GIPSY SMITH WELCOMED HOME.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1491, 13 July 1912, Page 15

GIPSY SMITH WELCOMED HOME.

- r -f- ; - FORTY THOUSAND TROPHIES. There .is no resisting Gipsy Smith '(6ays the "Christian World"). His audience may be as cynical and supercilious, Sβ prejudiced against popular evangelists and monster missions as it chooses,. but in ton minutes' it will be safely. unde.r the Gipsy's spell, listening entranced as he tells, almost in awestruck tones, of the latest triumphs of "the old Gospel." It was by no means a cynical audience that crowded Whitefields, London, recently, to welcome him homo from America, and he had not spoken for five minutes before tho first .surreptitious handkerchief appeared. Few men,, surely, in this unsentimental age, have such a gift of mak,ing people cry, and laugh, and believe. First, however,-came two weighty tributes to the solid qualities that he bohind the Gipsy's, emotional, magnetic oratory. Dr. James. Mitchell (president iof the National Free Church, Council), who presided, said .that Gipsy Smith was. a constant reminder of what they were too apt to forget—the spiritual character of. the Church. Bβ always put that first, and so must tho rest of us. Dr. Clifford, too, bore witness to the Gipsy's loyalty to the Church,. He never thought his workdone unless ho had convinced a man that it was his duty to come into full and active membership. Another-quality-he admired in the Gipsy was his frank acceptance of tho fact that neither "ho, nor. any one evangelist, nor any one Church, had a monopoly of the truth of the Gospel. That could not be said of all evangelists. Gipsy Smith, who hod an upstanding welcome, spoke with all his old charm about the triumphs ho had witnessed on tbo Pacifio coaet. After every anecdote, "It's only the old Gospel that could do that," was his refrain. ■ After thirty-five years as an evangelist he was still serving out plain "bread and water." Ho was not a "Tangentionist." "That's a Gipsonian word," he explained. ■ "It means I've stuck to iny, own business—Christ and Him crucib'od." During his tour he had travelled 25,000 miles and addressed 400 meetings, and between . 30,00Q and 40,000 people had stood up to make a public confession of their desire to lead a Christian life. The majority were men, too. They told him that San Francisco would be "the proposition of his life," hut in that city of 410,000, of whom only IG.COO were avowed Protestants, he had seen 5000 business men marching through the streets in broad daylight, with their Bibles in their ha?ids, publicly yritnegsing to Christ. One man of sixty was the fourth member of one family to be won at Smith's meetings in various parts of tho world. Hβ had come to tho meeting owing to a cablegram from home: ">Xear rGipsy Smith in" Snn Francisco." Tbo Gipsy paid a grateful tribute to the friends who had made him what ho was, "When God gives out the laurels, it. won't all bo "Gipsy Smith." It will bo his family, it will be Dr. Clifford, it will be Mr. Sloyor, and all who have helped me." Ho closed with ono of his famous "mother slories." There was not, frankly, much point in it, but, told with his illimitable charm, it went home, as all tho Gipsy s stories do.