Things as they are
by Amy Carmichael · English · Gutenberg #29426 · 508,707 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Things as they are
Mission work in Southern India
Author: Amy Carmichael
Release date: July 16, 2009 [eBook #29426]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29426
Credits: Produced by The Bookworm, Emmy and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THINGS AS THEY ARE ***
Produced by The Bookworm, Emmy and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
[Transcriber's Notes: vowels with macrons are shown by an equals sign
before the vowel in brackets. [=a]
Bold is surrounded by =equal signs=.
Italics are shown by _underscores_.]
[Illustration: Old India. "You think you know us; you know nothing at
all about us!" and the old eyes peer intently into yours, and the old
head shakes and he smiles to himself as he moves off. Every bit of this
picture is suggestive: the closed door behind,--only a Brahman may open
that door; the mythological carving,--only a Brahman has the right to
understand it; the three-skein cord,--only a Brahman may touch it. Even
the ragged old cloth is suggestive. In old India nothing but Caste
counts for anything, and a reigning Prince lately gave his weight in
gold to the Brahmans, as part payment for ceremonies which enabled him
to eat with men of this old man's social position. Look at the marks on
the baby's forehead; they are suggestive too.]
THINGS AS THEY ARE
MISSION WORK IN SOUTHERN INDIA
BY
AMY WILSON-CARMICHAEL
_Keswick Missionary C.E.Z.M.S._
AUTHOR OF "FROM SUNRISE LAND," ETC.
WITH PREFACE BY
EUGENE STOCK
[Illustration: Tamil Text: VICTORY TO JESUS' NAME!]
LONDON: MORGAN AND SCOTT
(OFFICE OF "=The Christian=")
12, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C.
_And may be ordered of any bookseller_
1905
FIRST EDITION _April 1903_
_Reprinted_ _August 1903_
" _January 1904_
" _November 1904_
" _January 1905_
To the Memory of My Dear Friend,
ELEANOR CARR,
Whose last message to the Band, before her
translation on June 16, 1901, was:
"YOU WILL BE IN THE THICK OF THE FIGHT
BY THE TIME THIS REACHES YOU,
[Illustration: Tamil text: THE BATTLE IS THE LORD'S!]"
Note
WITHIN a few weeks of the publication of _Things as They Are_, letters
were received from missionaries working in different parts of India,
confirming its truth. But some in England doubt it. And so it was
proposed that if a fourth edition were called for, a few confirmatory
notes, written by experienced South Indian missionaries, other than
those of the district described, would be helpful. Several such notes
are appended. The Indian view of one of the chief facts set forth in the
book is expressed in the note written by one who, better than any
missionary, and surely better even than any onlooker at home, has the
right to be heard in this matter--_and the right to be believed_.
And now at His feet, who can use the least, we lay this book again; for
"to the Mighty One," as the Tamil proverb says, "even the blade of grass
is a weapon." May it be used for His Name's sake, to win more prayer for
India--and all dark lands--the prayer that prevails.
AMY WILSON-CARMICHAEL,
Dohnavur, Tinnevelly District,
S. India.
Confirmatory Notes
_From_ Rev. D. DOWNIE, D.D., American Baptist Mission, Nizam's
Dominions, S. India.
I have felt for many years that we missionaries were far too prone to
dwell on what is called the "bright side of mission work." That it has a
bright side no one can question. That it has a "dark" side some do
question; but I for one, after thirty years of experience, know it to be
just as true as the bright side is true. I have heard Miss Carmichael's
book denounced as "pessimistic." Just what is meant by that I am not
quite sure; but if it means that what she has written is untrue, then I
am prepared to say that it is NOT pessimistic, _for there is not a line
of it that cannot be duplicated in this Telugu Mission_. That she has
painted a dark picture of Hindu life cannot be denied, but, _since it is
every word true_, I rejoice that she had the courage to do what was so
much needed, and yet what so many of us shrank from doing, "lest it
should injure the cause."
_From_ Rev. T. STEWART, M.A., Secretary, United Free Church Mission,
Madras.
This book, _Things as They Are_, meets a real need--_it depicts a phase
of mission work of which, as a rule, very little is heard_. Every
missionary can tell of cases where people have been won for Christ, and
mention incidents of more than passing interest. Miss Carmichael is no
exception, and could tell of not a few trophies of grace. _The danger
is, lest in describing such incidents the impression should be given
that they represent the normal state of things, the reverse being the
case._ The people of India are not thirsting for the Gospel, nor
"calling us to deliver their land from error's chain." The night is
still one in which the "spiritual hosts of wickedness" have to be
overcome before the captive can be set free. The writer has laid all
interested in the extension of the Kingdom of God under a deep debt of
obligation by such a graphic and accurate picture of the difficulties
that have to be faced and the obstacles to be overcome. Counterparts of
the incidents recorded can be found in other parts of South India, and
there are probably few missionaries engaged in vernacular work who could
not illustrate some of them from their own experience.
_From_ Dr. A. W. RUDISILL, Methodist Episcopal Press, Madras.
In _Things as They Are_ are pictured, by camera and pen, _some_ things
in Southern India. The pen, as faithfully as the camera, has told the
truth, and nothing but the truth.
The early chapters bring out with vivid, striking, almost startling
reality the wayside hearers in India. One can almost see the devil
plucking away the words as fast as they fall, and hear the opposers of
the Gospel crying out against it.
Paul did not hesitate to write things as they were of the idolaters to
whom he preached, even though the picture was very dark. _It is all the
more needful now, when so many are deceived and being deceived as to the
true nature of idolatry, that people at home who give and pray should be
told plainly that what Paul wrote of idolaters in Rome and Corinth is
still true of idolaters in India._
Miss Carmichael has given only glances and glimpses, not full insights.
Let those who think the picture she has drawn is too dark know that, if
the whole truth were told, an evil spirit only could produce the
pictures, and hell itself would be the only fit place in which to
publish them, because in Christian lands eyes have not seen and ears
have not heard of such things.
_From_ Rev. C. W. CLARKE, M.A., Principal, Noble College, Masulipatam.
I have worked as Principal of a College for over seventeen years amongst
the caste people of South India, and I entirely endorse Miss
Carmichael's views as to the actual risks run by students and others
desirous of breaking caste and being baptized. While the teaching of the
Bible and English education generally have removed a great deal of
prejudice, and greatly raised the ethical standard amongst a number of
those who come under such influences, Hinduism as held and practised by
the vast majority of caste people remains essentially unchanged. To
break caste is held to be the greatest evil a person can inflict upon
himself and his community, _therefore practically any means may be
resorted to to prevent such a calamity_. It is a commonplace amongst
missionaries, that when a caste man or woman shows any serious intention
of being baptized,--in any case, where caste feeling is not modified by
special circumstances,--the most stringent precautions must be taken to
protect the inquirer from the schemes of his caste brethren.
_From_ KRISHNA RAN, Esq., B.A., Editor, _Christian Patriot_, Madras
(himself a convert).
The question is often asked whether a high caste Hindu convert can live
with his own people after his baptism. _It is only those who know
nothing of the conditions of life in India, and of the power of caste as
it exists in this country, who raise the question._
The convert has to be prepared for the loss of parents and their tender
affection; of brothers and sisters, relatives and friends; of wife and
children, if he has any; of his birthright, social position, means of
livelihood, reputation, and all the power which hides behind the magic
word "caste"; of all that he is taught from his childhood to hold as
sacred.
_From_ Miss READE, South Arcot, South India.
I am not surprised that anyone unacquainted with mission work in India
should be staggered at the facts narrated in _Things as They Are_. But
as one who has worked for nearly thirty years in the heart of
heathenism, away from the haunts of civilisation, I can bear testimony
_that the reality of things far exceeds anything that it would be
possible to put into print_. One's tongue falters to tell of what is
custom in this country. I know a case where a young girl of ten was
placed in such a position that her choice lay between two sinful courses
of life, _no right way being open to her_. I think one of the most
distressing things we have to meet in caste work in this country is the
fact that often as soon as a soul begins to show interest in Christ _he
or she disappears_, and one either hears next that he is dead, or can
get no reliable information at all.
_Extract from_ a letter to Miss CARMICHAEL on _Things as They Are_. (The
writer is a veteran American missionary.)
_I could duplicate nearly every incident in the book_; so I know it is a
true picture, not alone because I believe your word, but because my
experience has been so similar to yours. Many times, while reading it,
the memory of the old heart-break has been so vivid that I have had to
lay the book down and look round the familiar room in order to convince
myself that it was you, and not I, who was agonising over one of the
King's own children who was being crowded back into darkness and hurled
down to destruction, because Satan's wrath is great as he realises that
his time is short.
I wish the book might be read by all the Christians in the homeland.
_From_ PANDITA RAMABAI.
While I was reading _Things as They Are_, I fancied I was living my old
life among Hindus over again. I can honestly corroborate everything said
in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus. I came from
that part of the country, and I am very glad that the book has succeeded
in bringing the truth to light.
_From_ Miss L. TROTTER.
There is hardly a phase of all the heart-suffering retold that we have
not known: page after page might have been written out here, word for
word.
Preface
THE writer of these thrilling chapters is a Keswick missionary, well
known to many friends as the adopted daughter of Mr. Robert Wilson, the
much-respected chairman of the Keswick Convention. She worked for a time
with the Rev. Barclay Buxton in Japan; and for the last few years she
has been with the Rev. T. Walker (also a C.M.S. Missionary) in
Tinnevelly, and is on the staff of the Church of England Zenana Society.
I do not think the realities of Hindu life have ever been portrayed with
greater vividness than in this book; and I know that the authoress's
accuracy can be fully relied upon. The picture is drawn without
prejudice, with all sympathy, with full recognition of what is good, and
yet with an unswerving determination to tell the truth and let the facts
be known,--that is, so far as she dares to tell them. What she says is
the truth, and nothing but the truth; but it is not the whole
truth--_that_ she could not tell. If she wrote it, it could not be
printed. If it were printed, it could not be read. But if we read
between the lines, we do just catch glimpses of what she calls "the
Actual."
It is evident that the authoress deeply felt the responsibility of
writing such a book; and I too feel the responsibility of recommending
it. I do so with the prayer of my heart that God will use it to move
many. It is not a book to be read with a lazy kind of sentimental
"interest." It is a book to send the reader to his knees--still more to
_her_ knees.
Most of the chapters are concerned with the lives of Heathen men and
women and children surrounded by the tremendous bars and gates of the
Caste system. But one chapter, and not the least important one, tells of
native Christians. It has long been one of my own objects to correct the
curious general impression among people at home that native Christians,
as a body, are--not indeed perfect,--no one thinks that, but--earnest
and consistent followers of Christ. Narratives, true narratives, of true
converts are read, and these are supposed to be specimens of the whole
body. But (1) where there have been "mass movements" towards
Christianity, where whole villages have put themselves under Christian
instruction, mixed motives are certain; (2) where there have been two or
three generations of Christians it is unreasonable to expect the
descendants of men who may have been themselves most true converts to be
necessarily like them. Hereditary Christianity in India is much like
hereditary Christianity at home. The Church in Tinnevelly, of which this
book incidentally tells a little, is marked by both these features.
Whole families or even villages have "come over" at times; and the large
majority of the Christians were (so to speak) born Christians, and were
baptized in infancy. This is not in itself a result to be despised.
"Christian England," unchristian as a great part of its population
really is, is better than Heathen India; and in the chapter now referred
to, Miss Carmichael herself notices the difference between a Hindu and a
Christian village. But the more widely Christianity spreads, the more
will there assuredly be of mere nominal profession.
Is the incorrect impression I allude to caused by missionaries dwelling
mostly on the brighter side of their work? Here and there in the book
there is just a suggestion that they are wrong in doing so. But how can
they help it? What does a clergyman or an evangelist in England tell of?
Does he tell of his many daily disappointments, or of his occasional
encouraging cases? The latter are the events of his life, and he
naturally tells of them. The former he comprises in some general
statement. How can he do otherwise? And what can the modern missionary
do in the short reports he is able to write? Fifty years ago missionary
journals of immense length came home, and were duly published; and then
the details of Hindu idolatry and cruelty and impurity, and the
tremendous obstacles to the Gospel, were better known by the few regular
readers. Much that Miss Carmichael tells was then told over and over
again, though not perhaps with a skilful pen like hers. But the work has
so greatly developed in each mission, and the missions are so far more
numerous and extended, that neither can missionaries now write as their
predecessors did, nor, if they did, could all the missionary periodicals
together find space for their journals.
The fault of incorrect impressions lies mainly in the want of knowledge
and want of thought of home speakers and preachers. I remember, thirty
years ago, an eloquent Bishop in Exeter Hall triumphantly flinging in
the face of critics of missions the question, "Is Tinnevelly a
fiction?"--as if Tinnevelly had become a Christian country, which
apparently some people still suppose it to be, notwithstanding the
warning words to the contrary which the C.M.S. publications have again
and again uttered. Even now, there are in Tinnevelly about twenty
heathen to every one Christian; and of what sort the twenty are this
book tells. Tinnevelly is indeed "no fiction," but in a very different
sense from that of the good Bishop's speech. Again, a few months ago, I
heard a preacher, not very favourable to the C.M.S., say that the
C.M.S., despite its shortcomings, deserved well of the Church because it
had "converted a nation" in Uganda!--as if the nation comprised only
30,000 souls. Some day the "Actual" of Uganda will be better understood,
and the inevitable shortcomings of even its Christian population
realised, and then we shall be told that we deceived the
public--although we have warned them over and over again.
But the larger part of this book is a revelation--so far as is
possible--of the "Actual" of Hinduism and Caste. God grant that its
terrible facts and its burning words may sink into the hearts of its
readers! Perhaps, when they have read it, they will at last agree that
we have used no sensational and exaggerated language when we have said
that the Church is only playing at missions! Service, and self-denial,
and prayer, must be on a different scale indeed if we are ever--I do not
say to convert the world--but even to evangelise it.
EUGENE STOCK.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ABOUT THE BOOK 1
II. THREE AFTERNOONS OFF THE TRACK 5
III. HUMDRUM 18
IV. CORRESPONDENCES 26
V. THE PREY OF THE TERRIBLE 33
VI. MISSED ENDS 41
VII. "THE DUST OF THE ACTUAL" 57
VIII. ROOTS 71
IX. THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES 83
X. THE CREED CHASM 91
XI. CASTE VIEWED AS A DOER 96
XII. PETRA 105
XIII. DEATH BY DISUSE 111
XIV. WHAT HAPPENED 118
XV. "SIMPLY MURDERED" 124
XVI. WANTED, VOLUNTEERS 132
XVII. IF IT IS SO VERY IMPORTANT. . . ? 141
XVIII. THE CALL INTENSIFIED 145
XIX. "ATTRACTED BY THE INFLUENCE" 160
XX. THE ELF 171
XXI. DEIFIED DEVILRY 188
XXII. BEHIND THE DOOR 194
XXIII. "PAN, PAN IS DEAD" 203
XXIV. "MARRIED TO THE GOD" 217
XXV. SKIRTING THE ABYSS 223
XXVI. FROM A HINDU POINT OF VIEW 236
XXVII. THOUGH YE KNOW HIM NOT 249
XXVIII. HOW LONG? 256
XXIX. WHAT DO WE COUNT THEM WORTH? 262
XXX. TWO SAFE 273
XXXI. THREE OBJECTIONS 277
XXXII. "SHOW ME THY GLORY!" 289
APPENDIX. SOME INDIAN SAINTS 303
Illustrations
AN OLD BRAHMAN _Frontispiece_
BANDY CROSSING A POOL _Facing page 5_
A YOUNG TAMIL GIRL 11
A POTTER AT HIS WHEEL 24
A DEVOTEE OF SIVA 26
THE RED LAKE VILLAGE 28
DEATH SCENE 51
WAILING 53
THREE CEREMONIAL MOURNERS 54
CEREMONIAL BATHING 56
AN ANCIENT PARIAH 58
VELLALA WIDOW 66
TYPICAL OLD WIDOW 73
HINDU SCHOOLMASTER AND BOYS 87
SHANAR MOTHER AND CHILD 91
COOKING IN A SHANAR HOUSE 98
FAIRLY TYPICAL VELLALAR 105
CHRISTIAN WIDOW 112
BRAHMAN GIRL 118
THREE TYPES OF BRAHMANHOOD--
KEEN 132
THOUGHTFUL 134
DULL 138
AN OLD WOMAN AND BABY 143
BRAHMAN WIDOW 145
BRAHMAN STREET 147
SHEPHERD-CASTE HOUSE 151
VELLALA CHILD 161
"UGLY DUCKLING" 178
DESIGNS IN CHALK 194
HANDMARKS ON THE DOOR 202
A "HOLY BRAHMAN" 221
WOMAN AND WATER-VESSEL 262
Glossary
AGNI God of Fire.
AIYO Alas! "Ai" runs together almost like "eye." The word is
repeated rapidly, Eye-eye Y[=o] Eye-eye Y[=o]!
AMM[=A] Mother! (vocative case). "A" is pronounced like "u" in
"up." The word is also used by all women in speaking
to each other, and by girls in speaking to women.
AMM[=A]L Lady or woman. "A" is pronounced like "u" in "up."
ANNA One penny.
ARECA NUT Nut "eaten" by the Indians with betel leaf or lime.
BETEL Leaf of a creeper.
BANDY A bullock cart.
BRAHMA The first person in the Hindu Triad, regarded as the
Creator.
BRAHMAN The highest of the Hindu Castes.
BRAMO SAMÂJ A sect of Hindu reformers who honour Christ as a man,
but reject Him as a Saviour.
CHEE! Exclamation of derision, disgust, or remonstrance.
COMPOUND A piece of ground surrounding a house.
COOLIE A paid labourer. "Coolie" is the Tamil word for pay.
CURRY A preparation of meat or vegetables made by grinding
various condiments and mixing them together.
FAKEER Religious beggar.
GURU A religious teacher.
IYER Title given to Brahmans and Gurus.
PADDY Rice in the husk. Paddy fields = rice fields.
PARIAH A depressed class.
P[=U]JAH Worship. "[=u]" is pronounced like "oo."
RUPEE Value 1s. 4d.
SAIVITE A worshipper of Siva.
SALAAM A salutation meaning "peace," used in greeting and
farewell, and often in the sense of "thank you."
The right hand is raised to the forehead as one says
salaam.
SEELEY Tamil woman's dress of silk, muslin, or cotton.
SHANAR A Caste of Palmyra-palm climbers.
SIVA The third person in the Hindu Triad. The Destroyer.
TOM-TOM An Indian drum.
VAISHNAVITE A worshipper of Vishnu.
VELLALAR A Caste of landowners and cultivators.
VISHNU The second person in the Hindu Triad. The Preserver.
THINGS AS THEY ARE
MISSION WORK IN SOUTHERN INDIA
CHAPTER I
About the Book
"We can do nothing against the Truth, but for the
Truth."
_St. Paul, Asia and Europe._
"There is too little desire to know what is the
actual state of mission work in India, and a
regard to the showy and attractive rather than to
the solid and practical. I will try, however, to
avoid being carried away by the tide, and to set
myself the task of giving as plain and unvarnished
a statement as possible of what is actually being
done or not done in the great field of our foreign
labour."
_Bishop French, India and Arabia._
THREE friends sat Native fashion on the floor of an Indian verandah. Two
of the three had come out to India for a few months to see the fight as
it is. And they saw it. They now proposed that the third should gather
some letters written from the hot heart of things, and make them into a
book, to the intent that others should see exactly what they had seen.
