A LONELY LIFE.

Woodville Examiner, Volume VII, Issue 659, 30 January 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

A LONELY LIFE.

(“in black and white,” by eudyaed KIPLING.)

Do you know what life at a mission outpost means ? Try to imagine a loneliness exceeding that of the smallest station to which Government has ever sent you—isolation that weighs upon the waking eyelids and drives you perforce headlong into the labours of the day. There is no post, there is no one of your own colour to speak to, there are no roads; there is, indeed, food to keep you alive, but it is not pleasant to eat; and whatever of good or beauty or interest there is in your life must come from yourself and the grace that may be planted in y ou. In the morning, with a patter of soft feet, the converts, the doubtful, and the open scoffers troop up to the verandah. You must be infinitely kind and patient, and, above all, clear-sighted, for you dsal with the simplicity of childhood, the experience of man, and the subtlety of the savage. Your congregation have a hundred material wants to be considered ; and it is for you, as you believe in your personal responsibility to your Maker, to pick out of the clamouring crowd any grain of spirituality that may lie therein. If to the cure of souls you add that of bodies, your task will be all the more difficult, for the sick and the maimed will possess any and every creed for the sake of healing, and will laugh at you because you are simple enough to believe them. As the day wears and the impetus of the morning dies away, there will come upon you an overwhelming sense of the uselessness of your toil. This must be striven against, and the only spur in your side will be the belief that you are playing against the devil for the living soul. It is a great, a joyous belief ; but he who can hold it unwavering for four and-twenty consecutive hours must be blessed with an abundantly strong physique and an equable nerve. Ask the grey heads of the Bannockburn Medical Crusade what manner of life their preachers lead; speak to theEacine Gospel Agency, those lean Americans whose boast is that they go where no Englishman dare follow; get a pastor of the Tubingen Mission to speak of his experiences —if you can. You will bo referred to the printed reports, but these contain no mention of the men who have lost youth and health, all that a man may lose except faith, in the wilds; of English maidens who have gone forth and died in the fever-stricken jungles of the Panth Hills, knowing from the first that death was almost a certainty. Few pastors will tell you of these things any more than they will speak of that young David of St. Bees, who, set apart for the Lord’s work, broke down in the utter desolation, and returned half distraught to the head mission, crying, “There is no God, but I have walked with the devil 1” The reports are silent here, because heroism, failure, doubt, despair, and self-abnegation on the part of a mere cultured white man are things of no weight as compared to the saving of one half-human soul from a fantastic faith in wood spirits, goblins of the rock, and river fiends.