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At all meetings addressed by the founders of the proposed Society, the speaker repeatedly enforced his arguments by quotations from the Periodical Accounts; and finally, when the Society was established, the founders submitted to La Trobe, the editor, the following series of questions: "1. How do you obtain your missionaries? 2. What is the true calling of a missionary? 3.
La Trobe, if affected at all, was only encouraged or scared into still more decided indecision. Wilson was not much of a man of practical business. He was not successful in his early life at home, where business is a harder ordeal, and with fewer of the "flukes" that cross the path in young colonies.
As he was now a minister of the Brethren's Church, he considered it his duty, wherever possible, to build chapels, to organize congregations, and to introduce Moravian books and customs; and in this work he had the assistance of La Trobe, Symms, Caries, Cooke, Wade, Knight, Brampton, Pugh, Brown, Thorne, Hill, Watson, and a host of other Brethren whose names need not be mentioned.
Thomas, he said, Zinzendorf had heard the negroes sing Luther's fine "Gelobet seiest"; at Gnadenthal, in South Africa, Ignatius La Trobe had heard the Hottentots sing Grummer's "Jesu, der du meine Seele"; in Antigua the negroes could sing Hassler's "O Head so full of bruises"; and therefore, he said, he naturally concluded that chorales which were not above the level of Negroes and Hottentots could easily be sung, if they only tried, by Englishmen, Scotchmen and Irishmen of the nineteenth century.
As the companions of Zinzendorf Boehler, Cennick, Rogers and Okeley passed one by one from the scenes of their labours, there towered above the other English Brethren a figure of no small grandeur. It was Benjamin La Trobe, once a famous preacher in England. He sprang from a Huguenot family, and had first come forward in Dublin.
We read one or two of the names, and they were quaint and strange: "Anne Rypheria Hurloch;" "Anna Benigna La Trobe;" and one was especially interesting, James Gillray, forty years sexton to this simple cemetery, and father of Gillray, the H. B. of the past century. One thing pleased us mightily, the extreme old age to which the dwellers in this house seemed to have attained.
For a year or so some pious people, led by Benjamin La Trobe, a Baptist student, had been in the habit of meeting for singing and prayer; and now, with these as a nucleus, Cennick began preaching in a Baptist Hall at Skinner's Alley. It was John Cennick, and not John Wesley, who began the Evangelical Revival in Ireland.
By Wesley he was visited thrice; by La Trobe, at his own request, repeatedly; and La Trobe was the one who brought comfort to his soul, stayed with him till the end, and afterwards wrote an official account of his death. And yet, on the other hand, the policy now pursued by La Trobe was the very worst policy possible for the Moravians in England.
If the Brethren had preached emancipation they would simply have made their converts restive; and these converts, by rebelling, would only have cut their own throats. Again and again, in Jamaica and Antigua, the negroes rose in revolt; and again and again the Governors noticed that the Moravian converts took no part in the rebellion. The reply was drafted by Christian Ignatius La Trobe.
Whatever may depend on your own personal influence, or on the zealous co-operation of Mr. La Trobe, will I am sure be done at once, and I will not doubt that your efforts in this respect will be successful. In regard to the missions and the protectors, I give you no definite instructions.
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