Finally, those to whom the “heavenly vision” is not a momentary and fleeting phantom, but an abiding reality, will not hesitate to extend by money and by influence, if they have either or both, the consolations of a Spiritual Kingdom to their less enlightened, or less privileged brethren in the British colonies and dependencies.
In connection with this great subject, I know no finer lines than those written by James Russell Lowell, the great American nature-loving poet. Believing that divinity, more or less, lies concealed in the commonplace garb of our humanity, he says:
“Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.”
CHAPTER XXI
SIR HENRY MORGAN—LORD RODNEY—EDUCATION IN JAMAICA—CAPTAIN BAKER ON THE BRIGHT PROSPECTS OF JAMAICA
If Jamaica was known as the white man’s grave in a bygone age, it has now completely changed its character. Twenty-five years ago Chief-Justice Cockburn declared that “there was not a stone in the island of Jamaica which, if the rains of heaven had not washed off from it the stains of blood, might not have borne terrible witness to the manner in which martial law had been exercised for the suppression of native discontent.”
I was told only yesterday of the panic-stricken way in which the natives learnt of the death of the late Queen Victoria. A nonconformist minister, whose sphere of work lies amongst the mountains at the eastern end of the island, graphically described to me how the inhabitants of those isolated parts flocked into the nearest towns and to the parsonage houses, chattering anxiously together about the death of the great “Missus Queen.” Some native agitators had worked upon their ignorance and credulity, and they quite believed with the accession “of the new young man” slavery times would come again!