The Earl and Countess of Tankerville also invited me to Chillingham Castle, and gave me an opportunity of addressing a great assembly there, then gathered together from all parts of the County. The British and Foreign Bible Society received me in a special meeting of the Directors; and I was able to tell them how all we, the Missionaries of these Islands whose language had never before been reduced to writing, looked to them, and leant upon them, and prayed for them and their work—without whom our Native Bibles never could have been published. After the meeting the Chairman gave me £5, and one of the Directors a check for £25 for our Mission Ship.
I was also invited to Leicester, and made the acquaintanceship of a godly and gifted servant of the Lord Jesus, the Rev. F. B. Meyer, B. A. (now of London), whose books and booklets on the higher aspects of the Christian Life are read by tens of thousands, and have been fruitful of blessing. There I addressed great meetings of devoted workers in the Lord's vineyard; and the dear friend who was my host on that occasion, a Christian merchant, has since contributed £10 per annum for the support of a Native Teacher on the New Hebrides.
It was my privilege also to visit and address the Müller Orphanages at Bristol, and to see that saintly man of faith and prayer moving about as a wise and loving father amongst the hundreds, even thousands, that look to him for their daily bread and for the bread of Life Eternal. At the close of my address, the venerable founder thanked me warmly and said, "Here are £50, which God has sent to me for your Mission." I replied saying, "Dear friend, how can I take it? I would rather give you £500 for your Orphans if I could, for I am sure you need it all!"
He replied, with sweetness and great dignity, "God provides for His own Orphans. This money cannot be used for them. I must send it after you by letter. It is the Lord's gift."
Often, as I have looked at the doings of men and Churches, and tried to bring all to the test as if in Christ's very presence, it has appeared to me that such work as Müller's and Barnardo's, and that of my own fellow-countryman, William Quarrier, must be peculiarly dear to the heart of our blessed Lord. And were He to visit this world again, and seek a place where His very Spirit had most fully wrought itself out into deeds, I fear that many of our so-called Churches would deserve to be passed by, and that His holy, tender, helpful, divinely-human love would find its most perfect reflex in these Orphan Homes. Still and forever, amidst all changes of creed and of climate, this, this is "pure and undefiled Religion" before God and the Father!
But in this connection I must not omit to mention that the noble and world-famous servant of God, the Minister of the Tabernacle, invited me to a garden-party at his home, and asked me to address his students and other Christian workers. When I arrived I found a goodly company assembled under the shade of lovely trees, and felt the touch of that genial humor, so mighty a gift when sanctified, which has so often given wings to C. H. Spurgeon's words, when he saluted me as "The King of the Cannibals!" On my leaving, Mrs. Spurgeon presented me with her husband's Treasury of David, and also "£5 from the Lord's cows"—which I afterwards learned was part of the profits from certain cows kept by the good lady, and that everything produced thereby was dedicated to the work of the Lord. I praised God that He had privileged me to meet this extraordinarily endowed man, to whom the whole Christian World had been so specially indebted, and who had consecrated all his gifts and opportunities to the proclamation of the pure and precious Gospel.
Of all my London associations, however, the deepest and the most imperishable is that which weaves itself around the Honorable Ion Keith-Falconer, who has already passed to what may truly be called a Martyr's crown. At that time I met him at his father-in-law's house at Trent; and on another occasion spent a whole day with him at the house of his noble mother, the Countess-Dowager of Kintore. His soul was then full of his projected Mission to the Arabs, being himself one of the most distinguished Orientalists of the day; and as we talked together, and exchanged experiences, I felt that never before had I visibly marked the fire of God, the holy passion to seek and to save the lost, burning more steadily or brightly on the altar of any human heart. The heroic founding of the Mission at Aden is already one of the precious annals of the Church of Christ. His young and devoted wife survives, to mourn indeed, but also to cherish his noble memory; and, with the aid of others, and the banner of the Free Church of Scotland, to see the "Keith-Falconer Mission" rising up amidst the darkness of blood-stained Africa, as at once a harbor of refuge for the slave, and a beacon-light to those who are without God and without hope The servant does his day's work, and passes on through the gates of sleep to the Happy Dawn; but the Divine Master lives and works and reigns, and by our death, as surely as by our life, His holy purposes shall be fulfilled.