Chapter Twenty-Six, Admiring His Kindness
Chapter Twenty-Six, Admiring His Kindness
During some of our tours [wrote Muller] we have for many weeks together been exposed to cold from 50 to 56 degrees below freezing point; and at other times to heat from 90 to no degrees and upwards, discomforts which must have been experienced in order to know the full force of them. Then, on the sea, again and again, very heavy gales, and even a typhoon, have overtaken us, when the trials thus occasioned were severe. On the land we have had to travel, on a stretch, not merely for twenty or thirty hours uninterruptedly, but more than once we have been on the railway six days and six nights in succession. Though, on the whole, we have had excellent accommodation during our long journeys, yet sometimes we have been obliged to put up with the most trying and inferior kind. Twice, though in the best cabins, on board large, first class steam-ships, we have been exceedingly tried by insects; in the United States, in New South Wales, in Ceylon, and in India, the mosquitos were most grievous; and in two first class steamships, rats so abounded that they ran over us by night. Yet hitherto God has helped us and, we doubt not, will help us to the end.
And indeed He did. Within a few days of coming close to death on that train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, Muller was able to resume a typically busy schedule—preaching regularly at Union Chapel, delivering lectures at the Town Hall, conducting Bible readings at the Manse, preaching in the theatre in neighbouring Jellapahar and holding a meeting for the German population of Darjeeling. At the same time he was busy writing the fiftieth annual report of the Scriptural Knowledge Institution.
The Indian tour took them on to Simla, Mussourie, Dehra Dim, Agra, Cawnpore and Allahabad where Muller preached to seven hundred Indian Christians from five different churches who had gathered in the open air for a love feast.
At Jubbulpore, Muller was handed a telegram from his son-in-law, James Wright: Muller’s only child Lydia Wright had died on January 10th 1890, in her 58th year. He had had no previous indication of her illness and he described the news, quite naturally, as a ‘heavy blow’; but he took comfort from Romans 8:28: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose’. The Mullers decided to return for England by the first suitable steamer from Bombay.
At Bombay—while waiting for the first ship to leave—Muller preached fifteen times in a large tent, and once in German to the sailors of a Prussian man-of-war, by courtesy of the commander. He arrived in London on March nth and preached at the Mildmay Conference Hall. Returning, then, to Bristol he had ‘great cause for praise, that the whole work was going on so well under the direction of [the bereaved] Mr Wright’.
For more than four months in the summer of 1890 Muller worked on Ashley Down. He badly needed a rest, however, and for this reason he and Susannah left England in August for a river trip down the Rhine past Nenwied, Coblentz, Mayence and picturesque ruins set amid lovely wooded country. At Heidelberg, Muller, feeling rested and invigorated, preached four times at the German Evangelical Chapel. He began to receive numbers of invitations to preach in Germany and Switzerland and therefore decided to extend his break into another lengthy preaching tour.
He began at Stuttgart, holding a large number of meetings, and noted that ‘the love of the truth was so great, that I had always extreme difficulty to reach the desk at the large Hall of the Burger Museum from whence I spoke; and the last few times that I preached, was obliged to be admitted through a side door, into this Hall, because by the ordinary way the desk could not be got at, on account of the immense crowds which filled the building’.
At Schaffhausen he preached several times to over two thousand people in the Johannes Kirche; then on to Winterthur, Basle—where a dozen times the great Hall of the Vereins Haus was packed to hear him—Langall, St Gallen, Heiden, Herisau, Hauptweil and Chur in December—where the Mullers noticed large masses of thick ice floating on the rivers and lakes, and found the frost severe and cold intense.
Returning from Switzerland to Germany Muller preached at Constance, Carlsruhe and Pforzheim, where (as at Stuttgart) ‘I had the greatest difficulty to press through the people, in order to reach the desk from which I spoke; and on the last three occasions had to obtain an entrance into the large Hall through a side door … At Freiburg in Baden he preached fifteen times and at Weisbaden ‘believers were edified, and careless unsaved persons were converted’ through Muller’s preaching. On March 18th he was asked to address over one hundred people at a large drawing-room meeting in the mansion of Princess Elizabeth von Schomberg Lippe.
