FOR several years after his conversion in the forests of the upper Amazon, Antao continued to serve the Brazilian Government on the Colombian frontier station, bearing faithful witness to his newfound faith. At last his time expired, and he made the long trip down the river, and then the equally long journey to his old home away back in Parahyba.
His arrival caused a great sensation, not alone on account of his wonderful experiences and troubles, but still more because of the new religion he began to preach among his townsfolk. Some listened sympathetically, while others mocked―the same old story―but Antão was full of enthusiasm, and his sincerity was too transparent for any to doubt the reality of his faith. The local priest, after several attempts to confound him, retired from combat with a man who knew too much of the Bible for him.
After a year or two of farming he paid me a visit in Maceió. I persuaded him to try his hand in Bible work, and very timidly he made his first attempt. He made rapid progress, however, and soon I was able to send him far afield, where alone he visited the fanatical city of Correntes. He arrived on market day, and started selling Gospels among the country folk. All at once the town priest appeared with a crowd of armed men behind him, and commenced to denounce the colporteur as an enemy of the Church and of Jesus and the Virgin. Antão endeavored to hold his own, but the priest was furious, and struck him several times on the head with the stick he carried, while the crowd demanded their money back, and threw the little books at his feet. Emboldened in his malice, the priest snatched his bag of books from his hand, and tore the contents into a thousand pieces, while Antão narrowly escaped lynching. Only the grace of God prevented him giving the priest a good hiding, which he was well able to do, but he suffered all this indignity with patience. Nevertheless, he visited the local authority to protest against the outrage. While he was thus engaged the priest called a few of his special friends, and mounting their animals they rode out to the farmhouse a mile away, where Antão was staying, and where he had his stock of books for the whole journey. Bursting open his locked boxes, the priest piled up the books in the road and made a bonfire of them all.
This proved too much even for the semi-compliant authorities, who began to fear the probable consequences of this breach of the constitution, and calling Antão, they said he had the right to have the priest imprisoned and heavily fined. To this Antão refused to agree, and to the surprise of the town magistrate he read them words about forgiving and loving your enemies, and all he could be persuaded to accept was the bare value of the burnt Bibles.
All this frightened the priest, and he so completely lost his authority and the respect of the people, that he speedily moved to another town, and whenever one of our colporteurs passes that way, as Antão has done several times, he looks in another direction and has not a word to say, while in the city of Correntes there is now a very promising Gospel mission station.
Here and there in the remoter parts of these northern regions there are little communities of Christians who received their first light from the ex-rubber slave. In one place he sold a Bible to a man who had been first interested through reading a Testament lent by a woman who did not believe in it. The Word of God and the testimony of Antão made the man a believer; the first in all that part of Brazil. Then he in turn brought his cousin to the Lord, who was finally convinced of the Truth by reading an approved Catholic Bible. Together the cousins preached the Gospel to their friends, and so many began to turn to the Lord that they decided to send for a preacher, a Mr. Briault, living in a town three hundred miles away, who, arriving with his wife in his battered old Ford, was soon in the midst of a real spiritual awakening among all classes, one of the new converts being a brother of the State President.
Amidst all this movement and salvation the woman who had started the fire with her New Testament remained hard and bitter in her opposition, and when her own husband was converted she was indignant, and openly declared she would oppose him to the last ditch. One day, while she was letting off her spleen against the husband, the brother of the President entered the house, and hearing her conversation, reproved her severely, while drawing out his beloved little New Testament, and turning to Eph. 5, he read to her of the duties of wives to their husbands. The effect was instant and remarkable, for she there and then gave up the fight and surrendered to the Truth. She went home to tell her very astonished husband that she was now a believer in Jesus, and that from then on the Gospel should be preached in their home. She also sent him out at once to invite all the believers in the countryside to a thanksgiving feast, while she got busily to work preparing the victuals. Thus the good work went on among young and old, and those who were most in opposition generally became the best fruit of all. One very old lady was in great distress to see her children all being converted, but, attracted by the singing, she, too, went to listen afar off to the beautiful Portuguese hymns. Then one day a stranger visited her little house, and as he talked, drew her attention to the picture on her wall―The Sacred Heart of Jesus―pointing out that though it had mouth, ears, eyes, and nose, it could not use them; it was merely a piece of paper, and had no power. As they continued to converse, the blessed truths of the Gospel began to enter her heart, and when her nephew came in a little later she exclaimed: “It is only now I am beginning to understand something of the Gospel; the pastor spoke so beautifully to me just now!”
“That was not the pastor,” said he; “that was his chauffeur.”
“Well, well, if the chauffeur talks like that, what must the pastor be like?”
After that she began to attend the meetings, and one day, after the hymn, “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,” had been sung, she cried out: “Pastor, sing that hymn again!” This they gladly did, and at the close she said: “I am now a believer in Jesus.” Since then her bright face and clear testimony have had a powerful influence on her Catholic neighbors, who have dubbed her “Queen of the Believers.”
