IN a recent letter to the Secretary Mr. Shaw thus refers to the subject of Mr. Colebrook's letter: You will be interested to know that I am now able to read and write Italian tolerably, but at present I am a poor speaker, and a worse hearer of the language. Our congregations are good, and our prospects are very encouraging. I have to pray for patience when I see such attendances and attention, and such possibilities of sowing and reaping for the Lord, while I am unable to handle either the plough or the sickle. The howling we have in place of singing is sometimes enough to drive one mad. It is simply indescribable! We must have a harmonium, and soon. I must either beg, buy, or borrow one. Mr. Colebrook, whose faithful picture of Roman Catholicism was in the May Maga zine, kindly volunteered to write to some friends in the hope of obtaining one for us, and I suppose we must try to wait patiently. I believe we shall do much good by a wise use of singing. Almost all the mission services I have attended here are very dull and heavy. I mean to try another plan. I am pleased to see that the Miller's have reached England in safety. May the Lord soon give them health. My dear wife has been very unwell, but I thank God that she is better, and also that our little girl is recovering from fever. Mr. Cook's party are here, but there is no one whom I recognize. Foreign Letters Received. BERHAMPORE-H. Wood, March 22, April 11. CUTTACK-T. Bailey, April 15. Contributions Received on account of the General Baptist Missionary Society from April 16th, to May 15th, 1879. General Baptist Societies. FOREIGN MISSIONS.-TREASURER: W. B. BEMBRIDGE, Esq., Ripley, nr. Derby. I. II. CHILWELL SECRETARY: REV. W. HILL, Crompton Street, Derby. III. HOME MISSIONS.-TREASURER: T. H. HARRISON, Esq., Wardwick, Derby. Monies should be sent to the Treasurers or Secretaries. Information, Collecting Books, etc., may be had of the Secretaries. Words and Deeds Deeds of the Prince Consort. BY GEORGE W. M'CREE. WE once saw the Prince Consort sitting beside the Queen as she went to open Parliament, and we saw him again as he left a splendid carriage to inspect a model lodging-house in St. Giles. He was a true Prince, and an earnest philanthropist, and we hold his memory in high esteem. We were, therefore, charmed to find that Mr. Theodore Martin has issued the fourth volume of his admirable life of the Prince Consort, and from this we shall quote some passages of great interest. The Prince Consort was a hard-worker. He presided at the opening of the Art Exhibition, at Manchester, and at eight o'clock the next morning he proceeded to the Peel Park, Salford. We then have this account of THE PRINCE'S DAY'S WORK. He received an address from the Corporation of Salford, in the Museum and Free Library, to which he replied. After visiting the Exhibition of Manchester Local Artists, he attended the unveiling of a statue of the Queen in the Peel Park, where he again spoke. Soon after midday he was on his way to London, and six o'clock found him present in Buckingham Palace in the Council-room, when the speech for the opening of the New Parliament was submitted for the approval of the Queen. No wonder that his diary for the day concludes with the words: 66 Very tired-early to bed." To the Princess Royal, after her illustrious reception in Germany as a royal bride, he wrote a touching letter, from which we quote his words on A ROYAL WIFE'S TRUE POWER. ou have now entered upon your new home, and been received and welconed on all sides with the greatest friendship and cordiality. This kindly and trustful advance of a whole nation towards an entire stranger must have kindled and confirmed within you the determination to show yourself in every way worthy of such feelings, and to reciprocate and requite them by the steadfast resolution to dedicate the whole energies of your life to this people of your new home. And you have received from Heaven the happy task of effecting this object by making your husband truly happy, and of doing him, at the same time, the best service, by aiding him to maintain and to increase the love of his countrymen. That you have everywhere made so favourable an impression has given intense happiness to me as a father. Let me express my fullest admiration of the way in which, possessed exclusively by the duty which you had to fulfil, you have kept down and overcome your own little personal troubles, perhaps also many feelings of sorrow not yet healed. This is the way to success, and the only way. If you have succeeded in winning people's hearts by friendliness, simplicity, and courtesy, the secret lay in this, that you were not thinking of yourself. Hold fast this mystic power, it is a spark from Heaven. Your place is that of your husband's wife, and of your mother's daughter. You will desire nothing else, but you will also forego nothing of that which you owe to your husband and to your mother. Ultimately your mind will, from the overexcitement, fall back to a little lassitude and sadness. But this will make you feel a craving for activity, and you have much to do studying your new country, its tendencies and its people, and in overlooking your household as a good houseGENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE, JULY, 1879.-VOL. LXXXI.