At the sight of his suffering the scoffers were dumb. What his
preaching had not done to win them over, his sorrows did. They were
at last one.
That dreadful year left Egede a broken man. In his dark moments he
reproached himself with having brought only misery to those he had
come to help and serve. One thorn which one would think he might
have been spared rankled deep in it all. Some missionaries of a
dissenting sect--Egede was Lutheran--had come with the smallpox ship
to set up an establishment of their own. At their head was a man
full of misdirected zeal and quite devoid of common-sense, who
engaged Egede in a wordy dispute about justification by faith and
condemned him and his work unsparingly. He had grave doubts whether
he was in truth a "converted man." It came to an end when they
themselves fell ill, and Egede and his wife had the last word, after
their own fashion. They nursed the warlike brethren through their
illness with loving ministrations and gave them back to life, let us
hope, wiser and better men.
At Christmas, 1735, Egede's faithful wife, Gertrude, closed her
eyes. She had gone out with him from home and kin to a hard and
heathen land, and she had been his loyal helpmeet in all his trials.
Now it was all over.
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