and his eye fixed on God, maintains that much labour will favourably affect the conquest of the Javanese souls for God’s Kingdom, then surely I may conclude that I am not speaking altogether beside the truth when I say that coffee can be perfectly well grown in Lebak. And more than this, it is even possible that the Supreme Being has made the soil there unsuitable for coffee-growing for no other purpose than that the population of those parts, through the labour that will be necessary to transport a different soil there, shall become ready to accept salvation.
I do hope my book will come under the eye of the King, and that soon an increase in the sales will testify how closely the knowledge of God is connected with the well-understood interest of the whole middle-class community! Just see how a simple and humble man like Twaddler, devoid of the wisdom of humanity—the man has never set foot in the Exchange—but enlightened by the Gospel, which is a lamp on his path, has suddenly given me, a coffee-broker, a hint which not only is of importance to all Holland, but which will enable me, if Frits behaves himself—he sat fairly still in Church—to retire to Driebergen five years earlier. Yes, labour, labour, that’s my watchword! Labour for the Javanese, that’s my principle! And my principles are sacred to me.
Is not the Gospel our highest good? Does anything rank above salvation? Is it not then our duty to save those people? And when, as a means thereto, labour is necessary—I myself have laboured on ’Change for twenty years—may we then refuse labour to the Javanese, knowing that his soul is so pressingly in need of it to escape the burning fire hereafter? It would be selfishness, shameful selfishness, if we did not make every effort to guard those poor erring ones against the terrible future the Reverend Twaddler has so eloquently described. A lady fainted when he spoke of that black child . . . perhaps she had a little boy who was somewhat dusky. Women are like that!
And ought not I to insist upon labour, I who do nothing but think of business from morning until eve? Is not even this book
