He Fell at His Post by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Aug 13, 1914

He Fell at His Post

By William Ambrose Spicer

MAIL has just reached the Mission Board office bringing the particulars of the death of Elder E. H. Wilbur, of South China. As was inferred from the first, his death was due to heart failure. The end of our brother’s work came just as he would have desired it to come whenever his life’s work was finished.

Years ago, as a nurse in Iowa, connected with the Iowa Sanitarium, Brother Wilbur felt a burden for China. At that time we had no work in the interior of that vast field, our only representative being the aged Brother La Rue, in the British port of Hongkong. But Brother Wilbur failed to pass the medical test. His heart was affected, and the medical report showed that it was liable to fail at any time. So the Mission Board declined to consider the appointment. Brother Wilbur took it in good part, but for a year or more continually pressed his claim for China. His argument was that if his life was to be short there was all the more reason why he should spend the years that he did have where the need was greatest, where there were the most souls unwarned in the darkness. Now and then reminders would come to the Mission Board office, and to the several officers of the board,—a Chinese Scripture text, some collection of facts regarding China, always with the subscription, “Yours for China.”

Brother Wilbur’s earnest advocacy of his case for China finally won with his own associates in Iowa, and it was agreed that he should go to the field. Twelve years ago he and Mrs. Wilbur sailed for South China. Always devoted and earnest in the work, Elder Wilbur labored untiringly. Some years ago he was ordained to the gospel ministry, and more recently was appointed to superintend a work in Pakhoi, southernmost China, on the northern shore of the gulf of Tongking. There, with his hands full of service, he was called abruptly to lay down all the burdens, and to rest through the closing scenes until the Lord gives the reward unto his servants.

“With the heart trouble that he has had for years,” writes Sister Wilbur, “we expected he would die almost any time; but as he kept up and did the same usual work every day, it seemed so sudden. He was ill but two days.” Our sister was five hundred miles from fellow missionaries, but was surrounded by the sympathy of our Chinese brethren and sisters, and the kind courtesy of foreign residents. “It is my desire,” she writes, “to remain in China, and to work a while longer. The workers are few, and some are sick. The Lord has blessed me with health and the children are well. So the brethren here have decided to have me stay in Hongkong, to do Bible work among the Chinese women. My heart is in this work, and I want to do all I can to hasten the Lord’s coming.”

It is not that the worker with some constitutional weakness should ordinarily push on into the far tropical fields, where the strain upon health is severe. Every consideration dictates that the strong and the hearty should be chosen to take up work in the fields where physical vigor is put to the highest test. But our brother’s difficulty was constitutional, and from the best knowledge he could get, he could live in one place about as well as another; and as he waited upon the Lord himself the conviction came to his brethren that the burden in this case was of the Lord; and these twelve years of service have been devoted just where our brother wished them to be spent, in one of the darkest and neediest corners of the earth.

And now in response to the urgent call from the Asiatic Division Committee for the sending of further help to South China, Iowa is giving up one of its strongest young workers and his wife, to catch up the torchlight of truth and bear it still farther onward among China’s millions. W. A. S.