Gods Answers | Page 2

for this world and the world that is to come. This is a picture on
which a kind heart loves to rest. But who shall make the picture real?
Go and first catch your little Arab, if you can. I say, if you can; for he is
too old to be caught by chaff, and you shall need as much guile as any
fowler ever did. Then with patient hands bestow on his body its first
baptism of clean water, a task often unspeakably shocking; reduce to fit
size and shape a cast-off suit humbly begged for the occasion, and give
him his first experience of decent clothing. Thereafter, proceed to the
work, sometimes the most trying ever undertaken, of taming this
singularly acute, desperately sly, and often ferociously savage little
Englishman, training him to be what he is not, or harder task still, to be

not what he is. Having, by dint of much pains and many prayers,
obtained, as you hope, some beginnings of victory over the most
wayward of wills, and the most unaccountably strange of mixed natures,
with its intellectual sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious
knowingness and stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and
slowness to unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay
out your scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to
say, call it flown from heaven and wile it out of earthly pockets,
anticipate all possible emergencies and wants by land and sea, finish
for the time the much epistolary correspondence to which this same
fragment of humanity has given rise, tempt the deep with your restless
charge, bear the discomforts of the stormiest of seas, and inwardly
groan at the signs of other and worse tempests ready ever to burst forth
in the Atlantic of that young sinner's future course; and when after
many weeks of anxious thought, fatiguing travel, and laborious inquiry
you find a home for the child, fold your hands, give thanks and say,
"What an adventure! What a toil! But now at length it is finished!" And
yet perhaps it is not half finished.
Multiply all this thought and feeling, all this labour and prayer a
thousandfold; and imagine the work of a woman as tenderly attached to
home and its peaceful ways as any one of her sisters in the three
kingdoms, who has made some twenty-eight voyages across the
Atlantic "all for love and nothing for reward;" has, by miracles of
prayerful toil and self-denying kindness, rescued from a worse than
Egyptian bondage over three thousand waifs and strays, borne them in
her strong arms to the other side of the world, and planted them in a
good land; meanwhile, in the intervals of travel, facing the perils and
storms of the troubled sea of East London society at its very worst, and
from a myriad wrecks of manhood and womanhood, snatching the
stragglers not yet past all hope, and, in a holy enthusiasm of love,
parting with not a little of her own life in order that those dead might
live.
The outer part of the story alone can be told: the inner part only God
and the patient toiler on this field can know. Yet the inner work is by
far the greater. The thought, the cares, the fears, the prayers, the tears,
the anguish, the heart-breaking disappointments, and the fiery ordeals
of spirit by which alone the motive is kept pure and the flame of a true

zeal is fed,--in short, all the lavish expenditure of soul that cannot be
spoken, or written, or known, until the Omniscient Recorder, who
forgets nothing and repays even the good purpose of the heart, will
reveal it at the final award, is by far the most important service as it is
ever the most toilsome and painful.
In the work of the kingdom of God on earth the true worker is in point
of importance first. Apart from the wise, holy, beneficent soul, even the
truth of the Gospel is but a dead letter. It is in the intelligence,
loveliness, magnanimity and sweetness of a human spirit, touched
finely by His own grace, that the Holy Ghost finds His chief
instrumentality. Preparation for a good work is usually begun in early
life, and the worker, whose story is to fill the following pages,
unconsciously learnt her first lessons for this service in her father's
house. There was, indeed, seemingly little to be learned of any rare sort
in the quiet village of Campsie, where life passed as peacefully as the
clouds sailing along the peaceful heavens. Almost the only break in the
even tenor of those days was an occasional sojourn in the house of her
uncle, the Rev. Dr. Edwards, a minister of the United Presbyterian
Church in Glasgow,