A reporter was among those who heard with amazement the words of the bishop as he explained how, charged with being a “spy,” he was “imprisoned, tortured, and flogged with ropes almost beyond endurance” by the Japanese. Four thousand persons were crowded into a prison designed to accommodate seven hundred. They were a courageous company, however. “When men and women came downstairs bleeding from torture, they might not speak; but they smiled, and the others smiled back.” Bishop Wilson was the only “European among Malayans, Indians and Chinese.” But his fellow-prisoners, observing his firmness and forgiving spirit, asked him to teach them to pray.
Bread and wine were lacking, but Bishop Wilson used tea or water in the celebration of the Holy Communion on Sundays. “It might be irregular,” the speaker remarked with a smile; but he could not be convinced that it was not valid. A Christian girl, he learned, was there for helping the British, and the elements were passed through the prison bars to her.
The hymn which lifted the soul of the imprisoned bishop above his immediate surroundings came from the singing spirit of Charles Wesley, and appeared in 1740 in his “Hymns and Sacred Poems.” The hymnology of both British and American Methodism is enriched by the inclusion of this song of worship; and it is also found in the Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church, The Hymnal (Presbyterian), The Hymnary (of the United Church of Canada), The Inter-Church Hymnal, etc. The three verses will be found “full of the sunshine of which they sing,” observed Dr. Charles S. Robinson. Lovers of literature will be especially interested in a comment made by Dr. James Moffatt, where he says, “George Eliot uses this hymn in Adam Bede describing how Seth Bede, the young Methodist, on leaving his brother one Sunday morning in February, ‘walked leisurely homeward, mentally repeating one of his favorite hymns.’ It was this one.”
Easy is it, therefore, for us to imagine Bishop Wilson, the liberty-loving Englishman, confined to a sunless prison in a foreign country, catching a glimpse of “a blaze of leafage on some trees,” then refreshing his singing spirit by mentally repeating the lines which he had often joined with others in publicly singing when a youth in his homeland:
“Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by Thee;
Joyless is the day’s return
Till Thy mercy’s beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Cheer my eyes and warm my heart.”