Many more crowded meetings were arranged at Frankfurt, Bonn, Mulheim and Essen where on Sunday morning May 24th 1891 over two thousand five hundred people crowded into the great Paulus Kirche to hear the veteran preacher. More meetings followed at packed halls and churches in Barmen, Elberfeld, Cassel—where he preached to four hundred prisoners—Berlin and Hamburg.
At Halberstadt, where Muller had lived for five years as a scholar at the Cathedral Classical School before going up to the University of Halle, he preached in one of the churches to a ‘large and most attentive audience’. Then, after a stop at Wernigerode at the foot of Germany’s highest mountain, he travelled to Heimersleben where he had lived with his parents between the ages of four and ten. He rented a large hall and counted it ‘an especial honour and privilege to be allowed by the Lord to witness now for Him in the very place where, as a boy and young man, before my conversion, I had only dishonoured Him.’
Ten more meetings followed at Magdeburg and Brandenburg before he returned to Berlin for a second series of meetings; at Breslau he addressed the university students.
Travelling south Muller preached in Vienna at the Reformed Church, the Methodist and Baptist Chapels. It was in Vienna that year that he met up with his friend F. W. Baedeker and, according to Baedeker’s biographer, Muller ‘laid his hands on the head of Dr Baedeker, then a comparative youth of only sixty-eight summers, and “separated him to the special ministry to the banished brethren, committing him to the loving care of our Heavenly Father”.’ In the previous year the Russian Orthodox Church had resolved that Baptists, Stundists and those following ‘Paschkoffist heresies’ should be sternly dealt with; Colonel Paschkoff was simply one of many thousands banished to Siberia, Transcaucasia or other remote parts of the Empire. Baedeker travelled right across Siberia and into Sakhalin Island, visiting and encouraging these groups of persecuted Christians.
Moving further south into Italy, besides a number of church services, Muller held four large drawing-room meetings in the apartments of Canon Seymour, an English clergyman living in Florence. From January to May 1892 he preached numerous times in Rome and Naples with translation into Italian by Count Papenegouth Oswald.
On May 5th the Mullers arrived back at Dover and proceeded straight to Ashley Down after an absence of twenty-one months.
The preaching tours were over. In seventeen years Mr and Mrs Muller had travelled about two hundred thousand miles; Muller was now in his eighty-eighth year. During the tours it had occurred to him that Mary, who had died in her seventy-third year, would not have had the strength to undertake such ardous travels. Susannah, on the other hand, while never taking any part in public, had been an ideal companion and had greatly assisted Muller in the circulation of tens of thousands of tracts in many different languages and large numbers of Bibles and testaments. She had spoken privately to thousands about the Christian gospel.
The financial year that ended a few weeks after the Mullers arrived back at Ashley Down—year ending May 26th 1892—was the second only in the history of the homes in which expenditure had exceeded income. The first occasion had been the year 1881-2 when the expenses of the children’s work had exceeded income by nearly five hundred pounds; but in less than a month after the opening of the new financial year a sum was received from the payment of legacies which was three times greater than the deficiency: and this had occurred before the publication of the annual accounts.
On this, the second occasion, expenditure was nearly two thousand pounds in excess of income. Sixteen legacies, however, which had been left were due and might be paid on any date worth nearly £3,500. In addition there were between forty and fifty other legacies which had been left to the Homes, worth nearly £2,600, but the payment of which depended on the decease of the testators’ widows or other relatives. Further, the five houses on Ashley Down had been built and furnished at a cost of £115,000; none was encumbered by a mortgage. Finally, the Institution owned about nineteen acres of valuable building land worth thousands of pounds. On the strength of all this Muller had not the slightest difficulty in borrowing from the bank for a short period to cover the deficit.
On the other hand, however, Muller did not feel happy even to appear to be in debt. He wrote:
The Lord’s dealings with us during the last year indicate that it is His will we should contract our operations, and we are waiting upon Him for directions as to how, and to what extent, this should be done; for we have but one single object in connection with this Institution, viz., the glory of God. When I founded it, one of the principles stated was, ‘That there would be no enlargement of the work, by going into debt’; and, in like manner, we cannot go on with that, which already exists, if we have not sufficient means coming in, to meet the current expenses.
