I. INTRODUCTORY. {1}


The Rev. Thomas Gowles, well known in Colonial circles where the Truth is
valued, as "the Boanerges of the Pacific," departed this life at Hackney
Wick, on the 6th of March, 1885. The Laodiceans in our midst have
ventured to affirm that the world at large has been a more restful place
since Mr. Gowles was taken from his corner of the vineyard. The
Boanerges of the Pacific was, indeed, one of those rarely-gifted souls,
souls like a Luther or a Knox, who can tolerate no contradiction, and
will palter with no compromise, where the Truth is concerned. Papists,
Puseyites, Presbyterians, and Pagans alike, found in Mr. Gowles an
opponent whose convictions were firm as a rock, and whose method of
proclaiming the Truth was as the sound of a trumpet. Examples of his
singular courage and daring in the work of the ministry abound in the
following narrative. Born and brought up in the Bungletonian communion,
himself collaterally connected, by a sister's marriage, with Jedediah
Bungleton, the revered founder of the Very Particular People, Gowles was
inaccessible to the scepticism of the age.

His youth, it is true, had been stormy, like that of many a brand
afterwards promoted to being a vessel. His worldly education was of the
most elementary and indeed eleemosynary description, consequently he
despised secular learning, and science "falsely so called." It is
recorded of him that he had almost a distaste for those difficult
chapters of the Epistles in which St. Paul mentions by name his Greek
friends and converts. In a controversy with an Oxford scholar, conducted
in the open air, under the Martyrs' Memorial in that centre of careless
professors, Gowles had spoken of "Nicodemus," "Eubulus," and "Stephanas."
His unmannerly antagonist jeering at these slips of pronunciation, Gowles