He Shall See of the Travail of His Soul
HOW shall I tell what happened?” he writes, looking back on that illuminated day. “God opened my heart, and I opened my lips to praise Him for His love.” Simply told, is it not? “God opened my heart: I opened my lips.” Life henceforth was to be for him full of that opening of the lips which fills other lips with song.
But not quite yet.” Now, though none of my family knew of my change, they began to grow suspicious about me, because I discontinued my former religious observances; and they asked questions about it. I put them off with evasive answers. I used to pray on my mat, after all had retired. Sometimes my wife would come unexpectedly and ask me some question, and my silence increased her suspicions. I soon got tired of concealments, and calling her alone one day, I said a few words gently about Christianity. She at once began to cry and make a great noise, threatening to take her life.
“When I came to the decision to become a Christian, we had three little daughters under five years of age. My chief anxiety was lest, by becoming an open Christian, I should plunge my family in great grief and confusion; “RESTLESSLY AT REST” 105
and though my decision was not weakened by this, I had not the boldness to shake myself free from my fear, and take the open step. And so it came to pass that I spent some time like a man fast bound in prison.”
This will seem incredible to some. Had he not known the Lord Christ? To others it will seem only natural, indeed right. His mother had been already sorely stricken by her other son’s defection; how could he raise his hand to strike her again? His wife trusted him; how could he wrong her trust? His relations, though not dependent upon him, were connected by closest ties of affection; uncles and aunts who had known him from childhood, cousins innumerable. In England families subdivide: in India they hold together. How could he, as he said, plunge all these people, who loved him, and whom he loved, into “great grief and confusion.” He could not wreck the home: all that was good in him rose and protested. So he did certain compromising things, and instead of the sword, there was peace. How could he do otherwise? someone asks with sympathy. “Things that appeared undoubted sins wear little crowns of light” (if we may misquote in thought), when we looJ: at them from the human side, and sympathise first, with each other, and second, with God. “For the bravest sin that ere was praised, the King Eternal wore a crown of thorns “: that is how the matter looks from the other side. He realised this at last.
Then came the inevitable agony. Would God it need not be! To smooth it over a friend suggested that if he went quietly to Madras, then farther from his home than India is from England as regards journey-time, it would be easier to confess Christ openly, and to persuade his wife to join him. Easier in every way, because the family would be among strangers, and not their own caste people. And so it was arranged. He left his wife and children with his mother, went to Madras, got work as Pandit, and wrote for his family to come and join him. Not knowing all, they consented; but, just as they were about to start, some one gave the alarm, — some “meddlesome old woman,” he writes disgustedly, — and they refused to come. A month afterwards, when the news reached him, he felt he could delay no longer. He and two other young caste men from his own country, who also wanted to be Christians, clubbed together, went to church together, studied the Bible together, and finally decided to be baptized together. His heart went out to them in clinging affection.
But spies were on the track. They had thought themselves unnoticed in the great city; but the Caste confederation has eyes everywhere, they had been under observation all the time. It was reported that they consorted with Christians, ceased wearing Vishnu’s marks, and were cooking for themselves, because their Hindu cook considered them reprobate. This brought two of the fathers in hot haste to Madras. Both sons yielded. The third had no father to come; the month’s journey was too much for the frail old mother, so he was left unmolested, and he went quietly on.
There were crowds in the great city, but none of his own. It was an empty city to him. Most of us have known such times, when the sudden ceasing of some voice makes a silence that “aches round” us “like a strong disease, and new.” His was the poet nature, sensitive to suffering as to happiness. Behind him lay his home, and all good memories; before him the heaped-up pain of hurting further those whom he most dearly loved; and around him, closing heavily, the silence.
It was the most difficult time in his life. He was helped through it by a young missionary to whom he was teaching Tamil. “She talked to me most feelingly about the Saviour, and steadied me in Christ. The work I did for her was little; the work she did for me was much.”
He saw his two friends occasionally, but most of his time was spent alone, and as he had no one to talk to he talked the more to his Lord. Conversations alone with Christ are wonderfully strengthening. Soon he felt himself urged with an inward urging to burn the bridge behind. He was baptized.
From this time onwards he was in truth a man in love with our Lord Jesus Christ. It pleased the Lord so to “line his heart with the love of his Lord Jesus,” that in the years when we knew him he could not speak of Him without a kindling of expression and a fervour that recalled Samuel Rutherford, Ter Steegen, and Tauler. The same spirit burned in him, the warm love that is not afraid of being too warm. The Love that would not let him go, but followed and found and won him, had won him now to an abandonment of love that broke out in rivers of love songs. Oh, for more and more of that love! “Oh, that He would strike out windows, and fair and great lights in this old house, this fallen-down soul, and then set the soul near-hand Christ, that the rays and beams of light and the soul-delighting glances of the fair, fair Godhead might shine in at the windows and fill the house! A fairer, and more near and direct sight of Christ would make room for His love; for we are but pinched and straitened in His love. Alas, it were easy to measure and weigh all the love that we have for Christ by inches and ounces. Alas, that we should love by measure and weight, and not rather have floods and feasts of Christ’s love! Oh, that Christ would break down the old narrow vessels of these narrow and ebb souls, and make fair, deep, wide, and broad souls, to hold a sea and a full tide (flowing over all its banks) of Christ’s love!”
