by their right names; and what others styled prevarication,
exaggeration, misstatement or hyperbole, he called a lie. Though he
was far from being undecided in his views, and never professed
neutrality, or had any consort with those miserable men who boast how
well they can walk on both sides of a dividing line and be on neither,
yet even in the excitements of election canvass, when his name was
hotly discussed in public journals, I do not think his integrity was ever
assaulted. Starting every morning with a chapter of the Bible, and his
whole family around him on their knees, he forgot not, in the
excitements of the world, that he had a God to serve and a heaven to
win. The morning prayer came up on one side of the day, and the
evening prayer on the other side, and joined each other in an arch above
his head, under the shadow of which he walked all the day. The
Sabbath worship extended into