“THE BLACK ELIJAH”

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 December 1929, Page 9

“THE BLACK ELIJAH”

MISSIONARY’S DEATH. LONDON, October 11. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in London received news yesterday of the death near Cape Palmas, Liberia, of William Wade Harris, known as the “Black Elijah,” a preacher of wonderful power, who began in 1915 a tour of the tribes of West Africa, especially on the Ivory Coast, telling them to burn their festishes. believe in one God, buy Bibles, and await the coming of missionaries. Harris was a Kruboy, illiterate and uneducated as far as'school learning was concerned. But he knew the needs of the human heart, and he was consumed with a passion for preaching the gospel and gathering the people into Christian worship and service. Clothed in a loose white calico gown, with a roughly-woven cross hanging from his neck, Harris tramped through the ■Western part of the Gold Coast Colony on his self-imposed mission. In one hand he bore a bamboo cross, held aloft, and in the other a tattered Bible. • He asked for nothing and he accepted nothing, except it was the submission of those whom he had brought to accept Christianity. He Refused to join any existing church, and he.was equally firm in refusing to become the founder of a new one. All he did was to bid his converts join any church they pleased if only it preached the gospel of Christ. Most of his preaching was done in the open air, for no building was

Llie OptJU clir, LUI liu UUIIUIUS VYUD large enough to hold the thousands, who hocked to his call, and at the end of each sermon the natives would cast 1 away their idols and accept the bap- • tism at his hands. As each convert passed through the rite of baptism ' Harris laid his tattered Bible on the 1 disciple’s head as an act of confirmation and hade him join a church. Suddenly Harris announced that he must return to his native country, and 1

passed on to the Ivory Coast. Fox- 12 months he preached and labored,there with undiminished zeal, converting the natives by the thousand as he / had done in the Gold Coast Colony. Then he vanished as suddenly as he had come. ;

DISAPPEARED Ft)R 10 YEARS. Sceptics said that Harris’ influence would go with him, but it did not. He had bidden his converts to build churches, and . they built them —150 churches of stone —with their own hands, and furnished them with pulpits and Bibles. Harris had told then! that the Gospel would be made fully known by teachers who would be sent in God’s own time. So they waited, meeting in their churches twice every Sunday, singing hymns, praying and exhorting each othei’ to continue in , the better life. ' For 10 years they waited for the fulf filment of Harris’ promise, and in 1926, | when the Rev. W. Platt visited the

Ivory Coast he was hailed as the promised teacher by crowds of men, women, and children, who led him to the churches they had built against his coming and flocked to hear him. His, tom* was a triumph; 22,000 converts were received as catechumens. Meanwhile nothing had been heard of Harris; the “Black Elijah” had passed into obscurity, < but in .the autumn of 1926 he was found living in poverty at Cape Palmas, by M. Pierre Benoit, ,a French Wesleyam missionary. Harris had aged and’his body had grown feeble, but the flame of his zeal still burned within him. His work was taken over by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, which also provided for the simple needs of his old age. -