The third was not sure. The world has many books. Does it want another,
and especially another of the kind this one would be? Brain and time
are needed for all that writing a book means. The third has not much of
either. But the two undertook to do all the most burdensome part of the
business. "Give us the letters, we will make the book," and they urged
reasons which ended in--this.
This, the book, has tried to tell the Truth. That is all it has to say
about itself. The quotations which head the chapters, and which are
meant to be read, not skipped, are more worthful than anything else in
it. They are chosen from the writings of missionaries, who saw the Truth
and who told it.
The story covers about two years. We had come from the eastern side of
this South Indian district, to work for awhile in the south of the
South, the farthest southern outpost of the C.M.S. in India. Chapter II.
plunges into the middle of the beginning. The Band Sisters are the
members of a small Women's Itinerating Band; the girls mentioned by
translated names are the young convert-girls who are with us; the Iyer
is Rev. T. Walker; the Ammal is Mrs. Walker; the Missie Ammal explains
itself.
The Picture-catching Missie Ammal is the friend who proposed the book's
making. This is her Tamil name, given because it describes her as she
struck the Tamil mind. The pictures she caught were not easy to catch.
Reserved and conservative India considered the camera intrusive, and we
were often foiled in getting what we most desired. Even where we were
allowed to catch our object peaceably, it was a case of working under
difficulties which would have daunted a less ardent picture-catcher.
Wherever the camera was set up, there swarms of children sprang into
being, burrowed in and out like rabbits, and scuttled about over
everything, to the confusion of the poor artist, who had to fix focus
and look after the safety of her camera legs at the same time, while the
second Missie Ammal held an umbrella over her head, and the third
exhorted the picture, which speedily got restive, to sit still. So much
for the mere mechanical.
Finally, I should explain the book's character. "Tell about things as
they actually are"; so said the Two with emphasis. I tried, but the
Actual eluded me. It was as if one painted smoke, and then, pointing to
the feeble blur, said, "Look at the battle! 'the smoking hell of
battle!' There is the smoke!" The Poet's thought was not this, I know,
when she coined that suggestive phrase, "The Dust of the Actual," but it
has been the predominating thought in my mind, for it holds that which
defines the scope and expresses the purpose of the book, and I use it as
the title of one of the chapters. It does not show the Actual.
Principalities, Powers, Rulers of the Darkness, Potentialities unknown
and unimagined, gathered up into one stupendous Force--we have never
seen it. How can we describe it? What we have seen and tried to describe
is only an indication of Something undescribed, and is as nothing in
comparison with it--as Dust in comparison with the Actual. The book's
scope, then, is bounded by this: it only touches the Dust; but its
purpose goes deeper, stretches wider, has to do with the Actual and our
relation to it.
But in touching the Dust we touch the outworkings of an Energy so awful
in operation that descriptive chapters are awful too. And such chapters
are best read alone in some quiet place with God. For the book is a
battle-book, written from a battle-field where the fighting is not
pretty play but stern reality; and almost every page looks straight from
the place where Charles Kingsley stood when he wrote--
"God! fight we not within a cursèd world,
Whose very air teems thick with leaguèd fiends--
Each word we speak has infinite effects--
Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell--
And this our one chance through eternity
To drop and die, like dead leaves in the brake!
. . . . . . .
Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt:
Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven,
And that thy last deed ere the judgment day."
[Illustration: This is our bullock-bandy. The water was up to the top of
the bank when we crossed last. The palms are cocoanuts.]
CHAPTER II
Three Afternoons off the Track
"They are led captive by Satan at his will in the
most quiescent manner."
_David Brainerd, North America._
"Oh that the Lord would pour out upon them a
spirit of deep concern for their souls!"
_Henry Martyn, India._
"I ask you earnestly to pray that the Gospel may
take saving and working effect."
_James Gilmour, Mongolia._
THE Western Ghauts sweep down to the sea in curves. Dohnavur is in one
of the last of these curves. There are no proper roads running under the
mountains, only rough country ruts crossing the plain. We were rolling
along one of these at the rate of two miles an hour.
Crash and tumble went the bandy, a springless construction with a mat
roof; bang over stones and slabs of rock, down on one side, up on the
other; then both wheels were sharp aslant. But this is usual. On that
particular First Afternoon the water was out, which is the South Indian
way of saying that the tanks, great lake-like reservoirs, have
overflowed and flooded the land. Once we went smoothly down a bank and
into a shallow swollen pool, and the water swished in at the lower end
and floated our books out quietly. So we had to stop, and fish them up;
and then, huddled close at the upper end we sat, somewhat damp, but
happy.
At last we got to our destination, reached through a lane which then was
a stream with quite a swift little current of its own. Cupid's Lake the
place is called. We thought the name appropriate. Cupid's Lake is
peopled by Castes of various persuasions; we made for the Robber quarter
first. The Robber Caste is honourable here; it furnishes our watchmen
and the coolies who carry our money. There is good stuff in the Robber
Caste people: a valiant people are they, and though they were not
prepared for the thing that was coming towards them, they met it with
fortitude. A little girl saw it first. One glance at my hat through the
end of the cart, and she flew to spread the news--
"Oh! everyone come running and see! A great white man is here! Oh what
an appalling spectacle! A great white man!"
Then there was a general rush; children seemed to spring from the
ground, all eyes and tongues and astonishment. "She isn't a man!" "He
is!" "She isn't!" "He has got a man's turban!" "But look at her seeley!"
(Tamil dress.) A _woman_, and white--it staggered them till the
assurances of the Band Sisters prevailed; and they let me into a
neighbouring house, out of the sun which made that hat a necessity. Once
it was off they lost all fear, and crowded round in the friendliest
fashion; but later, one of the Band was amused by hearing me described
in full: "Not a man, though great and white, and wearing a white man's
turban, too! Was it not an appalling spectacle?" And the old body who
was addressed held up both her hands amazed, and hastened off to
investigate.
An English magazine told us lately exactly what these poor women think
when they see, for the first time in their lives, the lady missionary.
They greatly admire her, the article said, and consider her fairer and
more divine than anything ever imagined before--which is very nice
indeed to read; but here what they say is this: "Was it not an appalling
spectacle? A great white man!"
And now that the spectacle was safe in the house, the instincts of
hospitality urged clean mats and betel. Betel (pronounced _beetle_) is
the leaf of a climbing plant, into which they roll a morsel of areca nut
and lime. The whole is made up into a parcel and munched, but not
swallowed. This does not sound elegant; neither is the thing. It is one
of the minor trials of life to have to sit through the process.
We took a leaf or two, but explained that it was not our custom to eat
it; and then we answered questions straight off for ten minutes. "What
is your Caste?" "Chee!" in a tone of remonstrance, "don't you see she is
_white_? Married or widow? Why no jewels? What relations? Where are they
all? Why have you left them and come here? Whatever can be your business
here? What does the Government give you for coming here?" These last
questions gave us the chance we were watching for, and we began to
explain.
Now what do these people do when, for the first time, they hear the Good
Tidings? They simply stare.
In that house that day there was an old woman who seemed to understand
a little what it was all about. She had probably heard before. But
nobody else understood in the least; they did not understand enough to
make remarks. They sat round us on the floor and ate betel, as everybody
does here in all leisure moments, and they stared.
The one old woman who seemed to understand followed us out of the house,
and remarked that it was a good religion but a mistaken one, as it
advocated, or resulted in, the destruction of Caste.
In the next house we found several girls, and tried to persuade the
mothers to let them learn to read. If a girl is learning regularly it
gives one a sort of right of entrance to the house. One's going there is
not so much observed and one gets good chances, but to all our
persuasions they only said it was not their custom to allow their girls
to learn. Had _they_ to do Government work? Learning was for men who
wanted to do Government work. We explained a little, and mentioned the
many villages where girls are learning to read. They thought it a wholly
ridiculous idea. Then we told them as much as we could in an hour about
the great love of Jesus Christ.
I was in the middle of it, and thinking only of it and their souls, when
an old lady with fluffy white hair leaned forward and gazed at me with a
beautiful, earnest gaze. She did not speak; she just listened and gazed,
"drinking it all in." And then she raised a skeleton claw, and grabbed
her hair, and pointed to mine. "Are you a widow too," she asked, "that
you have no oil on yours?" After a few such experiences that beautiful
gaze loses its charm. It really means nothing more nor less than the
sweet expression sometimes observed in the eyes of a sorrowful animal.
But her question had set the ball rolling again. "Oil! no oil! Can't you
even afford a halfpenny a month to buy good oil? It isn't your custom?
Why not? Don't any white Ammals ever use oil? What sort of oil do the
girls use? Do you _never_ use castor oil for the hair? Oh, castor oil is
excellent!" And they went into many details. The first thing they do
when a baby is born is to swing it head downwards, holding its feet, and
advise it not to sin; and the second thing is to feed it with castor
oil, and put castor oil in its eyes. "Do we do none of these things?" We
sang to them. They always like that, and sometimes it touches them: but
the Tamils are not easily touched, and could never be described as
unduly emotional.
All through there were constant and various interruptions. Two bulls
sauntered in through the open door, and established themselves in their
accustomed places; then a cow followed, and somebody went off to tie the
animals up. Children came in and wanted attention, babies made their
usual noises. We rarely had five consecutive quiet minutes.
When they seemed to be getting tired of us, we said the time was
passing, to which they agreed, and, with a word about hoping to come
again, to which they answered cordially, "Oh yes! Come to-morrow!" we
went out into the street, and finished up in the open air. There is a
tree at one end of the village; we stood under it and sang a chorus and
taught the children who had followed us from house to house to sing it,
and this attracted some passing grown-ups, who listened while we
witnessed unto Jesus, Who had saved us and given us His joy. Nothing
tells more than just this simple witness. To hear one of their own
people saying, with evident sincerity, "One thing I know, that whereas I
was blind now I see," makes them look at each other and nod their heads
sympathetically. This is something that appeals, something they can
appreciate; many a time it arrests attention when nothing else would.
[Illustration: We were not able to get the photo of that special girl
in the blue seeley, but this girl is so like her that I put her here.
She is a Vellalar. The jewels worn by a girl of this class run into
thousands of rupees. They are part of the ordinary dress. This girl did
not know we were coming, she was "caught" just as she was. She had a
ball of pink oleander flowers in her hands and white flowers in her
hair.]
We were thoroughly tired by this time, and could neither talk nor sing
any more. The crowd melted--all but the children, who never melt--one by
one going their respective ways, having heard, some of them, for the
first time. What difference will it make in their lives? Did they
understand it? None of them seemed specially interested, none of them
said anything interesting. The last question I heard was about
soap--"What sort of soap do you use to make your skin white?" Most of
them would far prefer to be told that secret than how to get a white
heart.
Afternoon Number Two found us in the Village of the Temple, a
tumble-down little place, but a very citadel of pride and the arrogance
of ignorance. We did not know that at first, of course, but we very soon
found it out. There was the usual skirmish at the sight of a live white
woman; no one there had seen such a curiosity. But even curiosity could
not draw the Brahmans. They live in a single straggling street, and
would not let us in. "Go!" said a fat old Brahman disdainfully; "no
white man has ever trodden our street, and no white woman shall. As for
that low-caste child with you"--Victory looked up in her gentle way, and
he varied it to--"that child who eats with those low-caste people--she
shall not speak to one of our women. Go by the way you have come!"
This was not encouraging. We salaamed and departed, and went to our
bandy left outside ("low-caste bandies" are not allowed to drive down
Brahman streets), and asked our Master to open another door. While we
were waiting, a tall, fine-looking Hindu came and said, "Will you come
to my house? I will show you the way." So we went.
He led us to the Vellala quarter next to the Brahmans, and we found his
house was the great house of the place. The outer door opened into a
large square inner courtyard. A wide verandah, supported by pillars
quaintly carved, ran round it. The women's rooms, low and windowless,
opened on either side; these are the rooms we rejoice to get into, and
now we were led right in.
But first I had to talk to the men. They were regular Caste Hindus;
courteous--for they have had no cause to fear the power of the
Gospel--yet keen and argumentative. One of them had evidently read a
good deal. He quoted from their classics; knew all about Mrs. Besant and
the latest pervert to her views; and was up in the bewildering tangle of
thought known as Hindu Philosophy. "Fog-wreaths of doubt, in blinding
eddies drifted"--that is what it really is, but it is very difficult to
prove it so.
One truth struck him especially--Christianity is the only religion which
provides a way by which there is deliverance from sin _now_. There is a
certain system of philosophy which professes to provide deliverance in
the future, when the soul, having passed through the first three stages
of bliss, loses its identity and becomes absorbed in God; but there is
no way by which deliverance can be obtained here and now. "Sin shall not
have dominion over you"--there is no such line as this in all the
million stanzas of the Hindu classics. He admitted this freely, admitted
that this one tenet marked out Christianity as a unique religion; but he
did not go on further; he showed no desire to prove the truth of it.
After this they let us go to the women, who had all this time been
watching us, and discussing us with interest.
Once safely into their inner room, we sat down on the floor in the midst
of them, and began to make friends. There was a grandmother who had
heard that white people were not white all over, but piebald, so to
speak; might she examine me? There were several matronly women who
wanted to know what arrangements English parents made concerning their
daughters' marriages. There were the usual widows of a large Indian
household--one always looks at them with a special longing; and there
was a dear young girl, in a soft blue seeley (Tamil dress), her ears
clustered about with pearls, and her neck laden with five or six
necklets worth some hundreds of rupees. She was going to be married; and
beyond the usual gentle courtesy of a well-brought-up Tamil girl,
showed no interest in us. Almost all the women had questions to ask. On
the track it is different; they have already satisfied their lawful
curiosity concerning Missie Ammals; but here they have not had the
chance; and if we ignore their desires, we defeat our own. They may seem
to listen, but they are really occupied in wondering about us. We got
them to listen finally, and left them, cheered by warm invitations to
return.
Then we thought of the poor proud Brahmans, and hoping that, perhaps, in
the interval they had inquired about us, and would let us in, we went to
them again. We could see the fair faces and slender forms of the younger
Brahman women standing in the shadow behind their verandah pillars, and
some of them looked as if they would like to let us in, but the street
had not relented; and a Brahman street is like a house--you cannot go in
unless you are allowed.
There was one kind-faced, courtly old man, and he seemed to sympathise
with us, for he left the mocking group of men, and came to see us off;
and then, as if to divert us from the greater topic, he pointed to one
of the mountains, a spur of the God King's mountain, famous in all South
India, and volunteered to tell me its story. We were glad to make
friends with him even over so small a thing as a mountain; but he would
speak of nothing else, and when he left us we felt baffled and sorry,
and tired with the tiredness that comes when you cannot give your
message; and we sat down on a rock outside the Brahman street, to wait
till the Band Sisters gathered for the homeward walk.
It was sunset time, and the sky was overcast by dull grey clouds; but
just over the Brahman quarter there was a rift in the grey, and the
pent-up gold shone through. It seemed as if God were pouring out His
beauty upon those Brahmans, trying to make them look up, and they would
not. One by one we saw them go to their different courtyards, where the
golden glow could not reach them, and we heard them shut their great
heavy doors, as if they were shutting Him out.
In there it was dark; out here, out with God, it was light. The
after-glow, that loveliest glow of the East, was shining through the
rent of the clouds, and the red-tiled roofs and the scarlet flowers of
the Flame of the Forest, and every tint and colour which would respond
in any way, were aglow with the beauty of it. The Brahman quarter was
set in the deep green of shadowy trees; just behind it the mountains
rose outlined in mist, and out of the mist a waterfall gleamed white
against blue.
We spent Afternoon Number Three in the Village of the Warrior, a lonely
little place, left all by itself on a great rough moorland--if you can
call a patch of bare land "moor" which is destitute of heather, and
grows palms and scrub in clumps instead. It took us rather a long time
to get to it, over very broken ground on a very hot day; but when we did
get there we found such a good opening that we forgot about our
feelings, and entered in rejoicing. There were some little children
playing at the entrance to the village, and they led us straight to
their own house, making friends in the most charming way as they
trotted along beside us. They told us their family history, and we told
them as much of ours as was necessary, and they introduced us to their
mothers as old acquaintances. The mothers were indulgent, and let us
have a room all to ourselves in the inner courtyard, where a dozen or
more children gathered and listened with refreshing zest. _They_
understood, dear little things, though so often their elders did not.
Then the mothers got interested, and sat about the door. The girls were
with me. (We usually divide into two parties; the elder and more
experienced Sisters go off in one direction, and the young convert-girls
come with me.) And before long, Jewel of Victory was telling out of a
full heart all about the great things God had done for her. She has a
very sweet way with the women, and they listened fascinated. Then the
others spoke, and still those women listened. They were more intelligent
than our audience of yesterday; and though they did not follow nearly
all, they listened splendidly to the story-part of our message. In the
meaning, as is often the case, their interest was simply nil.
But we were sorry, and I think so were they, when a commotion outside
disturbed us, and we were sorrier when we knew the cause. The village
postman, who only visits these out-of-the-way places once a week, had
appeared with a letter for the head of the house. One of the men folk
had read it. It told of the death of the son in foreign parts--Madras, I
think--and the poor old mother's one desire was to see us out of the
room. She had not liked to turn us out; but, as the news spread, more
women gathered clamouring round the door; and the moment we left the
room empty, in they rushed, with the mother and the women who had
listened to us, and flinging themselves on the floor, cried the Tamil
cry of sorrow, full of a pathos of its own: "Ai-y[=o]! Ai-y[=o]!
Ai-Ai-y[=o]!"
It was sad to leave them crying so, but at that moment we were certainly
better away. The children came with us to the well outside the village,
and we sat on its wall and went on with our talk. They would hardly let
us go, and begged us to come back and "teach them every day," not the
Gospel--do not imagine their little hearts craved for that--but reading
and writing and sums! As we drove off some of the villagers smiled and
salaamed, and the little children's last words followed us as far as we
could hear them: "Come back soon!"
Sometimes, as now, when we come to a new place, we dream a dream, dream
that perhaps at last it may be possible to win souls peacefully. Perhaps
these courteous, kindly people will welcome the message we bring them
when they understand it better. Perhaps homes need not be broken up,
perhaps whole families will believe, or individual members believing may
still live in their own homes and witness there. Perhaps--perhaps--! And
snatches of verse float through our dream--
"Oh, might some sweet song Thy lips have taught us,
Some glad song, and sweet,
Guide amidst the mist, and through the darkness,
Lost ones to Thy feet!"
It sounds so beautiful, so easy, singing souls to Jesus. And we dream
our dream.
Till suddenly and with violence we are awakened. Someone--a mere girl,
or a lad, or even a little child--has believed, has confessed, wants to
be a Christian. And the whole Caste is roused, and the whole countryside
joins with the Caste; and the people we almost thought loved us, hate
us. And till we go to the next new place we never dream that dream
again.
CHAPTER III
Humdrum
"A missionary's life is more ordinary than is
supposed. Plod rather than cleverness is often the
best missionary equipment."
_Rev. J. Heywood Horsburgh, China._
"Truly to understand the facts of work for Christ
in any land, we must strip it of all romance, and
of everything which is unreal."
_Miss S. S. Hewlett, India._
THERE have been times of late when I have had to hold on to one text
with all my might: "It is required in stewards that a man be found
_faithful_." Praise God, it does not say "successful."
One evening things came to a climax. We all spent a whole afternoon
without getting one good listener. We separated as usual, going two and
two to the different quarters of a big sleepy straggly village. Life and
I went to the potters. Life spoke most earnestly and well to an
uninterested group of women. After she had finished one of them pointed
to my hat (the only foreign thing about me which was visible--oh that I
could dispense with it!). "What is that?" she said. Not one bit did they
care to hear. One by one they went back to their work, and we were left
alone.