-N. S. No. 115. wife, with punctuality, method, and vigilant care. To success in the affairs of life, apportionment of time is essential, and I hope you will make this your first care, so that you may always have some time over for the fulfilment of every duty. The ways of statesmen, as we have seen in our time, are not always perfectly straight and honest; but few of us would venture to condemn them as the Prince Consort did in a letter written to the Dowager Duchess of Coburg in 1859, that is, at the close of the Franco-Austrian War. He thus speaks of THE TORTUOUS WAYS OF DIPLOMACY. I can remember no period of equal confusion and danger. The ill-starred telegraph speaks incessantly from all quarters of the globe, and from every quarter a different language (I mean to a different purport). Suspicion, hatred, pride, cunning, intrigue, covetousness, dissimulation, dictate the despatches, and in this state of things we cast about to find a basis on which peace may be secured. An agreeable occupation! We are certain that all will read with interest the Prince Consort's solemn words on OUR DIVINE MISSION. Man alone is born into this world with faculties far nobler than the other creatures, reflecting the image of Him who has willed that there should be beings on earth to know and worship Him, but endowed with the power of selfdetermination, and having reason given them for their guide. Man can develop his faculties, place himself in harmony with his Divine prototype, and attain that happiness which is offered to him on earth, to be completed hereafter in entire union with Him through the mercy of Christ. But he can also leave these faculties unimproved, and miss his mission on earth. He will then sink to the level of the lower animals, forfeit happiness, and separate from his God, whom he did not know how to find. I say a man has no right to do this-he has no right to throw off the task which is laid upon him for his happiness; it is his duty to fulfil his mission to the utmost of his power; but it is our duty, the duty of those whom Providence has removed from this awful struggle and placed beyond this fearful danger, manfully, unceasingly, and untiringly, to aid by advice, assistance, and example, the great bulk of the people, who, without such aid, must almost inevitably succumb to the difficulty of their task. They will not cast from them the aiding hand, and the Almighty will bless the labours of those who work in His cause. Few records have affected us more than the account we have of the Prince Consort's efforts on behalf of the BALLAST-HEAVERS OF THE PORT OF LONDON. It cannot be presented more truthfully than in their own words, in a memorial presented to the Queen in June, 1863, in which they acknowledged that to the Prince "we owed eight years' contented life in our hard labour, after a long time of misery from which he relieved us. "Before he came to our rescue, we could only get work through a body of riverside publicans and middlemen, who made us drink before they would give us a job, made us drink while at it, and kept us waiting for our wages and drinking after we had done our work, so that we could only take half our wages home to our families, and that half often reached them, too, through a drunkard's hands. The consequence was that we were in a pitiable state; this truckdrinking system was ruining us, body and soul, and our families too. "Your Majesty, we tried hard to get out of this accursed system; we appealed to men of all classes, and opened an office ourselves; but we got no real help till we sent an appeal to your late Royal Consort on his election to the WORDS AND DEEDS OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. 263 Mastership of the Trinity House. He at once listened to us. Your Majesty, he loved the wife of his own bosom, and he loved the children of his love; he could put himself down from the throne he shared to the wretched home of us poor men, and could feel what we and our wives and children were suffering from the terrible truck-drinking system that had dragged us into the mire. He inquired himself into the evils that oppressed us; he resolved that, if he could release us from our bonds, he would; he saw the President of the Board of Trade (the Right Hon. E. Cardwell) about us, and with his counsel a clause was put into the Merchant Shipping Act, 1853, which placed us under the control of the Corporation of the Trinity House. "At once our wrongs were redressed, and the system that had ruined us swept away. The good Prince and the Brethren whom he led framed rules for our employment, which secured us a fair wage for our very hard toil; they let us take it home to our families unclipt; they gave us a room to wait in for our work, and supplied it with papers and books; they encouraged us to form a sick benefit society, and in every way strove to promote our welfare. Your Majesty may well imagine what a change this was to us; from the publicans and grasping middlemen seeking our money at the cost of our lives, to Albert the Good and his generous brethren, desiring only our good! At one dead lift they raised us from the drunkard's life and the drunkard's fate, to the comfort and respectability of the fairly-paid, hard-toiling English working man." The memorialists go on to inform the Queen that they "celebrate their deliverance by an annual treat" on her Majesty's birthday, and that they "then think with special gratitude of their deliverer." We should like, they add, to "have a representation of him in the room that he and the brethren gave us; we should like to see his kind and earnest face looking on us as we daily partake of the boon he has