With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
His marginal annotations disclose the profound and the devoted student
of the Bible—the man who without the slightest shred of mealy-mouthed
sanctimoniousness searches the Scriptures, and lives close to the spirit
of the Master. Anyone who sees even a little of Grenfell in action must
realize how faithful his life is to the pattern of Christ’s life on
earth. There are many passages of Christ’s experience—as when the crowd
pressed in upon Him—or when learned men were supercilious—or when He
perceived that virtue had gone out of Him—or when He was reproached
because He let a man die in His absence—that remind one of Grenfell’s
thronged and hustled life. Many believe that Grenfell can all but work a
miracle of healing; and the lame, the halt and the blind are brought to
him from near and far, at all times of the day or the night, even as
they were brought to the Master. In his love of children, in his
patience with the doer of good and his righteous wrath aflame against
the evil-doer, in his candour and his sunny sweetness and his unfailing
courage Grenfell translates the precepts of the Book into the action and
the speech of the living way. He cannot live by empty professions of
faith; he is happy only when he is putting into vivid practice the creed
which guides his living.
IV
ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK
It was hard to say where the Doctor’s day began or ended. One night he
rose several times to inspect wind and weather ere deciding to make a
start; and at twenty minutes before five he was at the wheel himself.
Mrs. Grenfell clipped from “Life” and pinned upon his tiny stateroom
mirror a picture of a caterpillar showing to a class of worms the early
bird eating the worm. The legend beneath it ran: “Now remember, dear
children, the lesson for today—the disobedient worm that would persist
in getting up too early in the morning.”
His books and articles are usually written between the early hours of
five and seven o’clock in the morning. The log of the _Strathcona_,
religiously kept for the information of the International Grenfell
Association, was likely to be pencilled on his knee while sitting on a
pile of firewood on the reeling deck. Just as Roosevelt wrote his
African game-hunting articles “on safari,” while so wearied with the
chase that he could hardly keep his eyes open, the Doctor has schooled
himself to do his work without considering his pulse-beat or his
temperature or his blood pressure. After a driving day afloat and
ashore, as surgeon, magistrate, minister and skipper, he rarely retires
before midnight, and often he sits up till the wee small hours engrossed
in the perusal of a book he likes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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