The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1933, Page 127

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

127

Kendal and Cambridge.
ligious man.

His religious views were held with great
strength of conviction. The desire to help bring
the Gospel to all nations became a ruling passion
with him, and he conceived it as his special purpose
in life to devote the large fortunes he had inherited
and all that he could add to it by penurious care to
the rapid increase of the missionary enterprise.
Among his papers was found after his death, evi-
dently much studied and cherished, this quotation
from an impassioned utterance by King George: —

He became a deeply re-

“Were I in England again, I would gladly live
in one room, make the floor my bed, a box my chair,
and another my table, rather than that the heathen
world should perish for lack of the knowledge of
Christ.”

With almost literal exactness Robert Arthington
acted for years according to that ideal.

He invested his money under skilled advice and
with great care. He reduced his own scale of living
to the scantiest limits. Though he continued to oc-
cupy his large house in Headingley, he gave up
keeping any servant and used but one room, lived
like a miserly recluse, did his own cooking at the
fire in his dining-room, reduced his meat allowance
to one sausage a day, gathered his firewood from
under the trees after a storm, wore shabby clothes,
and endured the common taunt of being a miser.
But he spent his life in poring over maps and books
of travel. His liberal education had given him
broad interests, and he gained an expert and de-
tailed knowledge of the geography of non-Christian
lands and the conditions of their people.

The achievements of the great explorers of the
Victorian Era filled him with enthusiasm and led
him to make offers of large donations to missionary
societies to follow up those explorations by evan-
gelistic effort. ‘The Congo Mission of the Baptist
Missionary Society may be said to have been in
large measure due to the vision and the challenge
of Robert Arthington, whose gift of 1,000 pounds
made possible the first expedition of Comber and
Grenfell. he first mission-steamer, Peace, whicli
did such great service on the Upper Congo, under
its famous explorer-evangelist George Grenfell, was
the gift of Mr. Arthington. The first missionaries
to the Lushai Hills, Assam, India, J. Herbert Lor-
rain and Fred W. Savidge, were sent out by Mr.
Arthington and maintained by him personally.
They only joined the Baptist Mission after his

death. He also gave considerable sums to other
missionary societies, in some cases anonymously.

He kept no ordinary bank account. His finances
were managed for him by his brokers, and until a
short time before his death he did not know to how
great an amount his inheritance had accumulated.

With queer inconsistency he contrived the most
petty savings; but whenever he traveled by railway,
he always paid for first-class accommodations and
sometimes even reserved a compartment for the sake
of privacy.

That he was not without a sense of humor, even
if the joke was at his expense, is illustrated by a
story he told of his bargain with a plumber for some
urgent repairs in his house. To reduce the esti-
mated cost of the repairs by 2s. 6d., he undertook
to assist the workman, a bargain which involved him
in much toilsome fetching and carrying and finally
resulted in his having to pay 2s. 6d. for a cab to
convey the too heavy load of tools, which, the work-
man insisted, it was the “boy’s” job to carry. He
much enjoyed being able to retort upon an old
Quaker friend of his father’s, who gently chided
him upon wearing so shabby a hat in Leeds, where
his late father had been so much honored, that the
hat in question was actually his father’s hat!

Among the few people who were admitted
through the jealously closed door of his house none
were more welcomed, and none found it more diffi-
cult to withdraw from the interesting conversation
of this strange recluse than those who could tell him
from their own experiences in foreign service what
he so much desired to know of the possibilities and
prospects of world evangelization. One of the early
Congo pioneers called to see him on a winter eve-
ning and had to sit with his host over a very small _
fire with but a single candle to light the room.
After a few minutes’ talk, Mr. Arthington sug-
gested that, as they could speak as well in the dark,
it would be more economical to put out the candle,
which he did. ‘The young Lushai missionaries,
freshly home from several years’ absence in the
wilds, brought upon themselves a mild rebuke for
a worldly indulgence in bodily attire, which was
certainly in marked contrast to that of their mis-
sionary supporter.

After he had passed the age of seventy, when his
health was much impaired, he was constrained to
dispose of his house in Leeds and to live in South
Devon. There he remained in simple apartments
till his death.