secured us;" and they ask for a framed engraving of the Prince "as a remembrance of our benefactor, and as a reminder that we, in our humble way, should strive to be, as husbands, fathers, and men, what he was." The request was at once granted, and the gift made more precious by the words that accompanied it, which told that of all the tokens of sympathy submitted to the Queen in her grief, "no one was more in harmony with her feelings than the simple and unpretending tribute from these honest hardworking men." The Prince Consort was a man of intense social affections, and was sorely grieved when an old and favourite servant died. The following is from THE QUEEN'S DIARY. Thursday, August 12. He Up at six. Air still fresh, but streets very oppressive. While I was dressing, Albert came in, quite pale, with a telegram, saying, "My poor Cart is dead (Mein armer Cart ist Gestorben!)" [Cart had been Prince Albert's valet for twenty-nine years.] I turn sick now (14th August) in writing it. died suddenly on Saturday at Morges, of angina pectoris. I burst into tears. All day long the tears would rush every moment to my eyes, and this dreadful reality came to throw a gloom over the long-wished-for day of meeting with our dear child. Cart was with Albert from his seventh year. He was invaluable; well educated, thoroughly trustworthy, devoted to the Prince, the best of nurses, superior in every sense of the word, a proud, independent Swiss, who was quite un homme de confiance, peculiar, but extremely careful, and who might be trusted in anything. He wrote well, and copied much for us. He was the only link my loved one had about him which connected him with his childhood, the only one with whom he could talk over old times. I cannot think of my dear husband without Cart! He seemed part of himself! We were so thankful for and proud of this faithful old servant, he was such a comfort to us, and now he is gone! A sad breakfast we had indeed. Albert felt the loss so much, and we had to choke our grief down all the day. England lost a great Prince when Albert the Good was borne to his grave, and his memory should be held in remembrance. The Local Preacher at Home and Abroad.* BY B. BALDWIN. THE essential basis on which the Local Preacher should rest his pretensions to be a preacher at all is that he is truly converted to God, and is a devout and grateful lover of the gospel he essays to preach and teach. Moreover he must show real aptitude for a work so honourable and important by finding scope for the gift that is within him in the Sunday school, in meetings for social prayer, and in seeking to encourage, instruct, and guide the anxious and inquiring. Nor should he only "stir up the gift that is in him," but he must cultivate and nurture and improve it by all available means, so that his mind may be trained to think, and be well stored, that he may become a workman needing not to be ashamed. I would also desire to see him manifest at home that spirit of Christian love and urbanity, that kindly and gentle deportment, and that genial-heartedness of manners which should evidence his possession of that charity which "behaveth not itself unseemly," and by these means to gather the young around him, to attract them unto himself with the irresistible force of an all-conquering love; to win them over to the love of all that is excellent, and lovely, and kind, by the manifestation of like features in his own character; to copy Christ himself, and then reflect the beauty of His image, so fair and so divine. He must also be the friend and right hand of his pastor, ready to aid him in every good work; willing, so far as with him it might be possible, to adopt and carry out, and urge others also to aid in carrying out, every wise suggestion made by his pastor for the best interests of the church; and so he should be doing his part to wipe away the stigma which, rightly or wrongly, has been associated with the name of "local preacher." I speak this in the past tense, because if ever there were just occasion in byegone days to brand the local preacher, as such, as a hindrance to the church's prosperity, as an enemy to its peace, and as a thorn in the pastor's heart, I believe it has died away, or that the manifestation of such a spirit is happily very rare, and the sooner it is utterly exorcised the better. I have already said there should be a manifest aptitude for the great work of preaching the gospel; and I would have our churches ever alive to detect, to foster, and kindly encourage such aptitude. The harvest of the world is great, the labourers are few; and those who will labour, and who can, should have the sympathy and the friendly eye of the church at home. They should not have the cold shoulder, as being too forward and precocious, but invited to give evidence, before the church, of their ability to speak, in the great Master's name, the truths of His life-giving gospel; and thus the church should be able to sanction and commend the labours they approve to neighbouring churches where such help is needed for the extension of the kingdom of Christ. By this means, also, a wholesome check would be put upon such local preachers as are anxious to run before they are sent, and a guarantee would thus be afforded to churches needing preaching supplies, of the respectability of character, the preaching power, the Christian position * Substance of a paper read at the Local Preachers Conference at the Association, June 18, 1879. |
