Rising to the Call by Os Guinness

Author:Os Guinness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Do you want the best and most wonderful gifts God has given you to decay, spent on your own self? Or do you want them to be set free to come into their own as you link your profoundest abilities with your neighbor’s need and the glory of God?

LISTEN TO JESUS OF NAZARETH;

ANSWER HIS CALL.

CHAPTER

4

THE AUDIENCE OF ONE

July 27, 1881, was the happiest day in the life of Andrew Carnegie. A Scottish weaver’s son, he had risen from a Pittsburgh “bobbin boy” at $1.20 a week to America’s “King of Steel,” “the Industrial Napoleon,” “the Homo Croesus Americanus,” “St. Andrew” (Mark Twain’s nickname)—and one of the world’s most fabled rich men. He was always proud to be called “the star-spangled Scotchman,” and he had set his heart on a triumphal return to Dunfermline, the city of his birth in the east of Scotland. “What Benares is to the Hindu, Mecca to the Mohammedan, Jerusalem to the Christians, all that Dunfermline is to me,” he purred as he saw the city from the Ferry Hills above it.

Carnegie’s trip had been long planned. With his mother and a select group of friends, he crossed the Atlantic from New York, set out from Brighton on the south coast of England, and slowly traveled north to Scotland and Dunfermline in a carriage that was royally built and furnished. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the coach and four rolled up St. Leonard’s Street, greeted by banners reading “Welcome Carnegie, generous son” and passing the flags of Scotland, England, and the United States.

Then the official parade began, led by the Lord Provost, the guilds, and town councilors in their carriages. The procession passed the little stone cottage where Carnegie had been born and a similar cottage nearby from which his poverty-stricken family had fled to Pittsburgh thirty-three years earlier.

The climax of the day was Carnegie’s bestowal of a new, handsome public library on the city of his birth, the first such bequest outside the United States. But long before then, his mother Margaret, who throughout the entire trip had ridden on top of the coach, had asked to sit inside so that she could weep freely but unseen on her day of triumph.

Homecomings, alumni reunions, visits to ancestral countries . . . most people can identify with the feelings of a native son returning home. But Andrew Carnegie’s pride that day had another source too. Years earlier, when he was a young boy and he and his family lived in penury in Pittsburgh, he found his mother weeping in a moment of despair. Cradling her hands in his, he urged her not to cry and tried to console her.

“Some day I’ll be rich,” he assured her, “and we’ll ride in a fine coach driven by four horses.”

“That will do no good over here,” his mother snorted, “if no one in Dunfermline can see us.”

That was the moment when young Andrew solemnly resolved that someday he and his mother would make a grand entry into Dunfermline in a coach and four, and the whole town would witness it.

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