“Mr. Paton, that veto has spoiled your mission home. The Free Church cannot take you by the hand in face of the _veto_ from Sydney!”
Having letters from Andrew Scott, Esquire, Carrugal, my very dear friend and helper in Australia, to Dr. J. Hood Wilson, Barclay Free Church, Edinburgh, I resolved to deliver them that evening; and I prayed the Lord to open up all my path, as I was thus thrown solely on Him for guidance and bereft of the aid of man. Dr. Wilson and his lady, neither of whom I had ever seen before, received me as kindly as if I had been an old friend. He read my letters of introduction, conversed with me as to plans and wishes (chiefly through Mrs. Wilson, for he was suffering from sore throat), and then he said with great warmth and kindliness,—
“God has surely sent you here to-night! I feel myself unable to preach to-morrow. Occupy my pulpit in the forenoon and address my Sabbath School, and you shall have a collection for your Ship.”
Thereafter, I was with equal kindness received by Mr. Balfour, having a letter of introduction from his brother, and he offered me his pulpit for the evening of the day. I lay down blessing and praising Him, the Angel of whose Presence was thus going before me and opening up my way. That Lord’s Day I had great blessing and joy; there was an extraordinary response financially to my appeals; and my proposal was thus fairly launched in the Metropolis of our Scottish Church life. I remembered an old saying, Difficulties are made just to be vanquished. And I thought in my deeper soul,—Thus our God throws us back upon Himself; and if these £6,000 ever come to me, to the Lord God alone, and not to man, shall be all the glory!
On the Monday following, after a long conversation and every possible explanation, Colonel Young, of the Free Church Foreign Missions Committee, said,—
“We must have you to address the Assembly on the evening devoted to Missions.”
But the rest insisted that, to keep straight with the Board at Sydney, no formal approval should be given of my proposals. This I agreed to, on condition that the Committee did not publish the Sydney veto, but allowed it simply to lie on their table or in their minutes. Thus I had the pleasure and honour of addressing that great Assembly; and though no notice was taken of my proposals in any “finding” of the Court, yet many were thereby interested deeply in our work, and requests now poured in upon me from every quarter to occupy pulpits and receive collections for the new Ship.
Still I had occasional trouble and misunderstanding through that veto during all my tour in Britain and Ireland. It prevented me particularly from getting access to the Free Church Foreign Missions Committee, or addressing them on one single occasion, though I pled hard to be allowed to do so and to explain my position. This I felt all the more keenly, as I laboured freely and for weeks, along with their noble Missionaries then at home on furlough, in addressing meetings in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Greenock, etc., chiefly for Sabbath Scholars, but from which I received no help directly in the matter of the Mission Ship. Doubtless they were trying to do their duty, and refusing to take either side; and that they thought they had succeeded appears from the following fact. When rumour reached Australia that my Mission home had been under God a great success, a letter came to them from their Committee’s agent in Sydney as to the “application” of the sum that had been raised by me, to which they replied,—
“The Foreign Missions’ Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, in accordance with the action of the _Dayspring_ Committee at Sydney, have from the first abstained from assisting Mr. Paton in this movement, believing that the question is one entirely for the Australian Churches.”