CHAPTER VIII - THE CLOSE

Summary

But this life-long labour of love was at last to close. For more than thirty years he had been identified with the Church Missionary Society. To give himself wholly to the work, this devoted servant of Christ resigned a living of £500 a year, and persistently forbore to receive any remuneration for his priceless services, even refusing the ordinary reimbursements of travelling expenses, and other payments actually disbursed. During much of that period he had been a severe sufferer; but a few years before his final summons came his malady assumed such serious proportions that all believed that his earthly toil was done. It was a time when he could have been ill spared, and those who believe in the power of prayer have no doubt that in answer to many earnest intercessions he was so spared a little longer to guide the council-chamber with his ‘old experience,’ till he had unravelled—no light task—most of the problems of foreign missionary work in this day and generation.

Such expressions as the following, from a private letter of that period, show how he waited his appointed time until his change should come. After writing of the defection—temporary, as it proved—of one from whom much had been hoped, he adds:

(To the Rev. W. Knight.)

The Lord alone knows them that are His. Such cases as this do not affect me as once they did. Nearness to the world of light consoles me in the sight of gropers in the dark. The hope of soon seeing the King in His glory makes me indifferent to the silly dishonour done to His office by those who obscure it by sacerdotalism.