Chapter Twenty-Two, To the White House
Chapter Twenty-Two, To the White House
After spending a few weeks on Ashley Down, the Mullers set off for the United States on August 23rd 1877 aboard the Sardinian. They had been allocated the chief officer’s deck room, for their cabin, which Mrs Muller found to be ‘tolerably comfortable’.
Off Newfoundland the weather turned cold and the ship’s progress was seriously retarded by fog. The captain had been on the bridge for twenty-four hours when something happened which was to revolutionise his life. George Muller appeared on the bridge.
‘Captain, I have come to tell you I must be in Quebec by Saturday afternoon.’
‘It is impossible,’ said the captain.
‘Very well,’ said Muller, ‘if your ship cannot take me, God will find some other way—I have never broken an engagement for fifty-two years. Let us go down into the chart-room and pray.’
The captain wondered what lunatic asylum Muller had come from.
‘Mr Miiller,’ he said, ‘do you know how dense this fog is?’
‘No, my eye is not on the density of the fog, but on the living God, Who controls every circumstance of my life.’
Muller then knelt down and prayed simply. When he had finished the captain was about to pray, but Muller put his hand on his shoulder, and told him not to:
‘First, you do not believe He will; and second, I believe he has, and there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.’
The captain looked at Muller in amazement.
‘Captain,’ he continued, 1 have known my Lord for fifty-two years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to get an audience with the King. Get up, captain, and open the door, and you will find the fog is gone.’
The captain walked across to the door and opened it. The fog had lifted. It was the captain himself, who later told the story of this incident, and who was subsequently described by a well-known evangelist as ‘one of the most devoted men I ever knew.’
‘Land!’ cried some of the passengers, and Belle Island was seen to starboard, only a short distance from the ship. That evening Muller held a meeting in the forecastle for the sailors and steerage passengers, and spoke afterwards in the Chart Room to as many of the cabin passengers who were able to attend.
On the Saturday, as they drew near Quebec, the Sardinian fired her guns as a signal of her approach. The voyage had lasted nine days. At the Hotel St Louis, a number of letters were awaiting the Mullers, welcoming them to America, and numerous invitations for George to preach. Before travelling south to New York, they found time to visit Niagara.
The couple were rather disappointed by their first distant view of the Niagara Falls. After driving to a bridge just above the American Falls, they made a partial circuit of Boat Island on foot. Then, climbing a staircase to Lima Island, and standing by a railing close to the edge of the precipice they began to appreciate the size and grandeur of the American Falls.
‘This,’ they thought, ‘surpasses everything; surely this must be the grandest cataract in the world!’
But it was not; a few more steps brought them into full view of the great Horse Shoe Fall, on the Canadian side of the river, gushing (every hour) its 1,500 million cubic feet of water over the cliffs to form a huge, boiling cauldron at the bottom. And then their attention was attracted to the Rapids where the Niagara descends ‘over rough ridges of rock, great masses of stone and large boulders’, and where, observed Mrs Muller, ‘its waters surge and foam, in ten thousand fantastic shapes, and in the wildest turmoil, as though frantically eager to rush over the precipices into the abyss below.’
After spending the night at the Clifton Hotel, they left the following afternoon for New York travelling all night in a Pullman sleeping-car. They were taken to Pierpoint House in Brooklyn where they were to spend the next six weeks. On Sunday morning, September 9th, at Dr Talmage’s Tabernacle—said, at that time, to be the largest church in the United States—Muller was introduced to the congregation by Professor Thwing who had been responsible for inviting Muller over. Pausing in the course of a short speech, he shook hands warmly with Muller and welcomed him to the States. Muller then preached for three-quarters of an hour, and again in the evening. After the evening meeting, one of those who pressed forward to greet the Mullers was a former Ashley Down girl, now married and settled in America.
Muller preached about fifty times in the Brooklyn and New York area, including a number of times in German to the large German population. They then travelled to Boston where Muller’s first engagement was at Moody’s Tabernacle—an enormous building holding seven thousand people. On the morning of October 23 rd Muller was called on by a young man who had been so convicted of sin while listening to Muller preach the previous evening that he could hardly speak for crying. Muller preached many times at Boston and visited Dr Cullis’s Institution for Consumptive patients.
‘But for your example, all this would never have been in existence,’ Dr Cullis told Muller.
On November 4th Muller preached twice at the Old Presbyterian Church Newburyport, founded by George Whitefield. Muller caused a stir by reading from the Bible which had belonged to the great man; the book was not normally used. He occupied the pulpit which stands just above the spot where Whitefield’s remains are buried.
