SIERRA LEONE
Letter of Rev. H.P. Thompson
Waterloo, June 23, 1856.
The following letter to Brother Bowen, which has been
kindly placed at our disposal, presents some encouraging facts
relative to our Sierra Leone Mission.
Presuming that you and your dear wife will have arrived
safely at home ere this reaches America, I feel great pleasure in
writing a reply to your kind letter of June 12. As you have
requested me to detail all my special wants, I commence first with
regard to chapels.
We need at Waterloo a good substantial board house as a
chapel and school-house, say about fifty feet long and twenty-four
feet wide. At present we have only a shabbily-built house of sticks
and mud that can hardly hold fifty persons. I am sorry that your ill
health prevented you from visiting my station, as it would have
enabled you to see the necessity for such a chapel, and assisted you
in giving your opinion to the Board relative to what is necessary to
the prosperity of the cause of God among these poor heathens.
The spot I have chosen has been, I am told, contemplated as a
building site by other denominations, but they have been deterred
from building by the gross superstition that prevails among the
tribes; and, therefore, these poor ignorant people have been left to
themselves to attend the places of worship, at a distance from
them, or not. But now I may truly exclaim, with wonder and
astonishment, “What hath God wrought?” He hath done many
wonderful things. The name of Jesus hath wrought an increasing
desire to know more of Him; His love to poor sinners hath filled
them with astonishment; and when they are told of their miserable
and guilty state as sinners, and the willingness of God to pardon
them through Christ, they, I mean many, are brought to ask, “What
shall 1 do to be saved.”
This is the place, I think, at which the long neglected
church of Christ will take its rise and spread like leaven on this
part of Africa, and I doubt not of success so long as our Christian
friends all over the world will, with earnest desire, beseech the
King of Heaven to extend the glorious light of the Gospel to our
poor countrymen, the heathens. Those who were formerly
