“PERILS BY THE HEATHEN.”
[_]
2 Corinthians, xi. 26.
Lines in memory of the Rev. William Threlfall, Wesleyan
Missionary, who, with two native converts (Jacob Links
and Johannes Jagger), set out in June, 1825, to carry the
Gospel into Great Namaqua-land, on the western coast of
South Africa. The last communication received from him
by his brethren was the following brief note, dated “Warm
Baths, August 6. 1825. Being rather unkindly handled by
this people, in their not finding or not permitting us to have
a guide, we returned hither yesterday, after having been
to the north four days' journey, and losing one of the oxen.
I feel great need of your prayers, and my patience is much
tried. These people are very unfeeling and deceitful; but,
thank God, we are all in good health, though we doubt of
success. Our cattle are so poor that they cannot, I think,
bring us home again; but we shall yet try to get further; and
then it is not unlikely I shall despatch Johannes to you to
send oxen to fetch us away. Do not be uneasy about us;
we all feel much comforted in our souls, and the Lord
give us patience. We are obliged to beg hard to buy meat.
Peace be with you!
—William Threlfall.”
No further intelligence arrived concerning the wanderers for
seven months, except unauthorised rumours that they
had, in some way, perished in the desert. In the sequel it
was ascertained, that Mr. Threlfall and his faithful companions
had left the Warm Baths above mentioned about
the 9th or 10th of August, having obtained a vagabond
guide to the Great Fish River. This wretch, meeting
with two others as wicked as himself, conducted them to a
petty kraal of Bushmen (the outcasts of all the Caffre
tribes), and there murdered them in the night after they had
lain down to sleep, for the sake of the few trifling articles
which they carried with them for the purchase of food by
the way. Two of the assassins were long afterwards taken
by some of their own wild countrymen, and by them delivered
up to the colonial authorities. One of these was
the arch-traitor, called Naangaap, who with his own hand
hurled the stone which caused the death of the missionary.
He was tried at Clanwilliam, and condemned to be shot.
On their way to the place appointed for execution, the
escort halted at Lily Fountain, where the relatives of his
murdered companion Jacob Links resided. These came
out of their dwellings and spoke to the criminal upon his
awful situation, of which he seemed little heedful. Martha,
Jacob's sister, was especially concerned to awaken him to
a sense of his guilt and peril, saying to him, with true Christian
meekness and sympathy,—“I am indeed very sorry
for you, though you have killed my brother, because you are
indifferent about the salvation of your own sinful soul.”
On the 30th of September 1827, he was shot, according to
his sentence, by six men of his own tribe, at Silver Fountain,
on the border of the colony, with the entire concurrence
of the chief, who had come from his distant
residence to witness the execution.
Mr. Threlfall was a young man who had served on several
missionary stations in South Africa, from the year 1822,
under great bodily affliction for the most part of the time,
but with unquenchable fervency of spirit, and devotion to
the work of God among the heathen. His two fellow-labourers
and fellow-sufferers, Jacob Links and Johannes
Jagger, had voluntarily offered themselves to the same
service and sacrifice with him, for the sake of carrying the
gospel of the grace of God to their benighted countrymen
in the farther regions of Namaqua-land.
Not by the lion's paw, the serpent's tooth,
By sudden sun-stroke, or by slow decay,
War, famine, plague,—meek messenger of truth!—
Wert thou arrested on thy pilgrim-way.
The sultry whirlwind spared thee in its wrath,
The lightning flash'd before thee, and pass'd by,
The brooding earthquake paused beneath thy path,
The mountain-torrent shunn'd thee, or ran dry.
Thy march was through the savage wilderness,
Thine errand thither, like thy gracious Lord's,
To seek and save the lost, to heal and bless
Its blind and lame, diseased and dying hordes.
How did the love of Christ, that, like a chain,
Drew Christ himself to Bethlehem from his throne,
And bound Him to the cross, thine heart constrain,
Thy willing heart, to make that true love known!
But not to build, was thine appointed part,
Temple where temple never stood before;
Yet was it well the thought was in thine heart,
—Thou know'st it now,—thy Lord required no more.
The wings of darkness round thy tent were spread,
The wild beast's howlings brake not thy repose,
The silent stars were watching over-head,
Thy friends were nigh thee,—nigh thee were thy foes.
The sun went down upon thine evening-prayer,
He rose upon thy finish'd sacrifice;
The house of God, the gate of heaven, was there;
Angels and fiends on thee had fix'd their eyes.
At midnight, in a moment, open stood
The' eternal doors to give thy spirit room;
At morn the earth had drunk thy guiltless blood,
—But where on earth may now be found thy tomb?
At rest beneath the ever-shifting sand,
This thine unsculptured epitaph remain,
Till the last trump shall summon sea and land,—
“To me to live was Christ; to die was gain.”
And must with thee thy slain companions lie,
Unmourn'd, unsung, forgotten where they fell?
O for the spirit and power of prophecy,
Their life, their death, the fruits of both, to tell!
They took the cross, they bore it, they lay down
Beneath it, woke, and found that cross their crown.
O'er their lost relics, on the spot where guilt
Slew sleeping innocence, and hid the crime,
A church of Christ, amidst the desert built,
May gather converts till the end of time,
And there, with them, their kindred, dust to dust,
Await the resurrection of the just.