At Amherst Muller (staying with the Principal) preached to the college students, and also at South Hadley spoke to the staff and students of Mount Holyoke Seminary. At Providence, Rhode Island, Muller addressed large audiences and was asked by the University President to speak to his students.
At Philadelphia his engagements included addressing five hundred ministers and pastors from various denominations who had assembled to hear him. He spoke for an hour and twenty minutes on fifteen aspects of service for the Lord. After the meeting, a large number of men pressed around Muller, expressing their thanks and inviting him to preach in their churches. Muller considered this occasion ‘one of the most precious opportunities of witnessing for Christ ever afforded to him in his whole life’. On December 14th Muller preached on Psalm 103 at a packed All Saints Episcopal Church. Mrs Muller commented that ‘no clerical gown was put on, and a few collects only were read by the minister at the commencement of the service’.
From Philadelphia to Baltimore where Muller preached night after night to immense audiences: at the large Methodist Episcopal Church every available square inch including the aisles was taken up with people; and at the First Presbyterian Church many had to stand and others were turned away for lack of room.
Outside Washington, at Wayland Seminary, Muller addressed about a hundred coloured missionary students and he and Susannah were thrilled to hear them sing.
‘God sent you to America, dear Brother!’ a pastor said to Muller after he had preached at Dr Mitchell’s Church in Washington. ‘That’s just the kind of teaching we want; something that will rouse and wake up Christians as well as the unconverted. God sent you to America, Sir; of that I am certain.’
On the morning of January 10th, at half-past nine, the Mullers had a very special appointment. They had been invited to the White House to meet the President and Mrs Hayes. ‘They received us with much courtesy,’ said Mrs Muller, ‘and, after making some inquiries about our work in England, the President entered for half an hour into conversation with Mr Muller. Mrs Hayes afterwards conducted us through the White House, a large old mansion, and showed us the State apartments, with the various objects of interest which this residence contains.’
Muller had a gruelling three weeks in Washington, often preaching twice a day, but they found time to climb the four hundred feet to the top of the dome on the Capitol building, and to admire the view.
From Washington they travelled up to Salem in the Alleghany Mountains, where Muller preached twice at the Lutheran Church to crowded congregations. On the first evening Mrs Muller described the audience as consisting of ‘pastors, theological students, ladies, country people, negroes, children, the visitors from the Duval Hotel—where we were staying—its three proprietors, the servants (one woman only being left at home); and,’ she continued, ‘an elderly Welsh minister from Merthyr Tydfil, for thirty years a resident in the United States, walked seven miles from the country to be present at the meeting’.
By the second evening Muller’s fame seems to have spread even further afield.
Hundreds of young men were present, most of them students from Roanoke College and the Theological Seminary, many of whom were standing at the entrance closely packed together; whilst others sat upon the pulpit side by side. The gallery was thronged. At the back of it several young men were standing upon forms, with their heads near the ceiling, and upon the edge of the front seats in the gallery a few boys were perched, with their legs hanging over the pews, in a somewhat dangerous position.
It is perhaps surprising that there were no serious accidents, for Muller spoke for an hout and thirty-five minutes having been particularly asked to give an account of his life and work.
The next journey took them four hundred miles to Columbia in South Carolina, where they stayed with Chief Justice Willard. Mr Willard took them to the State House and introduced them to the Governor, the Secretary of State for South Carolina and other government officers. Muller was asked to open the day’s deliberations at the House of Representatives with prayer, an invitation which he accepted.
After a number of engagements at Columbia, they moved on to Charleston where heavy rain kept congregations small at first. But on the evening of Sunday February 10th most of the churches in the town were closed to enable their ministers and congregations to hear Muller preach at the large Citadel Baptist Church. Two days later, at the Centenary Church, ‘an immense congregation of negroes and coloured persons assembled, many of whom stood in the aisles and outside the doors, whilst numbers were unable to get in’.
On next to Savannah, amidst its luxuriant plantations of orange and lemon trees, where the Mullers were lavishly entertained at the mansion of a Christian merchant, Mr Charles Green. Muller preached at Baptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and Methodist Episcopal Churches, and gave addresses to the girls of the Episcopal Orphan Asylum and at Whitefield’s Orphanage in Georgia.
At the end of February the Mullers boarded the river steamer City of Bridgetown for a tedious journey down the river Savannah to Jacksonville. Here, at the Polk’s Hall a vast audience assembled to hear Muller; it was said to be the largest congregation ever known in Jacksonville.