Antão has made many a visit to this place since he sold that first Bible, and nobody is better loved and welcomed. All this information was given me by Mr. Gillanders, who became Antão’s companion for many a long mile through the wilds of Brazil. One day the latter wrote me the following interesting account of their travels with the troop.
“We have just completed―Antão and I―another colportage journey on the borderland of Parahyba and Pernambuco, nearly 300 miles of our path being through a region where Romanism and Mariolatry hold sway practically unchallenged, with scarcely five believing souls in all the countryside. Electric light, tramways, picture shows, and merry-go-rounds—but of the Gospel of Christ, nothing.
“Yet people are willing to receive the Gospel message, if only we bring it to them. In Pesqueira, a place noted for its religiousness, with its convent, bishop, and half-a-dozen great churches, and its people―as an old man said― ‘most holy and most perverse,’ we were received well by the majority, and many bought Scriptures. Entering, however, the office of a great jam factory, which practically supports the bishop, I encountered a broadside of abuse and ridicule such as I have rarely faced.
“On the other hand, in a field where the foundations of a great convent were being laid, I sold a number of Bibles, New Testaments, and Gospels to the foreman and laborers, but as usual Antão had the best sales.
“In a quiet, sleepy little village called Villa de Cimbre, we had scarcely begun our work, and I was sitting reading out of God’s Word in the house of a kindly old man, when suddenly an apparition appeared in the doorway―a monk in Franciscan garb, with long, flowing beard and skull cap, and close behind him a crowd of men, women, and children. With a distinctly foreign accent he commanded me not to sell my Protestant books there, and proceeded to miscall the Bibles and Testaments, and to denounce Protestantism and Luther, whom he described as a most evil man.
“Thereupon those who had bought books returned them and demanded their money back, and I was asked by the old man, at the instigation of the priest to depart, which I did, and commenced to read from the Word to the villagers in the street, in spite of the padre’s warning.
“The sale of books now seemed hopeless, but we proceeded. I was kindly received in one house, given coffee, and listened to with courtesy, even though the man of the house is a seller of rosaries. From door to door and shop to shop I went, ever followed by the crowd, flat refusal being always the only answer, until one shopkeeper, a veritable John Hampden he looked, in the face of the crowd and his wife’s angry denunciation, that she would surely burn the book, bought a New Testament.
“We had a splendid little Gospel meeting one night in a ‘mud’ house, secluded from a village where we had labored during the day. There were present a Christian couple from the village, the members of the household, one young lady strongly pro-Catholic, yet intelligent and kindly disposed, and the chief man of the place, a humble old gentleman who had read much of the Bible, lent to him by this Christian couple. The hymns, the wonderful Word, Antão’s apt message, and the simple prayers, all so different from what most of them have been used to, made a deep impression upon them.
“The old gentleman came in the morning to see us off, and as we rode away said: ‘Do not forget to pray for the old man. Remember him in your prayers.’
“In St. Joseph do Egypto we had canvassed a fair part of the town and sold a number of books, but as I was offering a book to a boy in a shop, a voice at my shoulder said: ‘What are these books you are selling?’ and I was startled to find a big padre at my back, with a crowd filling the shop.
“He denounced the books as heretical, and when I presented him with a Catholic edition, he said that we put one good book among the bad to deceive the people, and afterward said it also was false. In the end he told me to get out of the town or he would take a stick to me.
“After visiting a few more houses, followed by a mob of boys hissing, and even spitting, I turned my steps homeward in the gathering dusk, and had passed on round the corner of a street when a soldier came up with me saying the police delegate wished to see me.
“He was awaiting my arrival, at the top of the street, and the crowd was gathering. To my surprise he turned on them and warned them that they would have a taste of rifle fire if there was any more nonsense. Turning to me, he assured me I was perfectly free to sell my books. I thanked him and he wished me good night.
“Leaving early next morning, we reached a neighboring village by midday, and offered our books in the fair and from house to house; and lo, almost everyone was eager to see and, buy the books that had roused the padre’s ire, while in the hotel where we stayed a big crowd gathered that night to hear the Gospel. Thus God made even the wrath of man to praise Him.”
A little later, Antão and his companion were engaged in the longest muleback journey we have undertaken, covering no less than three thousand miles, S. S. W., right down through the center of this great Republic to the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, passing through Goyaz city en route. They were away nearly a year, traveling part of the time through uninhabited or Indian-infested regions, with little food for men or beasts, and too often scourged by the prevailing fevers in the valleys of the S. Francisco and Tocantins. With all this they were not downhearted, for they were enabled to preach the Gospel in many a new center, and to scatter the Word of God freely by the wayside. So I take my hat off to the individual with the big sombrero hat with his guileful ways, for he was indirectly the means of giving us so very brave and valuable a soldier of Jesus Christ as is Antão Pessoa.