We went to another quarter. It was just the same. At a rest-house by the
way I noticed a Brahman, and went to see if he would listen. He would if
I would talk "about politics or education, but not if it was about
religion." However, I did get a chance of pleading with him to consider
the question of his soul's salvation, and he took a book and said he
would read it at his leisure. And then he asked me how many persons I
had succeeded in joining to my Way since I began to try. It was exactly
the question, only asked in another form, which the devil had been
pressing on me all the afternoon. After this he told me politely that we
were knocking our heads against a rock; we might smash our heads, but we
never would affect the rock.
"Rock! Rock! when wilt thou open?" It is an old cry; I cried it afresh.
But the Brahman only smiled, and then with a gesture expressing at once
his sense of his own condescension in speaking with me, and his utter
contempt for the faith I held, motioned to me to go.
Outside in the road a number of Hindus were standing; some of them were
his retainers and friends. I heard them say, as I passed through their
midst, "Who will fall into the pit of the Christian Way!" And they
laughed, and the Brahman laughed. "As the filth of the world, the
offscouring of all things, unto this day."
We walked along the road bordered with beautiful banyan trees. We sat
down under their shade, and waited for what would come. Some little
children followed us, but before we could get a single idea clearly into
their heads a man came and chased them away. "It is getting dark," he
said. "They are only little green things; they must not be out late." It
was broad daylight then, and would be for another hour. Some coolies
passing that way stopped to look at us; but before they had time to get
interested they too remarked that darkness was coming, and they must be
off, and off they went.
We were left alone after that. Within five minutes' walk were at least
five hundred souls, redeemed, but they don't know it; redeemed, _but
they don't want to know it_. Sometimes they seem to want to know, but
however tenderly you tell it, the keen Hindu mind soon perceives the
drift of it all--Redemption must mean loss of Caste. One day last week I
was visiting in the Village of the Red Lake. Standing in one of its
courtyards you see the Western Ghauts rising straight up behind. The Red
Lake lies at the mountain foot; we call it Derwentwater, but there are
palms and bamboos, and there is no Friar's Crag.
That afternoon I was bound for a house in the centre of the village,
when an old lady called me to come to her house, and I followed her
gladly. There were six or eight women all more or less willing to
listen; among them were two who were very old. Old people in India are
usually too attached to their own faith, or too utterly stupid and dull,
to care to hear about another; but this old lady had been stirred to
something almost like active thought by the recent death of a relative,
and she felt that she needed something more than she had to make her
ready for death. She was apparently devout. Ashes were marked on her
brow and arms, and she wore a very large rosary. It is worn to
accumulate merit. I did not refer to it as I talked, but in some dim way
she seemed to feel it did not fit with what I was saying, for, with
trembling hands, she took it off and threw it to a child. I hoped this
meant something definite, and tried to lead her to Jesus. But as soon as
she understood Who He was, she drew back. "I cannot be a disciple of
your Guru, here," she said; "would my relations bear such defilement?"
Being a Christian really meant sooner or later leaving her home and all
her people for ever. Can you wonder an old lady of perhaps seventy-five
stopped at that?
The little children in the Village of the Warrior are not allowed to
learn. The men of the place have consulted and come to the decision. The
chill of it has struck the little ones, and they do not care to run the
chance of the scolding they would receive if they showed too much
interest in us. The mothers are as friendly as ever, but indifferent.
"We hear this is a religion which spoils our Caste," they say, and that
is the end of it. In the great house of the Temple Village they listened
well for some weeks. Then, as it gradually opened to them that there is
no Caste whatever in Christianity, their interest died.
How much one would like to tell a different story! But a made-up story
is one thing and a story of facts is another. So far we have only found
two genuine earnest souls here. But if those two go on--! Praise God for
the joy on before!
We went again to the potters' village and sat on the narrow verandah and
talked to a girl as she patted the pots into shape underneath where the
wheel had left an open place. She listened for awhile; then she said,
"If I come to your Way will you give me a new seeley and good curry
every day?" And back again we went to the very beginning of things,
while the old grandfather spinning his wheel chuckled at us for our
folly in wasting our time over potters. "As if _we_ would ever turn to
your religion!" he said. "Have you ever heard of a potter who changed
his Caste?"
Caste and religion! They are so mixed up that we do not know how to
unmix them. His Caste to the potter meant his trade, the trade of his
clan for generations; it meant all the observances bound up with it; it
meant, in short, his life. It would never strike him that he could be a
Christian and a potter at the same time, and very probably he could not;
the feeling of the Caste would be against it. Then what else could he
be? He does not argue all this out; he does not care enough about the
matter to take the trouble to think at all. He has only one concern in
life--he lives to make pots and sell them, and make more and sell them,
and so eat and sleep in peace.
But the girl had the look of more possibility; she asked questions and
seemed interested, and finally suggested we should wait till she had
finished her batch of pots, and then she would "tell us all her mind."
So we waited and watched the deft brown hands as they worked round the
gaping hole till it grew together and closed; and at last she had
finished. Then she drew us away from the group of curious children, and
told us if we would come in three days she would be prepared to join our
Way and come with us, for she had to work very hard at home, and her
food was poor and her seeley old, and she thought it would be worth
risking the wrath of her people to get all she knew we should give her
if she came; and this was all her mind.
She had touched a great perplexity. How are we to live in India without
raising desires of this sort? It is true the Brahmans look down upon us,
and the higher Castes certainly do not look up, but to the greater
number of the people we seem rich and grand and desirable to cultivate.
The Ulterior-Object-Society is a fact in South India. We may banish
expensive-looking things from our tables, and all pictures and ornaments
from our walls, and confine ourselves to texts. This certainly helps;
there is less to distract the attention of the people when they come to
see us, and we have so many the fewer things to take care of--a very
great advantage--but it does not go far towards disillusioning them as
to what they imagine is our true position. We are still up above to
them; not on a level, not one of themselves.
The houses we live in are airy and large, and they do not understand the
need of protection from the sun. The food we eat is abundant and good,
and to them it looks luxurious, for they live on rice and vegetable
curry, at a cost of twopence a day. Our walls may be bare, but they are
clean, and the texts aforesaid are not torn at the corners; so, whatever
we say, we are rich.
Identification with the people whom we have come to win is the aim of
many a missionary, but the difficulty always is the same--climate and
customs are dead against it; how can we do it? George Bowen struck at
English life and became a true Indian, so far as he could, but even he
could not go all the way. No matter how far you may go, there is always
a distance you cannot cover--yards or inches it may be, but always that
fatal hiatus. We seem so undeniably up, far up above them in everything,
and we want to get to the lowest step down, low enough down to lift lost
souls up.
[Illustration: "I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he
wrought a work on the wheels." The vessel the potters are making here is
worth about a halfpenny, but it is perfect of its kind. The moulder
never lifts his hand from it from the moment he puts a lump of shapeless
clay on the wheel till the moment he takes it off finished, so far as
the wheel can finish it. If it is "marred," it is "marred _in the hand_
of the potter," and instantly he makes it again another vessel as it
seems good to him. He never wastes the clay.]
On and on, if they will let us, time after time, by text and hymn and
story, we have to explain what things really mean before they are able
to understand even a fraction of the truth. The fact that this girl had
thought enough to get her ideas into shape was encouraging, and with
such slender cause for hope we still hoped. But when after some weeks'
visiting she began to see that the question was not one of curries and
seeleys but of inward invisible gifts, her interest died, and she was
"out" when we went, or too busy patting her pots to have time to listen
to us.
Humdrum we have called the work, and humdrum it is. There is nothing
romantic about potters except in poetry, nor is there much of romance
about missions except on platforms and in books. Yet "though it's dull
at whiles," there is joy in the doing of it, there is joy in just
obeying. He said "Go, tell," and we have come and are telling, and we
meet Him as we "go and tell."
But, dear friends, do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing
great things, as an everyday matter of course. Our aim is great--it is
_India for Christ_! and before the gods in possession here, we sing
songs unto Him. But what we say to you is this: Do not expect every true
story to dovetail into some other true story and end with some
marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life
end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned.
We do not find, as a rule, when we go to the houses--the literal little
mud houses, I mean, of literal heathendom--that anyone inside has been
praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the
other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines
were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life
is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It
is very prosaic at times.
CHAPTER IV
Correspondences
"It is very pleasant when you are in England, and
you see souls being saved, and you see the
conviction of sin, and you see the power of the
Gospel to bring new life and new joy and purity to
hearts. But it is still more glorious amongst the
heathen to see the same things, to see the Lord
there working His own work of salvation, and to
see the souls convicted and the hearts broken, and
to see there the new life and the new joy coming
out in the faces of those who have found the Lord
Jesus."
_Rev. Barclay F. Buxton, Japan._
BEFORE putting this chapter together, I have looked long at the
photograph which fronts it. The longer one looks the more pitiful it
seems. Perhaps one reads into it all that one knows of her, all one has
done for her, how one has failed--and this makes it sadder than it may
be to other eyes. And yet can it fail to be sad? Hood's lines reversed
describe her--
"All that is left of her
Now is not womanly."
The day we took her photo she was returning from her morning worship at
the shrine. She had poured her libation over the idol, walked round and
round it, prostrated herself before it, gone through the prayers she had
learned off by heart, and now was on her way home.
[Illustration: A Saivite ascetic. Siva represents the severer side of
Hinduism, the Powers of Nature which destroy. But as all disintegrated
things are reintegrated in some other form, the two Powers, Destruction
and Reconstruction, were united in the thought of the old Hindus, and
Siva represents the double Power. The Saivite form of Hinduism is older
than the Vaishnavite, and more widely spread over India. There are said
to be 30,000,000 symbols of the god Siva scattered about the land.
Saivites are instantly recognised by the mark of white ashes on their
foreheads, and sometimes on the breast and arms, and often a necklet of
berries is worn.]
We had gone to her village to take photographs, and had just got the
street scene in the morning light. The crowd followed us, eager to see
more of the doings of the picture-catching box; and she, fearing the
defiling touch of the mixed Castes represented there, had climbed up on
a granite slab by the side of the road, and stood waiting till we
passed.
There we saw her, and there we took her,--for, to our surprise, she did
not object,--and now here she is, to show with all the force of truth
how far from ideal the real may be. We looked at her as I look at her
now, stripped of all God meant her to have when He made her, deep in the
mire of the lowest form of idolatry, a devotee of Siva. She had been to
Benares and bathed in the sacred Ganges, and therefore she is holy
beyond the reach of doubt. She has no room for any sense of the need of
Christ. She pities our ignorance when we talk to her. Is she not a
devotee? Has she not been to Benares?
Often and often we meet her in the high-caste houses of the place, where
she is always an honoured guest because of her wonderful sanctity. She
watches keenly then lest any of the younger members of the household
should incline to listen to us.
One of her relatives is an English-educated lawyer, a bitter though
covert foe, who not long ago stirred up such opposition that we were
warned not to go near the place. Men had been hired "to fall upon us and
beat us." This because a girl, a connection of his, read her Bible
openly, instead of in secret as she had done before. He connected this
action on her part with a visit we had paid to the house, and so induced
certain of the baser sort to do this thing. We went, however, just the
same, as we had work we had promised to do, and saw the old gentleman
sitting on the verandah reading his English newspaper in the most
pacific fashion. He seemed surprised to see us as we passed with a
salaam; we saw nothing of the beaters, and returned with whole bones, to
the relief of the community at large. Only I remember one of our Band
was woefully disappointed: "I thought, perhaps, we were going to be
martyrs," she said.
[Illustration: Street in the Red Lake Village. An ordinary typical
village scene, except that just then there were more people than usual
before the picture-catching box. The only way to keep them from crowding
round it was to show them something else: this explains the group on the
stones at the side.]
And so we realise, as so often in India, the power of both extremes; the
one with all the force of his education, and the other with all the
force of her superstition, each uniting with the other in repelling the
coming of the Saviour both equally need.
As one looks at the photograph, does it not help in the effort to
realise the utter hopelessness, from every human point of view, of
trying to win such a one, for example, to even care to think of Christ?
There is, over and above the natural apathy common to all, an immense
barrier of accumulated merit gained by pilgrimages, austerities, and
religious observances, and the soul is perfectly satisfied, and has no
desire whatever after God. It is just this self-satisfaction which makes
it so hopeless to try to do anything with it.
And yet nothing is hopeless to God; "Set no borders to His strength," a
Japanese missionary said. We say it over and over again to ourselves, in
the face of some great hopelessness, like that photograph before us; and
sometimes, as if to assure us it is so, God lifts some such soul into
light. Just now we are rejoicing in a letter from the eastern side of
the district, telling us of the growth in the new life of one who only a
little while ago was a temple devotee.
One has often longed to see Him work as He worked of old, healing the
sick by the word of His power, raising the dead. But when we see Him
gathering one--and such a one!--from among the heathen to give thanks
unto His holy Name and to triumph in His praise, one feels that indeed
it is a miracle of miracles, and that greater than a miracle wrought on
the body is a miracle wrought on the soul. But nothing I can write can
show you the miracle it was. In that particular case it was like seeing
a soul drawn out of the hand of the Ruler of Darkness. All salvation is
that in reality, but sometimes, as in her case, when the whole
environment of the soul has been strongly for evil in its most dangerous
phase, then it is more evidently so.
Perhaps we should explain. We know that in its widest sense environment
simply means "all that is." We know that "all that is" includes the
existence of certain beings, described as "Powers" in Ephesians vi. 12.
Some of us are more or less unconscious of this part of our environment.
We have no conscious correspondence with it, but it is there. Others,
again, seek and find such correspondence, to their certain and awful
loss.
Such a subject can hardly bear handling in language. Thank God we know
so little about it that we do not know how to speak of it accurately.
Neither, indeed, do we wish to intrude into those things which we have
not seen by any attempt at close definition; but we know there is this
unhallowed correspondence between men and demons, which in old days
drew down, as a lightning conductor, the flash of the wrath of God.
Here in India it exists; we often almost touch it, but not quite. We
would not go where we knew we should see it, even if we might; so,
unless we happen upon it, which is rare, we never see it at all. A year
ago I saw it, and that one look made me realise, as no amount of
explanations ever could, how absolutely out of reach of all human
influence such souls are. _Nothing_ can reach them, nothing but the
might of the Holy Ghost.
So I close with this one look. Will you pray for those to whom in the
moonless night, at the altar by the temple, there is the sudden coming
of that which they have sought--the "possession," the "afflatus," which
for ever after marks them out as those whose correspondences reach
beyond mortal ken. All devotees have not received this awful baptism,
but in this part of India many have.
We were visiting in a high-caste house. The walls were decorated with
mythological devices, and even the old wood-carvings were full of
idolatrous symbols. The women were listening well, asking questions and
arguing, until one, an old lady, came in. Then they were silent. She sat
down and discussed us. We thought we would change the subject, and we
began to sing. She listened, as they always do, interrupting only to
say, "That's true! that's true!" Till suddenly--I cannot describe
what--something seemed to come over her, and she burst into a frenzy,
exclaiming, "Let me sing! let me sing!" And then she sang as I never
heard anyone sing before--the wildest, weirdest wail of a song all about
idolatry, its uselessness and folly, its sorrow and sin.
So far I followed her, for I knew the poem well, but she soon turned off
into regions of language and thought unreached as yet by me. Here she
got madly excited, and, swaying herself to and fro, seemed lashing
herself into fury. Nearer and nearer she drew to us (we were on the
floor beside her); then she stretched out her arm with its clenched
fist, and swung it straight for my eye. Within a hair's-breadth she drew
back, and struck out for Victory's; but God helped her not to flinch.
Then I cannot tell what happened, only her form dilated, and she seemed
as if she would spring upon us, but as if she were somehow held back. We
dare not move for fear of exciting her more. There we sat for I know not
how long, with this awful old woman's clenched fist circling round our
heads, or all but striking into our eyes, while without intermission she
crooned her song in that hollow hum that works upon the listener till
the nerve of the soul is drawn out, as it were, to its very farthest
stretch. It was quite dark by this time; only the yellow flicker of the
wind-blown flame of the lamp made uncertain lights and shadows round the
place where we were sitting, and an eerie influence fell on us all,
almost mesmeric in effect. I did not need the awestruck whispers round
me to tell me what it was. But oh! I felt, as I never felt before, the
reality of the presence of unseen powers, and I knew that the Actual
itself was in the room with me.
At last she fell back exhausted, trembling in every limb. Her old head
hit the wall as she fell, but I knew we must not help her; it would be
pollution to her if we touched her. The people all round were too
frightened to move. So she fell and lay there quivering, her glittering
eyes still fixed on us; and she tried to speak, but could not.
Softly we stole away, and we felt we had been very near where Satan's
seat is.
Think of someone you love--as I did then--of someone whose hair is white
like hers; but the face you think of has peace in it, and God's light
lightens it. Then think of her as we saw her last--the old face torn
with the fury of hell, and for light the darkness thereof.
Oh, friends, do you care enough? Do we care enough out here? God give us
hearts that can care!
CHAPTER V
The Prey of the Terrible
"I believe we are in the midst of a great battle.
We are not ourselves fighting, we are simply
accepting everything that comes; but the Powers of
Light are fighting against the Powers of Darkness,
and they will certainly prevail. The Holy Spirit
is working, but the people do not as yet know it
is the Spirit."
_Hester Needham, Sumatra._
THE devil's favourite device just now is to move interested people to
far-away places. We have had several who seemed very near to the
Kingdom. Then suddenly they have disappeared.
There was Wreath, of the Village of the Temple. She used to listen in
the shadow of the door while we sat on the outside verandah. Then she
got bolder, and openly asked to see Golden, and talk with her. One day,
unexpectedly, Golden was led to the Red Lake Village, and to her
surprise found Wreath there. She had been sent away from the Village of
the Temple, and was now with some other relations, under even stricter
guard. But God led Golden, all unknowingly, to go straight to the very
house where she was. So she heard again.
Next time Golden went she could not see her alone, but somehow Wreath
got her to understand that if she went to a certain tree near the
women's bathing-place, at a certain time next week, she would try to
meet her there. Golden went, and they met. Wreath told her she believed
it all, but she could not then face breaking Caste and destroying her
family's name. They had been good to her, how could she disgrace them?
Still, she eagerly wanted to go on hearing, and we felt that if she did,
the love of God would win. So we were full of hope.
Next time Golden went she could find no trace of her. She has never seen
her since. There is a rumour that she has been carried off over the
mountains, hundreds of miles away.
In another village a bright, keen boy of seventeen listened one day when
we taught the women, and, becoming greatly interested, openly took the
Gospel's part when the village elders attacked it. After some weeks he
gathered courage to come and see the Iyer. He was a very intelligent
boy, well known all over the countryside, because he had studied the
Tamil classics, and also because of his connection with one of the chief
temples of the district.
A fortnight after his visit here, our Band went to his village. They
heard that he was married and gone, where, no one would say. The
relations must have heard of his coming to us (of course he was urged to
tell them), and they rushed him through a marriage, and sent him off
post haste. So now there is another key turned, locking him into
Hinduism.
In the Village of the Wind a young girl became known as an inquirer. Her
Caste passed the word along from village to village wherever its members
were found, and all these relations and connections were speedily
leagued in a compact to keep her from hearing more. When we went to see
her, we found she had been posted off somewhere else. When we went to
the somewhere else (always freely mentioned to us, with invitations to
go), we found she had been there, but had been forwarded elsewhere. For
weeks she was tossed about like this; then we traced her, and found her.
