The covenant - James A. Michener [226]
'The Book of Acts is significant for two reasons. It was written by the same hand that gave us the Gospel According to St. Luke, and that unknown author is extremely important because he is probably the only non-Jew to have composed any part of our Bible. All the other authors were rabbis like Jesus and St. Paul, or ordinary laymen like St. Matthew, the tax collector. In Acts we receive the first message about our church from a person like ourselves.'
But apart from knowledge, there was also deep conviction. These mature ministers truly believed that it was the duty of young men to 'go forth unto all the world' to spread the word of God; they were convinced that unless this word was taken to the remotest river, souls worthy of salvation might be lost.
For these simple English clergymen there was no predestination whereby all men were sorted out as either saved or damned; such belief would make missionary work a futility. The Society taught that every human soul was eligible for salvation, but this could be attained only if some missionary could instruct it. The task was to deliver Christ's precious message to savages who were in darkness, and few young Englishmen of this period who absorbed that teaching ever doubted that they personally could bring this salvation.
There was much prayer, and many learned discussions as to how salvation might be conveyed, and crude geography lessons outlining the problems to be encountered in Africa or the South Seas, where the young men were to go. It was studious and pious and soporific. But when Reverend Simon Keer, after having served four years on the frontier, burst into headquarters, every aspect of Hilary Saltwood's life was altered.
Keer was a Lancashire activist, son of a baker and lacking a university education. He was a short, round man, not over five feet two, with an unruly mop of red hair and a pair of wire spectacles that he kept shoving back onto the bridge of his nose. His station had been South Africa, a land that Hilary had scarcely heard of; vaguely he knew that through some accident or other a vast area had fallen under English rule. The students were spellbound when Keer, bounding up and down like the bobbin on an active line, launched his impassioned speeches:
'There is a land down there in our care which cries for the word of God, a land of black souls thirsting for redemption. Lions and hyenas ravage these people by night, slavery and corruption by day.
We need schools, and hospitals, and printing presses, and trusted men to teach farming. We need roads and proper houses for these children of God, and dedicated men to protect them from cruel abuse.'
After he had listed another dozen things the natives required, one young man whose father was a butcher asked, 'Don't we need churches, too?' and Reverend Keer replied, without halting the flow of his impassioned oratory, 'Of course we need churches.' But in the days that followed he never again mentioned any need for them. Instead, he captivated his eager listeners by his explicit accounts of what it was like to be a missionary:
'I landed at Cape Town with my Bible and my dreams, but before I preached my first sermon I traveled three hundred miles over almost impassable mountains, across arid lands and up and down ravines where there was no road. I lived for weeks with white men who spoke not a word of English and black men who knew nothing of Jesus Christ. I slept on the barren veld with only my coat to cover me and ate food that I had never seen before. The first task I was called to perform was aiding the birth of a baby girl, whom I baptized. The first service I conducted was under a thorn tree. When I finally reached my post I was alone, with no house, no food, no books and no congregation. All I had was