The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 3

Some years pa.s.sed by, yet Wilfrid in all his travels had never forgotten the Men of the Beach. And, strangely enough, he wanted to go back to them.

At last the time came when he could do so. This time he did not visit them by sea. After he had preached among the people in a distant part of the same great island, Wilfrid with four faithful companions--Eappa, Padda, Burghelm and Oiddi--walked down to the south coast of the island.

As he came to the tribe he found many of them gathered on the beach as before. But the fierceness was gone. They tottered with weakness as they walked. The very bones seemed ready to come through their skin.

They were starving with hunger and thirst from a long drought, when no grain or food of any kind would grow. And now they were gathered on the sh.o.r.e, and a long row of them linked hand in hand would rush down the very beach upon which they had attacked Wilfrid, and would cast themselves into the sea to get out of the awful agonies of their hunger.

"Are there not fish in the sea for food?" asked Wilfrid.

"Yes, but we cannot catch them," they answered.

Wilfrid showed the wondering Men of the Shingle Beach how to make large nets and then launched out in the little boats that they owned, and let the nets down. For hour after hour Wilfrid and his companions fished, while the savages watched them from the beach with hungry eyes as the silver-shining fish were drawn gleaming and struggling into the boats.

At last, as evening drew on, the nets were drawn in for the last time, and Wilfrid came back to the beach with hundreds of fish in the boats.

With eager joy the Men of the Beach lit fires and cooked the fish.

Their hunger was stayed; the rain for which Wilfrid prayed came. They were happy once more.

Then Wilfrid gathered them all around him on the beach and said words like these:

"You men tried to kill me and my friends on this beach years ago, trusting in your G.o.d of war. You _failed_. There is no G.o.d of war.

There is but one G.o.d, a G.o.d not of war, but of Love, Who sent His only Son to tell about His love. That Son, Jesus Christ, Who fed the hungry mult.i.tudes by the side of the sea with fish, sent me to you to show love to you, feeding you with fish from the sea, and feeding you with His love, which is the Bread of Life."

The wondering savages, spear in hand, shook their matted hair and could not take it in at once. Yet they and their boys and girls had already learned to trust Wilfrid, and soon began to love the G.o.d of Whom he spoke.

Now, those savages were the great, great, great grandfathers and mothers of the English-speaking peoples of the world. The North Sea Island was Britain; the beach was at Selsey near Chichester on the South Coast. And the very fact that you and I are alive to-day, the shelter of our homes, the fact that we can enjoy the wind on the heath in camp, our books and sport and school, all these things come to us through men like Wilfrid and St. Patrick, St. Columba and St. Ninian, St. Augustine and others who in the days of long ago came to lift our fathers from the wretched, quarrelsome life, and from the starving helplessness of the Men of the Shingle Beach.

The people of the North Sea Islands and of America and the rest of the Christian world have these good things in their life because there came to save our forefathers heroic missionaries like Wilfrid, Columba, and Augustine. There are to-day men of the South Sea Islands, who are even more helpless than our Saxon grandfathers.

To get without giving is mean. To take the torch and not to pa.s.s it on is to fail to play the game. We must hand on to the others the light that has come to us.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: The chief authority for the story of Wilfrid is Bede.]

CHAPTER III

THE KNIGHT OF A NEW CRUSADE

_Raymund Lull_

(Dates, b. 1234, d. 1315)

I

A little old man, barefooted and bareheaded, and riding upon an a.s.s, went through the cities and towns and villages of Europe, in the eleventh century, carrying--not a lance, but a crucifix. When he came near a town the word ran like a forest fire, "It is Peter the Hermit."

All the people rushed out. Their hearts burned as they heard him tell how the tomb of Jesus Christ was in the hand of the Moslem Turk, of how Christians going to worship at His Tomb in Jerusalem were thrown into prison and scourged and slain. Knights sold lands and houses to buy horses and lances. Peasants threw down the axe and the spade for the pike and bow and arrows. Led by knights, on whose armour a red Cross was emblazoned, the people poured out in their millions for the first Crusade. It is said that in the spring of 1096 an "expeditionary force" of six million people was heading toward Palestine.

The Crusades were caused partly by the cruelty of the followers of Mohammed, the Moslem Turks, who believed that they could earn entrance into Paradise by slaying infidel Christians. The Moslems every day and five times a day turn their faces to Mecca in Arabia, saying "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d; Mohammed is the Prophet of G.o.d." Allah (they believe) is wise and merciful to His own, but not holy, nor our Father, nor loving and forgiving, nor desiring pure lives. On earth and in Paradise women have no place save to serve men.

