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VOL. VIIIUnO. 17.
GYPSY SMITH AND 808 JONES AT CARTERSVILLE
OU can count on Cartersville to reach out
after the best of earth. Bob Jones, him
self who conducted the great meetings
at the Sam Jones Tabernacle last year,
HhehcbheM
and who was called by a committee of Christian
business men to manage the Sam Jones Taberna
cle meetings from year to year, is quite enough
as a leader to attract great crowds and stir any
community, but when it conies to supplementing
and surrounding Bob Jones with the influence
of Gyspy Smith, acknowledged to be the great
est evangelist today in the world, it seems that
veri y the cup of Cartersville, Georgia, ought to
be full to overflowing with thanksgiving and
expectation.
At the request of The Golden Age, Mrs. Lem
Gilreath, thhe gifted and beloved “State Evan
gel” of the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, has written a sketch of Gypsy Smith
that will quicken interest in his coming and
doubtless cause a widespread preparation to at
tend the Cartersville meetings.
Mrs. Gilreath’s Story of Gypsy Smith.
Surely in all the worl dthere is no other man
before whom we can stand, and with heads un
covered, say more reverently: “What hath God
wrought,” than before Gyp y Smith, the fa
mous English evangelist.
In 1860 in the parish of Wanstead, near
Epping Forest, the little brown gypsy baby be
gan his eventful career. From the very mo
ment he opened his eyes in the gypsy wagon,
God seems to have marked him for his own,
and began preparing him for what he had pre
pared for him.
In all of literature there is no more pathetic
picture than Gypsy Smith’s account in hL auto
biography of his mother’s death.
A little boy scarcely 8 years old, he remem
bers so distinctly the day a physician was sum
moned to their wagon to see one of his sisters,
who was sick.
He remembers seeing the physician turn from
his sick sister with the awful words. “Small
pox.” Then he recalls so vividly the confus
ion and sorrow’ in the family.
One month later his mother died of the dread
disease, leaving a little baby three days old.
His father, living as he did in almost heathen
darkness, yet believed in a God, and had some
where heard of the Savior of the world. When
he knew his wife was dying, he tried in his
ignorant way to point her to Christ. “Polly,”
he said, “can’t you pray; can’t you trust in
Jesus?” and she said: “No, Cornelius, I can’t
pray; a great black hand hangs over me, and
I am only conscious of my sins, that stand be-
WORLD-FAMOUS ENGLISH EVANGELIST WILL ASSIST 808 JONES IN GREAT MEETING AT
SAM JONES’ TABERNACLE AT CARTERSVILLE BEGINNING AUG. 3.
ATLANTA, GA., JUNE 19, 1913
tween me and God.” Then the evangelist tells
us his father climbed down out of the wagon,
and went off alone to pray for the soul so fast
going out into eternity.
The Saving Memory of a Song.
Presently as he prayed and wept for her, in
his own darkness, he heard her singing:
“I have a father in the promised land —
My God calls me and I must go
To meet him in the promised land.”
He tells us when his father went back to her
there was a glorious light of peace and joy on
the poor, sore, swollen face, and she said: “Cor
nelius, I am not afraid to die; I feel that it will
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“GYPSY SMITH.”
Famous English Evangelist.
be all right and God will take care of my chil
dren.” He said, “Polly, where did you hear
that scng?” and she told him that twenty years
before she had heard it in a mission Sunday
school, and that in that hour of her dire need it
had all come back to her, and she died in a full
assurance of faith.
Pathetic beyond description is his account of
his mother’s burial, at the midnight hour his
father, the cnly mourner, walking behind the
wagon to the open grave in the cemetery grave
yard. He tell s how the little motherless chil
dren huddled, shivering over the camp fire,
awaiting their father’s return from the new
made mound —shivered yet more and waited,
and wondered at the great mystery —wondered
with hearts full of a great longing for the moth
er who had gone.
Then we learn how a few days later he and
his sister, Tilly, wandered away three miles
hunting their mother’s grave, and when they
found it, they fell across it, in an agony of
grief and tears, and how he took from his flt
tle shirt a gold stick pin, the only thing he pos
sessed of any value, and pushed it into the soft
earth of the mound, trying to give it to his
mother.
I have read and reread this wonderful book,
but my tears always come when I read of the
lonely heart of this little brown gypsy boy,
lonely for his dead mother.
His wife’s wonderful death convicted Gypsy
Smith’s father of sin, and for months the old
man was very miserable. While camped near
Cambridge, where a great revival was in prog
ress he found peace and became a new creature
in Christ Jesus.
One by one, in order of age, the children were
converted, until all save Rodney (Gypsy), the
great evangelist, and his sister Tilly, had come
into the kingdom.
The Gypsy Boy Converted.
It occurred to him one day that he was stand
ing in his sister’s way by not seeking Christ.
That she was waiting on him and-then and
there he made a definite surrender to his Master
and peace entered his soul.
His father, together with two brothers, were
then engaged in evangelistic work in England,
and he tells us that from the very first it was
borne in upon him that he, too, must preach.
Tie could not read, was densely ignorant, but
his heart was filled with a burnin gintense de
sire to bring souls into the kingdom. His first
sermons were preached to the trees in the depths
of the forest, and he recalls one beautiful Sab
bath morning when he preached to a field of
turnips, and he says he “never had a more at
tentive or respectful audience.”
Tn those early days Gyp y Smith had a beau
tiful voice, and as he went from town to town
into different homes, selling his gypsy wares,
he would sing of the love of God to the people
he met.
Finally he became known as “The Singing
Gypsy Boy,” and so Gen. William Booth, foun
der of the Salvation Army, heard of him and
that he wanted to preach. Tn 1877 in one of
Booth’s missions in London the gypsy boy sang
a solo, and gave his first public talk. It was a
simple talk, telling of the Savior’s love in his
heart, and what he had done for him, and for
his loved ones, but it touched every heart pres
ent and from that hour it was an as ured fact
that God had placed his hand upon him for
the “work of an evangelist.” .■
(Continued on page S.WaW-
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