A master-builder on the Nile : being a record of the life and aims of John Hogg, D.D., Christian missionary

Preface

IT is the generous custom in the world of books to allow a writer one last word that none are bound to read. What woman could refuse the privilege?

Like the apostle Paul, this biography is " as one born out of due time " ; and this fact, while branding it as a rash venture to a reluctant publisher, has brought to the more reluctant writer both stimulus and strength. For why should her comrades in Egypt have asked her to unearth its buried history did it not contain enduring interest and a special message for to-day?

I want to thank my fellow-missionaries, as I lay down my pen, for the labour they have assigned me. I thank them for two years of intimate companionship with one who was too soon taken from me, and who, as I have worked, has been teaching me lessons that in his lifetime I was too young to learn. God grant that those who read may see what I have seen and feel what I have felt as I have written!

Other friends, too, I thank for help I could ill have spared, friends who I trust will recognise their unrecorded names. I thank them because their faith did not falter when my own was weak, their praise rescued me from disgust, and their kindness, remembrance, and prayers were my daily portion. To some my thanks are also due for more material assistance, and foremost among these is " Hugh Laurence," who, as brother, critic, and fellow-worker, has been, in matters great and small, an unfailing helper.

8 PREFACE

All these I thank from my heart. The book is theirs, not mine ; and if it does not disappoint them, if it carries to them stimulus and pleasure, I shall feel that the writing of it has made me rich.

Some may read this book who know little about Egypt, and I would seek to guard them against misapprehensions. Of recent years an Egypt has come into being of which little knowledge can be gained from these pages. A spirit of change has entered the land. It has touched politics and education, journalism and commerce, the Coptic Church and Islam, and the manners and customs of the people. To understand the present, we must know the past; and unaffected by the march of progress are large regions and essential elements that remain unaltered. But for accurate information about the new Egypt, the reader must go elsewhere. It is of an Egypt of yesterday that this book has to tell.

R. L. H.

Contents

Prologue ....

I. A Collier's Wean

II. Student Days

Epilogue

17 32

49 62

239 259 275 292

ILLUSTRATIONS

John Hogg Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

College Days at Edinburgh ..... 34

Egyptian River Boats — )

V , . . .00 "The Ibis," the Mission Boat j

Bamba 118

View of Assiut During Nile Overflow i

147 Protestant Church at Assiut

Assiut College 196

Village Scenes ........ 228

God's Acre : Grave of John Hogg .... 288

Prologue

THE days of legend have not wholly fled. There are regions in the Orient where the centuries fall from us and we seem nearer to the beginnings of history than in our modern West. Facts, instead of being buried under to-morrow's news and forgotten, are stored in the memory of an unhurried race, repeated by friend to friend and by father to son, and talked over with the vivid vocabulary of the East in a calm and ample leisure. Thus legend grows.

In many of the towns and villages of Upper Egypt, tales have been preserved which gain in glamour with the years, about a man whom the people call " Hoj," who "brought light to the land." He was "like an Egyptian exactly," and yet " like an angel from Heaven." At his words ignorant Mohammedan robbers were transformed into honest Christians in a night, and his purse, unfailing as the widow's meal and oil, was used not to feed an Elijah but to satisfy all who asked. That converts so lightly made would not have endured, or that indiscriminate generosity would have been the worst of mission policy, does not occur to these loving souls. Without thought of untruth, whatever they consider good they attribute to him. His sermons are remembered; his love of song, his powers of physical endurance, the illustrations he employed to point a lesson, his very gestures (as Egyptian as his accent) and the East-

14 PROLOGUE

ern modes of thought that made his words win home, discovering the joints in his hearers' armour, all are treasured and described.

Twenty-eight years have passed since what was mortal of this man, so dearly honoured, was laid in his desert grave, and though love and legend have kept his memory as green as the Nile valley in December, there is danger that the message of his life may be lost under a tangled mass of fact and fiction. Not to be canonised but to be followed is the tribute such a man would claim.

It is no saint or wonder-worker whom we see in the records he has left behind him. It is a man of like passions with ourselves who there reveals himself, but a strong man with one consuming purpose that made a unity of all his days.

" The evangelisation of the world in a single generation " was as yet an unknown watchword, but this ideal was implicit in the thoughts that moved him, and he dared to proclaim it possible if the Church would but yield to her Lord the obedience of faith.

