Walking by Faith, Not by Sight: Aldin Grout
Another bright missionary light shining into and out from the “Dark Continent,” a light that I rejoiced in and have been in a very real sense guided by, was Aldin Grout. Although he was twenty years the junior in missionary service of Robert Moffat, whose field in South Africa was not far from his, he was, as it seemed to me, no less a devoted and faith-filled representative of his divine Master than was that saintly Christian hero.
I first met Aldin Grout about 1858, when I was privileged to address, concerning the Sunday-school cause, a gathering of Christian workers in Connecticut, while he was to speak in behalf of the foreign missionary field. He was then about fifty-five years old. His presence impressed me at the very start. Tall, white-haired, sinewy, graceful in movement, with a bright face, keen eyes, and a loving, faith-filled expression of countenance, he won an audience to himself before he said a word for his cause. Almost his first words at that time showed the spirit of the true missionary, as the devoted man of God in God’s work in God’s field, and drew me to him in unbounded admiration as a soldier and servant of Christ who was glad to walk by faith, not by sight. Again and again I drove with him along country roads; several times I spoke with him before gatherings of children and of grown persons; I was privileged to know much of his Christlike spirit and work, and to desire at least that I might in some measure share them.
Telling of his earlier labors in his South African missionary field, he said, not despondently or sadly, but with a ringing soldierly voice, “I worked there as God gave me opportunity and ability for ten years, with various interruptions and intermissions, yet at the end of that period I could not point to a single convert in all the field in all the years; nor could I even point to a single one of my hearers of whom I could confidently say that he had been really benefited by or interested in my message during all the time.
“Yet,” he added, “in all that time it never entered my head to doubt that I and my fellow-workers were where God had called us to labor, and were doing what God had set us to do. We were there giving God’s message, sowing the seed of God’s truth. It was for one to plant, for another to water, for God to give — or to withhold — the increase as seemed best to him. Thirteen years, added to that ten, have passed since then,” he said; “there are now more than thirty Christian churches with hundreds of church-members in that apparently unfruitful field. It is good to be in God’s field and work, whatever the seeming results, for a time, may be.”
That testimony of faith has been an encouragement to me in days that would live otherwise looked dark within the past forty years. I am glad for that missionary’s confidence in the missionary’s God! And when I afterwards heard that he said, in looking back on the later years of his missionary life, “I have lived to see a hundred times more (of good results) than I ever dreamed of,” I could understand the trustful, grateful spirit in which he spoke.
Speaking of the help to the missionary in his far-off field, by the sympathy and prayers of Christian believers in their field at home, he said:” Since I came back to America, I found a good woman in Vermont who had for years been praying intelligently and persistently for foreign missions. She didn’t pray for us ail in a lump, and in a general way. She used a missionary map and the Missionary Herald to help her. She learned the names of the workers in every field of the American Board. She took one field at a time, week by week, and prayed for its workers by name; and so she girdled the world with her prayers. When I learned that, it explained a little matter that I’d wondered over.
“A few months ago, the telegraph-cable, as you know, was laid across, or under, the Atlantic. When the operator at Newfoundland was watching his end of the cable, at first he felt a quiver and a thrill that he couldn’t quite interpret. But he knew that some one across the ocean was trying to speak to him. That encouraged him, and after a while the message came. It was so with me in my Zulu field. There would be times when I would feel more helped and cheered than usual. I didn’t understand it then, but now I do. That feeling was when that Vermont woman got ‘round in her prayers to me and my field. I felt it, and no mistake. The prayer went up from the Vermont station to the throne of God,” — at this Mr. Grout pointed with his uplifted arms heavenwards, and then pointed down again with a sweep as he said, — “and it came down on the other side to the Zulu field.”
We all understood how we could do more for foreign missions, as we heard of that good woman’s prayers and of that good missionary’s gladdened heart, through the cable of faith-filled prayer by way of the throne of God. That was a lesson for us stayat-home Christians from a faithful and faith-filled foreign missionary.
The Transvaal and Zululand and other portions of South Africa have centred more of the world’s interest, since men have been killing one another so determinedly in the region where Robert Moffat and David Livingstone and Aldin Grout did so much for the saving of souls. But which, think you, is the greater or the better work in the sight of God, — or even in the estimation of the best of men?