However, they were not long at Aintab, for they were summoned before the Governor and accused of selling four Turkish Testaments. Then, being unable to deny having done so, the Governor said, "You must leave Aintab immediately." He provided camels, and they had perforce to go, as they had been so dictatorially bidden. But this was not all. A mob of fanatics beset them, followed them out into the country, and then pelted them with stones—first with small ones, but later with bigger ones, which could easily have stunned anyone who was hit by them. Presently a man galloped up and tried to seize Newman's horse's bridle, but he beat him off with an umbrella. Some of the crowd called out that the Governor had ordered them to be killed.
By the time Newman returned to his party Mr. Cronin was lying on the ground, and his mother declared that her son was dying. He had been set upon by men who had come to attack them, and beaten with fists, clubs, and stones. They tried their best to kill him. However, to Newman's intense surprise he was not hurt inwardly, only weak from exhaustion and pain. This was an almost unhoped-for comfort, and it was even found that he could continue his journey before evening. By this time the crowd had entirely dispersed, for an official had been sent by the Governor, and eventually he was able to quiet the people and send them off. Many of the travellers' possessions were lost, many stolen, but, at any rate, though discomforts and dangers undreamt of had been theirs, at least they were none of them seriously hurt; and that in itself was a thing for which they felt infinitely thankful. At last the Euphrates was reached.
"We saw it first in splendid contrast to a chalk desert, the most odious place through which I have travelled. We had soft chalk crumbling under foot, into which the beasts sank over their fetlocks or deeper…. When we surmounted the last chalk hills the green valley of the Euphrates burst upon us.
"It runs in a lowland excavation, bounded by opposite lines of high hills…. This valley was rich in the extreme, with trees scattered in it like England; but the sides of the hills were well wooded…. The river is very turbid, as if with white clay; it is unnaturally sweet, does not taste gritty, and is painfully cold. We presume this is from the melting of snow water…. The river is deep, rapid, smooth, and (I judge) as broad as the Thames at Blackfriars…."
He thus describes the raft they were having made to take them down the river to Bagdad:—"Rough branches of trees of most irregular shape and quite small are strung together crosswise by ties of rope, and under them are fastened a sort of flooring of goat-skins blown up like bladders…. On these is fixed a deck of planks. These rafts carry enormous weights and draw very little water."
In the Memoir of Lord Congleton the end of this journey is thus told:— "They reached Bagdad on 27th June, and were met by Mr. Groves, who had for so many months been anxiously waiting for their arrival, after sufferings neither few nor light on both sides. It is hard to realize what such a meeting would be after two such years of toil and suffering as the past had been."
SECOND PART—BAGDAD
No sooner had the missionary party at length settled down at Bagdad than more trouble fell upon them. Mrs. Cronin, who had suffered almost more from the troubles, discomforts, and dangers of the journey than perhaps her friends guessed, grew worse and worse. She told Mr. Groves "that she was come hither to die," and it proved to be true; for only a few days after her arrival she died, to the deep distress of her son. So already, besides the unceasing discomforts, dangers, and disasters which had befallen the missionaries, there had been the cost of these three lives— Lord Congleton's wife, Mrs. Groves, and now old Mrs. Cronin, worn out by the terrible weariness of their journeyings under such rough conditions.
There is one thing which has struck me very forcibly as regards Frank Newman's Personal Narrative, and it is this: Throughout the whole book there is no mention of actual missionary work—the aim and object of this journey into Syria. There are, it is true, allusions to their own private prayer-meetings (of course they were hardly what one generally understands by the word "private," but still they could not be termed public) and to the distribution of New Testaments, but no actual teaching is mentioned. Nor does Newman write his own views on the subject. The diary-letters are chiefly filled with descriptions of the "perils of the way"—it is more or less secular. To me this has always seemed strange, for there was no doubt that he was, with the others, filled with a very real religious Christian zeal then, although later his views unhappily underwent great change and alteration, until a few years before his death, when his earlier faith was restored. But this fact remains: but for one's own previous knowledge of the aim of this journey, one would hardly recognize the Narrative as a missionary's diary at all.
In the Memoir of Lord Congleton there is far more missionary spirit; but still, even there, there is but very little detailed information as to mission work. During their stay at Bagdad Lord Congleton and Mr. Groves did indeed "develop plans for missionary work" which it was hoped would soon prove successful. The former bought a large house in the midst of the city for mission purposes. At first they thought of working among the "Armenian and Roman Catholic Christian population," and also "among the Jews," but they found the Mohammedans in Bagdad "peculiarly bigoted." And they owned to themselves later that "Bagdad had proved a failure in a missionary point of view." Mr. Groves, who wrote the Memoir of Lord Congleton, indeed owns that, "To many who look at life superficially, these years may seem lost; but He who often leads us 'about' (Deut. xxxii. 10) … has purposes of which neither the one led, and still less the lookers-on, have any conception…. Thus to some these years of toil and sorrow will appear a mistake."