He had certain clearly defined ideas as to the means by which alone the campaign could be conducted to a speedy and successful issue. He laboured to win others to his point of view — his fellow-labourers, the Church of their planting, and the Church that sent him forth — in order that neither time nor money might be squandered on " the good " that should have been hoarded for " the best."

These ideas, rightly or wrongly, he considered to be the greatest thing in his life. Writing of them, he said, " I am willing to have them written in large characters as my epitaph after my mission life has ended, though all else concerning me and my work were blotted out."

PROLOGUE 15

We are seeking now to write this epitaph in large characters as he desired ; and that its message may lodge where he would have it lodge, in the hearts of men, where the springs of action are found, we are constrained to tell the story of his life.

He's up at early mornin', howe'er the win' may blaw Lang before the sun comes roun' tae chase the stars awa' ; And 'mang a thoosand dangers, unkent in sweet daylicht, He'll toil until the stars again keek through the chilly nicht.

See the puir wee callan' 'neath the cauld, clear moon,

His knees oot through his troosers, and hit) taes oot through

his shoon, Wadin' through the freezin' snaw, thinkin* owre again How happy every wean maun be that's no a collier's wean.

Oh, ye that row in Fortune's lap, his waefu' story hear. Aft sorrows no sae deep as his hae won a pitying tear ; And lichter wrangs than he endures your sympathy hae

won — Although he is a collier's, mind he's still a Briton's son. — WiNGATE, the Miner Poet, 183 — .

IN the year 1863, in an old mission house in Cairo, the man whose life we are to sketch sat imprisoned as nurse by the bedside of a sick wife. As the disease was smallpox a rigid quarantine was enforced, and to while away such leisure as his ministrations allowed him, he turned back in thought to the days of his childhood and wrote down in shorthand reminiscences of his past that otherwise would have been buried in oblivion, " In the hope," as he said, " that some of my children may read these notes to their mother when their father is in his grave."

The annals thus preserved carry us at once to a spot remote from that in which they were penned.

We turn from the closely built sun-baked city, the oriental Cairo of fifty years ago, to an open countryside in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland, where strong winds from the sea make the blood tingle and nerve a man for action. Eastward the Firth of Forth opens out to the German Ocean, and the Bass Rock and Berwick Law stand out as natural pyramids against the sky. To the north and west, beyond a stony shore and the waters of the Forth, grey, green, or blue according to the weather, are the hills of Fife, with an occasional glimpse on a clear day of the peaks of Perthshire in the distance. Directly west, Edinburgh and Leith mark the limit of the view, in smoke by day and in city lights by night, with Arthur's Seat and the Pentland Hills visible amid the haze. Southwards no hills appear, but a stretch of rolling country where fields of grain or pasture are interspersed by woodland and dotted with villages.

In one of the smallest of these, Penston, not; to be found on any map, on April 30, 1833, John Hogg was born. In this region he had his home till he reached the age of twenty-three, and back to it till the day of his death memory carried him, any time that music, the words of a( Scotch song, some familiar proverb of his youth, or a touch of the broad accent of the countryside, set the old chords vibrating and transported him to the land of his birth.

That he felt a certain pride in his origin is perfectly apparent. He had the pride that every one must share who has come from such a home as his, a home of the kind that Burns has left pictured for us as typical of his native land, pride in the solid worth of his parents, and in the virtues which in a humble sphere had marked

PARENTAGE 19

them out as belonging to the noble of the land, clothing poverty in the retrospect with a sort of lustre, wedding it to strength and courage, and crowning it with grace. He had, too, the pride that a strong man feels in difficulties and hardships so met that instead of marring him they had strengthened his moral fibre and added a keener hopefulness to his outlook on life.

Sir Walter Scott in beginning his autobiography assures us that " Every Scottish man has a pedigree," and that it is " a right as inalienable as his pride and his poverty ! " Strange to say, the Scot who sat penning his own history in the sick-room, while claiming poverty and, as we have seen, not altogether concealing pride, seems to have waived the first of his " inalienable rights," the right of pedigree. He traces his line of descent no farther back than to his father and mother, John Hogg, overseer of Penston Colliery, and Mary Richardson, daughter of a small country farmer and mother ere she died of a family of eight — six stalwart sons and two daughters. John was third of the family, and though bearing the same name as his father, no confusion could occur, for his father was known in the district as " the Jake." Under this title the father's memory still lingers among the oldest inhabitants as the " benefactor of the miners of East Lothian and Fife," the man who ventilated the mines and almost doubled their output — " No an eddicated man, ye ken, but jist a nateral genius"; while the son has been forgotten, or when inquired about, is cursorily dismissed with — " Oh, ay, I mind, the Jake had a son that went out to Egypt as a missionary."

