The welcome which his brethren thus bespoke for him he everywhere most cordially received. He preached in London, in Great Queen Street Chapel; he was at the laying of the stone of the Wesleyan chapel now being erected in the Caledonian Road; he preached in St. James’s Hall, taking one afternoon the place of a minister who was unable to conduct the special service there; and he preached, last of all, it is believed, at Dalston, and afterwards administered the Lord’s Supper with much solemnity.
As the representative of the Australian Conference, he attended the British Conference at Birmingham, and, with the same object in view, he visited Scotland and Ireland. At the sitting of the Conference in Birmingham, his modesty, his manly sense, his quiet earnestness, and his unaffected devotion called forth the general respect and admiration of the ministerial fathers and brethren present. He also visited some of the principal towns in England, and showed himself everywhere the courteous, kindly, and cheerful man, with a sound judgment and well-informed mind. As might have been expected, Fareham, the scene of his childhood and of his first efforts to preach Christ, was among the places he visited. He preached there, and had the grave of his parents attended to and beautified.
We have met with those whose happiness it was to come in contact with him during his stay in this country, and on all hands the testimony is, that he was a man as much beloved for the rich human qualities of his heart, as he was respected for his extensive practical knowledge of life and the world. One remembers his hearty cheerful laugh, another his telling anecdotes of Australian life, and another the simplicity and fervour of his prayers. One tells of the trouble he took to find out a young man in London, for whom he had been entrusted with a message of kindness; all can tell of the deep tender devotion of the man, untarnished by so much as a touch of fanaticism. One who was brought into close communion with him for several hours, about two or three weeks before he sailed in the London, has said:—
“I was much impressed by Mr. Draper’s conversation and bearing. He had seen the world, and he talked like a man to whom men and things were familiar. The experiences of life had evidently accomplished their purpose in him. He was in command of himself; his judgment was strong and well-balanced; his tone and manner altogether showed the completeness, the symmetry, and the tender and genial perfection of one who had laboured and suffered, and, in all, had grown wiser and better, and more serviceable for his generation and mankind. His centre could not be doubted. Christ and Christ’s work, these were conspicuously the objects about which his whole thought and being revolved. Cheerful, pleasant, courteous, alive to all that was going on around him, utterly free from all sourness and affectation, he exhibited, with wonderful attractiveness, the simplicity, purity, dignity, and high and holy aims of the minister of Christ. His prayer at family worship I shall never forget. As he offered it, I could not but remark how the little child and ripe saint met in those natural, lowly, reverent, and calmly mighty supplications. It was the prayer of a man, between whose spirit and God there was no haze, and who was as sure of answer as if voices from heaven told him he was heard.”
In November last he engaged a berth in the London. There were many who would have prolonged his stay in this country if possible, but Mr. Draper’s wish was, now that he had accomplished the end for which he had come to England, to return to the land of his adoption. He was advised to go through Egypt, and indulge himself with a few weeks journey through the Sinaitic peninsula and Palestine, but he seemed even anxious now to return to his work at Melbourne. In one of his last conversations with the Hon. W. A. McArthur, who had expressed some regret at the shortness of his stay in England, Mr. Draper said, “Well, I could spend another year in England very pleasantly, and should like to do so if my conscience would allow me, but I feel I must get back to my work.”
“Little,” says Mr. McArthur, “did he then imagine that his work on earth was so nearly finished, and that he was so soon to enter into the joy of his Lord; but if ‘that life be long which answers life’s great end,’ then Mr. Draper has lived a long life; and having had the pleasure of his acquaintance upwards of twenty years, I can testify that his was a joyous, happy life, and that much of his happiness consisted in seeing others happy, and endeavouring to make them so.”
And now we are in the track of the devoted Missionary, as he prepares to go on board the vessel which was soon to meet with a disaster terrible beyond many of the most grievous in the annals of shipwreck. Now that the agony is over, and the faithful one at rest, we are disposed to see a meaning in that dream—the story comes to us on good authority—which, thrice repeated, bade him resist all the importunities of friends, and go by the London, and no other way, and we would not have had him disobedient to the voice.
To a friend in Dublin he wrote, a few days before he sailed—“The steamer (the London) is a fine new vessel, having gone out but twice. Last time she did the voyage in sixty days. We join her (D. V.) at Plymouth on the 2nd January, and she will leave that port at six P.M. on that day. We trust in God our Heavenly Father for protection on our way, and delight in the thought that we shall be remembered by kind friends when they bow at the throne of grace.”
And so the good, genial, loving man went away from the land he loved, notwithstanding the associations of thirty years life in another country; from his Hampshire home which was as dear to him now, though approaching sixty years of age, as when he played there as a little child; and from the newly done-up grave, where the dust of his parents was sleeping. At the bidding of his Master, into whose hands he had committed his entire life, he had moved from station to station in Australia. He had never doubted the will of God in the successive changes which had marked his colonial life. He believed that there was a work for him to do in every place to which he was called, though he went to station after station, not knowing the things which were to befall him there. Shall we doubt now that a voice in richest mercy towards others, summoned him to a station in which he was to do his last here for the Master who loved him, and who had need of him indeed for an awful service, but on which hung a reward and a blessing more glorious than heart can ever dream of?
We believe that he had only been a few days out when he felt this, and summoned all his energies rightly to discharge the duty his Master had called him to, to make his last, his best. Serenely committing himself to the keeping of a merciful and faithful Creator, Daniel Draper perhaps never thought of his own wants, until he awoke up in glory, and found with sweet surprise that he had none, that he was in the likeness of his God, that he had exchanged corruption for incorruption, that mortality had been swallowed up in the deep, deep sea, and that around him were not shipwrecked mariners in their dripping garments and looks of agony, but faces bright with joy, and forms radiant with the glory of immortality.