The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
Pioneers are sometimes far from being popular, as Jonas Hanway discovered many years ago. It was the umbrella of my last week’s thought and the rain as I write, that turned my mind to old Jonas.
It’s quite true that the King of Assyria carried an umbrella seven hundred years before Christ was born. You can see it in a carving in the British Museum, though in his country it was used to keep the sun from him, or maybe it was designed to stop arrows - I wouldn’t know.
But nothing like an umbrella had appeared in England until one day Jonas Hanway took a walk through the streets of London carrying an umbrella. He had seen the idea in Persia and thought it would be fine for a wet day in London. He was greeted not only with jeering laughter but with rotten vegetables and bad eggs. People even leaned out of upstairs windows and threw dirty water at him as he passed by. The coach drivers didn’t like it because it was bad for trade. People even said that if God didn’t mean people to get wet why did He send the rain?
In this generation we are quite familiar with space exploration, and one of these days somebody will be having a chat with the man in the moon. It all really started with a man called Henry Trengrouse who lived in Cornwall about 1772. One day in 1807 he watched the wreck of a vessel called the Auson on the sands of Looe. The ship was one of the naval frigates keeping watch off the coast of France during the war with Napoleon and it had been driven across the Channel by a tremendous gale. Over a hundred of the crew were drowned within sight of the shore.
Henry Trengrouse started to experiment with methods of rescue and he thought of life lines. The problem was to get them from the shore to the ship. Throwing by hand was useless so he tried getting them across with a kite but often the wind was in the wrong direction. Finally one day he was at a fireworks display and he got the idea of a rocket. The rocket carried a thin line with which a rope could be pulled from the shore. It took hard work to convince the people that it would work and even after his death in 1854 the idea wasn’t popular. Now we’re thinking of shooting lines to the moon.
New truth isn’t always popular. The history of our race is studded with stories of men being persecuted and even put to death because they tried to teach new truth against the accepted ideas of the times. Our Lord, when He was on earth, was faced with the same kind of opposition, he didn’t fit into the accepted scheme of things. He came into the world in a way that men didn’t expect so they wouldn’t have Him. He taught as One having authority and not as the Scribes, so men refused His teaching. His whole way of life ran counter to the way of the Scribes and Pharisees so they crucified Him.
As I see it, the followers of the Master today must be prepared for the same kind of thing. If we follow the Lord of all truth we must be ready to live the truth in the face of all that is untrue whether it is popular or not. If we follow Him who is the Way, we must live that way and not the world’s way. He himself said, ‘If a man love Me he will keep My commandments,’ and that means that He is the sole authority for living.
It doesn’t much matter what our neighbours think. As Leslie Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfires put it, ‘We must live what we believe.’
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