The first Crusade ended in the capture of Jerusalem (July 15, 1099), and G.o.dfrey de Bouillon became King of Jerusalem. But G.o.dfrey refused to put a crown upon his head. For, he said, "I will not wear a crown of gold in the city where Our Lord Jesus Christ wore a crown of thorns."

The fortunes of Christian and Moslem ebbed and flowed for nearly two hundred years, during which time there were seven Crusades ending at the fall of Acre into the hands of the Turks in 1291.

The way of the sword had failed, though indeed the Crusades had probably been the means of preventing all Europe from being overrun by the Moslems. At the time when the last Crusade had begun a man was planning a new kind of Crusade, different in method but calling for just as much bravery as the old kind.

We are going to hear his story now.

II

_The Young Knight's Vision_

In the far-off days of the last of the Crusades, a knight of Majorca, in the Mediterranean Sea, stood on the sh.o.r.e of his island home gazing over the water. Raymund Lull from the beach of Palma Bay, where he had played as a boy, now looked out southward, where boats with their tall, rakish, brown sails ran in from the Great Sea.

The knight was dreaming of Africa which lay away to the south of his island. He had heard many strange stories from the sailors about the life in the harbours of that mysterious African seaboard; but he had never once in his thirty-six years set eyes upon one of its ports.

It was the year when Prince Edward of England, out on the mad, futile adventure of the last Crusade, was felled by the poisoned dagger of an a.s.sa.s.sin in Nazareth, and when Eleanor (we are told) drew the poison from the wound with her own lips. Yet Raymund Lull, who was a knight so skilled that he could flash his sword and set his lance in rest with any of his peers, had not joined that Crusade. His brave father carried the scars of a dozen battles against the Moors. Yet, when the last Crusade swept down the Mediterranean, Lull stood aside; for he was himself planning a new Crusade of a kind unlike any that had gone before.

He dreamed of a Crusade not to the Holy Land but to Africa, where the Crescent of Mohammed ruled and where the Cross of Christ was never seen save when an arrogant Moslem drew a cross in the sand of the desert to spit upon it. It was the desire of Raymund Lull's life to sail out into those perilous ports and to face the fierce Saracens who thronged the cities. He longed for this as other knights panted to go out to the Holy Land as Crusaders. He was rich enough to sail at any time, for he was his own master. Why, then, did he not take one of the swift craft that rocked in the bay, and sail?

It was because he had not yet forged a sharp enough weapon for his new Crusade. His deep resolve was that at all costs he would "Be Prepared"

for every counter-stroke of the Saracen whose tongue was as swift and sharp as his scimitar.

What powers do we think a man should have in order to convince fanatical Moslems, who knew their own sacred book--the Koran--of the truth of Christianity? Control of his own temper, courage, patience, knowledge of the Moslem religion and of the Bible, suggest themselves.

III

_The Preparation of Temper_

So Lull turned his back on the beach and on Africa, and plunged under the heavy shadows of the arched gateway through the city wall up the narrow streets of Palma. A servant opened the heavy, studded door of his father's mansion--the house where Lull himself was born.

He hastened in and, calling to his Saracen slave, strode to his own room. The dark-faced Moor obediently came, bowed before his young master, and laid out on the table ma.n.u.scripts that were covered with mysterious writing such as few people in Europe could read.

Lull was learning Arabic from this sullen Saracen slave. He was studying the Koran--the Bible of the Mohammedans--so that he might be able to strive with the Saracens on their own ground. For Lull knew that he must be master of all the knowledge of the Moslem if he was to win his battles; just as a knight in the fighting Crusades must be swift and sure with his sword. And this is how Lull spoke of the Crusade on which he was to set out.

"I see many knights," he said, "going to the Holy Land beyond the seas and thinking that they can acquire it by force of arms; but in the end all are destroyed before they attain that which they think to have.

Whence it seems to me that the conquest of the Holy Land ought not to be attempted except in the way in which Christ and His Apostles achieved it, namely, by love and prayers, and the pouring out of tears and blood."

Suddenly, as he and the Saracen slave argued together, the Moor blurted out pa.s.sionately a horrible blasphemy against the name of Jesus. Lull's blood was up. He leapt to his feet, leaned forward, and caught the Moor a swinging blow on the face with his hand. In a fury the Saracen s.n.a.t.c.hed a dagger from the folds of his robe and, leaping at Lull, drove it into his side. Raymund fell with a cry. Friends rushed in. The Saracen was seized and hurried away to a prison-cell, where he slew himself.

Lull, as he lay day after day waiting for his wound to heal and remembering his wild blow at the Saracen, realised that, although he had learned Arabic, he had not yet learned the first lesson of his own new way of Crusading--to be master of himself.