Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/142

 76 SIGNS OF PROGRESS. resurrection of the dead. My words evidently produced an impression. While dead bodies were being thus dried, it was very trying to one’s stomach to have divine worship on Sabbaths. We had to have it in our own house. The little room would be crammed with some forty or fifty blacks. They crowded the room as full as it would pack, and thronged about the open door and window. As they had been living and sleeping in the wurley with a putrefying body, the smell seemed to have been absorbed by their skins, and the odour which arose from my congregation was excessively unpleasant. But yet their attention and earnestness made me feel that I could put up with this in order to teach them. They listened with the most intense interest while I told them the narratives of Holy Scripture. And after the service several would linger behind, and ask questions, and start difficulties. One day, after service, a man named Billy Waukeri said, "How do we know that this Bible is Jehovah’s book? White-fellows tell us plenty of lies; how do we know this is not a whitefellows’ lie?" Here was an opportunity to set before them the evidence of the Bible being God’s Word, and I was not slow to take advantage of it. In all this there was much to encourage belief that a divine influence rested upon the preached Word, and that in due time fruit would be gathered as the result of such a sowing of the holy seed. And so the months passed away. Sometimes the tide seemed in our favour, then opposition would arise and prevail for a time, but on the whole there was steady progress. Very small signs of spiritual life cheer the heart of a missionary to such heathen as these. Circumstances which in civilised communities have no significance are encouraging indications of movement amongst a heathen people. Such an event was the first time a poor dying woman asked me to read to her out of that "very good book"meaning some translations of Holy Scripture into the native language. How gladly I read and prayed with her, and encouraged her to look to Jesus! There was not much response, it is true; but yet it gave a glimmering