The Jake's genius, though it may have increased the prosperity of his employers and the comfort and safety of his fellow-workmen, brought to himself no wealth. The position of overseer carried with it the right to free house and coal, with a weekly wage of four or five dollars. But there were periods in his life when he was reduced to working as a common collier. The diary represents this as due to his having lost his position through a misunderstanding ; but those who worked with him declare that he actually resigned it on two separate occasions for some reason which he did not choose to explain to his fellow-workmen, and which remained a mystery, as he continued on friendly terms with the mine-owner. Considering the sacrifice involved, the reason must have been a strong one.

During one of these intervals of common labour, the demand for coal being so small that the daily output was kept at a low limit, the combined wages of himself and two of his boys, amounted to but two and a half dollars a week. Yet the family was never in debt.

" Sobriety, industry, and thrift," writes the son, " enabled father and mother to rear up their large family well, giving them an education suited to their circumstances, and keeping them well-clothed, while others had eaten up the earnings of the week by Tuesday or Wednesday, and were almost famished ere pay-day. During a long strike of not below sixteen weeks, we had always food enough, and were even able to lend to some of our friends who else must have died of starvation."

The diary happily gives some description of the frugal methods of living that made it possible to lay up against such a mischance.

The mother and children gleaned during harvest season. By using their gleaning sparingly and treating wheaten bread as a luxury to be doled out on special occasions, their gleanings were sufficient for their needs during the greater part of the year. Their bread and scones for common use were made of pea-flour. Oatmeal

PLAIN FARE 21

porridge was the daily breakfast for old and young alike. Those not yet doing a man's work dined on pease-bread and sour milk. The older ones had for dinner during winter, broth with a little meat and potatoes and peasescones; in summer, herring and potatoes, potatoes and milk, or chipped potatoes with a little fat. This may sound a montonous regime, but once a week came the day of feasting. On Sabbath morning the whole family sat down to a diet of " fat brose " which was greatly relished, followed by tea or cofit'ee of which each was allowed one munificent cup ! They had, however, to live on the memory of this till evening, helped by a lunch of two hard biscuits eaten between services.

Tranent United Presbyterian Church was three miles distant. The father was an elder there, and he and his bairns were usually seated in their pew before most of the people of Tranent had begun to dress for church. The boys as they grew older joined the choir, and as the presence of the family was as much to be counted on as the appearance of the precentor with his tuning-fork, or the beadle bearing the pulpit-Bible, survivors in the district have not yet forgotten the weekly procession of father and sons marching down the aisle, some of them " giants in Israel," and none stopping in growth short of six feet. It may be left to the imagination to picture the appetite of a growing boy by five o'clock on a Sabbath afternoon, after six miles of walking in fresh country air and two long church services, through which he had been sustained by two hard biscuits. Can we wonder that the dinner that followed, of fried beef or roast pork " and sometimes a haggis," followed by tea and " fat scones," seemed royal fare, and its memory worth transmitting to children yet unborn ?

Frugality affected clothes as well as food, so that John wore no clothes but of his mother's making till well on in his teens, and rarely donned a suit that had not been already worn by one or both of his elder brothers. There was one glorious exception, however, for which he paid full dear.

" Well do I remember," he writes, " getting a new velvet jacket all to myself. Three were made at the same time for the three eldest of us. Mine had a big hump in the middle of the back, but I did not much care for that, and when father put a penny into my pocket to hansel it, I was as happy as a king. But I was sick of velvet jackets before I got through them. When George outgrew his it came to me, and then I wore James's, and when they were past wearing in daylight, they were worn in the pit until they had entirely changed their colour."

Coppers were a rarity and worth remembering, and it is recorded that each year on Hansel Monday, Mrs. Deans, the mine-owner's wife, gathered the children at the " Great House " and gave each a halfpenny. When all had received their dole, she asked, " And where is the good scholar? " and little John being pushed forward by the others, received an extra halfpenny as a special reward for superior scholarship, and was once more as happy as a king!