But she was thoroughly cowed, and dared not show the least interest in
us. It is often like that. Just at the point where the soul-poise is so
delicate that the lightest touch affects it, something, someone, pushes
it roughly, and it trembles a moment, then falls--on the wrong side.
The reason for all this alertness of opposition is, that scattered about
the five thousand square miles we call our field, here and there seeds
are beginning to grow. Some of the sowers are in England now, and some
are in heaven--sowers and reapers, English and Tamil, rejoice together!
This is known everywhere, for the news spreads from town to town, and
then out to the villages, and the result is opposition. Sometimes the
little patch of ground which looked so hopeful is trampled, and the
young seedlings killed; sometimes they seem to be rooted up. When we go
to our Master and tell Him, He explains it: "An Enemy hath done this."
But as the measure of the Enemy's activity is in direct proportion to
the measure of God's working, we take it as a sign of encouragement,
however hindering it may be. Satan would not trouble to fight if he saw
nothing worth attacking; he does not seem to mind the spread of a head
knowledge of the Doctrine, or even a cordial appreciation of it. Often
we hear the people say how excellent it is, and how they never worship
idols now, but only the true God; and even a heathen mother will make
her child repeat its texts to you, and a father will tell you how it
tells him Bible stories; and if you are quite new to the work you put it
in the _Magazine_, and at home it sounds like conversion. All this goes
on most peacefully; there is not the slightest stir, till something
happens to show the people that the Doctrine is not just a Creed, but
contains a living Power. And then, and not till then, there is
opposition.
This opposition is sufficiently strong in the case of a boy or young man
(older Caste men and women rarely "change their religion" in this part
of South India), but if a girl is in question, the Caste is touched at
its most sensitive point, and the feeling is simply intense. Men and
demons seem to conspire to hold such a one in the clutch of the
Terrible.
There is a young girl in Cupid's Lake Village whose heart the Lord
opened some weeks ago. She is a gentle, timid girl, and devoted to her
mother. "Can it be right to break my mother's heart?" she used to ask us
pitifully. We urged her to try to win her mother, but the mother was
just furious. The moment she understood that her daughter wanted to
follow Jesus, or "join the Way," as she would express it, she gathered
the girl's books and burnt them, and forbade her ever to mention the
subject; and she went all round the villages trying to stop our work.
At last things came to a crisis. The girl was told to do what she felt
would be sin against God. She refused. They tried force, sheer brute
force. She nerved herself for the leap in the dark, and tried to escape
to us. But in the dark night she lost the way, and had to run back to
her home. Next morning the village priest spread a story to the effect
that his god had appeared to him, told him of her attempt to escape, and
that she would try twice again, "but each time I will stand in the way
and turn her back," he said.
This naturally startled the girl. "Is his god stronger than Jesus?" she
asked in real perplexity. We told her we thought the tale was concocted
to frighten her; the priest had seen her, and made up the rest. But
twice since then, driven by dire danger, that girl has tried to get to
us, and each time she has been turned back. And now she is kept in
rigorous guard, as her determination to be a Christian is well known to
all in the place.
Do you say, "Tell her to stay at home and bear it patiently"? We do tell
her so, when we can see her, but we add, "till God makes a way of
escape"; and if you knew all there is to be known about a Hindu home,
and what may happen in it, you would not tell her otherwise.
But supposing there is nothing more than negative difficulty to be
feared, have you ever tried in thought to change places with such a
girl? Have you ever considered how impossible it is for such a one to
grow? The simple grace of continuance is in danger of withering when all
help of every sort is absolutely cut off, and the soul is, to begin
with, not deeply rooted in God. Plants, even when they have life, need
water and sunshine and air. Babes need milk.
You find it hard enough to grow, if one may judge from the constant
wails about "leanness," and yet you are surrounded by every possible
help to growth. You have a whole Bible, not just a scrap of it; and you
can read it all, and understand at least most of it. You have endless
good books, hymn-books, and spiritual papers; you have sermons every
week, numerous meetings for edification, and perhaps an annual
Convention. Now strip yourself of all this. Shut your Bible, and forget
as completely as if you had never known it all you ever read or heard,
except the main facts of the Gospel. Forget all those strengthening
verses, all those beautiful hymns, all those inspiring addresses.
Likewise, of course, entirely forget all the loving dealings of God with
yourself and with others--a Hindu has no such memories to help her. Then
go and live in a devil's den and develop saintliness. The truth is, even
you would find it difficult; but this Hindu girl's case is worse than
that, a million times worse. Think of the life, and then, if you can,
tell her she must be quite satisfied with it, that it is the will of
God. You could not say that it is His will! It is the will of the
Terrible, who holds on to his prey, and would rather rend it limb from
limb than ever let it go.
We are often asked to tell converts' stories; and certainly they would
thrill, for the way of escape God opens sometimes is, like Peter's from
prison, miraculous; and truth is stranger than fiction, and far more
interesting. But we who work in the Terrible's lair, and know how he
fights to get back his prey, even after it has escaped from him, are
afraid to tell these stories too much, and feel that silence is safest,
and, strange as it may seem to some, for the present most glorifies God.
For a certain connection has been observed between publicity and peril.
And we have learned by experience to fear any attempt to photograph
spiritual fruit. The old Greek artist turned away the face that held too
much for him to paint; and that turned-away face had power in it, they
say, to touch men's hearts. We turn these faces away from you; may the
very fact that we do it teach some at home to realise how much more lies
in each of them than we can say, how great a need there is to pray that
each may be kept safe. The names of one and another occur, because they
came in the letters so often that I could not cross them all out without
altering the character of the whole; they are part of one's very life.
But as even a passing mention may mean danger, unless a counteracting
influence of real prayer protects them, we ask you to pray that the
tender protection of God may be folded round each one of them; and then
when we meet where no sin can creep into the telling, and no harm can
follow it, they will tell you their stories themselves, and God will
give you your share in the joy, comrades by prayer at home! But let us
press it on you now--pray, oh, pray for the converts! Pray that they may
grow in Christ. Pray that He may see of the travail of His soul, and be
satisfied with each of them. And pray that we may enter into that
travail of soul with Him. Nothing less is any good. Spiritual children
mean travail of soul--spiritual agony. I wonder who among those who read
this will realise what I mean. Some will, I think; so I write it. It is
a solemn thing to find oneself drawn out in prayer which knows no relief
till the soul it is burdened with is born. It is no less solemn
afterwards, until Christ is formed in them. Converts are a responsible
joy.
And now we have told you a little of what is going on. There are days
when nothing seems to be done, and then again there are days when the
Terrible seems almost visible, as he gathers up his strength, and tears
and mauls his prey. And so it is true we have to fight a separate fight
for each soul. But another view of the case is a strength to us many a
time. "We are not ourselves fighting, but the Powers of Light are
fighting against the Powers of Darkness," and the coming of the victory
is only a question of time. "Shall the prey be taken from the Mighty or
the captives of the Terrible be delivered? But thus saith the Lord,
=Even the captives of the Mighty shall be taken away and the prey of the
Terrible shall be delivered=."
CHAPTER VI
Missed Ends
"If you could only know what one feels on finding
oneself . . . where the least ray of the Gospel has
not penetrated! If those friends who blame . . .
could see from afar what we see, and feel what we
feel, they would be the first to wonder that those
redeemed by Christ should be so backward in
devotion and know so little of the spirit of
self-sacrifice. They would be ashamed of the
hesitations that hinder us. . . . _We must remember
that it was not by interceding for the world in
glory that Jesus saved it. He gave Himself. Our
prayers for the evangelisation of the world are
but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our
superfluity, and draw back before the sacrifice of
ourselves._"
_M. François Coillard, Africa._
"Someone must go, and if no one else will go, he
who hears the call must go; I hear the call, for
indeed God has brought it before me on every side,
and go I must."
_Rev. Henry Watson Fox, India._
THE tom-toms thumped straight on all night, and the darkness shuddered
round me like a living, feeling thing. I could not go to sleep, so I lay
awake and looked; and I saw, as it seemed, this:
That I stood on a grassy sward, and at my feet a precipice broke sheer
down into infinite space. I looked, but saw no bottom; only cloud
shapes, black and furiously coiled, and great shadow-shrouded hollows,
and unfathomable depths. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth.
Then I saw forms of people moving single file along the grass. They
were making for the edge. There was a woman with a baby in her arms and
another little child holding on to her dress. She was on the very verge.
Then I saw that she was blind. She lifted her foot for the next step
. . . it trod air. She was over, and the children over with her. Oh,
the cry as they went over!
Then I saw more streams of people flowing from all quarters. All were
blind, stone blind; all made straight for the precipice edge. There were
shrieks as they suddenly knew themselves falling, and a tossing up of
helpless arms, catching, clutching at empty air. But some went over
quietly, and fell without a sound.
Then I wondered, with a wonder that was simply agony, why no one stopped
them at the edge. I could not. I was glued to the ground, and I could
not call; though I strained and tried, only a whisper would come.
Then I saw that along the edge there were sentries set at intervals. But
the intervals were far too great; there were wide, unguarded gaps
between. And over these gaps the people fell in their blindness, quite
unwarned; and the green grass seemed blood-red to me, and the gulf
yawned like the mouth of hell.
Then I saw, like a little picture of peace, a group of people under some
trees, with their backs turned towards the gulf. They were making daisy
chains. Sometimes when a piercing shriek cut the quiet air and reached
them it disturbed them, and they thought it a rather vulgar noise. And
if one of their number started up and wanted to go and do something to
help, then all the others would pull that one down. "Why should you get
so excited about it? You must wait for a definite call to go! You
haven't finished your daisy chains yet. It would be really selfish,"
they said, "to leave us to finish the work alone."
There was another group. It was made up of people whose great desire was
to get more sentries out; but they found that very few wanted to go, and
sometimes there were no sentries set for miles and miles of the edge.
Once a girl stood alone in her place, waving the people back; but her
mother and other relations called, and reminded her that her furlough
was due; she must not break the rules. And being tired and needing a
change, she had to go and rest for awhile; but no one was sent to guard
her gap, and over and over the people fell, like a waterfall of souls.
Once a child caught at a tuft of grass that grew at the very brink of
the gulf; it clung convulsively, and it called--but nobody seemed to
hear. Then the roots of the grass gave way, and with a cry the child
went over, its two little hands still holding tight to the torn-off
bunch of grass. And the girl who longed to be back in her gap thought
she heard the little one cry, and she sprang up and wanted to go; at
which they reproved her, reminding her that no one is necessary
anywhere; the gap would be well taken care of, they knew. And then they
sang a hymn.
Then through the hymn came another sound like the pain of a million
broken hearts wrung out in one full drop, one sob. And a horror of great
darkness was upon me, for I knew what it was--the Cry of the Blood.
Then thundered a Voice, the Voice of the Lord: "=And He said, What hast
thou done? The voice of thy brothers' blood crieth unto Me from the
ground.="
. . . . . . .
The tom-toms still beat heavily, the darkness still shuddered and
shivered about me; I heard the yells of the devil-dancers and the weird
wild shriek of the devil-possessed just outside the gate.
What does it matter, after all? It has gone on for years; it will go on
for years. Why make such a fuss about it?
God forgive us! God arouse us! Shame us out of our callousness! Shame us
out of our sin!
* * * * *
One afternoon, a few weeks after that night at the precipice edge,
Victory and I were visiting in the Red Lake Village, when we heard the
death-beat of the tom-tom and the shriek of the conch shell, and we knew
that another had gone beyond our reach. One can never get accustomed to
this. We stopped for a moment and listened.
The women we were teaching broke in with eager explanations. "Oh, he was
such a great one! He had received the Initiation. There will be a grand
ceremonial, grander than ever you have!" Then they told us how this
great one had been initiated into the Hindu mysteries by his family
priest, and that the mystical benefits accruing from this initiation
were to be caused to revert to the priest. This Reverting of the
Initiation was to be one of the ceremonies. We watched the procession
pass down the street. They were going for water from a sacred stream
for the bathing of purification. When they return, said the women, the
ceremonies will begin.
A little later we passed the house, and stood looking in through the
doorway. There was the usual large square courtyard, with the verandah
running round three sides. The verandah was full of women. We longed to
go in, but did not think they would let us. The courtyard was rather
confused; men were rushing about, putting up arches and decorating them;
servants were sweeping, and cooking, and shouting to one another; the
women were talking and laughing. And all the time from within the house
came the sound of the dirge for the dead, and the laugh and the wail
struck against each other, and jarred. No one noticed us for awhile, but
at last a woman saw us, and beckoned us to come. "We are all defiled
to-day; you may sit with us," they said; and yielding to the instincts
of their kindly Tamil nature, they crushed closer together to make room
for us beside them. How I did enjoy being squeezed up there among them.
But to appreciate that in the least you would have to work in a
caste-bound part of old India; you can have no idea, until you try, how
hard it is to refrain from touching those whom you love.
The house door opened upon the verandah, and we could hear the moan of
the dirge. "There is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet." There was
no quietness, only the ceaseless moan, that kept rising into a wail;
there were tears in the sound of the wail, and I felt like a sort of
living harp with all its strings drawn tight.
But the women outside cared nothing at all. It was strange to see how
callous they were. It was not their _own_ who had died, so they chatted
and laughed and watched the proceedings--the tying of the garlands round
the arches, the arrangement of offerings for the Brahmans. It was all
full of interest to them. We tried to turn their thoughts to the Powers
of the World to Come. But no. They did not care.
Presently there was a stir. "The men are coming!" they said. "Run! there
is a shady corner under those palms on the far verandah! Run and hide!
They are here!" And, even as they spoke, in streamed the men, each with
his brass water-vessel poised on his head, and they saw us standing
there. We thought they would turn us out, and were quite prepared to go
at a sign from the head of the clan. But he was a friend of ours, and he
smiled as we salaamed, and pointed to a quiet corner, out of the way,
where we could see it all without being too much seen.
To understand this, which to me was a surprise, one must remember that
by nature the Indian is most courteous, and if it were not for Caste
rules we should be allowed to come much closer to them than is possible
now. To-day they were all ceremonially unclean, so our presence was not
considered polluting. Also the Indian loves a function; sad or glad, it
matters little. Life is a bubble on the water; enjoy it while you may.
And they sympathised with what they thought was our desire to see the
show. This was human; they could understand it. So they let us stay; and
we stayed, hoping for a chance later on.
Then the ceremonies began. They carried the dead man out and laid him in
the courtyard under the arch of palms. He was old and worn and thin. One
could see the fine old face, with the marks of the Hindu trident painted
down the forehead. He had been a most earnest Hindu; all the rites were
duly performed, and morning and night for many years he had marked those
marks on his brow. Had he ever once listened to the Truth? I do not
know. He must have heard about it, but he had not received it. He died,
they told us, "not knowing what lay on the other side."
The water-bearers laid their vessels on the ground. Each had a leaf
across its mouth. The priest was crowned with a chaplet of flowers. Then
came the bathing. They threw up a shelter, and carried him there. It was
reverently done. There was a touch of refinement in the thought which
banished the women and children before the bathing began. Tamils bathe
in the open air, and always clothed, but always apart. And as the
women's verandah overlooked the screened enclosure, they were all
ordered off. They went and waited, silent now, awed by the presence of
the men. While the bathing was going on the priests chanted and muttered
incantations, and now and again a bell was rung, and incense waved, and
tapers lighted. Now they were causing that mysterious Something which
still hovered round the lifeless form to leave it and return to them,
and when the bathing was over they signified that all was done; the
Influence had departed, descended; the funeral ceremonies might proceed.
And all this time, without a break, the dirge was being sung by the
mourners in the house. It was a sort of undernote to all the sounds
outside. Then the old man, robed in white and crowned and wreathed with
flowers, was carried round to the other side; and oh, the pitifulness of
it all! St. Paul must have been thinking of some such scene when he
wrote to the converts, "That ye sorrow not even as others which have no
hope." And I thought how strangely callous we were, how superficial our
sympathy. The Lord's command does not stir us, the sorrow of those we
neglect does not touch us; we think so much more of ourselves and our
own selfish pleasure than we think of the purpose for which we were
saved--and at such a tremendous cost! Oh for a baptism of reality and
obedience to sweep over us! Oh to be true to the hymns we sing and the
vows we make! _God make us true._
Forgive all this. It was burnt into me afresh that day as I sat there
watching the things they did and listening to what they said. We had
come too late for that old dead man, too late for most of the living
ones too. Can you wonder if at such solemn times one yields oneself
afresh and for ever to obey?
Rice was prepared for the dead man's use, and balls of rice were ready
to be offered to his spirit after his cremation; for the Hindus think
that an intermediate body must be formed and nourished, which on the
thirteenth day after death is conducted to either heaven or hell,
according to the deeds done on earth. The ceremonies were all
characterised by a belief in some future state. The spirit was
somewhere--in the dark--so they tried to light the way for him. This
reminds me of one ceremony especially suggestive. All the little
grandchildren were brought, and lighted tapers given to them; then they
processioned round the bier, round and round many times, holding the
tapers steadily, and looking serious and impressed.
Then the widow came out with a woman on either side supporting her. And
she walked round and round her husband, with the tears rolling down her
face, and she wailed the widow's wail, with her very heart in it. Why
had he gone away and left her desolate? His was the spirit of fragrance
like the scented sandal-wood; his was the arm of strength like the lock
that barred the door. Gone was the scent of the sandal, broken and open
the door; why had the bird flown and left but the empty cage? Gone! was
he gone? Was he really gone? Was it certain he was dead? He who had
tossed and turned on the softest bed they could make, must he lie on the
bed of his funeral pyre? Must he burn upon logs of wood? Say, was there
no way to reach him, no way to help him now? "I have searched for thee,
but I find thee not." And so the dirge moaned on.
I could not hear all this then; Victory told it to me, and much more,
afterwards. "Last time I heard it," she said, "I was _inside_, wailing
too."
As the poor widow went round and round she stopped each time she got to
the feet, and embraced them fervently. Sometimes she broke through all
restraint, and clasped him in her arms.
[Illustration: A photo rarely possible. The dead woman lies in her bier;
the white on her eyes and brow is the mark of Siva's ashes. Some of the
mourners are so marked, as they are all Saivites. The fire is lighted
from the pot of fire to the right. Just before it is lighted, the chief
mourner takes a vessel of water, pierces a hole in it, walks round the
dead, letting the water trickle out, pierces another hole and repeats
the walk. After the third piercing and walk, he throws the pot backwards
over his shoulder, and as it smashes the water all splashes out. This is
to refresh the spirit if it should be thirsty while its body is being
burned.]
After many ceremonies had been performed, the men all went away, and the
women were left to bid farewell to the form soon to be carried out. Then
the men came back and bore him across the courtyard, and paused under
the arch outside, while the women all rushed out, tearing their hair and
beating themselves and wailing wildly. As they were lifting the bier to
depart the cry was, "Stop! stop! Will he not speak?" And this, chanted
again and again, would have made the coldest care. Then when all was
over, and the long procession, headed by the tom-toms and conch shells,
had passed out of sight, the women pressed in again, and each first let
down her hair, and seized her nearest neighbour, and they all flung
themselves on the ground and knocked their heads against it, and then,
rising to a sitting posture, they held on to one another, swaying
backwards and forwards and chanting in time to the swaying, in chorus
and antiphone. All this, even to the hair-tearing and head-knocking, was
copied by the children who were present with terrible fidelity.
We sat down among them. They took our hands and rocked us in the
orthodox way. But we did not wail and we did not undo our hair. We tried
to speak comforting words to those who were really in grief, but we
found it was not the time. A fortnight later we went again, and found
the house door open because we had been with them that day.
