Firstly, through the fact of his being a religious exile, and an exile
of a peculiar type.
The exiled Englishmen who founded the Northern States of America,
though they might wipe the dust off their feet against the land
they left, did not cut that land wholly out of their affections and
sympathies. A Government party, dominant for the moment, had made it
impossible for them to continue their own form of worship in peace; but
in the land they left, half their countrymen were bound to them by the
closest ties of spiritual and intellectual sympathy, and were a party
so strong as soon to become dominant. It was not England and its people
who expelled them, but a step-motherly Government. Therefore they
founded "New England" and clung to the old.
The Huguenot ancestor of the Boer left a country in which not only the
Government, but the body of his fellows were at deadly variance with
him; in which his religion was an exotic and his mental attitude alien
from that of the main body of the people.
To these men, when they shook off the dust of their feet against her,
France became the visible embodiment of the powers of evil; her rule
was the rule of Agag, whom the Lord should yet hew in pieces; her
people were the children of Satan, given over to believe a lie, and her
fields were the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which in judgment the
Almighty would yet rain down fire and brimstone; a righteous Lot fled
from them in horror with all that he had. To these homeless fugitives
the Europe that they had left was as the "house of bondage." The ships
which bore them to South Africa were the Ark of the Covenant of the
Lord their God, in which He bore His chosen to the Land of His Promise.
As the Huguenot paced the deck of his ship and saw the strange stars of
the Southern Hemisphere come out above him, like Abraham of old he read
in them the promise of his covenant-keeping God:--"To thee and to thy
seed shall the land be given and they shall inherit it. Look up and see
the stars of heaven if thou canst count them: so shall thy seed be for
multitude; like sand, like fine sand on the sea-shore. And when thou
comest to the land that I shall give thee, thou shalt drive out the
heathen from before thee."
And as he entered Table Bay, and for the first time the superb front of
Table Mountain broke upon him, he saw in it his first token from his
covenant-keeping God--"The land that I shall give thee!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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