In considering the circumstances that governed his upbringing, the fewness of his childhood's pleasures, its rigid economies, its habitual stint, one wonders to what extent they were responsible for the development in him of certain characteristics that marked him throughout life. In some natures their effect would have been the strengthening of the disposition supposed to be latent in every Scotsman to weigh a farthing before spending it, and to keep not the Sabbath only, but everything else

TRAINING AND CHARACTER 23

he can lay his hands on. In him the effect was the reverse. It was as though he were in revolt against the calculating spirit that had been a prime necessity in those days of his youth, and the generosity that had fretted against the barriers that poverty set up, inclined to overflow in a sort of joyous license. He hated anything shabby or scrimp. Never again must there be one cup of tea apiece ! At his table the provision must be such that he could supply any number, freely and fearlessly, leaving still enough for more. He inclined always towards a choice of the better of two qualities, with the comfortable philosophy that it must always be true economy to purchase what would last longer. He liked, too, to buy in quantity, as when during one of his furloughs, in need of a new toothbrush, he came happily home with a dozen in his pocket, as they would be sure to come in useful, and it saved time to buy a number at once!

The same largesse marked his giving, and he was readier than most to lend, though he suffered for it, as lenders must. He loved to surprise a friend with a cheque when times were hard and needs pressing, and the gift was sure to be a handsome one, surprising in its amount as much as in its spontaneity, given with keenest pleasure and in the firm faith, which time proved not ill-founded, that " our children will never be allowed to suffer for what we have given to help others."

The " good scholar," in spite of the superior excellence which had been so munificently rewarded at the " Great House," did not carry into after-life golden memories of his schooldays. According to his own account, though by the age of four he had learned to read and spell in " the fourpenny," he was " not particularly bright," and a reputation for cleverness which crowned him for a time was attributable only to his being trained at home in Bible knowledge and the Shorter Catechism more than his companions. With this judgment all might not agree. There are many amongst us who have conquered the land that lies between 2 y, 2 and 12 X 12 only after severe toil and a series of pitched battles extending over a long campaign. Such may think that a child who could, in a single afternoon, master that whole territory so as to have it forever after at his command must have had, in one line at least, native ability somewhat beyond the average. This feat, the diary tells us, he accomplished at the age of five. He had the previous year been drafted from Penston Infant School to Gladsmuir Grammar School, and there his troubles began.

Methods of education have altered since 1837. The problem of a schoolmaster in those days has been stated thus, " Given the book, the boy, and the rod ; how to get the first into the second by means of the third." John having fallen heir to a grammar-book from which the first part had been torn, the rod had but a blank to work upon. That blank it drove effectually into the boy's mind. As the rest of the class were reviewing the book for the second or third time, few explanations were made. The schoolmaster made no effort apparently to understand his difficulty, and to his parents grammar was a science unknown. Often he would learn carefully from memory an exercise that should have been parsed, to receive in consequence, as though he were indolent or worse, the punishment that had become his daily portion. With childhood's impotent patience he bore dumbly the injustice, but the shame of it ate into his soul.

Relief came at last. At the age of nine and a half, times being hard, he was allowed to leave school and join the rank of workers. The rise in dignity was grateful

IN THE PIT 25

to a small boy's soul, and as his tasks for a time were light, he imagined himself in a land of liberty. But if at first a miner's lamp seemed a badge of honour, he was not long in learning that such badges may be dearly bought. A miner's life is no child's play even now, and the primitive conditions of seventy years ago involved *' toil and pain ayont conceivin'." Before many weeks had passed, the child was labouring in daily weariness and suffering at work which the law of the land was soon to forbid to such as he. Merely to reach the pit involved hardship, and one does not wonder that his memory retained vivid pictures of rising three hours before the sun, whose face he saw but one day in the seven, stumbling along in the dark with heavy, sharp implements under his arm, and crouching in his thin, patched clothing behind hedges to shelter from the cutting east winds of winter ; pictures, too, of the fearsome descent of 120 feet by means of rope and ladder when the pit's mouth was reached, of the inclination to slip when older workers impatiently hurried him, and of occasions when his lamp went out, leaving him in midnight darkness to grope his way to the bottom of the shaft.

