Multiply all this thought and feeling, all this labour and prayer a
thousandfold; and imagine the work of a woman as tenderly attached to
home and its peaceful ways as any one of her sisters in the three
kingdoms, who has made some twenty-eight voyages across the Atlantic
"all for love and nothing for reward;" has, by miracles of prayerful
toil and self-denying kindness, rescued from a worse than Egyptian
bondage over three thousand waifs and strays, borne them in her
strong arms to the other side of the world, and planted them in a
good land; meanwhile, in the intervals of travel, facing the perils
and storms of the troubled sea of East London society at its very
worst, and from a myriad wrecks of manhood and womanhood, snatching
the stragglers not yet past all hope, and, in a holy enthusiasm of
love, parting with not a little of her own life in order that those
dead might live.
The outer part of the story alone can be told: the inner part only
God and the patient toiler on this field can know. Yet the inner work
is by far the greater. The thought, the cares, the fears, the
prayers, the tears, the anguish, the heart-breaking disappointments,
and the fiery ordeals of spirit by which alone the motive is kept
pure and the flame of a true zeal is fed,--in short, all the lavish
expenditure of soul that cannot be spoken, or written, or known,
until the Omniscient Recorder, who forgets nothing and repays even
the good purpose of the heart, will reveal it at the final award, is
by far the most important service as it is ever the most toilsome and
painful.
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