Arthur Stace (1884 – 1967) Mr Eternity
For thirty-seven years, Arthur Stace wandered the streets of Sydney before dawn chalking an anonymous one-word sermon on the pavement. The word was ‘Eternity’ and he wrote it more than half a million times. It intrigued Sydneysiders who pondered its meaning whilst trying to identify its mysterious author.
For thirty-seven years, Arthur Stace wandered the streets of Sydney before dawn chalking an anonymous one-word sermon on the pavement. The word was ‘Eternity’ and he wrote it more than half a million times. It intrigued Sydneysiders who pondered its meaning whilst trying to identify its mysterious author.
Arthur Stace was born in a Balmain slum in 1884 to a family of alcoholics. Stace learned to fend for himself at an early age, sleeping on bags under the house to avoid his drunken parents, stealing food and assisting his sisters who ran brothels. By his 20s he was in and out of prison for housebreaking and other offences and had developed a heavy drinking habit. Left half-blind after a gas attack in WW1, he slipped further into poverty and such extreme alcoholism that he was in danger of becoming a permanent inmate of the mental asylum. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t give up the drink.
In 1930, hungry, hopeless and desperate, he stumbled into St Barnabas’ Church on Broadway where he had heard there was free food available to those who listened to the preaching. Struck by the Christians he met there, Stace got down on his knees and prayed. He gave up the drink and began to work.
Some months later, in a church in Darlinghurst, he heard the preacher shout, “I wish I could shout eternity through the streets of Sydney. Eternity, eternity, eternity.” Stace was powerfully struck by the words and said he felt a great call from the Lord to write the word Eternity. He had a piece of chalk in his pocket so he bent down and wrote it on the pavement. “The funny thing is I could hardly spell my own name. I had no schooling and couldn’t have spelt ‘Eternity” for a hundred quid. But it came out smoothly in beautiful copperplate script. I couldn’t understand it. I still can’t.”
Arthur Stace lived with his wife in Pyrmont. His daily routine was to wake up at 4:00am, pray for an hour then head to whichever suburb he thought God was directing him to, writing ‘Eternity’ every hundred yards or so. The message could be seen on walls and footpaths, prompting people to consider eternity itself. The police very nearly arrested him 24 times for defacing the pavement. “But I had permission from a higher source,” said Stace.
Stace regarded his unique style of evangelism as a serious mission given him by God. Throughout years of speculation in Sydney, he kept his identity quiet. However, he was finally identified by a churchman in 1956. Stace gave his first interview to the Sunday Telegraph in 1956.
Writing Eternity wasn’t all Arthur Stace did to help men and women come to know Jesus. On Saturday nights he led gospel meetings, with Open Air Campaigners, at the corner of Bathurst and George Streets – just across from the Cathedral. At first he did it from the gutter but in later years he had a van with electric lighting and an amplifier. Stace eventually became a member of St. Barnabas’ Broadway, where he had first heard the gospel in 1930.
Arthur Stace died at the age of 83 in 1967. Ten years later, a plaque was dedicated to him in Sydney. The message ‘Eternity’ was spread to billions of people during the millennium festivals of 2000 as the word was written in fireworks above the Harbour Bridge.
Links:
Eternity at the Olympics – http://www.wesleymission.org.au/publications/eternity/eternity.htm
John G. Ridley, an evangelist who is known today as the man behind Mr Eternity (Arthur Stace) Refer http://atributetoaustralianchristians.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/john-g-ridley/ and http://www.johngridley.org.au/
Making your life count for Eternity – http://www.acl.asn.au/eternity.html
and
Robert Hammond (1870 – 1946) Anglican clergyman, social reformer http://atributetoaustralianchristians.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/robert-hammond/
Sydney Morning Herald – One Word Sermon We Can’t Forget – http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/01/18/1105810905250.html
Eternity at The National Museum of Australia
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/now_showing/eternity/
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What a lovely story of God’s grace and saving power. I’m 70 this year and can remember on one or two occasions early in the morning briefly chatting with Arthur as he wrote in beautiful copperplate, “Eternity”. He once visited our church at Springwood and spoke to a men’s meeting and had dinner at our home. A lovely, humble Christian. I penned a poem entitled, “Not in my time” inspired partly by Arthur Stace.
God bless,
Lyn Lockrey
NOT IN MY TIME.
(My apology to God)
(Thoughts prompted by Arthur Stace, the man,
who for many years, wrote the word “Eternity”
on Sydney’s streets)
I met that man,
who walked the city streets
in overcoat and hat,
bent to write in copperplate, with chalk,
the simple word, “Eternity”.
An alcoholic, saved by grace
from the bondages of time.
He’d found new hope
and on those very streets
shared with all, his script.
It’s one of life’s hardest lessons,
waiting for your time.
Instant blend, instant cash,
phone banking, watching the clock,
bells, buzzers, i-pods, laptops,
emails, face-book and twitter.
A world of the instant, 24/7,
wanting things today, even earlier,
so I struggle with your timing.
My thoughts push you at times,
prod your memory,
hint for a smarter response,
with a note of exasperation
but of course,
couched in respectful tones,
“In the fullness of time….”
For ages, we’ve failed
to fully comprehend those words.
Some spent forty wilderness years
trying to solve the mystery,
for there was a time to die and a time to rise
and I missed that at first.
I make the same mistakes time and time again,
love to do it my way,
usually messing things up,
pushed by impatience, overzealous actions,
a mind fixated on a “now” mentality.
I keep forgetting
you’re not interested in the clock,
a new millennium, or Greenwich meantime.
For whose timepiece tells the birds to fly north,
the whales to migrate,
the seasons to change,
the rains to fall
and the vast heavens to mesh?
Help me, to throw off my schedules,
to cast away my deadlines,
my greed that demands things now,
the “wristwatch looking” for answers,
simply to wait and trust.
For you know the beginning from the end,
you are eternity’s author.
Lyn Lockrey.