But we could not help them then, so we rose and were going away, when,
held by the power of that dirge of theirs, I turned to look again. The
last rays of the afternoon sun were lighting up the courtyard, and
shining on the masses of black hair and grey. As I looked they got up
one by one, and put their disordered dress to rights, and shook out the
dust from their glossy hair, and did it up again. And one by one,
without farewell of any sort, they went away. An hour later we met
groups of them coming home from bathing. They would not touch us then.
Afterwards the chief mourners came out and bathed, and went all round
the village wailing. And the last thing I saw, as the sun set over the
hills and the place grew chill and dark, was the old widow, worn out
now, returning home in her wet things, wailing still.
I write this under a sense of the solemnity of being "a servant . . .
separated unto the Gospel." I would not write one word lightly. But oh!
may I ask you to face it? Are we honest towards God? If we were, would
these people be left to die as they are being left to die?
We feel for them. _But feelings will not save souls; it cost God Calvary
to win us._
_It will cost us as much as we may know of the fellowship of His
sufferings, if those for whom He died that day are ever to be won._
. . . . . . .
I am writing in the midst of the sights and the sounds of life. There is
life in the group of women at the well; life in the voices, in the
splash of the water, in the cry of a child, in the call of the mother;
life in the flight of the parrots as they flock from tree to tree; life
in their chatter as they quarrel and scream; life, everywhere life. How
can I think out of all this, back into death again?
But I want to, for you may live for many a year in India without being
allowed to see once what we have seen twice within two months, and it
cannot be for nothing that we saw it. We must be meant to show it to
you.
[Illustration: This needs to be looked into. Gradually the middle
clears. The women are holding each other's hands preparatory to swaying
backwards and forwards as they chant the dirge for the dead. The lamp
(you see its top near the vessel on the right) was lighted as soon as
the old woman died, and placed at her head on the floor. So blindly they
show their sense of the darkness of death. The brass water vessel, with
the leaves laid across its mouth, was filled with the water of
purification. This was poured in a circle on the floor round the body.
The bits of grass are the sacred Kusa grass used in many religious
ceremonies.]
The Picture-catching Missie and I were in the Village of the Tamarind
Tree, when for the second time I saw it. They are very friendly there,
and just as in the Red Lake Village they let us look behind the curtain,
so here again they pushed it back, and let us in, and went on with their
business, not minding us. We crouched up close together on the only
scrap of empty space, and watched.
Everything was less intense; the dead was only a poor and very old widow
who had lived her life out, and was not wanted. There were no near
kindred, only relations by marriage; it was evident everyone went
through the form without emotion of any sort.
The woman lay on a rough bier on the floor, and round her crowded a
dozen old women. At her head there was a brass vessel of water, a
lamp-stand, some uncooked rice, and some broken cocoanuts. Just before
we came in they had filled a little brass vessel from the larger one.
Now one of the old hags walked round the dead three times, pouring the
water out as she walked. Then another fed her--fed that poor dead mouth,
stuffed it in so roughly it made us sick and faint. There were other
things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last
was the rubbing on of ashes--she had been a worshipper of Siva--also
they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And
all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death.
There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full
of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Védic times, was to them simply
a custom, a set of customs, to be followed and got through as quickly as
might be by heedless hands. And yet they faithfully carried out every
detail they knew, and they finished their heartless work and called to
the men to come. The men were waiting outside. They came in and carried
her out.
It seemed impossible to think of a photograph then; it was most unlikely
they would let us take one, and we hardly felt in the spirit of
picture-catching. Yet we thought of you, and of how you certainly could
never see it unless we could show it to you; and we wanted to show it to
you, so we asked them if we might. Of course if there had been real
grief, as in the other I had seen, we could not have asked it, it would
have been intrusion; but here there was none--_that_ was the pathos of
it. And they were very friendly, so they put their burden on the ground,
and waited.
There it is. To the right the barber stands with his fire-bowl hanging
from a chain; this is to light the funeral pyre. The smoke interfered
with the photo, but then it is true to life. To the left stands the man
with the shell ready to blow. At the back, with the sacred ashes rubbed
on forehead and breast and arms, stand the two nearest relatives, who
to-morrow will gather the ashes and throw them into the stream.
The picture was caught. The man with the shell blew it, the man with the
fire came in front, the bearers lifted the bier; they went away with
their dead.
[Illustration: These are three of the mourners, but they were only
mourning ceremonially; and so, released for the moment from their duty,
they quite enjoyed themselves.]
Then the old women, who had been pressing through the open door, rushed
back in the usual way and began the usual rock and dirge. These
Comparison Songs are always full of soul. They have sprung into being in
times of deepest feeling, taken shape when hearts were as finely wrought
moulds which left their impress upon them. And to hear them chanted
without any soul is somehow a pitiful thing, a sort of profanation, like
the singing of sacred words for pay.
The photograph was not easy to take, the space was so confined, the
movement so continuous, the commotion so confusing. _How_ it was taken I
know not; the women massed on the floor were not still for more than a
moment. In that moment it was done. Then we persuaded three of them to
risk the peril of being caught alone. They would not move farther than
the wall of the house, and as it was in a narrow street, again there
were difficulties. But the crowning perplexity was at the water-side. It
was windy, and our calls were blown away, so they did not hear what we
wanted them to do, and they splashed too vigorously. Their only idea
just then was to get themselves and their garments ceremonially clean,
defiled as they were by contact with the dead.
But let those six whom you can partly see stand for the thousands upon
thousands whom you cannot see at all. Those thousands are standing in
water to-day from the North to the uttermost South, as the last act in
the drama which they have played in the presence of the dead.
. . . . . . .
The women have gone from the well. The parrots have flown to other
trees. The Tamils say the body is the sheath of the soul. I think of
that empty sheath I saw, and wonder where the soul has flown. It has
gone--but where? Has it gone home, like the women from the well? Has it
flown far, like the birds among the trees? It has gone, it has gone,
that is all we know. _It has gone._
Then I read these words from Conybeare and Howson's translation: "If the
tent which is my earthly house be destroyed I have a mansion built by
God . . . eternal in the heavens. And herein I groan with earnest
longings, desiring to cover my earthly raiment with the robes of my
heavenly mansion. . . . _And He who has prepared me for this very end is
God._"
The dead man missed his End. That old dead woman missed it too. And the
millions around us still alive are missing their End to-day. "This very
End"--think of it--Mortality swallowed up in Life--Death only an
absence, Life for ever a presence--Present with the Lord who has
prepared us "for this very End."
Can we enjoy it all by ourselves? Will there be no sense of
incompleteness if the many are outside, missing it all because they
missed their End? Will the glory make us glad if they are somewhere far
away from it and God? Will not heaven be almost an empty place to one
who has never tried to fill it? Yet there is room, oh so much room, for
those we are meant to bring in with us!
And there is room, oh so much room, along the edge of the precipice.
There are gaps left all unguarded. Can it be that you are meant to guard
one of those gaps? If so, it will always remain as it is, a
falling-point for those rivers of souls, unless you come.
Are these things truth or are they imagination? If they are
imagination--then let the paper on which they are written be burnt,
burnt till it curls up and the words fall into dust. But if they are
true--then what are we going to do? Not what are we going to say or
sing, or even feel or pray--_but what are we going to do?_
[Illustration: The ceremonial bathing. They are all old women, but the
very oldest old woman in India bathes most vigorously. After this
bathing is over, they are purified from the defilement contracted by
going to the house of the dead.]
CHAPTER VII
"The Dust of the Actual"
"This may be counted as our richest gain, to have
learned afresh one's utter impotency so completely
that the past axiom of service, '_I can no more
convert a soul than create a star_,' comes to be
an awful revelation, so that God alone may be
exalted in that day."
_Rev. Walter Searle, Africa._
WE have just come back from a Pariah village. Now see it all with me.
Such a curious little collection of huts, thrown down anywhere; such
half-frightened, half-friendly faces; such a scurrying in of some and
out of others; and we wonder which house we had better make for. We stop
before one a shade cleaner than most, and larger and more open.
"May we come in?" Chorus, "Come in! oh, come in!" and in we go. It is a
tiny, narrow slip of a room. At one end there is a fire burning on the
ground; the smoke finds its way out through the roof, and a pot of rice
set on three stones is bubbling cheerfully. No fear of defilement here.
They would not like us to touch their rice or to see them eating it, but
they do not mind our being in the room where it is being cooked.
At the other end of the narrow slip there is a goat-pen, not very clean;
and down one side there is a raised mud place where the family
apparently sleep. This side and the two ends are roofed by palmyra
palm. It is dry and crackles at a touch, and you touch it every time you
stand up, so bits of it are constantly falling and helping to litter the
open space below.
[Illustration: An ancient Pariah, but the baby in her arms is a son of
the Caste of Palmyra Climbers. Both faces--the old crone's and the baby
boy's--are very typical. The baby is a "Christian," I should explain,
and his parents are true Christians, otherwise the Pariah woman would
not have been allowed to touch him.]
Five babies at different stages of refractoriness are sprawling about on
this strip of floor; they make noises all the time. Half a dozen
imbecile-looking old women crowd in through the low door, and stare and
exchange observations. Three young men with nothing particular to do
lounge at the far end of the platform near the goats. A bright girl,
with more jewellery on than is usual among Pariahs, is tending the fire
at the end near the door; she throws a stick or two on as we enter, and
hurries forward to get a mat. We sit down on the mat, and she sits
beside us; and the usual questions are asked and answered by way of
introduction. There is a not very clean old woman diligently devouring
betel; another with an enormous mouth, which she always holds wide open;
another with a very loud voice and a shock of unspeakable hair. But they
listen fairly well till a goat creates a diversion by making a remark,
and a baby--a jolly little scrap in its nice brown skin and a
bangle--yells, and everyone's attention concentrates upon it.
The goat subsides, the baby is now in its mother's arms; so we go on
where we left off, and I watch the bright young girl, and notice that
she listens as one who understands. She looks rather superior; her
rose-coloured seeley is clean, and two large gold jewels are in each
ear; she has a little gold necklet round her throat, and silver bangles
and toe rings. All the others are hopelessly grubby and very
unenlightened, but they listen just as most people listen in church,
with a sort of patient expression. It is the proper thing to do.
I am talking to them now, and till I am half-way through nobody says
anything, when suddenly the girl remarks, "We have ten fingers, not just
one!" which is so astonishing that I stop and wonder what she can be
thinking of. I was talking about the one sheep lost out of one hundred.
What has that got to do with one finger and ten? She goes on to explain,
"I have heard all this before. I have a sister who is a Christian, and
once I stayed with her, and I heard all about your religion, and I felt
in my heart it was good. But then I was married" ("tied," she said),
"and of course I forgot about it; but now I remember, and I say if ten
of our people will join and go over to your Way, that will be well, but
what would be the use of one going? What is the use of one finger moving
by itself? It takes ten to do the day's work."
"If ten of you had cholera, and I brought you cholera medicine, would
you say, 'I won't take it unless nine others take it too'?" I replied.
She laughs and the others laugh, but a little uneasily. They hardly like
this reference to the dreaded cholera; death of the body is so much more
tremendous in prospect than death of the soul. "You would take it, and
then the others, seeing it do you good, would perhaps take it too"; and
we try to press home the point of the illustration. But a point pricks,
and pricking is uncomfortable.
The three men begin to shuffle their feet and talk about other things;
the old mother-in-law proposes betel all round, and hands us some
grimy-looking leaves with a pressing invitation to partake. The various
onlookers make remarks, and the girl devotes herself to her baby. But
she is thinking; one can see old memories are stirred. At last with a
sigh she gets up, looks round the little indifferent group, goes over to
the fireplace, and blows up the fire. This means we had better say
salaam; so we say it and they say it, adding the usual "Go and come."
It will be easier to help these people out of their low levels than it
will be to help their masters of the higher walks of life. But to do
anything genuine or radical among either set of people is never really
easy.
"=It takes the Ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off the Dust of the
Actual.="
It takes more. It takes =God=. It takes =God= to do anything anywhere.
Yesterday we were visiting in one of the Caste villages, and one old
lady, who really seems to care for us, said she would greatly like to
take my hand in hers; "but," she explained, "this morning one of the
children of the place leaned over the edge of the tank to drink, and he
fell in and was drowned; so I have been to condole with his people, and
I have now returned from bathing, and do not feel equal to bathing
again." If she touched me she would have to bathe to get rid of the
defilement. Of course I assured her I quite understood, but as she sat
there within two inches of me, yet so carefully preserving inviolate
those two inches of clear space, I felt what a small thing this
caste-created distance was, the merest "Dust of the Actual" on the
surface of the system of her life; and yet, "to blow a hair's-breadth
of it off, nothing less is needed than the breath of the power of God."
"Come, O Breath, and breathe!" we cry. Nothing else will do.
Something in our talk led to a question about the character of Jesus,
and, as we tried to describe a little of the loveliness of our dear Lord
to her, her dark eyes kindled. "How beautiful it is!" she said; "how
beautiful He must be!" She seemed "almost persuaded," but we knew it was
only almost, not quite; for she does not yet know her need of a Saviour,
she has no sense of sin. Sometimes, it is true, that comes later; but we
find that if the soul is to resist the tremendous opposing forces which
will instantly be brought to bear upon it if it turns in the least
towards Christ, there must be a _conviction_ wrought within it; nothing
so superficial as a _feeling_, be it ever so appreciative or hopeful or
loving, will stand that strain.
So, though the eyes of this dear woman fill with tears as she hears of
the price of pain He paid, and though she gladly listens as we read and
talk with her and pray, yet we know the work has not gone deep, and we
make our "petitions deep" for her, and go on.
In India men must work among men, and women among women, but sometimes,
in new places, as I have told before, we have to stop and talk with the
men before they will let us pass. For example, one afternoon I was
waylaid on my way to the women by the head of the household I was
visiting, a fine old man of the usual type, courteous but opposed. He
asked to look at my books. I had a Bible, a lyric book, and a book of
stanzas bearing upon the Truth, copied from the old Tamil classics. He
pounced upon this. Then he began to chant the stanzas in their
inimitable way, and at the sound several other old men drew round the
verandah, till soon a dozen or more were listening with that
appreciative expression they seem to reserve for their own beloved
poetry.
After the reader had chanted through a dozen or more stanzas, he stopped
abruptly and asked me if I really cared for it. Of course I said I did
immensely, and only wished I knew more, for the Tamil classics are a
study in themselves, and these beautiful ancient verses I had copied out
were only gleanings from two large volumes, full of the wisdom of the
East.
They were all thoroughly friendly now, and we got into conversation. One
of the group held that there are three co-eternal substances--God, the
Soul, and Sin. Sin is eternally bound up in the soul, as verdigris is
inherent in copper. It can be removed eventually by intense meditation
upon God, and by the performance of arduous works of merit. But these
exercises they all admitted were incompatible with the ordinary life of
most people, and generally impracticable. And so the fact is, the
verdigris of sin remains.
I remember the delight with which I discovered that Isaiah i. 25 uses
this very illustration; for the word translated "dross" in English is
the colloquial word for verdigris in Tamil; so the verse reads, "I will
turn My hand to thee, and thoroughly purify thee, _so as to remove thy
verdigris_."
Most of the others held a diametrically opposite view. So far from Soul
and Sin being co-eternal with God they are not really existent at all.
Both are illusory. There is only one existent entity. It is the Divine
Spirit, and it has neither personality nor any personal qualities. All
apparent separate existences are delusive. Meditation, of the same
absorbing type held necessary by the other, is the only way to reach the
stage of enlightenment which leads to reabsorption into the Divine
essence, in which we finally merge, and lose what appeared to be our
separate identity. We are lost in God, as a drop is lost in the ocean.
Some of the men advocated a phase of truth which reminds one of
Calvinism gone mad, and others exactly opposite are extravagantly
Arminian. The Calvinists illustrate their belief by a single
illuminating word, _Cat-hold_, and the Arminians by another,
_Monkey-hold_. Could you find better illustrations? The cat takes up the
kitten and carries it in its mouth; the kitten is passive, the cat does
everything. But the little monkey holds on to its mother, and clings
with might and main. Those who have watched the "cat-hold" in the house,
and the "monkey-hold" out in the jungle, can appreciate the accuracy of
these two illustrations.
But running through every form of Hinduism, however contradictory each
to the other may be, there is the underlying thought of pure and simple
Pantheism. And this explains many of the aforesaid contradictions, and
many of the incongruities which are constantly cropping up and
bewildering one who is trying to understand the Hindu trend of thought.
So, though those men all affirmed that there is only one God, they
admitted that they each worshipped several. They saw nothing
inconsistent in this. Just as the air is in everything, so God is in
everything, therefore in the various symbols. And as our King has divers
representative Viceroys and Governors to rule over his dominions in his
name, so the Supreme has these sub-deities, less in power and only
existing by force of Himself, and He, being all-pervasive, can be
worshipped under their forms.
This argument they all unitedly pressed upon me that afternoon, and
though capital answers probably present themselves to your mind, you
might not find they satisfied the Hindu who argues along lines of logic
peculiar to the East, and subtle enough to mystify the practical Western
brain; and then--for we are conceited as well as practical--we are apt
to pity the poor Hindu for being so unlike ourselves; and if we are
wholly unsympathetic, we growl that there is nothing in the argument,
whereas there is a good deal in it, only we do not see it, because we
have never thought out the difficulty in question. Quite opposite,
sometimes we have to meet a type of mind like that of MacDonald's
student of Shakespeare, who "missed a plain point from his eyes being so
sharp that they looked through it without seeing it, having focussed
themselves beyond it." Assuredly there is much to learn before one can
hope to understand the winding of the thread of thought which must be
traced if one would follow the working of the Hindu mind. Let no one
with a facility for untying mental knots think that his gift would be
wasted in India!
The word that struck those men that afternoon was 1 John v. 11 and 12:
"God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that
hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not
life." I was longing to get to the women, but when they began to read
those verses and ask about the meaning, I could not go without trying to
tell them. Oh, how one needed at that moment Christ to become to us
Wisdom, for it is just here one may so easily make mistakes. Put the
truth of God's relation to the soul subjectively--"He that hath the Son
hath life"--before thoughtful Hindus such as these men were, and they
will be perfectly enchanted; for the Incarnation presents no difficulty
to them, as it would to a Mohammedan; and perhaps, to your sudden
surprise and joy, they will say, that is exactly what they are prepared
to believe. "Christ in me"--this is comprehensible. "The indwelling of
the Spirit of God"--this is analogous to their own phrase: "The
indwelling of the Deity in the lotus of the heart." But probably by
trading on words and expressions which are already part of the Hindu
terminology, and which suggest to them materialistic ideas, we may
seriously mislead and be misled. We need to understand not only what the
Hindu says, but also what his words mean to himself, a very different
thing.
That talk ended in a promise from the men that they would arrange a
meeting of Hindus for the Iyer, if he would come and take it, which of
course he did. I should like to finish up by saying, "and several were
converted," but as yet that would not be true. These deep-rooted ancient
and strong philosophies are formidable enough, when rightly understood,
to make us feel how little we can do to overturn them; but they are
just as "Dust" in comparison with the force of the "Actual" entrenched
behind them. Only superficial Dust; and yet, as in every other case,
nothing but the Breath of God can blow this Dust away.
[Illustration: Another widow. She was never a wife; and, moved by some
sort of pity, they let her keep one jewel in each ear. She is a
Vellalar; her people are wealthy landowners. She was ashamed of having
yielded to the weakness of letting us take her photo; and when we went
to show it to her, she would not look at it. She has no desire whatever
to hear; and she and the young girl on the step at her feet are resolute
in opposing the teaching.]
