The Barre Daily Times

Minister Has 10000 Square Miles of Land and Sea.

In the "Interesting People" department of the October American Magazine appears a sketch of John Antle, who is called the "Grenfell of the Pacific." He is a minister whose parish is 10,000 square miles of sea and land in Canada. The following is an extract:

"The Dominion of Canada is bounded on the east by Wilfrid Grenfell and on the west by John Antle. If it were bounded on every provincial and township line with apostles of similar purpose and power, the world would stop praying 'Thy kingdom come' and rest its faith in an earthly democracy.

"Grenfell and Antle are partners, three thousand miles divided. The first came into fame long since, for the one reason that he pitied what no one else seems to have pitied—the helpless, Godless isolation of the fisher-folk along the Labrador; and he made that pity the focus of the world's concern. Obviously the one way to raise money and men, libraries and chapels, relief ships and hospitals was to tell the story to his generation. Grenfell became 'well-known' because he wisely recognized that his obscurity was a real foe to the future of his people.

"If Antle—Reverend, Captain, John or Jack—differs in his plan of attack from Grenfell across the continent, it is in that little item of publicity. He can match him on the bitterest night, peering over the pilot wheel into the pitch of a Pacific blizzard, or shouldering half the weight of a wounded lumberjack down the tricky staircases of the forest; but he cannot 'stump the country' for finances, and he cannot even for a brief while walk the deck of a public hall without an unconquerable homesickness for the North Star and a rolling sea.

"Antle is a minister, not a preacher, because the work doesn't need one. He 'ministers unto them' and is ten hours in the practice of Christianity to one in enunciating its principles. He has a congregation of five thousand men in the logging and mining camps of the British Columbia coast, and ten thousand square miles of parish made up largely of islands.

"It is a hard life, a testing life. His loggers are uncompromising men, sturdy in physical proportions and solemnly self-possessed until they give themselves over to their pay day demons. They breathe clean air and hate deceit and meanness. They fight with fists when occasion calls, and reckon a man's size with a curious instinct of thoroughbred animals. But strength and rollicking sympathies are meant for the spending, and the loggers in their periodical jaunts to 'civilization' spend with the heedlessness of primordial giants. If you want to know where the scorpion of Eden migrated to, call round at a Pacific coast saloon.

"Antle, a young, reserved, imaginative rector of a church in Vancouver, said to a friend, 'There's no use preaching against this thing. I'm going to build a ship and show these fellows there is something worth living for besides whisky.'"

"He built a small ship, 'The Columbia,' and made himself the captain, took aboard a surgeon, stored the bunkers with gasoline and bandages and iodoform, books, magazines, and tracts, and set sail one afternoon through the straits of Georgia to the north. It was the church's voyage of discovery. He found five thousand worth while men, cast together by the world's whirlpool from the homes of the great, from gipsy carts, from the halls of Oxford and Yale, from the school of a New York alley. Antle made these men his; and they made Antle theirs. That coupling pin of faith may explain why the percentage of alcohol in the air of the Pacific coast has decreased perceptibly with the passing and repassing of the 'Columbia' and her crew.

"To-day they stop at the waving of a white flag on shore and take aboard a six-footer with a crushed chest. The surgeon operates and Antle heads the boat about and runs her full speed for fifty miles or a hundred miles to one of three hospitals that he persuaded the lumber kings to erect."