An Angry Mob Held Powerless by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 16, 1909

An Angry Mob Held Powerless

By W. A. S.

As a Methodist pioneer, Dr. Adam Clarke, of Ireland, author of the “Commentary,” traveled all about Ireland, England, and Wales, and to the Channel Islands. In those days Methodism met the opposition of the established church and of “society,” and the irreligious mob felt itself doing respectable service in assailing the sect everywhere spoken against. On one of these trips, Dr. Clarke experienced so remarkable an interposition of Providence to save his life that he records it in his “Commentary,” as a note on the deliverance of Christ from the mob at Nazareth. Luke 4: 30. Writing of himself in the third person, he says a certain missionary was called to preach in a place where there was much prejudice:—

About fifty people who had received impressions from the Word of God, assembled. He began his discourse, and after he had preached about thirty minutes, an outrageous mob surrounded the house, armed with different instruments of death, and breathing the most sanguinary purposes. Some that were within, shut to the door; and the missionary and his flock betook themselves to prayer.

The mob assailed the house, and began to hurl stones against the walls, windows, and roof; and in a short time, almost every tile was destroyed, and the roof nearly uncovered, and before they quitted the premises, scarcely left one square inch of glass in the five windows by which the house was enlightened. While this was going forward, a person came with a pistol to the window opposite to the place where the preacher stood (who was then exhorting his flock to be steady, to resign themselves to God, and trust in him), presented it at him, and snapped it, but it only flashed in the pan.

As the house was a wooden building, they began with crows and spades to undermine it, and take away its principal supports. The preacher then addressed his little flock to this effect: “These outrageous people seek not you, but me; if I continue in the house, they will soon tear it down, and we shall all be buried in the ruins; I will therefore, in the name of God, go out to them, and you will be safe.” He then went toward the door; the poor people got around him, and entreated him not to venture out, as he might expect to be instantly massacred. He went calmly forward, opened the door, at which a whole volley of stones and dirt was that instant discharged; but he received no damage.

The people were in crowds in all the space before the door, and filled the road for a considerable way, so that there was no room to pass or repass. As soon as the preacher made his appearance, the savages became instantly as silent and as still as night; he walked forward, and they divided to the right and to the left, leaving a passage of about four feet wide, for himself and a young man who followed him, to walk in. He passed through the whole crowd, not a soul of whom either lifted a hand or spoke one word, till he and his companion had gained the uttermost skirts of the mob. The narrator, who was present on the occasion, goes on to say:—

“This was one of the most affecting spectacles I ever witnessed; an infuriated mob without any visible cause (for the preacher spoke not one word) became in a moment as calm as lambs. They seemed struck with amazement bordering on stupefaction; they stared and stood speechless; and after they had fallen back to right and left to leave him a free passage, they were as motionless as statues. They assembled with the full purpose to destroy the man who came to show them the way of salvation; but he, passing through the midst of them, went his way. Was not the God of missionaries in this work?”

In the quietness that followed for a few minutes after the preacher disappeared, the people inside the church also went out and escaped. Then the mob awoke “as from a dream,” and broke the windows and otherwise vented their fury on the house.

The One who, passing through the midst of the mob at Nazareth, went his way, has promised the gospel worker, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” W. A. S.