We left the old men to their books and endless disquisitions, and went
on to the women's quarter. There we saw a young child-widow, very fair
and sweet and gentle, but quieter than a child should be; for she is a
widow accursed. Her mind is keen--she wants to learn; but why should a
widow learn, they say, why should her mind break bounds? She lives in a
tiny mud-built house, in a tiny mud-walled yard; she may not go out
beyond those walls, then why should she _think_ beyond? But she is
better off than most, for she lives with her mother, who loves her, and
her father makes a pet of her, and so she is sheltered more or less from
the cruel scourge of the tongue.
There is another in the next courtyard; she is not sheltered so. She
lives with her mother-in-law, and the world has lashed her heart for
years; it is simply callous now. There she sits with her chin in her
hand, just hard. Years ago they married her, an innocent, playful little
child, to a man who died when she was nine years old. Then they tore her
jewels from her, all but two little ear-rings, which they left in pity
to her; and this poor little scrap of jewellery was her one little bit
of joy. She could not understand it at first, and when her pretty
coloured seeleys were taken away, and she had to wear the coarse white
cloth she hated so, she cried with impotent childish wrath; and then she
was punished, and called bitter names,--the very word _widow_ means
bitterness,--and gradually she understood that there was something
the matter with her. She was not like other little girls. She had
brought ill-fortune to the home. She was accursed.
It is true that some are more gently dealt with, and many belong to
Castes where the yoke of Custom lies lighter; for these the point of the
curse is blunted, there is only a dull sense of wrong. But in all the
upper Castes the pressure is heavy, and there are those who feel
intensely, feel to the centre of their soul, the sting of the shame of
the curse.
"It is fate," says the troubled mother; "who can escape his fate?" "It
is sin," says the mother-in-law; and the rest of the world agrees.
"'Where the bull goes, there goes its rope.' 'Deeds done in a former
birth, in this birth burn.'"
Much of the working of the curse is hidden behind shut doors. I saw a
young widow last week whose mind is becoming deranged in consequence of
the severity of the penance she is compelled to perform. When, as they
put it, "the god of ill-fortune seizes her," that is, when she becomes
violent, she is quietly "removed to another place." No one sees what is
done to her there, but I know that part of the treatment consists in
scratching her head with thorns, and then rubbing raw lime juice
in--lime juice is like lemon juice, only more acid. When the paroxysm
passes she reappears, and does penance till the next fit comes. This has
been repeated three times within the last few months.
I was visiting in a Hindu house for two years before I found out that
all that time a girl of seventeen was kept alone in an upper room. "Let
her weep," they said, quoting a proverb; "'though she weeps, will a
widow's sorrow pass?'" Once a day, after dark, she was brought
downstairs for a few minutes, and once a day, at noon, some coarse food
was taken up to her. She is allowed downstairs now, but only in the back
part of the house; she never thinks of resisting this decree--it, and
all it stands for, is her fate. Sometimes the glad girl-life reasserts
itself, and she plays and laughs with her sister-in-law's pretty baby
boy; but if she hears a man's voice she disappears upstairs. There are
proverbs in the language which tell why.
I sat on the verandah of a well-to-do Hindu house one day, and talked to
the bright-looking women in their jewels and silks. And all the time,
though little I knew it, a widow was tied up in a sack in one of the
inner rooms. This wrong is a hidden wrong.
I do not think that anyone would call the Hindus distinctively cruel; in
comparison with most other Asiatics their instincts are kind. A custom
so merciless as this custom, which punishes the innocent with so
grievous a punishment, does not seem to us to be natural to them. It
seems like a parasite custom, which has struck its roots deep into the
tree of Hindu social life, but is not part of it. Think of the power
which must have been exerted somewhere by someone before the disposition
of a nation could be changed.
This custom as it stands is formidable enough. Many a man, Indian and
foreign, has fought it and failed. It is a huge and most rigorous system
of tyrannical oppression, a very pyramid to look at, old, immovable.
But there is Something greater behind it. It is only the effect of a
Cause--the Dust of the Actual.
What can alter the custom? Strong writing or speaking, agitations, Acts
of Parliament? All these surely have their part. They raise the
question, stir the Dust--but blow it off? Oh no! nothing can touch the
conscience of the people, and utterly reverse their view of things, and
radically alter them, but =God=.
Yes, it is true, we may make the most of what has been done by
Government, by missionaries and reformers, but there are times in the
heart histories of all who look far enough down to see what goes on
under the surface of things, when the sorrow takes shape in the
Prophet's cry, "We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth!"
It is true. _We_ have not. We cannot even estimate the real weight of
the lightest speck of the Dust that has settled on the life of this
people. But we believe that our God, Who comprehended the dust of the
earth in a measure, comprehends to the uttermost the Dust of the Actual,
and we believe to see Him work, with Whom is strength and effectual
working.
We believe to see, and believing even now we see; and when we see
anything, be it ever so little, when the Breath breathes, and even "a
hair's-breadth" of that Dust is blown away, then, with an intensity I
cannot describe, we feel the presence of the Lord our God among us, and
look up in the silence of joy and expectation for the coming of the Day
when all rule, and all authority and power, yea, the power of the very
Actual itself, shall be put down, that God may be all in all.
So again and yet again we ask you to pray not less for the Reform
movement, and the Educational movement, and the Civilising movement of
India, but far more for the Movement of the Breath of God, and far more
for us His workers here, that we may abide in Him without Whom we can do
nothing.
CHAPTER VIII
Roots
"It is not an easy thing in England to lead an old
man or woman to Christ, even though the only
'root' which holds them from Him is love of the
world. As the Tamil proverb says, 'That which did
not bend at five will not be bent at fifty,' still
less at sixty or seventy. When a soul in India is
held down, not by one root only, but by a myriad
roots, who is sufficient to deliver it? Only He
who overturneth the mountains by the roots. 'This
kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.'"
_An Indian Missionary._
"AMMA, you are getting old."
"Yes (grunt), yes."
"When we are old then death is near."
"Yes (grunt), yes."
"Then we must leave our bodies and go somewhere else."
Three more grunts.
"Amma, do you know where you are going?"
Then the old woman wakes up a little, grunts a little more, "Who knows
where she is going?" she mumbles, and relapses into grunts.
"I know where I am going," the girl answers. "Amma, don't you want to
know?"
"Don't I want to know what?"
"Where you are going."
"Why do I want to know what?"
The girl goes over it again. The old woman turns to her
daughter-in-law. "Is the rice ready?" she says. The girl tries again.
The old woman agrees we all must die. Death is near to the ancient; she
is ancient, therefore death is near to her, she must go somewhere after
death. It would be well to know where she is going. She does not know
where she is going. Then she gazes and grunts.
[Illustration: Enlargement of one of the old dames seen in chapter vi. A
capital typical face. We have a number of these keen, interesting old
people, but very rarely find they have any desire to "change their
religion." They are "rooted."]
The girl tries on different lines. Whom is the old woman looking to, to
help her when death comes?
"God."
"What God?"
"The great God." And rousing herself to express herself she declares
that He is her constant meditation, therefore all is well. "Is the rice
ready?"
"No."
"Then give me some betel leaf," and she settles down to roll small
pieces of lime into little balls, and these balls she rolls up in a
betel leaf, with a bit of areca nut for taste, and this betel leaf she
puts into her mouth--all this very slowly, and with many inarticulate
sounds, which I have translated "grunts." And this is all she does. She
does not want to listen or talk, she only wants to scrunch betel, and
grunt.
This is not a touching tale. It is only true. It happened this evening
exactly as I have told it, and the girl, a distant connection of the old
woman, who had come with me so delightedly, eager to tell the Good
Tidings, had to give it up. She had begun by speaking about the love of
Jesus, but that had fallen perfectly flat; so she had tried the more
startling form of address, with this result--grunts.
I spent an afternoon not long ago with a more intelligent specimen. Here
she is, a fine sturdy old character, one of the three you saw before.
She was immensely interested with her photo, which I showed her, and she
could not understand at all how, in the one moment when she stood
against a wall, her face "had been caught on a piece of white paper." A
little explanation opened the way for the greater thing I had come
about. We were sitting on a mud verandah, opening on to a square
courtyard; two women pounding rice, two more grinding it, another
sweeping, a cow, some fowls, a great many children, and several babies,
made it exceedingly difficult to concentrate one's attention on
anything, and still more difficult to get the wandering brains of an old
woman to concentrate on a subject in which she had no interest. She had
been interested in the photograph, but that was different.
The conversation ended by her remarking that it was getting dark, ought
I not to be going home? It was not getting dark yet, but it meant that
she had had enough, so I salaamed and went, hoping for a better chance
again. Next time we visited the Village of the Tamarind she was nowhere
to be seen; she had gone to her own village, she had only come here for
the funeral. Would she return, we asked? Not probable, they said, "she
had come and gone." "Come and gone." As they said it, one felt how true
it was. Come, for that one short afternoon within our reach; gone, out
of it now for ever.
In that same village there is one who more than any other drew one's
heart out in affection and longing, but so far all in vain.
I first saw her in the evening as we were returning home. She was
sitting on her verandah, giving orders to the servants as they stood in
the courtyard below. Then she turned and saw us. We were standing in the
street, looking through the open door. The old lady, in her white
garments, with her white hair, sat among a group of women in vivid
shades of red, behind her the dark wood of the pillar and door, and
above the carved verandah roof.
The men were fresh from the fields, and stood with their rough-looking
husbandry implements slung across their shoulders; the oxen, great
meek-eyed beasts, were munching their straw and swishing their tails as
they stood in their places in the courtyard, where some little children
played.
The paddy-birds, which are small white storks, were flying about from
frond to frond of the cocoanut palms that hung over the wall, and the
sunset light, striking slanting up, caught the underside of their wings,
and made them shine with a clear pale gold, gold birds in a darkness of
green. A broken mud wall ran round one end, and the sunset colour
painted it too till all the red in it glowed; and then it came softly
through the palms, and touched the white head with a sort of sheen, and
lit up the brow of the fine old face as, bending forward, she beckoned
to us. "Come in! come in!" she said.
We soon made friends with her. She was a Saivite and we heard afterwards
had received the Initiation; the golden symbol of her god had been
branded upon her shoulder, and she was sworn to lifelong devotion to
Siva; but she had found that he was vain, and she never worshipped him,
she worshipped God alone, "and at night, when the household is sleeping,
I go up alone to an upper room, and stretch out my hands to the God of
all, and cry with a long, loud cry." Then she suddenly turned and faced
me full. "Tell me, is that enough?" she said. "Is it all I must do for
salvation? Say!"
I did not feel she was ready for a plunge into the deep sea of full
knowledge yet, and I tried to persuade her to leave that question,
telling her that if she believed what we told her of Jesus our Lord, she
would soon know Him well enough to ask Him direct what she wanted to
know, and He Himself would explain to her all that it meant to follow
Him. But she was determined to hear it then, and, as she insisted, I
read her a little of what He says about it Himself. She knew quite
enough to understand and take in the force of the forceful words. She
would not consent to be led gently on. "No, I must know it now," she
said; and as verse by verse we read to her, her face settled
sorrowfully. "So far must I follow, so far?" she said. "_I cannot follow
so far._"
It was too late for much talk then, but she promised to listen if we
would come and read to her. She could not read, but she seemed to know a
great deal about the Bible.
For some weeks one of us went once a week; sometimes the men of the
house were in, and then we could not read to her, as they seemed to
object; but oftener no one was about, and she had her way, and we read.
She told us her story one afternoon. She was the head of a famous old
house; her husband had died many years ago; she had brought up her
children successfully, and now they were settled in life. She had a
Christian relation, but she had never seen him; she thought he had a son
studying in a large school in England--Cambridge, I knew, when I heard
the name; the father is one of our true friends.
All her sons are greatly opposed, but one of her little girls learnt for
a time, and so the mother heard the Truth, and, being convinced that it
was true, greatly desired to hear more.
But the child was married, and went away, and she feared to ask the
Missie Ammal to come again, lest people should notice it and talk. So
the years passed emptily, "and oh, my heart was an empty place, a void
as empty as air!" And she stretched out her arms, and clasping her hands
she looked at the empty space between, and then at me with inquiring
eyes, to see if I understood.
How well one understood!
"I am an emptiness for Thee to fill,
My soul a cavern for Thy sea, . . .
I have done nought for Thee, am but a Want."
She had never heard it, but she had said it. We do not often hear it
said, and when we do our whole heart goes out to meet the heart of the
one who says it; everything that is in us yearns with a yearning that
cannot be told, to bring her to Him Who said "Come."
We were full of hope about her, and we wrote to her Christian relative,
and he wrote back with joy. It seemed so likely then that she would
decide for Christ.
But one day, for the first time, she did not care to read. I remember
that day so well; it was the time of our monsoon, and the country was
one great marsh. We had promised to go that morning, but the night
before the rivers filled, and the pool between her and us was a lake. We
called the bandyman and explained the situation. He debated a little,
but at last--"Well, the bulls can swim," he said, and they swam.
We need not have gone, she was "out." "Out," or "not at home to-day," is
a phrase not confined to Society circles where courtesy counts for more
than truth. "I am in, but I do not want to see you," would have been
true, but rude.
This was the first chill, but she was in next time, and continued to be
in, until after a long talk we had, when again the question rose and had
to be faced, "Can I be a Christian _here_?"
It was a quiet afternoon; we were alone, only the little grandchildren
were with her--innocent, fearless, merry little creatures, running to
her with their wants, and pulling at her hands and dress as babies do at
home. Their grandmother took no notice of them beyond an occasional pat
or two, but the childish things, with their bright brown eyes and little
fat, soft, clinging hands went into the photo one's memory took, and
helped one the better to understand and sympathise in the humanness of
the pretty home scene, that humanness which is so natural, and which God
meant to be. I think there is nothing in all our work which so rends and
tears at the heart-strings within us, as seeing the spiritual clash with
the natural, and to know that while Caste and bigotry reign it always
must be so.
We had a good long talk. "I want to be a Christian," she said, and for a
moment I hoped great things, for she as the mistress of the house was
almost free to do as she chose. I thought of her influence over her sons
and their wives, and the little grandchildren; and I think my face
showed the hope I had, for she said, looking very direct at me, "By a
Christian I mean one who worships your God, and ceases to worship all
other gods; for He alone is the Living God, the Pervader of all and
Provider. This I fully believe and affirm, but I cannot break my Caste."
"Would you continue to keep it in all ways?"
"How could I possibly break my Caste?"
"And continue to smear Siva's sign on your forehead?"
"That is indeed part of my Caste."
More especially part of it, I knew, since she had received the
Initiation.
Then the disappointment got into my voice, and she felt it, and said,
"Oh, do not be grieved! These things are external. How can mere ashes
affect the internal, the real essential, the soul?"
It was such a plausible argument, and we hear it over and over again;
for history repeats itself, there is nothing new under the sun.
I reminded her that ashes were sacred to Siva.
"I would not serve Siva," she answered me, "but the smearing of ashes on
one's brow is the custom of my Caste, and I cannot break my Caste."
Then she looked at me very earnestly with her searching, beautiful, keen
old eyes, and she went over ground she knew I knew. She reminded me what
the requirements of her Caste had always been, that they must be
fulfilled by all who live in the house, and she told me in measured
words and slow that I knew she could not live at home if she broke the
laws of her Caste. But why make so much of trifling things? For matter
and spirit are distinct, and when the hands are raised in prayer, when
the lamp is lighted and wreathed with flowers, the outward observer may
mistake and think the action is pujah to Agni, but God who reads the
heart understands, and judges the thought and not the act. "Yes, my hand
may smear on Siva's ashes, while at the same moment my soul may commune
with God the Eternal, Who only is God."
I turned to verse after verse to show her this sort of thing could never
be, how it would mock at the love of Christ and nullify His sacrifice. I
urged upon her that if she were true, and the central thought of her
life were towards God, all the outworkings would correspond, creed
fitting deed, and deed fitting creed without the least shade of
diversity. But faith and practice are not to be confused, each is
separate from the other; the two may unite or the one may be divorced
from the other without the integrity of either being affected: this is
the unwritten Hindu code which she and hers had ever held; and now,
after years of belief in it, to face round suddenly to its
opposite--this was more than she could do. She held, as it were, the
Truth in her hand, and turned it round and round and round, but she
always ended where she began; she would not, _could_ not, see it as
Truth, or perhaps more truly, would not accept it. It meant too much.
There she sat, queen of her home. The sons were expected, and she had
been making preparations for their coming. Her little grandchildren
played about her, each one of them dear as the jewel of her eye. How
could she leave it all, how could she leave them all--home, all that it
stands for; children, all that they mean?
Then she looked at me again, and I shall never forget the look. It
seemed as if she were looking me through and through, and forcing the
answer to come. She spoke in little short sentences, instinct with
intensity. "I _cannot_ live here and break my Caste. If I break it I
must go. I _cannot_ live here without keeping my customs. If I break
them I must go. You know all this. I ask you, then, tell me yes or no.
Can I live here and keep my Caste, and at the same time follow your God?
Tell me yes or no!"
I did not tell her--how could I? But she read the answer in my eyes, and
she said, as she had said before, "I cannot follow so far--so far, _I
cannot follow so far_!"
"Reverence for opinions and practice held sacred by his ancestors is
ingrained in every fibre of a Hindu's character, and is, so to speak,
bred in the very bone of his physical and moral constitution." So writes
Sir Monier Williams. It is absolutely true.
Oh, friends, is it easy work? My heart is sore as I write, with the
soreness that filled it that day. I would have given anything to be able
truthfully to say "yes" to her question. But "across the will of nature
leads on the path of God" for them; and they have to follow so very far,
so very, very far!
All trees have roots. To tear up a full-grown tree by the roots, and
transplant it bodily, is never a simple process. But in India we have a
tree with a double system of roots. The banyan tree drops roots from its
boughs. These bough roots in time run as deep underground as the
original root. And the tap root and its runners, and the branch roots
and theirs, get knotted and knit into each other, till the whole forms
one solid mass of roots, thousands of yards of a tangle of roots,
sinuous and strong. Conceive the uprooting of such a tree, like the
famous one of North India, for instance, which sheltered an army of
seven thousand men. You cannot conceive it; it could not be done, the
earthward hold is so strong.
The old in India are like these trees; they are doubly, inextricably
rooted. There is the usual great tap root common to all human trees in
all lands--faith in the creed of the race; there are the usual running
roots too--devotion to family and home. All these hold the soul down.
But in India we have more--we have the branch-rooted system of Caste;
Caste so intricate, so precise, that no Western lives who has traced it
through its ramifications back to the bough from which it dropped in the
olden days.
This Caste, then, these holding laws, which most would rather die than
break, are like the branch roots of the banyan tree with their infinite
strength of grip. But the strangest thing to us is this: the people love
to have it so; they do not regard themselves as held, these roots are
their pride and joy. Take a child of four or five, ask it a question
concerning its Caste, and you will see how that baby tree has begun to
drop branch rootlets down. Sixty years afterwards look again, and every
rootlet has grown a tree, each again sending rootlets down; and so the
system spreads.
But we look up from the banyan tree. God! what are these roots to Thee?
These Caste-root systems are nothing to Thee! India is not too hard for
Thee! O God, come!
CHAPTER IX
The Classes and the Masses
"We speak of work done against the force of
gravitation. If the magnitude of a force can be
estimated in any sense by the resistance which it
has to overcome, then verily there is no land
under the sun more calculated than India to
display the Grand Forces of God's Omnipotent
Grace. For here it has to face and overcome the
_combined resistances_ of the Caste system,
entrenched heathenism, and deeply subtle
philosophies. Praise God! it can and will be done.
