The wondering savages, spear in hand, shook their matted hair and
could not take it in at once. Yet they and their boys and girls had
already learned to trust Wilfrid, and soon began to love the God of
Whom he spoke.

* * * * *

Now, those savages were the great, great, great grandfathers and
mothers of the English-speaking peoples of the world. The North Sea
Island was Britain; the beach was at Selsey near Chichester on the
South Coast. And the very fact that you and I are alive to-day, the
shelter of our homes, the fact that we can enjoy the wind on the heath
in camp, our books and sport and school, all these things come to us
through men like Wilfrid and St. Patrick, St. Columba and St. Ninian,
St. Augustine and others who in the days of long ago came to lift our
fathers from the wretched, quarrelsome life, and from the starving
helplessness of the Men of the Shingle Beach.

The people of the North Sea Islands and of America and the rest of
the Christian world have these good things in their life because
there came to save our forefathers heroic missionaries like Wilfrid,
Columba, and Augustine. There are to-day men of the South Sea Islands,
who are even more helpless than our Saxon grandfathers.

To get without giving is mean. To take the torch and not to pass it on
is to fail to play the game. We must hand on to the others the light
that has come to us.

FOOTNOTES: