It had been uphill work for her. At first there had been only a dogged
response to the message she had brought. When some impression had been
made she found that it soon disappeared. In ordinary life the people
were volatile, quick as fire to resent, and as quick to forgive and
forget, and they were the same in regard to higher things. They went
into rapture over the Gospel, prayed aloud, clasped their hands, shed
tears, and then went back to their drinking, sacrificing, and
quarrelling. They kept to all the old ways, in case they might miss the
right one. "Yes, Ma," they would say, "that is right for you; but you
and we are different."
But she never lost hope. "There is not much progress to report," she
was accustomed to say, "and yet very much to thank God for, and to lead
us to take courage." She was quite content to go on bringing rays of
sunshine into the dark lives of the people, and securing for the
children better conditions than their fathers had. "After all," she
would say, "it comes back to this, Christ sent me to preach the Gospel,
and He will look after results." She was always much comforted by the
thought of something she had heard the Rev. Dr. Beatt, of her old
church in Aberdeen, say in a sermon: she could recall nothing but the
heads, and one of these was, "_Between the sower and the reaper stands
the Husbandman._" But results there were of a most important kind, and
it is time to take stock of them. Fortunately she was induced at this
time to jot down some impressions of her work, and these, which were
never published, give the best idea of the remarkable change which had
been wrought in the life and habits of Okoyong. It will be noticed that
she does not use the pronoun "I." Whenever she gave a statement of her
work she always wrote "we," as if she were a co-worker with a Higher
Power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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