Thou, who alone doest wondrous things, work on.
'So will we sing and praise Thy power.'"
_Rev. T. Walker, India._
PERHAPS it would help towards the better understanding of these letters
if we stopped and explained things a little. Some may have been
wondering, as they read, how it is that while the South Indian fields
are constantly quoted as among the most fruitful in the world, we seem
to be dealing with a class where fruit is very rare, and so subject to
blighting influences after it has appeared, that we hardly like to speak
of it till it is ripe and reaped and safe in the heavenly garner. I
think it will be easier to understand all this if we view Hindu Tamil
South India (with which alone this book deals) from the outside, and let
it fall into two divisions the Classes and the Masses. There is, of
course, the border line between, crossed over on either side by some who
belong to the Classes but are almost of the Masses, and by some who
belong to the Masses but are almost of the Classes. Broadly speaking,
however, there is a distinct difference between the two. As to their
attitude towards the Gospel, the Classes and the Masses unite; they are
wholly indifferent to it.
In a paper read at the Student Volunteers' Conference in 1900, a South
Indian missionary summed up the matter in a comprehensive sentence:
"Shut in for millenniums by the gigantic wall of the Himalayas on the
North, and by the impassable ocean on the South, they have lived in
seclusion from the rest of the world, and have developed social
institutions and conceptions of the universe, and of right and wrong,
quite their own. Their own religion and traditionary customs are
accepted as sufficiently meeting their needs, and they are not conscious
of needing any teaching from foreigners. They will always listen
courteously to what we say, and this constitutes an open door for the
Gospel, but of conscious need and hungering for the Gospel there is
little or none. So long as it is only a matter of preaching, there are
in the world no more patient listeners than the Hindus. But as soon as a
case arises of one of their number abandoning the Caste customs and
traditionary worship, all their hostility is aroused, and the whole
community feels it a duty of patriotism to do its utmost to deprive that
individual of liberty of action, and to defend the vested rights of
Hinduism."
For the true Hindu is fervently Hindu. His religion "may be described as
bound up in the bundle of his everyday existence." His intense belief in
it, and in his Caste, which is part of it, gives edge to the blade with
which he fights the entrance of a new religion to his home. This new
religion he conceives of as something inherently antagonistic to his
Caste, and as Caste is at every point connected with Hinduism, a thing
interwoven with it, as if Hinduism were the warp and Caste the woof of
the fabric of Indian life, we cannot say he is mistaken in regarding
Christianity as a foe to be fought if he would continue a Caste Hindu.
So far, in South Indian religious history, we have no example on a large
scale of anything approaching the Bramo Samâj of the North. In the more
conservative South there is almost no compromise with, and little
assimilation of, the doctrine which makes all men one in Christ.
To return to the division--Classes and Masses--the Classes comprise
members of what are known as the higher Castes, and in speaking of towns
and villages where these dwell, and of converts from among them, the
prefix "Caste" is sometimes used. Among the Classes we find women of
much tenderness of feeling and a culture of their own, but their minds
are narrowed by the petty lives they live, lives in many instances
bounded by no wider horizon than thoughts concerning their husbands and
children and jewels and curries, and always their next-door neighbour's
squabbles and the gossip of the place. Much of this gossip deals with
matters which are not of an elevating character. It takes us years to
understand it, because most of the conversation is carried on in
allusion or innuendo. But it is understood by the children. One of our
converts told me that she often prays for power to forget the words she
heard, and the things she saw, and the games she played, when she was a
little child in her mother's room.
[Illustration: This old man is the Hindu village schoolmaster. The boys
write on a strip of palm leaf with an iron style. These little lads come
to us every Sunday afternoon. Will some one remember them?]
The young girls belonging to the higher Castes are kept in strict
seclusion. During these formative years they are shut up within the
courtyard walls to the dwarfing life within, and as a result they get
dwarfed, and lose in resourcefulness and independence of mind, and above
all in courage; and this tells terribly in our work, making it so
difficult to persuade such a one to think for herself or dare to decide
to believe. Such seclusion is not felt as imprisonment; a girl is
trained to regard it as the proper thing, and we never find any desire
among those so secluded to break bounds and rush out into the free, open
air. They do not feel it cramped as we should; it is their custom.
It is this custom which makes work among girls exceedingly slow and
unresultful. They have to be reached one by one, and it takes many
months of teaching before the mind opens enough to understand that it
may be free. The reaction of the physical upon the mental is never more
clearly illustrated than in such cases. Sometimes it seems as if the
mind _could_ not go out beyond the cramping walls; but when it has, by
God's illumination, received light enough to see into the darkness of
the soul, and the glory that waits to shine in on it, conceive of the
tremendous upheaval, the shock of finding solid ground sink, as
gradually or suddenly the conviction comes upon such a one that if she
acts upon this new knowledge there is no place for her at home. She must
give everything up--_everything_!
Do you wonder that few are found willing to "follow so far"? Do you
wonder that our hearts nearly break sometimes, as we realize the cost
for them? Do you wonder that, knowing how each is set as a target for
the archer who shoots at souls, we fear to say much about them, lest we
should set the targets clearer in his sight?
The men and boys of the Classes live a more liberal life, and here you
find all varying shades of refinement. There is education, too, and a
great respect for learning, and reverence for their classic literature
and language, a language so ancient that we find certain Tamil words in
the Hebrew Scriptures, and so rich, that while "nearly all the
vernaculars of India have been greatly enriched from the Sanscrit,
Sanscrit has borrowed from Tamil." Almost every Caste village has its
own little school, and every town has many, where the boys are taught
reading, writing, poetry, and mental arithmetic.
There is not much education among the Masses. Here and there a man
stands out who has fought his way through the ignorance of centuries, up
into the light of the knowledge of books. Such a man is greatly
respected by the whole community. The women have the same kindly nature
as the women of the Classes, and there is surprising responsiveness
sometimes, where one would least expect it. We have known a Tamil woman,
distinctly of the Masses, never secluded in her girlhood, but left to
bloom as a wild flower in the field, as sensitive in spirit as any lady
born. The people are rough and rustic in their ways, but there are
certain laws observed which show a spirit of refinement latent among
them; there are customs which compare favourably with the customs of the
masses at home. As a whole, they are like the masses of other lands,
with good points and bad points in strong relief, and just the same
souls to be saved.
Converts from among the Masses, as a general rule, are able to live at
home. There is persecution, but they are not turned out of village,
street, or house. Often they come in groups, two or three families
together perhaps, or a whole village led by its headman comes over.
There is less of the single one-by-one conversion and confession, though
there is an increasing number of such, and they are the best we have.
It is easy to understand how much more rapidly Christianity spreads
under such conditions than among those prevailing among the Classes; we
see it illustrated over and over again. For example, in a certain
high-caste Hindu town some miles distant from our station on the Eastern
side, a young man heard the Gospel preached at an open-air meeting; he
believed, and confessed in baptism, thus breaking Caste and becoming an
alien to his own people. He has never been able to live at home since,
and so there has been no witness borne, no chance to let the life show
out the love of God. The men of that household doubtless know something
of the truth; they know enough, at least, to make them responsible for
refusing it; but what can the women know? Only that the son of the house
has disgraced his house and name; only that he has destroyed his Caste
and broken his mother's heart. "Shame upon him," they cry with one
voice, "and curses on the cause of the shame, the 'Way' of Jesus
Christ!" It is useless to say they are merely women, and do not count;
they _do_ count. Their influence counts for a very great deal.
Theoretically, women in India are nothing where religion is concerned;
practically, they are the heart of the Hindu religion, as the men are
its sinew and brain. There has never been a convert in that town since
that young man was banished from it, out-casted by his Caste.
But in a village only a few miles from that town a heathen lad believed,
and was baptised, and returned home, not so welcome as before, but not
considered too defiled to be reckoned a son of the household still. His
father is dead, his mother is a bitter opponent, but his brother has
come since, and within a stone's-throw another; and so it goes on: the
life has a chance to tell. Almost every time we have gone to that
village we have found some ready for baptism, and though none of the
mothers have been won, they witness to the change in the life of their
sons. "My boy's heart is as white as milk now," said one, who had stood
by and seen that boy tied up and flogged for Christ's sake. They rarely
"change their religion," these staunch old souls; "let me go where my
husband is; he would have none of it!" said one, and nothing seems to
move them; but they let their boys live at home, and perhaps, even yet,
the love will break down their resistance. They are giving it a chance.
I think this one illustration explains more than many words would the
difference between work among the Classes and the Masses, and why it is
that one form of work is so much more fruitful than the other.
The Masses must not be understood as a vast casteless Mass, out-casted
by the Classes, for the Caste system runs down to the very lowest
stratum, but their Caste rules allow of freer intercourse with others.
We may visit in their houses more freely, enter more freely into their
thoughts, share more freely in the interests of their lives. We are less
outside, as it were. But the main difference between the one set of
people and the other lies deeper; it is a difference underground. It
works out, however, into something all can see. Among the Masses, "mass
movements" are of common occurrence; among the Classes, with rare
exceptions, each one must come out alone.
[Illustration: A village woman of the Shanar Caste. The photo shows the
baby's ears being prepared for the jewels her mother hopes will fill
them by and by. Holes are made first and filled with cotton wool,
graduated leaden weights are added till the lobes are long enough.]
This is often forgotten by observers of the Indian Field from the home
side. There are parts of that field where the labourers seem to be
always binding up sheaves and singing harvest songs; and from other
parts come fewer songs, for the sheaves are fewer there, or it may be
there are none at all, only a few poor ears of corn, and they had to be
gathered one by one, and they do not show in the field.
CHAPTER X
The Creed Chasm
"I have had to deal in the same afternoon's work,
on the one hand with men of keen powers of
intellect, whose subtle reasoning made one look to
the foundations of one's own faith; and on the
other hand with ignorant crowds, whose conception
of sin was that of a cubit measure, and to whom
the terms 'faith' and 'love' were as absolutely
unknown as though they had been born and bred in
some undeveloped race of Anthropoids."
_Rev. T. Walker, India._
IN writing about the Classes and the Masses of South India, one great
difference which does not exist at home should be explained. In England
a prince and a peasant may be divided by outward things--social
position, style of life, and the duty of life--but in all inward things
they may be one--one in faith, one in purpose, one in hope. The
difference which divides them is only accidental, external; and the
peasant, perhaps being in advance of the prince in these verities of
existence, may be regarded by the prince as nobler than himself: there
is no spiritual chasm between them. It is the same in the realm of
scholarship. All true Christians, however learned or however unlearned,
hold one and the same faith. But in India it is not so. The scholar
would smile at the faith of the simple villagers, he would even teach
them to believe that which he did not believe himself, holding that it
was more suitable for them, and he would marvel at your ignorance if
you confounded his creed with theirs; and yet in name both he and they
are Hindus.
Sir Monier Williams explains the existence of this difference by
describing the receptivity and all-comprehensiveness of Hinduism. "It
has something to offer which is suited to all minds, its very strength
lies in its infinite adaptability to the infinite diversity of human
characters and human tendencies. It has its highly spiritual and
abstract side, suited to the metaphysical philosopher; its practical and
concrete side, suited to the man of affairs and the man of the world;
its æsthetic and ceremonial side, suited to the man of poetic feeling
and imagination; its quiescent and contemplative side, suited to the man
of peace and lover of seclusion. Nay, it holds out the right hand of
brotherhood to nature worshippers, demon worshippers, animal
worshippers, tree worshippers, fetich worshippers. It does not scruple
to permit the most grotesque forms of idolatry and the most degrading
varieties of superstition, and it is to this latter fact that yet
another remarkable peculiarity of Hinduism is mainly due--_namely, that
in no other System of the world is the chasm more vast which separates
the religion of the higher, cultured, and thoughtful Classes, from that
of the lower, uncultured, and unthinking Masses_."
Naturally, therefore, work among them is different; one almost needs a
different vocabulary for each, and certainly one needs a different set
of ideas. I remember how, in one afternoon's work, we saw the two types
most perfectly. In thinking of it, it is as if one saw again the quiet
face of the old scholar against a background of confusion, the clear
calm features carved as in ivory, and set with a light upon it; chaotic
darkness behind. We were visiting his wife, when he came out from the
inner room, and asked if he might talk with us. Usually to such a
question I say no; we have come to the women, who are far the more
needy, the men can easily hear if they will. But he was such an old man,
I felt I could not refuse; so he began to tell me what he held as truth,
which was, in brief, that there are two sets of attachment, one outer,
one inner; that deliverance from these, and from Self, the Ego, which
regards itself as the doer, constitutes Holiness; that is, that one must
be completely disentangled and completely self-less. This attained, the
next is Bliss, which is progressive. First comes existence in the same
place as God. Second, nearness to God. Third, likeness to God. Fourth,
identity with God. Then he quoted from a classic beloved by all the old
Tamil school, stanza after stanza, to prove the truth of the above,
ending with one which Dr. Pope has thus translated--
"_Cling thou to that which He to Whom nought clings hath bid thee
cling,
Cling to that bond, to get thee free from every clinging thing._"
He knew Sanscrit, and read me strange-sounding passages from a huge
ancient book, and then, in return for a booklet, he gave me one of Mrs.
Besant's translations from the _Bhagavad Gita_.
The talk ended in my quoting what he could not deny was the true
heart-cry of one of his greatest poets. "I know nothing! nothing! I am
in darkness! Lord, is there no light for me?" And another, from the
poem he had quoted, which asks the question, "What is the use of
knowledge, mere knowledge, if one does not draw near to the All-knowing,
All-pure One?" And this led into what he would not listen to at first, a
little reading from the Book of books, before whose light even these
wonderful books pale as tapers in clear sunshine. The marvel of our
Bible never shows more marvellous than at such times, when you see it in
deed and in truth the Sword of the Spirit, and it _cuts_.
The old man asked me to come again, and I did, as the Iyer was away. He
often got out of my depth, and I longed to know more; but I always found
the Bible had the very word he needed, if he would only take it. So far
as I know, he did not, and I left him--to quote his own words, though
not spoken of himself, alas!--"bewildered by numerous thoughts, meshed
in the web of delusion."
As we left our old scholar, we came upon a thing wholly foolish and
brainless, animalism in force. It was the difference between the Classes
and the Masses once for all painted in glare. A huge procession was
tearing along the streets and roads, with all the usual uproar. They
stopped when they got to a big thorn bush, and then danced round it,
carrying their idols raised on platforms, and borne by two or three
dozen to each. We passed, singing as hard as ever we could "Victory to
Jesus' Name! Victory!" and when we got rather out of the stream,
stopped, and sang most vigorously, till quite a little crowd gathered,
and we had a chance to witness.
It was dark, and the flaming torches lit up the wildest, most barbaric
bit of heathenism I have seen for a long time. The great black moving
mass seemed like some hellish sea which had burst its bounds, and the
hundreds of red-fire torches moving up and down upon it like lights in
infernal fishermen's boats, luring lost souls to their doom.
As we waited and spoke to those who would hear, a sudden rush from the
centre of things warned us to go; but before we could get out of the
way, a rough lad with a thorn-branch torch stuck it right into the
bandy, and all but set fire to us. He ran on with a laugh, and another
followed with an idol, a hideous creature, red and white, which he also
pushed in upon us. Our bullocks trotted as fast as they could, and we
soon got out of it all, and looking back saw the great square of the
devil temple blazing with torches and firebrands, and heard the
drummings and clangings and yells which announced the arrival of the
procession.
All that night the riotous drumming continued, and, as one lay awake and
listened, one pictured the old scholar sitting in the cool night air on
his verandah, reading his ancient palm-leaf books by the light of the
little lamp in the niche of his cottage wall.
CHAPTER XI
Caste viewed as a Doer
"It is matter for especial notice that in every
department of applied science we have to deal with
the unseen. All forces, whether in physics,
mechanics, or electricity, are invisible."
_Alexander Mackay, Africa._
THE division of the Tamil people, over fifteen million strong, into
Classes and Masses, though convenient and simple, is far too simple to
be of value in giving an accurate idea of the matter as it is understood
from within. As we said, it is only an outside view of things. A study
of Caste from an Indian point of view is a study from which you rise
bewildered.
What is Caste? What is electricity? Lord Kelvin said, on the occasion of
his jubilee, that he knew no more of electric and magnetic force . . .
than he knew and tried to teach his students of natural philosophy fifty
years ago in his first session as Professor. We know that electricity
exists, we are conscious of its presence in the phenomena of light,
heat, sound; but we do not know what it is.
Nothing could more perfectly illustrate Caste. You cannot live long in a
conservative part of India, in close contact with its people, without
being conscious of its presence; if you come into conflict with it, it
manifests itself in a flash of opposition, hot rage of persecution, the
roar of the tumult of the crowd. But try to define it, and you find you
cannot do it. It is not merely birth, class, a code of rules, though it
includes all these. It is a force, an energy; there is spirit in it,
essence, hidden as the invisible essence which we call electricity.
Look at what it does. A few months ago a boy of twelve resolved to be a
Christian. His clan, eight thousand strong, were enraged. There was a
riot in the streets; in one house the poison cup was ready. Better death
than loss of Caste.
In another town a boy took his stand, and was baptised, thus crossing
the line that divides secret belief from open confession. His Caste men
got hold of him afterwards; next time he was seen he was a raving
lunatic. The Caste was avenged.
It may be someone will wonder if these things are confined to one part
of the field, so I quote from another, working in a neighbouring field,
Tamil, but not "ours."
She tells of a poor low-caste woman who learned in her home, and
believed. Her husband also believed, and both thought of becoming
Christians. The village soothsayer warned them that their father's god
would be angry; they did not heed him, but went on, and suddenly their
baby died. This was too much for their faith then, and they both went
back to idolatry.
A few years afterwards their eldest child began to learn to read, and
the mother's faith revived. The soothsayer and her husband reminded her
of the infant's fate, but she was brave, and let her child learn. Then
her cow suddenly died. "Did we not tell you so?" they said, and for the
moment she was staggered; but she rallied, and only became more earnest
in faith. So the soothsayer threatened worse.
[Illustration: Cooking in a house of the Shanar Caste, always the most
accessible of all Castes here, but this is a specially friendly house,
or we should not have been allowed to take the photo. The small girl who
is grinding curry stuff on the stone is the "Imp" of chapter xx.]
Then a Caste meeting was called to determine what could be done with
this woman. The husband attended the meeting, and was treated to some
rice and curry; before he reached home he was taken violently ill, and
in three days he died. The relatives denounced the woman as the cause of
her husband's death, took her only son from her, and entreated her to
return to her father's gods before they should all be annihilated. They
gave her "two weeks to fast and mourn for her husband, then finding her
mind as firmly fixed on Christ as before, they sent her to Burmah."
This happened recently. It is told without any effort to appeal to the
sympathies of anyone, simply as a fact; a witness, every line of it, to
the power of Caste as a Doer. But there is something in the tale, told
so terribly quietly, that makes one's heart burn with indignation at the
unrelenting cruelty which would hound a poor woman down, and send her,
bereft of all she loved, into exile, such as a foreign land would be to
one who knew only her own little village. And when you remember the
Caste was "low," which they took such infinite pains to guard, you can
judge, perhaps, what the hate would be, the concentration of scorn and
hate, if the Caste were higher or high.
