But I Shall Not Again
Refer To The Inner Spiritual Life Which I Believe Then Began,
Nor Do I Intend To Specify With Any Prominence The Evangelistic Labors
To Which The Love Of Christ Has Since Impelled Me.
This book will speak,
not so much of what has been done, as of what still remains to be performed,
before the Gospel can be said to be preached to all nations.
In the glow of love which Christianity inspires, I soon resolved
to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery. Turning this idea over
in my mind, I felt that to be a pioneer of Christianity in China
might lead to the material benefit of some portions of that immense empire;
and therefore set myself to obtain a medical education,
in order to be qualified for that enterprise.
In recognizing the plants pointed out in my first medical book,
that extraordinary old work on astrological medicine, Culpeper's "Herbal",
I had the guidance of a book on the plants of Lanarkshire, by Patrick.
Limited as my time was, I found opportunities to scour the whole country-side,
"collecting simples". Deep and anxious were my studies
on the still deeper and more perplexing profundities of astrology,
and I believe I got as far into that abyss of phantasies as my author said
he dared to lead me. It seemed perilous ground to tread on farther,
for the dark hint seemed to my youthful mind to loom toward
"selling soul and body to the devil", as the price of the unfathomable
knowledge of the stars. These excursions, often in company with brothers,
one now in Canada, and the other a clergyman in the United States,
gratified my intense love of nature; and though we generally returned
so unmercifully hungry and fatigued that the embryo parson shed tears,
yet we discovered, to us, so many new and interesting things,
that he was always as eager to join us next time as he was the last.
On one of these exploring tours we entered a limestone quarry -
long before geology was so popular as it is now. It is impossible to describe
the delight and wonder with which I began to collect the shells found in
the carboniferous limestone which crops out in High Blantyre and Cambuslang.
A quarry-man, seeing a little boy so engaged, looked with that pitying eye
which the benevolent assume when viewing the insane. Addressing him with,
"How ever did these shells come into these rocks?" "When God made the rocks,
he made the shells in them," was the damping reply. What a deal of trouble
geologists might have saved themselves by adopting the Turk-like philosophy
of this Scotchman!
My reading while at work was carried on by placing the book
on a portion of the spinning-jenny, so that I could catch
sentence after sentence as I passed at my work; I thus kept up
a pretty constant study undisturbed by the roar of the machinery.
To this part of my education I owe my present power of completely abstracting
the mind from surrounding noises, so as to read and write with perfect comfort
amid the play of children or near the dancing and songs of savages.
The toil of cotton-spinning, to which I was promoted in my nineteenth year,
was excessively severe on a slim, loose-jointed lad, but it was well paid for;
and it enabled me to support myself while attending medical and Greek classes
in Glasgow in winter, as also the divinity lectures of Dr. Wardlaw,
by working with my hands in summer.
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