A church which he served in his early ministry is thus described by Dr. William L. Stidger, professor in Boston University: “There was a little church on the top of a hill in the sand dunes of the Sunset District of San Francisco, California. On the top of that beautiful little church, covered with ivy vines, a white revolving cross flashed its light through the night across the dunes.” I visited that church when I attended the great Exposition in the city mentioned, and heard Dr. Stidger preach. In fact, I received great kindness at his hands during the few days I was in the city. Through him I was privileged to attend a meeting at which Edwin Markham spoke.
In one of his articles Professor Stidger related this story: “At the foot of that little hill there was a grocery store. The light of that revolving cross, when it turned west, flashed through the front windows of that grocery store. The proprietor of the store, Robert Mobbs, as he waited on his customers at evening time, could look up and see the flash of that white cross and it always gave him a comfortable feeling. He liked that cross, he liked to have it flash its message into his store when the twilight fell across the sand dunes looking toward the Golden Gate.
“Robert Mobbs, tall, angular, had been born in Prince Edward Island, and he had grown up in a church-going family. His mother had taught him to memorize the great hymns of the church and he loved them. As he worked in the grocery store he liked to hum the hymns of the church over to himself as he waited on his customers. The hymn he loved best of all was ‘In the Cross of Christ I Glory.’ He would hum that hymn to himself as the evening shadows gathered and the light of Calvary’s Cross flashed in through the wide windows. One of his customers, hearing him, said, ‘I go out with little songs singing in my heart. I like it.’” He had heard the grocer sing:
“In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gather round its head sublime.”
Visiting Singer Familiar with the Hymn
Nelson Eddy, famed for his singing voice, was far from his American home when he gave a concert to the United States Army on a Saturday evening at Aden. But an interesting sidelight of this visit to the troops was given in The British Weekly in February, 1944, and also referred to the next morning, when he sang in the little Scots Kirk.
The explanation was made to the soloist to the effect that the place of worship was only a small building. But, accepting the invitation, he said that the size of the church made no difference, as it was his personal wish to sing the Lord’s Prayer in the Scottish Church. He, therefore, slipped quietly into the building just as the congregation had begun to sing the hymn, “Crown Him With Many Crowns.” “Not only did he join in,” said the one who reported the incident, “but he practically led the singing, and without a hymn book.”