MARY CATLETT | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 7, 1880

MARY CATLETT.

MORE than one hundred years ago there lived in England a Kentish girl, named Mary Catlett. She never discovered a planet, or wrote a book, or gave a lecture. I cannot find that she ever clamored for her “rights,” or was discontented because she could not fill some great place in the world. But so far as I discover she spent the days spinning flax and spreading the linen to whiten on the grass, conserving rose-leaves, and making jam and gooseberry-tarts like any other rosy-cheeked English girl. Yet though she did nothing great, and her very name is almost unknown, by simply being a woman, sweet, and fair, and lovable, she was better than he that taketh a city.

For in the next county lived a young man of whom at this time nothing good could be said, excepting that he had had a good mother; a loving and pious mother, who tried to train him to be a good boy, and a good man. But the seed had been sown among thistles, and the boy was wayward and wicked. He had somehow found out our pretty Mary, but, though he must have loved her even then, he loved wild ways better, and drifted off toward all manner of evil.

When no more than nineteen years old, he was impressed, and carried off to serve on a man-of-war. He managed soon to escape, but was caught, and treated with great severity, so that he was glad to be exchanged into an African trader, and from that hired himself out to a slave-trader, in the island of Benanoes, off the African coast. Here he lived for several years a more wicked life than you can imagine, so that it is said even the savage natives would not stay in his company.

At last his father sent for him to come home, but only one thought persuaded him. This was the memory of Mary Catlett. Silent and unconscious, she had the power to draw that rough, hardened man to a new life.

He sailed for England, and during the stormy voyage the early lessons his mother taught him came back to his remembrance and stirred his heart. The next year he was married to Mary Catlett, and afterward became the friend of Wesley’s, and an ordained minister. He lived a long and godly life, and wrote some of our sweetest hymns.

When over eighty years old his friends tried to persuade him to spare his strength, but he kept on preaching three times a week. “What! shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?”

The man who was saved by the love and memory of the two women was John Newton.

—Advocate.