'God loves me!' exclaims Richard Weaver, in surprise.
'I saw that God loves me!' says Duncan Matheson.
'I thought that "whosoever" meant "me"' says Weaver.
'I saw that "whosoever" meant "me,"' says Matheson.
'The happiness I then enjoyed I cannot describe,' says our English coal-miner.
'I could not contain myself for gladness,' says our Scottish stonemason.
We may dismiss the evangelists with that, and turn to the missionaries.
III
Like Richard Weaver and Duncan Matheson, Frederick Arnot and Egerton R. Young were contemporaries. I heard them both--Fred Arnot in Exeter Hall and Egerton Young in New Zealand. They lived and labored on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Fred Arnot gave himself to the fierce Barotses of Central Africa; Egerton Young set himself to win the Red Men of the North American woods and prairies.
Arnot's life is one of the most pathetic romances that even Africa has given to the world. He made the wildest men love him. Sir Francis de Winton declares that Arnot made the name of Englishman fragrant amidst the vilest habitations of cruelty. 'He lived a life of great hardship,' says Sir Ralph Williams; 'I have seen many missionaries under varied circumstances, but such an absolutely forlorn man, existing on from day to day, almost homeless, without any of the appliances that make life bearable, I have never seen.' And the secret of this great unselfish life? The secret was the text. He was only six when he heard Livingstone. He at once vowed that he, too, would go to Africa. When his friends asked how he would get there, he replied that, if that were all, he would swim. But nobody knew better than he did that the real obstacles that stood between himself and a life like Livingstone's were not physical but spiritual. He could not lead Africa into the kingdom of Christ unless he had first entered that kingdom himself. As a boy of ten, he found himself lying awake at two o'clock one morning, repeating a text. He went over it again and again and again. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 'This,' says Sir William Robertson Nicoll, 'was Arnot's lifelong creed, and he worked in its spirit.' 'This,' he says himself, 'was my first and chief message.' He could imagine none greater.