Father Backhaus was often seen walking with long strides among the
holes and hillocks on Bendigo Flat or up and down the gullies, on a
visit to some dying digger, for Death would not wait until we had all
made our pile. His messengers were going around all the time;
dysentery, scurvy, or fever; and the priest hurried after them.
Sometimes he was too late; Death had entered the tent before him.

He celebrated Mass every Sunday in a tent made of drugget, and
covered with a calico fly. His presbytery, sacristy, confessional,
and school were all of similar materials, and of small dimensions.
There was not room in the church for more than thirty or forty
persons; there were no pews, benches, or chairs. Part of the
congregation consisted of soldiers from the camp, who had come up
from Melbourne to shoot us if occasion required. Six days of the
week we hated them and called "Joey" after them, but on the seventh
day we merely glared at them, and let them pass in silence. They
were sleek and clean, and we were gaunt as wolves, with scarcely a
clean shirt among us. Philip, especially hated them as enemies of
his country, and the more so because they were his countrymen, all
but one, who was a black man.

The people in and around the church were not all Catholics. I saw a
man kneeling near me reading the Book of Common Prayer of the Church
of England; there was also a strict Presbyterian, to whom I spoke
after Mass. He said the priest did not preach with as much energy as
the ministers in Scotland. And yet I thought Father Backhaus' sermon
had that day been "powerful," as the Yankees would say. He preached
from the top of a packing case in front of the tent. The audience
was very numerous, standing in close order to the distance of
twenty-five or thirty yards under a large gum tree.

The preacher spoke with a German accent, but his meaning was plain.

He said:

"My dear brethren' 'Beatus ille qui post aurum non abiit'. Blessed
is the man who has not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money or
treasures. You will never earn that blessing, my dear brethren. Why
are you here? You have come from every corner of the world to look
for gold. You think it is a blessing, but when you get it, it is
often a curse. You go what you call 'on the spree'; you find the
'sly grog'; you get drunk and are robbed of your gold; sometimes you
are murdered; or you fall into a hole and are killed, and you go to
hell dead drunk.