THOMAS T—was an ex-clergyman, sprung from a good family in Ireland. He was already in consumption when he became impressed that it was his duty to go to Demerara for the work of the Lord. Some may have thought that he would have done better to have filled a decent grave in his own country, rather than to be thrown overboard on the voyage, as was confidently expected. Far from this, he lived and labored for years among those who had not long been freed from slavery. Abolition was sometimes expressed among them, more forcibly than accurately, to the effect that Queen Victoria had sent out word that they were not to work anymore. They never had worked save because they were compelled, and now they welcomed the abolition of slavery as the abolition of work. It fell to the lot of the servants of Christ to explain to those who were converted that whatever Queen Victoria might or might not have said, the word of God said plainly that they should work, for the credit of Christ.
Thomas T—felt the need of supporting precept by example. He had been well accustomed, to working at Greek and the like, but the reading of books was not the kind of work to furnish a telling example to his dark brethren.
He bethought himself that the making even of a pair of shoes was more than he could do, but that he might at any rate be able to patch and mend them. The ex-clergyman urged on by Christian devotedness, started in business in the “land of mud” as a cobbler. Carey left cobbling to study the tongues of India; Thomas T—took to it; but both to serve great gospel ends.
About this time his relatives in Ireland sent a letter to him by the hands of a sea-captain, who was strictly charged to give it into no other hands than those of Thomas T—. Picture then the sailor in search of this gentleman, standing before one of the wooden houses raised on posts above the mud. In the space beneath the house, formed by the posts on which it stood, the perplexed seaman saw a white man bending over a last, with a little book open beside him while he worked.
“Where’s the Rev. Thomas T—, my man?”
“I am Thomas T—.”
“You don’t come that over me; you want to see what I’ve got for him.”
And the sailor, much at his ease, picked up the little Greek Testament from which the brother was reading.
“Hullo! Can you read this? I can’t.”
T—said gently, “If you sit down, I will read you a little;” and turning it into simple English words as he went along, he read the gracious words of Jesus from John 4.
Soon the sea-captain forgot all about the letter that he had to deliver to the clergyman whom he could not find, for he learned that he too was such another as that woman of Samaria; and more, that the same Jesus was even then speaking to his soul the same words of grace as to her of old.
He returned to tell the Irish T—s that he had found the “Reverend Thomas” cobbling shoes in Demerara, but that he had been the means of the salvation of his soul. On one more voyage he sailed, but this time his ship was lost, and his spirit fled to Him Who had thus brought him to Himself. A.C.