Dry Land
WE are often glad that India is not all a Shah Najaf. And though we feel strongly that it is time Christ’s soldiers were in more earnest about winning the forts that are harder to win, it is good to know there are many less inaccessible places, such as Skywisdom’s village, and a multitude of people for whom conversion need not necessarily mean complete social ostracism. When a village allows a Christian of its own clan to continue living within it, and to share its common life, there is hope for that village. The light can shine from within, instead of only from without. But even here, it is not a case of “come, see, and conquer “; the tactics of the enemy are different, his attack less ferocious; but he is there, though we may not see him distinctly at first.
Once more our story looks back to the year when the antagonistic town said “Victory to Siva,” and saw victory to Christ. Six or seven miles east of that town there is a village where nothing of note had ever happened, so far as any one knew. Several nominal Christians lived there, and the villagers knew the main facts of Christianity, but they took no interest in it, “TOO BLIND TO HAVE DESIRE TO SEE” 163
Their field of thought was small. All that makes life tense, vivid, was just not there, or at least was not apparent. If you want to know how circumscribed village life may be, sit down by the well in the early morning, and listen to the conversation. Then spend the forenoon in a friendly courtyard. You will find food for reflection.
The village was fast asleep, what the Bible calls dead. A real fight is exhilarating, but the stillness of the sleep of death has nothing exciting about it. In such places one’s faith is apt to lie low, and one is inclined to be almost quiescent. We need to be roused and shamed out of our fatal content to live while sou e are dead. We need to be reinspired with the faith tha accounts God able to raise them up even from the dead.
This slumberous village was not closed to us. It belonged to a caste which was not affected by the happenings elsewhere. We valued the opportunity to visit it and its allied villages during the hot season of that year, when distant itineration was impossible.
Imagine a waste of blazing sand; the reflected glow rises up through the hot air and heats it seven times hotter. You wonder how the cactus and the scrub can live in such hot sand. It burns the bare feet of a boy as he runs across it. But there is water near, and a perfect oasis of palm. You pass it, and cross a jungle belt. Your bullock cart presses its way through the thorns, and they scratch its roof vindictively. On you go, and the thorns grow still closer and tear at your mat roof more fiercely. At last you break through and find yourself in the village, whose name means the Village of Sand, but which we call the Village of Shrines.
There are more shrines than houses. Small, pyramidical red mud altars stand under every scrubby tree. It is Athens in mud. But the contrast between marble and mud is as nothing compared with the contrast between those Athenians and these villagers, from whose mind nothing is further than the desire to hear or tell any new thing. The Tamils are a most intelligent race, and capable of almost anything; but you often come across hamlets like this one, buried in the country, whose inhabitants know little, and care less, about the movements of the world outside their encompassing jungle. One would have expected that so many shrines implied some keenness about religion; but if such a sentiment existed, it was most successfully concealed.
Stand now with us by these thorn bushes and look: you see tumble-down cottages, built anyhow and anywhere, surrounded by broken mud walls and half-finished fences. There is not a straight length of street, or a well-swept courtyard, or a thrifty-looking homestead in the place.
A chorus, sung lustily, if not musically, brings the women out into the sunshine, and, nothing loth, they loll about on their narrow verandah-ledges and gaze at us from afar. Another chorus, and they come a little closer. One of us, an Indian sister, speaks; they move off slowly, just out of earshot, and begin to talk to each other. The poor sister looks blank, expostulates, invites, in vain. Nobody has curiosity enough to listen, though they are willing to stare, for that does not involve an
exertion. So we scatter, and go to their houses, and talk to them one by one. Some drift off to their work; some listen a little. The Gospel of Christ is the Power of God, the Power of God, we say to ourselves over and over, and watch to see it lay hold on a soul, and, in spite of all seemings, believe to see. But just then and there we see nothing at all. And we work our way back through the thorns to the cart.
We went again; it was just the same. Repeated visits only deepened our disappointment. We might as well have spoken to their native sand for all the impression we appeared to create upon the people. The place was like a bit of primeval creation, for no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up. It was just dry land, so dry and hard that we felt as if the little blade of the tender grass would be hurt and broken if it tried to win its way through, anywhere — till we remembered the mist that went up and watered the whole face of the ground; and the imagery of the 65th Psalm seemed illuminated in the tropical light: “Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it. Thou greatly enrichest it; the river of God is full of water: Thou providest them corn when Thou hast so prepared the earth. Thou waterest her furrows abundantly; Thou settlest the ridges thereof: Thou makest it soft with showers; Thou blessest the springing thereof.” The very thought of it all brought cool in the midst of the heat.
