Gods Answers | Page 2

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, where that venerable soldier of the cross still lingers, as if halfway betwixt the Church militant and the Church triumphant But whether in the father's house or in the uncle's manse, kind and truthful speech was the coin current, a good example the domestic stock-in-trade, and an interchange of cheerful, loving service the main business. It was a quiet school, whose very hum was peaceful;