With His Stripes We Are Healed
ABOUT this time his “Hindu soul” was stirred to its depths, and lashed into wrath, by the conversion of several of his friends. The first one to cross the line, and break for ever with life as it had been, was a fellow-Pandit, who as a fellow-student in old days had been “a fast heart-friend.” This was grief unspeakable. And worse followed; for shortly afterwards his own younger brother, together with two other friends, confessed themselves Christians, and were baptized.
“It would be impossible to describe all that followed this,” he writes:” the tumults which arose; the insults which the missionaries had to endure; the anguish which filled the hearts of the parents and relations of the newly baptized. No English mind can grasp the extent of the grief which my mother and I experienced on account of my brother’s conversion. However much I might say or write about it, it would still remain utterly beyond the ken of foreigners, and might only seem to them grotesque, extraordinary. I do not charge them with want of sympathy. I only say that it lies beyond the bounds of their experience.
“One of the two who had just been baptized had been for years my bosom friend. Though he was younger than myself my mind rejoiced to regard his word as the word of a very guru, because of the ripeness of his knowledge, keenness of intellect, and nobility of character and life.” All that was over now. In that hour of shock it seemed as if the friend dishonoured and defiled could be a friend no longer. The pain was poignant.
Between the brothers there was the same misery of estrangement. They had been united in a closeness of intimacy rare in the West: now seas divided them. And the mother, devoted as the Indian mother is with a devotion the more intense because the less diffused, had to see the son who was ever as the nursling to her heart, pass into another world with which hers held no communion. Night after night she wailed the death wail for him. To her love, to her care, he was dead.
And then while the wound was still too new to bear even the tenderest touch, the missionary touched it, by mistake. “Your brother has become a Christian, has he not? What is there now to hinder you?” This was to the Pandit. What was there to hinder? Only his mother’s completed desolation, his young wife’s woe. Was not the home stricken hard enough already? Stung to the quick the Pandit answered haughtily, left the room indignantly, and immediately sent in his resignation. The missionary recognised his mistake, would not accept the resignation, tried to explain where he could not console. But though he persuaded his Pandit to stay, and strove to show him he truly cared, he could not undo the effect of those words, and one can understand how the two must have drifted apart.
It all happened years ago. Pandit and pupil have long been together in the land where forgiveness means forgetting. But the incident speaks to us of to-day. There are times when we can best help a soul through silence, not speech.
After a time the young Pandit and his special friend drew together, in spite of their divergence of views, and the friend understanding him could help him. He lent him The Pilgrim’s Progress to read; the book became alluring to him, took hold of him, became at once his possession and possessor. In after years he translated or adapted it so finely in Tamil verse, that it has become the greatest of our Christian classics, judged from a higher Tamil point of view. “I have poured my life into that book,” he said once. “My heart’s deepest is in it.” But that was later.
“My friend impressed it strongly upon me,” the story continues, “that it was absolutely essential for me to forsake all known sin, otherwise it would be useless for me to read religious books, or indeed anything else. I acted upon his advice. I endeavoured to put away everything which I knew to be wrong in my life. Some glaring sins, my conscience being witness, I entirely forsook. Nevertheless, though an outward reformation took place to some extent, there was no inward cleansing from sin, neither was my mind constant and steadfast.
“When I met my friend later he told me to read the Gospel history in order, and to ask God to open my spirit-eyes. He taught me, too, how I should pray, and “ALL’S LOVE YET ALL’S LAW” 101
I set to work to follow his instructions. But though I came in this way to understand clearly the doctrines of the Saviour’s holy incarnation, I was all in a haze of confusion as to how His atonement could bring salvation to man.”
I have hesitated about copying out the next paragraph: the wonderful way of salvation is so familiar to the reader. But it may be, one will read this page whose feet have not yet trodden that path, and perhaps the old scholar’s description of what was to him such unfamiliar ground may be like a light from the East, falling upon it, making the steps show clearer.
“One day, when that soul-friend and I were alone together, I told him all about my doubts and bewilderment, and asked him questions on the subject. He therefore explained to me how the Lord Christ, the Son of God, had become the Mediator between the holy God and sinful men, who had broken God’s law, and were in sin’s dark prison. He showed me how He, the Christ, had become Surety for men, and was incarnate as the Reconciler (the One who makes smooth the unevenness between justice and mercy); how He had kept the law for men, being pure in mind, word, deed; that is, pure in His whole nature. For we Hindus regard the essentials of being as threefold: there is the mind, source of thought; the tongue, which forms words, expression of thought; the body, producing action, thought made visible. Viewed from all points He was pure. My friend further showed me how the Lord had wrought out spotless righteousness, and had taken upon Himself all the sins of all mankind, with all the punishment due to them; and how He had endured untold agony of soul and body on the cross, shedding His blood, and yielding up His life as a sacrifice for sin, and so providing for us most perfect merit. He went on to describe how He had risen victorious from the dead, and so finally procured eternal life for countless souls; and how He had ascended to Heaven, and taken up His glorious session on the right hand of the Father, there to intercede and bestow salvation on all believers. He explained, moreover, that since Christ was universal Lord, the salvation which He had purchased was available for all mankind, and that whosoever sincerely, with real contrition and repentance, believes that Christ alone is the Sin-Destroyer, the World-Saviour, and that He bore and put away his punishment, — is justified; and to him is imparted Christ’s perfect merit. ‘This is salvation,’ said my friend. ‘The one so saved is a liberated soul.’”
Then followed the new-old miracle. “The Spirit of God sent home this truth to my heart then and there. That very day I knew the Lord Christ. That very day I learned to pray in His name. That very day the sins which had seemed sweet to me before became bitterness itself. That very day I resolved to be a Christian.”
And that very day he who was to be known wherever the Tamil tongue is known as the Christian poet, sang his first song to the glory of the “Glorious Sea of Grace, bright Sun of Love, whose radiance makes the darkness flee.” Thought on thought and word on word came running up, eager to tell what cannot be told of the light like the light of the morning when the sun rises, of the fairness like the fairness of the green tender “SEE THE CHRIST STAND” 103
grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain, of the skyful of stars which all were suns that had suddenly opened above him. And he longed for power to express to his people the beauty and dearness of Christ Jesus his Redeemer, by whose stripes he was healed.