In the event, the only actual contraction of the work took place in the day school activities: at the end of July 1892 it was announced that most home and foreign day schools would be closed on October 31st; and on the appointed date, the sad operation was duly carried out. The school at Purton in Gloucestershire, the premises of which were owned by the Institution, and where young teachers for Ashley Down were trained, carried on as usual. Also all the Spanish and Italian schools, as well as three United Kingdom ones, continued to exist independently of SKI, the institution aiding them whenever it remained possible. Sunday schools would be supported as usual.
With regard to the children’s work, after some months of prayer, Muller and his staff finally interpreted God’s will to be that the work should not expand further. Originally, Muller had purchased over ten acres of land on which he had planned to build two more houses opposite numbers four and five. In March 1893, however, this land was sold at £1,000 an acre for £10,405.
By the end of the century, the social problem which Muller had sought to alleviate was itself easing. Leaders of national opinion such as Charles Dickens and the Earl of Shaftesbury had aroused interest in the care of children throughout the country. And others, besides Muller, had entered the field—Barnardo, Fegan, the Church of England Children’s Society etc. Following Muller’s example, there was now none of the eighteenth-century style barriers to entry: and the system of admission by election of subscribers had, thanks to Muller, all but disappeared.
Muller’s influence on the care of children was not now confined to the United Kingdom. In October 1893 he received the following letter from Japan:
Dear Mr Muller,
Having had the pleasure of meeting you in Japan, in which country I have been living for the last seven years, I should like to see you again, and tell you something about the Orphanage, which Mr Ishii is now carrying on in Okayama, which is really one of the results of your visit, and of the accounts which you gave, while you were in Tokyo, of the wonderful way God has provided for your own orphans in Bristol.
The said Mr Ishii, a Japanese Christian, was acting on the same principles as were maintained on Ashley Down; he cared for some one hundred and fifty children.
Susannah Muller was now seventy-three. On January 13th 1894, Muller’s journal notes without warning that it pleased God to take to Himself my beloved wife, after He had left her to me twenty-three years and six weeks. By the grace of God I am not merely perfectly satisfied with this dispensation, but I kiss the hand which administered the stroke, and I look again for the fulfilment of that word in this instance, that ‘All things work together for good to them that love God’ (Romans 8:28).
Thus Muller was again a widower.
My loneliness [he wrote] after sixty-two years and five months of a happy married life, has been great, and is great; but I continually praise God for what He gave me, for what He left me for a long time, and for what He has now taken; for it is all good for me. By constantly admiring the Lord’s kindness to me in this very thing, and that He has now entirely freed my beloved departed one from all bodily and spiritual infirmities, and made her unspeakably happy in His presence; He overpowers my loneliness, .and is doing more than merely supporting me.
With the last preaching tour over, Muller rarely left Bristol. Now that he was alone, he decided to give up No. 21 Paul Street and to move into a suite of rooms in No. 3 House on Ashley Down which became his home for the remaining years of his life.
In September 1895, on his ninetieth birthday, a presentation was made to him in Bethesda Chapel. Acknowledging it, he said that his voice was stronger than it had been sixty-nine years earlier, and that his mental powers were as good as ever. That same day he recorded in his journal that ‘my mind is as clear and as capable of work, as when I passed my examination for the University in March, 1825 (seventy-one years since)’.
He still took regular part in the Sunday morning services at Bethesda, Alma Road, and Stokes Croft Chapels. He no longer preached, however, at evening services, though he continued to play his normal part in the running of the orphan-houses. Indeed, he continued to write the Annual Reports until the edition for the period May 1896 to May 1897.
His passion for detail and accuracy never waned. On November 5th 1895, he recorded some of the articles of provision which had been sent to Ashley Down during the previous year:
9,455 quarterns of bread, whereby 100 sacks of flour have been saved, 141 lbs of butter, 13 very large cheeses and 24 lbs, 15 tons and 16 cwts of coal, 59 lbs of tea, 239 lbs of bacon, 709 lbs of meat, 20 boxes of soap, 29 large pots of jam, 72,648 apples [who counted them?] 7,037 pears, 240 lbs of cherries, 3,362 plums, 4,174 buns, 22 cases of oranges, a large quantity of potatoes, carrots, turnips, flour. There were also two living oxen sent to be killed for meat for the Institution.