Blockhead

But we must look back a little to see how by simplest means causes are set in motion that lead to answered prayer.

Down in the dusty, noisy world a boy of fourteen sat in the stuffy twilight of a back room opening off an Indian bazaar. He was wrestling with accounts which would not come straight. He toiled earnestly, piling up little heaps of copper and silver and counting them over and over again; but there was some queer muddle somewhere, and they refused to square with the roughly scrawled figures on the tally. He was baffled.

‘* Blockhead!”’ said his father tersely. “‘ Blockhead!”’

It was too much for the boy.

*“Is it just, is it fair,’’ he flamed out, ‘‘to call me ‘blockhead’ when you have never sent me to school? Let me go to Dohnavur and learn!”

If towards the end of a festival day a cracker had walked across the street and gone off exactly under him, the father, man of repose as he was, would have jumped. He jumped now, mentally speaking, and he stared at the boy, flabbergasted.

Dohnavur!

From that day on the idea laid firm hold of Kinglet, and when he saw his mother he told her of it. She saw in it the answer to the longings of her heart. Of Star’s, of course, she as yet knew nothing.

But the letter, written by dictation, told Star that for some time — ‘‘ for about three months,”’ Star read with awe — her eldest boy had been beseeching to be allowed to go to Dohnavur. Might she bring him? Might she bring her second boy, too? She wanted to give them to God. Her husband had consented. When might she come?

‘“About three months.’? It could not be a mere coincidence; but Star, who has all her life gone to the bedrock of things, knew that such words as “‘I give my sons to God’’ might mean much or very little, and she did not, let it be remembered, know anything of all we know of those brave years. She did not know that Mimosa was a worshipper of our God.

But she did know that the Hindu father did not fear that his boys would become true and earnest followers of Christ. Had he not seen many a lad, his own nephews, for example, sent to school to be educated, returned in the holidays to be subjected to all the ancient influences, finally turned out, what? Christians, perhaps, but keeping caste as of old, which after all is the great matter, dealing with life in the Hindu way, not trammelled by Christian principles when they proved inconvenient; in fact, much like their fore-bears only more or less educated. Who fears veneer? Not the Hindu father who knows the firm quality of the grain of the wood below. He would not deny that there have been a few exceptions. But they are not frequent enough to cause alarm.

Star wrote, therefore, explaining clearly that this, as an end of education, did not even come into our thoughts. And she told them our aim, even the conversion of the children, their deliverance from caste, and their devotion to the service of Christ; and she explained what the means were, which we felt led most directly to this end.

It was a hard letter to write, for it seemed to shut the door, and turn the key in the lock. It would have been harder still to write, could Star have known all that lay behind that letter of Mimosa’s, seen the marks of the tears on it, felt the throb of the years init. These for the moment were hidden from her. But she did greatly long to have the handling of her sister’s boys, and there was one moving word; a dictated letter can tell so little, but Mimosa referred to her childhood’s desire, and said that perhaps it was to be fulfilled in these her sons.

Back went Star’s answer, slowly as letters go through country places, and at last it reached Mimosa. Who with even the faintest flicker of imagination can fail to see her, as she listened to the unimpressive reading of it by her husband? Star had thought it would almost certainly close the door. It had taken no common courage to write it. All Mimosa’s courage was needed to hear it read slowly and disapprovingly. Word by word it dropped into her heart like lead. It was impossible that her husband would ever agree to this

But her Father would hear the prayer of His child. How often He had heard! Deep in her spirit there was peace; she prayed again.

And the impossible happened. We call the opening of the iron gate of Peter’s prison a miracle. We know something of iron gates. We also know something of the Hindu, not as he is in the modern and modified India, but as he is in his own fastness of caste; we know that no iron gate that ever was hung is more firmly padlocked than is his mind where such things are concerned. Futile as the father had proved himself to be, poor-spirited as he undoubtedly is, he was and is a Hindu. He would have had his caste behind him had he said *‘ No.’’ And yet he said ‘‘ Yes,”’ and Mimosa wrote that they would come. - Her heart sang with the birds that day.

PP