More meetings followed in Montgomery and New Orleans before, at the end of March, the intrepid pair boarded the John Scudder for the long voyage up the Mississippi to Memphis. Although the food provided on board was excellent, they were disturbed to find that no drinking water was available, except the unfiltered water of the Mississippi. This was so full of impurities and muddy sediment, which formed a thick deposit in the bottom of any vessel into which it was poured, that poor Mr and Mrs Muller could not make up their minds whether to drink it cold, or in the form of tea or coffee; it was said, in any case, to be bad for the health. They eventually hit upon the expedient of procuring a jug filled with ice, allowing the ice to melt, and then mixing a little wine with the water to take off the chill, thus making a palatable draught.
One evening Muller held a meeting in the saloon, where he addressed the passengers, coloured servants, and as many of the ship’s company who were able to attend; he also spent a few hours every day preparing the next Annual Report of his Institution. After just over five days, the John Scudder tied up at Memphis after a voyage of about eight hundred miles.
Their next destination was St Louis, Missouri, where Muller began a busy schedule of meetings for ten days. These included an address to at least two thousand five hundred people in the largest church in the city, Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church.
On April 18th the Mullers rose at half-past five, and commended themselves to the Lord as they set off on the long journey to San Francisco, nearly two thousand four hundred miles from St Louis. They left at half-past eight in the reserved compartment of a Pullman carriage, which even Mrs Muller conceded was comfortable with excellent sleeping arrangements. At nine the following morning they pulled into Council Bluffs for breakfast, after which they were surrounded by a large number of emigrants to California, amongst whom the Mullers promptly distributed tracts. At Omaha, Nebraska, they changed trains and engaged a second private compartment. Their journey now took them through the prairies, and for a while Mrs Muller could not understand why the train proceeded at a mere fifteen miies an hour. At last she realised (or perhaps George told her) that they were gradually climbing thousands of feet above sea level: indeed, so long and so steep was the climb that the engine broke down and the passengers were able to get out to view the immense plains surrounding them. The evangelist and his wife grasped this as another opportunity to distribute tracts to their fellow travellers. Once the engine had been partially repaired, the journey continued still upwards—at reduced power and pace—until they could see large patches of snow on the ground. And then, just before Archer, they caught their first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains. On they crawled through Cheyenne and in the night to Sherman the highest railway station in the world, where the cold was intense and the snow deep.
At Ogden, where the Union Pacific ended and the Central Pacific began, the only private compartment in the next train had been engaged and the couple had to make do with a ‘section’ of a carriage. On arrival at Wells, they saw groups of Indians wrapped in scarlet blankets and striped woollen mantles dyed with brilliant colours; and (before the day of televised ‘westerns’) Mrs Muller was intrigued by their ‘curious-looking hats, trimmed with feathers and wide ribbons’ and noticed that they ‘had their faces painted with patches of vermilion’.
‘At some of the stations,’ she recorded, ‘a few Chinese also were standing about, with their hair plaited in long tails, reaching nearly to the heels. At Bewawe and Battle Mountain there were more Indians, and towards evening we reached Winnemucca, where several copper-coloured men and women gathered round the train.’ As dawn broke on the morning of April 23rd they had their first sight of California; the ascent of the Sierra Nevada mountains became so steep that an extra engine was coupled on to their train. At six o’clock they reached Summit Station, over seven thousand feet above sea level.
Here a magnificent prospect of indescribable grandeur suddenly burst upon our view. Far above the station innumerable mountain peaks were towering towards the sky; the sun, which shone brilliantly, lighted up the snow to a whiteness that was dazzling; deep abysses, chasms, and ravines surrounded us; millions of pine and fir-trees were growing up the mountains’ sides; and thousands of feet far down below, valleys clothed with the richest verdure, added beauty to the scene.
At eight o’clock the door of the compartment was thrown open. ‘Cape Horn!’ shouted the conductor.
All the passengers jumped up and looked out of the windows. The train was travelling slowly along the edge of a precipice nearly two thousand five hundred feet high: this was ‘Cape Horn’.
Then, through ‘Emigrant’s Gap’ they began to descend further into California. The weather grew warmer and Mrs Muller observed that ‘the fields were covered with grass, intermingled with brilliant masses of wild flowers; lupines, eschcoltzias, wild roses, geraniums etc. were flourishing ... and millions of Californian poppies of an intense yellow, deepening into orange colour, outshone all the rest.’ ‘I never saw flowers till I saw them in California,’ commented an American.
