Mr Eternity. Near the Sydney Square waterfall, set in aggregate, is a word cast in aluminium. The word, spelt out in beautiful copperplate writing, is Eternity. The plaque was placed there through the efforts of Ridley Smith, the man who designed Sydney Square. It is a tribute to a remarkable Sydneysider called Arthur Stace .Arthur Stace was born in the slums of Balmain in1884, The son of drunken parents, he too became an alcoholic. His sisters ran brothels and he was arrested many times for his involvement in petty crime. He went to war and came home blind in one eye. He was almost totally uneducated and the methylated spirits he was drinking very nearly sent him insane. He walked into a Sydney church one day in 1930 lonely, hungry and desperate to give up alcohol and began a journey back from the brink.Arthur gave his life to God and found the courage to give up his drinking. Later, while listening to a sermon preached by Reverend John Ridley, he discovered his unusual life’s work. Ridley said that he wished he ‘could shout ETERNITY through the streets of Sydney.’ Arthur suddenly felt called by God to write that word. He was unschooled and normally wrote an indecipherable scrawl but when he wrote this word in chalk on the pavement it came out in the most beautiful copperplate script. He said himself that he could never understand how he was able to write only that particular word in that way.Over the next 30 years Arthur rose at 4 am each day, took direction from God as to where he should start and, for a few hours before work, he would write Eternity on the pavement every hundred or so yards. The word intrigued and unsettled people. It was a call to Sydneysiders to remember they were more than just movers and shakers in a busy city – they had a soul, they were part of something much bigger than themselves. Gradually people came to expect these chalk or crayon letters on the pavement as part of the Sydney scene.No one knew for many years who wrote this compelling word all over the city until Reverend Thompson of Burton Street Baptist actually saw him writing it one day in 1956. Arthur Stace finally confessed and the Reverend Thompson told the world his remarkable story.Arthur also led Gospel meetings on a Saturday night on the corner of Bathurst and George Streets. A young Ridley Smith, named after the John Ridley who had so inspired Arthur, heard him preach on that very corner and was affected by his fervor. Later Arthur got a van to continue his streetwork.. He had a deep compassion for the people who inhabited the city streets and never stopped his efforts to reach them with the Good News.When he died in July 1967 he left his body to the university so that the proceeds from its sale would go to charity. He is remembered with great fondness in Sydney. Some think of him as an eccentric, some as a great man of God but at least one street still carries Eternity on it’s pavement. Sometimes one word can be a sermon and one life can profoundly affect an entire city.From (includes photo of him writing on the street):http://www.gospelcom.net/realgold/realsydney/historypeople/people.html
