With Grenfell on the Labrador

by Fullerton L. Waldo

DR. GRENFELL LEADING MEETING AT BATTLE HARBOUR.

“So often Christian people think it’s their duty to forbid and to repress and to bring gloom with a long face where they go. But that wasn’t Christ’s way and it isn’t God’s way. If religious people do these things people begin to suppose that religion is something to destroy the joy of living. But that isn’t what it’s for. It’s to make us kinder to fathers and mothers and sisters and friends, and true to the duty nearest our hand.

“I love to think of David as the master musician who went about scattering good and dispelling the clouds of heaviness. We ought to follow his example. Sometimes we say ‘Oh, they’ve all been so mean to me I’ll take it out on them by being sour and dull and jealous and bitter!’ Here in this crew we get to know one another almost as well as God knows us, and we see one another’s faults. It’s so easy to spy out faults when we’re so close together, day after day. But we should be blind to some things—like Nelson at Copenhagen. You remember when they gave the signal to retreat he put his blind eye to the telescope.

“If God looked for the faults in us, who could stand before Him? None of us is perfect. Let us judge not that we be not judged, and mercifully learn to make allowances. I knew a man who had been the cause of a loss of $20,000 to his employer, through costly litigation that was the result of his mistakes. His master, nevertheless, gave him a second chance, with an even better job. Later I asked him if the man was making good. He replied, ‘He is the best servant I have.’ Even so we ought to learn to be long-suffering with others, as God is lenient until seventy times seven with us.”

In the little church at Flower’s Cove the Doctor spoke on the meaning of the words of Christ in Mark 8, 34, as given in the vernacular version: “If any man wishes to walk in my steps, let him renounce self, take up his cross, and follow me.”

“What is there that a man values more than his life?

“When I was here early in the spring there was a man who was in a serious way. I told him he should come to the hospital at St. Anthony for an operation. He said he must get his traps and his twine ready. Then when I came again in June I saw that he was worse, and I again gave him warning that in six months at most the results might be fatal. Still he said that he could not go. When I came ashore today I learned that he was dead. The twine was ready—but he was gone. That is the way with so many of us. We say we are too busy—we can always give that excuse—and then death finds us, grasping our material possessions, perhaps, but with the great ends of life unwon. Its only a stage that we cross for a brief transit, coming in at this door and going out at that. It won’t do to play our part just as we are making our exit—we must play it while we are in the middle of the stage.

“At Sandwich Bay we followed a stream and the two men on the other side called my attention to the tracks of a bear: and when we came back to the boat the men aboard said they had seen two bears wandering about. The bears were unable to hide their tracks, and even so you and I cannot conceal the traces of our footsteps where we went. Captain Coté at the Greenly Island Light showed us the model of a steamship—made with a motor costing a dollar and a half that ran it in a straight line for an hour. It had no volition of its own. Man is not like that soulless boat: he has a mind of his own. We are surrounded by amazing discoveries: great scientists are ever toiling on the problem of communication with the dead. Men laughed at the alchemists of old: we laugh no longer at the idea of changing one substance into another. We can change water with electricity and change one frog’s egg into twins. We can fly from St. John’s to England in a day. We can see through solid substances—come to St Anthony and I will show it to you with the X-ray apparatus. What fools we are to deny immortality and the resurrection! What are realized values as compared with the spiritual? There was the ship Royal Charter for Australia that went ashore at Moidra in Wales. A sailor wrapped himself in gold and it drowned him. Would you say that he had the gold or that the gold had him?

“The carol of good King Wenceslaus tells us of the blessings that came to the little lad who followed in the footsteps of the king. Even so, better things than any temporal benefits come to us if we walk in the steps of Christ.