AN INTERESTING CONVERT

Waipawa Mail, Volume IX, Issue 882, 19 January 1886, Page 4

AN INTERESTING CONVERT

Few stock actors were known in the Australias and New Zealand a few years ago than Walter Reynolds. He was a passionate player, and if I remember rightly, wrote several melodramas of the “blood-and thunder” pattern, but the most striking feature about him was his ingenuous and quite unaffected belief in liis talents. After leaving the colonies Reynolds left for America for a time, but managers were slow to appreciate transcendent abilities ; and lie eventually drifted to London. Here too ho fared badly, and for some time I lost sight of him altogether. On Wednesday last he appeared before the public in an entirely and original character ; that of “ an excomedian and city missionary.” It seems that jnst when Reynolds was in very low water, he grew convinced of the vileness of the actor’s profession, and became converted. A city missionary’s income he soon discovered, if less lucrative, was more certain that an actor’s, and the opportunities for spouting on public platforms were about equal in both professions. For some little time past, now Reynolds has been attached to a “ hot and hot” sect of revivalists with a special mission to actors and other “ godless folk.” I have before me now an article on “The Byways of Christian Work,” which the ex-coraedian contributes to a journal called the “Christian Cffonicle.” In it Mr Reynolds says that the influence of pernicious and godless literature induced him at the dawn of manhood to become an actor ; that he achieved such success that his name became “ almost a household word,” and that having made large sums of money he spent them in extrava-

gance and debauchery, “like most of my brethren of the sock and buskin.” Being by-ond-bye converted, he assisted in the foundation of the Gospel Theatrical Mission, among the prominent supporters of which are Mr Henry Brougham Farnie (N.B. —Author of some of the most questionable and lascivious extravaganzas ever produced on the stage), and the Rev C. 11. Spurgeon. I needn’t follow Mr Reynolds through the rest of his tirade against the stage. It is. a pity vanity should have brought such a promising young man to so pitiful a pass. One striking peculiarity all “Zealous converts” seem to share alike. They revel in gloating over their past wickedness, making themselves out to have been as bad as possible. Reynolds, for example, tells of having spent his earnings as an actor in debauchery. As a matter of fact he lived particularly quietly, never tippled even a little bit, and bore the reputation of being close-fisted rather than extravagant.— Home correspondent of a Dunedin exchange.