WOMAN’S KINDLY IMPULSE STARTED CAREER OF FAME

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 87, 27 August 1948, Page 7

WOMAN’S KINDLY IMPULSE STARTED CAREER OF FAME

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) He was being stood up! In the lamp light on a London street corner in the early 1800’s, young John Williams pulled his sport cap down over his eyes and turned his back on the Sunday-evening crowd. It wasn’t the first night his city pals had failed to meet him. Probably they had picked up some girls and had gone on to the Highbury Tea Gardens without him. Tonight he felt the need for someone he could trust, a friend on whom he could rely always. A hand touched his shoulder. He whirled, a hot reproach ready for the late companions. His cheeks flamed. He choked back the rough words, for smiling up into his face was the wife of his employer, neatly dressed for \ Sunday evening church 'services. \ “John, wouldn’t you care to go with me to Whitefield Tabernacle this evening? Have you anything else planned?” “I’m waiting for friends,” he said bitterly. “They’ll show .up any time now.” The woman started to walk on, then came back. “Suppose I wait for you a few minutes?” she suggested pleasantly. “If your friends don’t come, then perhaps you would like to go to church.” John shrugged his shoulders and did not try to keep up a conversation. He wished the woman would go. If his friends didn’t come, he would go to see a girl he had met the other night. Even as he waited, though, he saw the girl passing with another boy. Within a few months, John Williams joined the church and took over a Sunday school class. Within a year he volunteered for foreign service with the London Missionary Society. John Williams became the most famous of all South Pacific missionaries during that century, and opened scores of islands, including dark and dangerous Samoa, to the forces of Christianity, before he was murdered by cannibalistic natives on November 20, 1839.