But these things were trivial as compared with the labour itself. His father soon became overseer of two mines, and was kept so busy that John and his brother were left to themselves. " Generally," he says, " we did the work of two men " ; but in truth it was not man's work that occupied them, but work fit rather for beasts of burden and now relegated, in many mines, to electricity. The men broke out the coal; the boys dragged it in small waggons to the surface up a steep underground passage, 900 yards long, 4 feet wide, and for the most part about 3 feet high. The little boy went in front, a chain in each hand, to drag and guide the waggon on its wooden rails, often knocking his head or grazing his back on some projecting ridge in the uneven roof, till the slightest touch on the unhealed sores caused the acutest pain. His older brother James pushed the waggon from behind. The work was hard on the temper. The feeble rails were apt to split and the waggons to go off the line, on which occasions the bigger boy relieved his feelings, as big boys will, by throwing the blame on the younger, whom the slightest word of reproof always cut to the quick, making him miserable for hours.

He did not bid a final farewell to a miner's life till he reached the age of eighteen and had spent two sessions at the University. Years of this period were passed largely in the work of dragging trucks, now in one pit and now in another, sometimes for what was considered a good wage and sometimes for the merest pittance. In one pit the workings were half a mile from the shaftbottom, and in some places the roads very steep.

" George and I," he writes, " could push out a box with considerable facility, but for one of us, especially at certain places, it was life-and-death work. As we had strong men to compete with, and there were only two roads and fifty putters, we were often followed closely up from behind. I well recollect, at the distance of seventeen years, how I used to push with my head, pulling myself forward by seizing the rails and sleepers with my hands, and often I would have to stand for a few seconds unable to move an inch and in danger of the heavy box coming back on me and running me over. ... I always blame this work for impeding my growth, as for three years at this time I did not grow in height by a single hair's-breadth. I became very stout, however, and capable of enduring much fatigue without suffering from it."

WORK AND PLAY 27

This power he carried with him through life, and it stood him in such good stead as a missionary that he learned to look upon the hard training of his youth as a providential preparation for the work that was to follow.

He won from his work also another compensating blessing that gave more immediate satisfaction — the added lustre shed by toil on intervals of leisure. Of one summer which specially impressed him as " a time of slavery," he writes:

" And yet this was in many respects the happiest time of my life. No sooner had v/e got home, than after washing off the coal dust from our faces, we seemed to wash away all our cares, and no one who saw us afterwards playing with ball or kite and running races on the village green, would imagine that we had anything to do but play all the day long. It was with difficulty that father could get us in at nine o'clock for family prayers, and even after that an excuse was often found for getting a little extra time for more play. But oh, how sweet was sleep, when wakening in the morning I found that I had still a few minutes before the ordinary time for rising! How quietly would I slip under the clothes again, lest I should awake my elder brother, that I might have another five minutes ! What supreme luxury to wake up and find it was Sabbath morning, and oh ! what horror, to dream it was Sabbath and wake to find it was some other day ! "

So far it has been but the life of a child we have been sketching, a life therefore for the most part irresponsible and unself-conscious, its course shaped by the will of others, as the river's by the contour of the land, its colour decided by the life and thought of those around, as the colour on the surface of still waters by the verdure on their margin or the sky above. It is true that a distinctive personality was already revealing itself. The intensity of the child's absorption now in games and now in work, his ambition not to be outdone even by competing men, and his extreme sensitiveness to praise and blame, are all suggestive of the man full grown. But as yet he accepted his lot unthinkingly, — his happiness play, his horizon the night's rest.

A time, however, comes in the life of every man, when he awakens to a sense of personality, of a life to live that is his own, and when he begins to shape that life consciously from within, instead of passively allowing it to fall into whatever mould external influences would shape for it. The awakening may be sudden and startling, or as gentle a process as the dawn. The essential for a strong life is that it be thorough, and that there be no second sleep. In the present case the event was precipitated by an accident that occurred before the boy completed his twelfth year.

One morning in January, 1845, his brother James and he were down the mine together and alone. Their task was to break in pieces and convey up the shaft a huge mass of coal of several tons weight. It proved tough and unmanageable. They were endeavouring by driving in wedges to break it into two, when there came an unexpected crash, and before John could save himself, half of it had fallen away, knocking him down and pinning him to the ground. His brother rushed for help, while he lay in the dark alone. In a few minutes nine or ten men gathered and succeeded with a mighty effort in slightly raising the fallen block, while one of their number dragged from underneath the injured boy, who was then laid in a waggon and wheeled amid excruciating pain to the pit-bottom.