On they travelled, through Sacramento and San Jose until at 5.35 they arrived at Oakland station, a suburb of San Francisco. Here two friends were waiting to greet them, and took them on board the El Capitan which ferried them across San Francisco Bay to the magnificent city itself. They were then escorted to the Palace Hotel and shown the suite of rooms which, as Mrs Muller—feeling rather guilty perhaps—was quick to point out, their friends had engaged for them. The journey from St Louis had taken six days.
After Muller’s first address at San Francisco, in the Calvary Presbyterian Church, a Mr James Wilkinson came up to speak to him. He was a former Ashley Down Boy who had been living in the States for fifteen years and in that time had been ‘used by the Lord as an instrument of great blessing to the souls of others’.
On their first Sunday in California, Muller addressed two thousand people at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church in Tyler Street.
The following Tuesday a friend called in his carriage and took them on a drive to see the sights. They walked along the beach and felt the Pacific breeze against their faces.
After walking some time upon the sands [Mrs Muller recorded] our friend conducted us to Cliff House, an hotel built upon a high rock overlooking the ocean, where, from a balcony, we had an opportunity of observing the sea-lions, by which the rocks that stand out in the sea are frequented. Hundreds of these curious, amphibious creatures were there, with their pointed heads, and bodies shining with salt water. Some were basking in the sunshine on dry portions of the cliffs, others were plunging into the sea, several were climbing up sloping places on the rocks, and others were barking discordantly. Soon after our arrival at Cliff House, a young waiter introduced himself as the brother of Emma Evans, one of the orphans formerly at Ashley Down. He knew we were in the United States, and having often heard Mr Muller preach in Bristol years ago, recognised him with great delight, and before our departure presented us with a beautiful bouquet of flowers, as a little token of his gratitude.
On May Day they visited China Town, Sacramento, where Mrs Muller noticed that the ground floors of many of the houses inhabited by Chinese ‘contain shops filled with curious and costly articles, manufactured by the natives of China and Japan; but most of the Chinese live down in places like cellars underneath their shops, where they dwell crowded together, smoking and eating quantities of opium’.
Next Sunday evening Muller preached at the large Calvary Presbyterian Church. The building including the galleries was packed; several people sat on the platform and the steps leading up to it were fully occupied. Numbers who could not gain admittance went away, and it was said that Muller’s ‘appeal to believers, and words of warning to the unconverted, were of a weighty, solemn character’.
Muller addressed a meeting of Californian pastors for an hour and twenty minutes, some of whom had come fifty miles to hear him. After a fortnight in San Francisco, Muller preached a farewell sermon to a large congregation at the Tyler Street Tabernacle after which a bouquet of choice Californian flowers was presented to him.
On then to Oakland, where all principal churches were closed so that congregations and ministers could hear Muller preach at the First Presbyterian Church. Hundreds were unable to gain admittance and missed the opportunity to hear Muller speak for an hour from Lamentations 3:22-26.
‘We have had a glorious meeting,’ a pastor told Muller at the close of the service.
After a series of meetings at Santa Cruz, they found time to visit California’s famous ‘Big Trees’. Mrs Muller, as fond of statistics as her husband, recorded:
Some of them are of gigantic growth, and shoot up their tall, straight trunks, like towering masts into the sky. The largest of these trees is 62 feet in circumference; its height was originally 371 feet, but the upper portion of the trunk having been blown off, its present height is only 296 feet ... but in other parts of California, there are ‘Big Trees’ considerably larger than the ones we saw. At Mariposa, for instance, the ‘Grizzly Giant’ is 107 feet in circumference, 34 in diameter, and 400 high; and the first branch (nearly 200 feet from the ground) is 8 feet in diameter.
On arrival at the Auzierais Hotel, San Jose, the following letter from an Oakland pastor was waiting for them:
Oakland May 15, 1878
Dear Brother,—I have just returned from our prayer meeting, and it may be a source of gratitude and encouragement to you to know, that very many testimonies were given to the great benefit received from your ministrations here. In fact there is evidence on every hand, that the seed you have sown, has taken root in many hearts. The faith of God’s children has been greatly strengthened, and principles of divine truth and Christian life have been received through your teaching, which will be of great good for many years to come. I rejoice with hundreds of others here, that God has led you to these shores, to teach us the way of God more perfectly. May the Lord wonderfully sustain you and your good wife, in your labours from place to place ...