But look at Caste in another way, in its power in the commonplace phases
of life. For example, take a kitchen and cooking, and see how Caste
rules there. For cooking is not vulgar work, or _infra dig._ in any
sense, in India; all Caste women in good orthodox Hindu families
either do their own or superintend the doing of it by younger members of
the same family or servants of the same Caste. "We Europeans cannot
understand the extent to which culinary operations may be associated
with religion. The kitchen in every Indian household is a kind of
sanctuary or holy ground. . . . The mere glance of a man of inferior
Caste makes the greatest delicacies uneatable, and if such a glance
happens to fall on the family supplies during the cooking operations,
when the ceremonial purity of the water used is a matter of almost life
and death to every member of the household, the whole repast has to be
thrown away as if poisoned. The family is for that day dinnerless. Food
thus contaminated would, if eaten, communicate a taint to the souls as
well as bodies of the eaters, a taint which could only be removed by
long and painful expiation." Thus far Sir Monier Williams (quoted as a
greater authority than any mere missionary!). Think of the defilement
which would be contracted if a member of the household who had broken
Caste in baptism took any part in the cooking. It would never be
allowed. Such a woman could take no share in the family life. Her
presence, her shadow, above all her touch, would be simply pollution.
Therefore, and for many other reasons, her life at home is impossible,
and the Hindu, without arguing about it, regards it as impossible. It
does not enter into the scheme of life as laid down by the rules of his
Caste. He never, if he is orthodox, contemplates it for a moment as a
thing to be even desired.
Cooking and kitchen work may seem small (though it would not be easy for
even the greatest to live without reference to it), so let us look out
on the world of trade, and see Caste again as a Doer there. If a
merchant becomes a Christian, no one will buy his goods; if he is a
weaver, no one will buy his cloth; if he is a dyer, no one will buy his
thread; if he is a jeweller, no one will employ him. If it is remembered
that every particular occupation in life represents a particular Caste,
it will be easily understood how matters are complicated where converts
from the great Trades Unions are concerned. Hence the need of Industrial
Missions, and the fact that they exist.
A man wants to become a Christian, say, from the blacksmith or carpenter
Caste. As a Christian he loses his trade, and he has been trained to no
other. His forefathers worked in iron or wood, and he cannot attempt to
learn other work. Let the Christians employ him, you say. Some do; but
the question involves other questions far too involved for discussion
here. And even if we discussed it, we should probably end where we
began--facing a practical problem which no one can hope to solve while
Caste is what it is.
Just now this system is in full operation in the case of a lad of the
brassworker Caste. He is a thoughtful boy, and he has come to the
conclusion that Christianity is the true religion; he would like to be a
Christian; if the conditions were a little easier he would be enrolled
as an inquirer to-morrow. But here is the difficulty. His father is not
strong, his mother and little sisters and brothers are his care; if he
were a Christian he could not support them; no one would sell him brass,
no one would buy the vessels he makes. He knows only his inherited
trade. He can make fine water-pots, lamps, vases, and vessels of all
sorts, nothing else. He is too old to learn any other trade; but
supposing such an arrangement could be made, who would support the
family in the meantime? Perhaps we might do it; we certainly could not
let them starve; but it would not do to tell him so, or to hold out
hopes of earthly help, till we know beyond a doubt that he is true. This
is what is holding him back. He reads over and over again, "He that
loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me," and then he
looks at his father and mother and the little children; and he reads the
verse again, and he looks at them again. It is too hard.
It is easy enough to tell him that God would take care of them if he
obeys. We do tell him so, but can we wonder at the boy for hesitating to
take a step which will, so far as he can see, take house and food and
all they need from his mother and those little children?
These are some of the things which make work in India what is simply
called difficult. We do not want to exaggerate. We know all lands have
their difficulties, but when being a Christian means all this, over and
above what it means elsewhere, then the bonds which bind souls are
visibly strengthened, and the work can never be described as other than
very difficult.
Or take the power of Caste in another direction--its callous cruelty. I
give one illustration from last year's life.
I was visiting in the house where the old lady lives upon whom the
afflatus fell. The first time we went there we saw a little lad of three
or four, who seemed to be suffering with his eyes. He lay in a swinging
bag hung from the roof, and cried piteously all the time we were there.
Now, two months afterwards, there he lay crying still, only his cries
were so weary he had hardly strength to cry.
They lifted him out. I should not have known the child--the pretty face
drawn and full of pain, the little hands pressed over the burning eyes.
Only one who has had it knows the agony of ophthalmia. They told me he
had not slept, "not even the measure of a rape-seed," for three months.
Night and day he cried and cried; "but he does not make much noise now,"
they added. He couldn't, poor little lad!
I begged them to take him to the hospital, twenty-five miles away, but
they said to go to a hospital was against their Caste. The child lay
moaning so pitifully it wrung my heart, and I pleaded and pleaded with
them to let me take him if they would not. Even if his sight could not
be saved, something could be done to ease the pain, I knew. But no, he
might die away from home, and that would disgrace their Caste.
"Then he is to suffer till he is blind or dead?" and I felt half wild
with the cold cruelty of it.
"What can we do?" they asked; "can we destroy our Caste?"
Oh, I did blaze out for a moment! I really could not help it. And then I
knelt down among them all, just broken with the pity of it, and prayed
with all my heart and soul that the Good Shepherd would come and gather
the lamb in His arms!
I wonder if you can bear to read it? I can hardly bear to write it. But
you have not seen the little wasted hands pressed over the eyes, and
then falling helplessly, too tired to hold up any longer; and you have
not heard those weak little wails--and to think it need not have been!
But we could do nothing. We were leaving the place next day, and even if
we could have helped him, they would not have let us. They had their own
doctor, they said; the case was in his hands. As we came away they
explained that one of the boy's distant relatives had died two years
ago, and that this was what prevented any of them leaving the house, as
some obscure Caste rule would be broken if they did; otherwise,
_perhaps_ they might have been able to take him somewhere for change of
treatment. So there that child must lie in his pain, one more little
living sacrifice on the altar of Caste.
The last thing I heard them say as we left the house was, "Cry softly,
or we'll put more medicine in!" And the last thing I saw was the
tightening of the little hands over the poor shut eyes, as he tried to
stifle his sobs and "cry softly." _This told one what the "medicine"
meant to him._ One of the things they had put in was raw pepper mixed
with alum.
Is not Caste a cruel thing? Those women were not heartless, but they
would rather see that baby die in torture by inches, than dim with one
breath the lustre of their brazen escutcheon of Caste!
[Illustration: "I determined not to laugh!" That was what she said when
she saw it, and she was fairly satisfied with the result of her efforts.
The jewels are gold, the seeley a rich red. A woman of this type makes a
fine picture,--the strong intelligent face, the perfect arms and hands,
the glistening gold on the clear brown, and the graceful dress
harmonising so perfectly with the colour of eyes and hair. The one
deformity is the ear, cut so as to hold the jewels, which are so heavy
that one wonders the stretched lobes do not break.]
This is one glimpse of one phase of a power which is only a name at
home. It is its weakest phase; for the hold of Caste upon the body is as
nothing to the hold it has upon the mind and soul. It yields to the
touch of pain sometimes, as our medical missionaries know; but it
tightens again too often when the need for relief is past. It is
unspeakably strong, unmercifully cruel, and yet it would seem as though
the very blood of the people ran red with it. _It is in them_, part of
their very being.
This, then, is Caste viewed as a Doer. It does strange things, hard
things, things most cruel. It is, all who fight it are agreed, the
strongest foe to the Gospel of Christ on the Hindu fields of South
India.
CHAPTER XII
Petra
"This work in India . . . is one of the most crucial
tests the Church of Christ has ever been put to.
The people you think to measure your forces
against are such as the giant races of Canaan are
nothing to."
_Bishop French, India and Arabia._
IT was very hot, and we were tired, and the friendly voice calling "Come
in! come in! Oh, come and rest!" was a welcome sound, and we went in.
She was a dear old friend of mine, the only real friend I have in that
ancient Hindu town. Her house is always open to us, the upper room
always empty--or said to be so--when we are needing a rest. But she is a
Hindu of the Hindus, and though so enlightened that for love's sake she
touches us freely, taking our hands in hers, and even kissing us, after
we go there is a general purification; every scrap of clothing worn
while we were in the house is carefully washed before sunset.
She insisted now upon feeding us, called for plantains and sugar, broke
up the plantains, dabbed the pulp in the sugar, and commanded us to eat.
Then she sat down satisfied, and was photographed.
This town, a little ancient Hindu town, is two hours journey from
Dohnavur. There are thirty-eight stone temples and shrines in and around
it, and five hundred altars. No one has counted the number of idols;
there are two hundred under a single tree near one of the smaller
shrines. Each of the larger temples has its attendant temple-women;
there are two hundred recognised Servants of the gods, and two hundred
annual festivals.
Wonderful sums are being worked just now concerning the progress of
Christianity in India. A favourite sum is stated thus: the number of
Christians has increased during the last decade at a certain ratio.
Given the continuance of this uniform rate of increase, it will follow
that within a computable period India will be a Christian land. One flaw
in this method of calculation is that it takes for granted that
Brahmans, high-caste Hindus, and Mohammedans will be Christianised at
the same rate of progress as prevails at present among the depressed
classes.
There are sums less frequently stated. Here in the heart of this Hindu
town they come with force; one such sum worked out carefully shows that,
according to the present rate of advance, it will be more than twenty
thousand years before the Hindu towns of this district are even
nominally Christian. Another still more startling gives us this result:
according to the laws which govern statistics, thirteen hundred thousand
years must pass before the Brahmans in this one South Indian district
are Christianised. And if the sum is worked so as to cover all India,
the result is quite as staggering to faith based on statistics.
Praise God, this is not His arithmetic! It is a purely human invention.
We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; we believe in
God, even God Who calleth the things that are not as though they were:
therefore these sums prove nothing. But if such sums are worked at all,
they ought to be worked on both sides, and not only on the side which
yields the most encouraging results.
Two of us spent a morning in the Brahman street. In these old Hindu
towns the Brahman street is built round the temple, and in large towns
this street is a thoroughfare, and we are allowed in. The women stood in
the shadow of the cool little dark verandahs, and we stood out in the
sun and tried to make friends with them. Then some Mission College boys
saw us and felt ashamed that we should stand in that blazing heat, and
they offered us a verandah; but the women instantly cleared off, and the
men came, and the boys besought us under their breath to say nothing
about our religion.
We spoke for a few minutes, throwing our whole soul into the chance. We
felt that our words were as feathers floating against rocks; but we
witnessed, and they listened till, as one of them remarked, it was time
to go for their noontide bathe, and we knew they wished us to go. We
went then, and found a wall at the head of the Brahman street, and we
stood in its shadow and tried again. Crowds of men and lads gathered
about us, but our College boys stood by our side and helped to quiet
them. "Now you see," they said to us, as they walked with us down the
outer street, "how quite impossible for us is Christianity."
It is good sometimes to take time to take in the might of the foe we
fight. That evening two of us had a quiet few minutes under the temple
walls. Those great walls, reaching so high above us, stretching so far
beyond us, seemed a type of the wall Satan has built round these souls.
We could touch this visible wall, press against it, feel its solid
strength. Run hard against it, and you would be hurt, you might fall
back bleeding; it would not have yielded one inch.
And the other invisible wall? Oh, we can touch it too! Spirit-touch is a
real thing. And so is spirit-pain. But the wall, it still stands strong.
It was moonlight. We had walked all round the great temple square, down
the silent Brahman streets, and we had stood in the pillared hall, and
looked across to the open door, and seen the light on the shrine.
Now we were out in God's clean light, looking up at the mass of the
tower, as it rose pitch-black against the sky. And we felt how small we
were.
Then the influences of the place began to take hold of us. It was not
only masonry; it was mystery. "The Sovereigns of this present Darkness"
were there.
How futile all of earth seemed then, against those tremendous forces and
powers. What toy-swords seemed all weapons of the flesh. Praise God for
the Holy Ghost!
While we were sitting there a Brahman came to see what we were doing,
and we told him some of our thoughts. He asked us then if we would care
to hear his. We told him, gladly. He pointed up to the temple tower.
"That is my first step to God." We listened, and he unfolded, thought by
thought, that strange old Védic philosophy, which holds that God, being
omnipresent, reveals Himself in various ways, in visible forms in
incarnations, or in spirit. The visible-form method of revelation is
the lowest; it is only, as it were, the first of a series of steps which
lead up to the highest, intelligent adoration of and absorption into the
One Supreme Spirit. "We are only little children yet. We take this small
first step, it crumbles beneath us as we rise to the next, and so step
by step we rise from the visible to the invisible, from matter to
spirit--to God. But," he added courteously, "as my faith is good for me,
so, doubtless, you find yours for you."
Next morning we went down to the river and had talks with the people who
passed on their way to the town. It was all so pretty in the early
morning light. Men were washing their bullocks, and children were
scampering in and out of the water. Farther downstream the women were
bathing their babies and polishing their brass water-vessels. Trees met
overhead, but the light broke through in places and made yellow patches
on the water. Out in one of those reaches of yellow a girl stood bending
to fill her vessel; she wore the common crimson of the South, but the
light struck it, and struck the shining brass as she swung it up under
her arm, and made her into a picture as she stood in her clinging wet
red things against the brown and green of water and wood. Everywhere we
looked there was something beautiful to look at, and all about us was
the sound of voices and laughter, and the musical splashing of water;
then, as we enjoyed it all, we saw this:
Under an ancient tree fifteen men were walking slowly round and round,
following the course of the sun. Under the tree there were numbers of
idols, and piles of oleander and jessamin wreaths, brought fresh that
morning. The men were elderly, fine-looking men; they were wholly
engrossed in what they were doing. It was no foolish farce to them; it
was reality.
There is something in the sight of this ordinary, evident dethronement
of our God which stirs one to one's inmost soul. We could not look at
it.
Again and again we have gone to that town, but to-day those men go round
that tree, and to-day that town is a fort unwon.
Petra, I have called it; the word stands for many a town walled in as
that one is. In Keith's _Evidence of Prophecy_ there is a map of Petra,
the old strong city of Edom, and in studying it a light fell upon
David's question concerning it, and his own triumphant answer, "Who will
lead me into the strong city? Who will bring me into Edom? Wilt not
Thou, O God?" for the map shows the mountains all round except at the
East, where they break into a single narrow passage, the one way in.
There was only one way in, but there _was_ that one way in!
Here is a town walled up to heaven by walls of Caste and bigotry, but
there must be one way in. Here is a soul walled all round by utter
indifference and pride, but there must be one way in.
"Who will lead me into the strong city? Who will bring me into Edom?
=Wilt not Thou, O God?="
CHAPTER XIII
Death by Disuse
"There is a strong tendency to look upon the
Atonement of Christ as possessing some quality by
virtue of which God can excuse and overlook sin in
the Christian, a readiness to look upon sinning as
the inevitable accompaniment of human nature
'until death do us part,' and to look upon
Christianity as a substitute for rather than a
cause of personal holiness of life."
_Rev. I. W. Charlton, India._
"From many things I have heard I fancy many at
home think of the mission as a sort of little
heaven upon earth, but when one looks under the
surface there is much to sadden one. . . . Oh,
friends, much prayer is needed! Many of the agents
know apparently nothing about conversion.
"You may not like my writing so plainly, but
sometimes it seems as if only the bright side were
given, and one feels that if God's praying people
at home understood things more as they really are
. . . more prayer for an outpouring of the Holy
Spirit on our agents and converts would ascend to
God. . . . We do long to see all our pastors and
agents really converted men, men of prayer and
faith, who, knowing that they themselves are
saved, long with a great longing to see the
heathen round them brought out of darkness into
His light, and the Christians who form their
congregations, earnest converted men and women."
_A. J. Carr, India._
"Fifty added to the Church sounds fine at home,
but if only five of them are genuine what will it
profit in the Great Day?"
_David Livingstone, Africa._
"Oh for the Fire to set the whole alight, and melt
us all into one mighty Holy-Ghost Church!"
_Minnie Apperson, China._
THE lamps were being lighted, the drums beaten, the cymbals struck, and
the horns blown for evening pujah in all the larger temples and shrines
of the "Strong City," when we turned out of it, and, crossing the
stream that divides the two places, went to the Christian hamlet, which
by contrast at that moment seemed like a little corner of the garden of
the Lord. Behind was the heathenish clash and clang of every possible
discord, and here the steady ringing of the bell for evening service;
behind was all that ever was meant by the "mystery of iniquity," and
here the purity and peace of Christianity. This is how it struck me at
first; and even now, after a spell of work in the heart of heathendom,
Christendom, or the bit of it lying alongside, is beautiful by contrast.
There you have naked death, death unadorned, the corpse exhibited; here,
if there is a corpse, at least it is decently dressed. And yet that
evening it was forced upon me that death is death wherever found and
however carefully covered.
[Illustration: "I do feel so shy!" she was just on the point of saying
to me, by the way of appeal to be released, when the camera clicked and
she was caught. Widows do not wear jewels, as a rule, among the Hindus
of the higher Castes, but Christians do as they like. She is a village
woman of fairly good position.]
The first of the Christians to welcome us was a bright-looking
widow--this is her photograph. We soon made friends. She told us she had
been "born in the Way"; her grandfather joined it, and none of the
family had gone back, so she was sure that all was right. We were not so
sure, and we tried to find out if she knew the difference between
joining the Way and coming to Christ. This was only a poor little
country hamlet, but everywhere we have travelled, among educated and
uneducated alike, we have found much confusion of thought upon this
subject.
"God knows my heart," she said, "God hears my prayers. If I see a bad
dream in the night, I pray to God, and putting a Bible under my head, I
sleep in perfect peace." Could anything be more conclusive?
There were numbers of other proofs forthcoming: If your grandfather gave
six lamps to the church, value three and a half rupees each (the
lamps are hanging to-day, and bear witness to the fact); if your father
never failed to pay his yearly dues, besides regular Sunday collections
(his name is in the church report, and how much he gave is printed); if
you freely help the poor, and give them paddy on Christmas Day (quite a
sackful of it); if you never offer to demons (no, not when your children
are sick, and the other faithless Christians advise you); if you never
tie on the cylinder (a charm frequently though covertly worn by purely
nominal Christians); and finally, if you have been baptised and
confirmed, and "without a break join the Night-supper," surely no one
can reasonably doubt that you are a Christian of a very proper sort? As
to questions about change of heart, and chronic indulgence in sins, such
as lying--who in this wicked world lives without lying? And when it
pleases God to do it He will change your heart.
We took the evening meeting for the villagers, who meanwhile had
gathered and were listening with approval. Privacy, as we understand it,
is a thing unknown in India. "That is right," they remarked cheerfully;
"give her plenty of good advice!" And we all trooped into the
prayer-room.
Once in there, everyone put on a sort of church expression, and each one
took his or her accustomed seat in decorous silence. The little
school-children sat in rows in front on the mats with arms demurely
folded, and sparkling eyes fixed solemnly; the grown-up people sat on
their mats on either side behind, and we sat on ours facing them. We
began with a chorus, which the children picked up quickly and shouted
lustily, the grown-ups joining in with more reserve; and then we got to
work.
Blessing spoke. She had once been a nominal Christian, and she knew
exactly where these people were, and how they looked at things. Her
heart was greatly moved as she spoke, and the tears were in her eyes,
for she knew none of these friends had the joy of conscious salvation,
and she told me afterwards she had thirst and hunger for them. But they
listened unimpressed. Then we had prayer and a quiet time; sometimes the
Spirit works most in quiet, and we rose expectantly; but there was no
sign of life.
After the meeting was over they gathered round us again. They are always
so loving and friendly in these little villages; but they could not
understand what it was that troubled us. Were they not all _Christians_?
Shortly afterwards they came, as their kindly custom is, to bring us
fruit and wreaths of flowers on New Year's Day. I missed my first friend
of that evening, and asked for her. "That widow you talked to?" said the
old catechist, "three days ago fever seized her, and"--He broke o
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