And now one idea informed his life — the passion of the soul-winner was like a fire within him. He must return to his own house, and win his wife and mother. He left Madras, travelled southwards, eager, expectant, longing to see his dear ones again, and to tell them all. They received him with tears, with coldness, with bitter reproaches, and the turning away of the faces he loved.
“0 Cross, that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from Thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.”
“My mother’s agony was boundless. It would be impossible to describe it. I know not the words.” Things soften as we look back at them through the mist of many years. This thing, this pain, stands out unblurred in the sharpness of its outline, a cruel thing “THRONGING THROUGH” 109
and a bitter. The days that followed were like so many jagged-edged saws, sawing away relentlessly at the very nerves of his being. It is easy to be brave when our hearts are whole and well, but when they are cut and hurt, and strained all out of shape, then it is hard. “Strive to throng through the thorns of this life to be with Christ.” By God’s grace he thronged through, but for eighteen months it was a daily thronging through. His wife left him. He had two young children to see to. None of his womenfolk would help him. His old friends despised him. His people would have none of him.
After a while his mother relented, and helped him a little with the children. And the brother did what he could. But until his own wife came back to him he was desolate on the human side, though comforted as such must be: for “only heaven is better than to walk with Christ at midnight over moonless seas.”
He had kept the two little children in the hope that they would draw their mother back. She, widowed, according to Hindu feeling, held aloof in loneliness only second to his. But it was as he had hoped. She returned to the town, though not at first to her home. The children were sent to see her. After long waiting she was willing to return to her polluted home, for the sake of the mother - love that could not rest away. And he taught her patiently till at last she too found Christ.
After a time his old mother gave in, and several other members of his family were converted. He was greatly used in winning intelligent Hindus, men not easily
110 “HE SHALL SEE OF THE TRAVAIL OP HlS SOUL ’
satisfied. He became known as the “Catcher of Men.” No one since his time has exerted quite such an influence among young students and thinkers and caste-bound orthodox Hindus. It was not only his scholarship which all acknowledged and respected, it was his character. The Hindus studied him through the years of his outwardly uneventful life, and they recognised the man for what he was. So old age came quietly on, and then, as we have told it:
“To the light more clear than noon,
Passed a soul that grew to music
Till it was with God in tune.”
A Tamil manuscript has been sent to us by a lawyer, one of our leading Christians. He tells his story, as our poet told his, to the glory of God’s grace. He went to study, he says, in the Christian school where the poet was Professor of Tamil. He had come from his Hindu home, and was full of prejudice against Christians. His mother had feared to let him go among Christians lest they would inject mind-deluding medicine into a plantain and persuade him to eat it, or otherwise tamper with him and beguile him. So, fortified by warnings, and inclined himself to be on guard, he approached Christianity cautiously. He boarded with his Tamil professor, for caste reasons. He studied him with a boy’s keen eyes: “I never heard him tell a lie, never saw him confuse truth; in his God there must be a holy power,” was his conclusion. That boy became a man noted for integrity of life. It will not be known till eternity shows up the secrets of time, how much our Church owes to this one life, influenced at its source by that dear friend, who, while he influenced, never knew that he was doing anything.
One of the first Tamil scholars I knew was a keen teacher, whose lessons were valued by all of us. He taught me in his holiday time, and when I asked about the fee (for the hours were worth rupees to him), he would not hear of pay. “No,” he said, and stuck to it, “it is the way by which I can help you to get quickly to my people.” This man was won by the poet, led by him, as he told us, “to the Lotus feet of the Lover of souls.”
Two out of many — God keeps the count — are enough to prove the poet did not live in vain. The Gospel which made him what he was, has not come here in vain. Nor have we come in vain if we may have fellowship with our Lord in His joy, when He sees of the travail of His soul even here, in a sorrowful land, where so often He has grief.
Part of the most enduring work our poet did was literary. He has left books which we can give to the most critical Hindu, knowing that so far as the choice of language is concerned it will not repel him, but appeal to the finer part of him, and put the message before him intelligently and winningly. Not long ago a Christian schoolmaster was travelling by train in the same compartment as a Brahman. He asked the Brahman if he had ever heard of Christianity. For answer the Brahman retired to the farther end of the carriage. The Christian waited, then asked, “Do you care for poetry?” If there is one word which charms and draws a cultured Hindu it is the word poetry. The Brahman’s eyes glistened. The Christian began to chant stanzas from our poet’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The poem follows Indian rules of art; to the trained ear the fall of its cadence is quite perfect. The Brahman listened, won to listen at first by the beauty of the poem. Sin, redemption, Christ’s life and death, clear teaching about the way of salvation, outpourings of love and devotion, — still the Brahman listened. At last, after long chanting, broken by words of explanation here and there, the Christian stopped. “That is Christianity,” he said. The Brahman was disarmed. For the first time he had listened to “the wooing note.”
But looking back, as we do now, to the memory of our poet, we think of him most as our friend. The scholar lives by the work he did; the friend lives on in our hearts. The wise may talk of East and West, and how neither can ever meet or merge, because there will always be something between. In Christ there is no East and West; His love fuses the two into one. That old man was one of us; we were as one of his own to him. And when we meet in our real Home, where East and West are unspoken words, and all earth’s divisions forgotten, he will welcome us as a father would welcome the children remembered name by name, parted from him for a little while.