With much love and gratitude for your faithful services,
I am
Your Brother In Christ
More crowded meetings followed at San Jose; and another encouraging letter arrived from San Francisco. It was from a woman whose daughter had been converted at fifteen, but two years later had become tied up with spiritism to which she had remained attracted for nine years. At San Francisco, however, she heard Muller preach several times and was profoundly impressed by one particular sermon. ‘You are the first person who has found the way to her heart for these nine years,’ the woman wrote to Muller. ‘... she says she would not have lost that sermon for 100 dollars.’ Numbers of friends repeatedly advised the Mullers not to leave California without making the trip to the celebrated Yosemite Valley; and after constant preaching at San Jose and Stockton Muller needed a break. They therefore decided to accept the suggestion, and never forgot their experience.
Though often told that travelling by Californian stage-waggon would prove an adventure never to be forgotten, scarcely were we prepared for the unpleasant jolting that now awaited us. Our coachman drove furiously. Rough and smooth, hill and dale, all were alike to him. Now we were driven over one great stone, and then came into collision with another; and as for a drag, going down hill, such a thing was never thought of. The man was doubtless an experienced driver, or at any rate he was a fearless one; but, being ourselves soberminded persons, unaccustomed to such ‘go ahead’ proceedings, we should have been thankful to take things more quietly; and besides this, desired greatly to reach our journey’s end, with no bruises and without broken bones. Through the Lord’s kindness, however, we reached Priest’s Hotel in safety, where we alighted for the night; and after a journey of eleven hours and a half, retired immediately to rest.
Next day their journey to the Yosemite continued in the hands of yet another Californian Jehu in the morning but a more careful driver in the afternoon. At about four o’clock they began to descend into the great valley to behold its wonders. ‘Stupendous perpendicular precipices, as we advanced, reared their gigantic summits, like enormous walls into the sky; the Bridal Veil Waterfall, with its rainbow hues, looked beautiful; whole ranges of rocky peaks and towering heights were seen; and one Cataract succeeded another… ’
Perhaps, after all, it was worth the excitement.
Next Sunday morning Muller conducted a little service in their hotel, Barnard’s, opposite the Yosemite Falls; and the couple distributed little books and tracts to their fellow guests who accepted them gratefully.
After three days in the Yosemite Valley they rose at half-past four to set off for the return journey with ten other passengers in a stage waggon drawn by five horses. At four in the afternoon a cart approached carrying a man and woman who drew up on one side of the road to let the larger carriage pass. Suddenly the woman jumped to her feet.
‘Is that George Miiller?’
‘Then I must shake hands with you, sir. I have read your Life of Trust, and it has been a great blessing to my soul.’
Mr and Mrs Muller obliged by leaning out of the window to shake hands with the woman and her husband.
‘Pray for me!’ shouted the woman as the journey continued.
After a series of meetings in Sacramento, they set off on the Central Pacific Railway for Salt Lake City. Here, at the great stronghold of Mormonism, Muller preached the gospel in the ‘plainest, clearest, most decided manner’. Lion House, the former home of Brigham Young, was pointed out to the Mullers. ‘His body lies buried in a miserable, neglected piece of ground—a sort of back yard—and his grave is covered by a large, flat stone, bearing an inscription; but,’ Mrs Muller added sardonically, ‘what the epitaph upon it was, we did not care to ascertain’. They noted that the homes of Young’s eighteen wives were also in the city. Muller preached a second time at the Methodist Church to a large congregation which included several Mormons; and after the service he chatted with members of the congregation.
By 8th June the Mullers were back in Chicago where, on the Sunday evening, George addressed a large audience in Moody’s Tabernacle. Numbers of people including the choir were accommodated on the platform. Muller spoke for an hour, after which William Howell, another former Ashley Down boy, shook hands with his old benefactor. They met two more former Ashley Down children after a meeting at the Farwell Hall.
Leaving Chicago more meetings were held at Cleveland, Washington and Gettysburg, until on Thursday June 27th 1878 they boarded the Adriatic for Liverpool. During the voyage, Muller addressed some passengers and officers in the saloon as well as holding a conversational meeting.
Muller had spoken over three hundred times and travelled over nineteen thousand miles; the tour had lasted for a year. On July 8th they arrived back in Bristol, and upon arriving in an open carriage at the top of Ashley Hill at half-past four, found a little army of the Orphan boys and girls, with almost all our helpers at the Orphan Houses, waiting to receive us. There, as we slowly drove along, the boys cheered heartily, and the girls waved their handkerchiefs, determined (as a by-stander remarked) to give us ‘a right royal welcome’; and at the entrance of New Orphan House No. 3, a crowd of children closed around us with loving, friendly greetings.