But for months we worked on, and saw nothing. The people listened or did not listen, just as they felt inclined. They never argued or opposed. They were not alive enough. They were perfectly content to be as they were. The vision that dissatisfied was not yet theirs. All workers in all lands know some such men and women; know, too, what it is to wonder whether there is any use in going on trying to arouse them.
At last we became aware of a certain sensible difference. There was a little feeble opposition, which gradually gathered force. Something was happening. We waited awhile before we could be sure that the something would develop into anything. Meanwhile, we went away on an itinerating tour. We returned to find the first blade through. A man and his wife in the Village of Shrines were genuinely converted. They had heard at an open-air meeting — the man at one, the woman at another. They knew very little, but they were sure of that little. From that time forth we had a welcome when we went.
Some months passed, and we had a Baptism day. Then it came out that the wife was a notable character. She had been a devil-dancer; and she had all the power and influence of one upon whom the afflatus falls; so her baptism made a certain stir. One could see a look upon the faces of the people as they saw her go down into the water — a wondering, almost frightened look. There was a breathless pause as she stood there, out in the shining of the sunset, — and then she came back radiant. And we lived in the thirteenth verse of our Psalm that day: “They shout for joy, they also sing.”
But the Village of Shrines was still Athens in mud. Perhaps one little mud altar was knocked down that day. Scores of them still stood hot and red as we passed them week by week. The people do not belong “HOPE THOU IN GOD” 167
to a caste which refuses a Christian house-room in its midst, so our friends went back to their home, and witnessed bravely there. But two months passed blankly. Nobody stirred. The village seemed to have turned in its sleep, and to sleep all the sounder for having been roused.
One morning, shortly before we went, as we waited before the Lord about the place, we felt drawn to ask for the conversion of some one there that very day. And the name of one, of whom we knew, was brought to us as we prayed. We were pressed to ask for her. Everyone who knows what it is to be moved to pray in this way knows how solemn it is, and how easily a mistake may be made; and yet when the pressure comes we dare not resist it: so we prayed.
The one whose name was brought before us was not a woman we should have chosen. She was a Temple devotee, a widow with two children, very ignorant, and so far as we knew quite uninterested in Christianity. Moreover, we did not know that she was in the village, and we did not know where her house was. We knew that if we went and asked for her, she would promptly hide or be hidden. So there was nothing hopeful in the prospect from a human point of view. It looked impossible. But we have not to look at things from a human point of view, so that did not matter, and “we reckon on God who is at home in impossibilities.”
When this prayer was laid on us, there were two of our little band who felt puzzled. They said, “But how shall we find her?” As our cart broke through the thorn bushes, and we got out and stood on the sand, a woman in white ran out of a house near by and flung herself down on the ground at our feet. It was this very woman. I had not seen her before; but I knew in a moment by the band sisters’ faces that it must be she.
We drew her aside, and she followed as one in a trance. We got her into the prayer-room, and tried to find out what had brought her to us, for never before had we seen one come like that, unless she was in bodily need and eagerly craving help. She had nothing to say about it. Then we told her how we had prayed. She did not understand. There she sat on the floor, and we beside her, a dull, stupid, uninteresting woman, without the least apparent desire after God, yet “He died for desire of her.” We looked at her, and read the writing on her forehead which no earth soil could quite obliterate, “For whom Christ died.”
Stupid was what she seemed at first; imbecile was what she seemed after half an hour’s endeavour to get one thought into her mind. Every few minutes she glanced at the door as if meditating an escape. We tried to put things before her in simple ways, using familiar illustrations to arrest her attention. But after a time we began to doubt whether she was capable of paying attention to anything. We almost gave up at last. She did not want to listen, she only wanted to get away. And yet she had come of her own accord. We were mystified. Then a bystander said something which threw a light upon it. I did not stop to think of all that was meant at that moment; but realising that talking was useless, and holding her lest she should slip away, we knelt down beside her and prayed.