When we were in Launceston in Tasmania, I received a letter from a man asking me to visit his wife. He said his wife had been an invalid for many years and they had tried all the physicians in Launceston. He noticed in the papers that I was a doctor and he thought an American doctor might succeed where their home doctors had failed. It was evident that the man had mistaken me for a physician. A few nights after this man followed up his letter by coming around to the meeting to interview me personally. He was the champion heavyweight pugilist of Tasmania. He had not come to hear a sermon but to implore me to visit his sick wife. But he got there in time to hear the sermon. The subject was “Heroes and Cowards,” and he was greatly interested. In it I told the story of a North Carolina farmer’s son whose father at great sacrifice had sent him to college, and then when the father went to visit the son, the son was ashamed of him before his gay college companions. As I pictured this farmer with glad heart driving towards the college town to visit his son and then his son’s denial of his father, the pugilist grew very angry. He wanted to thrash that ungrateful son, but then the thought came to him, “You are meaner and more ungrateful than he. You owe more to God than that son owed his father and yet how are you treating Him?” Filled with shame at his ungrateful treatment of God, when I gave out the invitation, the pugilist rose to his feet and then came forward and turned around and faced the audience, most all of whom knew him by reputation, and publicly confessed his sin and his acceptance of Jesus Christ.
He immediately went to work for Christ, and about the last sight we saw as the steamer pulled out of Launceston and sailed down the river was Jim Burke, towering above the crowd waving goodbye to us with his red hymnbook.