And It Was So

fTlHREE or four years after her conversion the devotee, -L Pearl Shell, got work in a market town some miles from her native village. Before she had been long there she heard of a young girl who was shut up in the town, and often mercilessly beaten because it was known that she wanted to be a Christian.

The year which we look back upon as the year of beginning of battles had been full of the sort of sorrow which battles mean. When the houses closed, as we told before, they closed upon eager, earnest, little hearts. Six children who, we knew, were much interested, lost all chance of hearing more. They were punished for wanting to hear. We heard of these punishments, and we felt as a mother would feel if her little ones were being badly hurt, and strong hands held her from running to them. One by one all the six gave way.

So often it is just like that: the plant is sending rootlets out: it will grip if it has time. Suddenly, fiercely downward sweeps a great wind from the wilderness, and we see what looks like our little plant flying with other frightened things in the dust before the storm. The great wind passes. We search for our “PIERCED WITH PAIN” 1*75

plant. We find it at last quite withered and dead, with dead white roots like tangled threads, lying limp on a heap of leaves, the de’bris of the storm. And only yesterday, perhaps, we were glad because it was alive.

There was one, a seventh, Sixfaced by name, whom we did not count, because she had not been properly taught. She had only heard a little in an open-air meeting. She came, after hearing that little, and asked us to keep her. She wanted to join our Way, she said. But she was much too young, and her knowledge of the Way she wished to join was so very limited that we did not seriously consider her proposal, but we sent her home, promising to call and ask her people to allow us to teach her.

We called as we promised, and we saw that child punished for having wished to be taught. The shock would hurt if we told how she was punished. Some of us have to stand such shocks, and they send us home tingling in every nerve, as if the blows had been twice our own, and they set our whole being crying to God, “How long? how long?”

After the punishment the child was hurried away to the town where Pearl Shell had found work. For three years we heard nothing of her. When Pearl Shell’s message reached us we felt sure that Sixfaced must be the girl in question. Inquiries proved it was so. We urged Pearl Shell to try to see her and to comfort her.

Pearl Shell found it difficult. Sixfaced was kept in what was virtually imprisonment. Occasionally the sound of blows and broken cries reached the outer world. Once the Hindu neighbours interfered. But such interference is not popular nor often possible in India. The uncle in whose guardianship the girl was, had killed her mother in a fit of passion. Money had changed hands. The thing had been hushed up. But men feared him; the defenceless child was wholly in his power.

One day, she tells us now, he had held her down firmly with one hand, while he struck her with the other, shouting between each blow, “This is for daring to persist that you will join the Christian Way.” She had almost utterly given up hope of any deliverance reaching her, but a new hope shot through her. She would pray. She had only once seen a Christian pray. She tried to recall how we did it. But the excitement of those few hurried minutes, when, three years ago, she had pleaded with us to keep her, had blotted out memory of detail. She only remembered we spoke to the One we called Jesus, the Loving Saviour, and that we had assured her He heard. So she joined her hands in the heathen way, and, with wide-open eyes looking timidly round lest her dreaded uncle should see, she repeated often her single petition, “Keep my uncle from beating me.” She did not expect to hear a voice answer. No voice had answered when we spoke in the bungalow. But she waited a minute, and felt comforted, she says. The room in which she was had grown dark. She remembered a fragment of truth she knew, that this Jesus Saviour had once been beaten, and then fastened (how, she did not know) to a piece of wood till He died. As He had been beaten, He must know how very much it hurt. She let the strange comfort of this thought sink down to the depths of her weary heart. Then she “KNEEL TO KNOW” 177

slipped out of the room. Her uncle was standing close to the door. She trembled as she saw him. But he did not speak to her. He never beat her again.

After this she seems to have understood she could pray about everything. Once a marriage seemed imminent: “Jesus, 0 Jesus! stop it. Do not let me be tied.” The marriage fell through. Then the relatives tried to entangle her by means of a kind of lottery. On a certain day, always postponed, a large sum of money and some jewels would fall to her share: “Jesus, 0 Jesus! let not my heart become caught by money and jewels.” And so she was kept.

But Sixfaced, by the time Pearl Shell after many vain attempts came in touch with her, was discouraged. She had waited through those three years in hope that we would come for her. We had told her, little thinking how eagerly she would remember it, that we could not protect her till she was sixteen. She believed herself sixteen now, and, not realising how impossible action on our part was, she could not understand our silence. For we had to be all but silent. We sent messages of love and sympathy to her through Pearl Shell, as soon as we knew where she was. But we could not say one word which could afterwards be translated into an invitation to come to us. We had no means of knowing that she was still steadfast, for much I have written was at that time unknown to us, and an Indian girl’s strength is not a thing to be counted upon. But Pearl Shell determined to help her to escape, and she prayed with the simple courage of faith for guidance in this difficult matter.

It was most difficult. Sixfaced did not look sixteen. How was she to be proved over sixteen? She was an orphan. The uncle, her guardian, could easily “prove” her any age he wished. It is a criminal offence to concern oneself with a minor’s escape from her home. Pearl Shell knew little of legal complications, but she did know that the caste could kill her if she did it. And the town was full of eyes.

One day when she was praying she believed that she was told to go to a certain stream, where sometimes Sixfaced was sent to bathe, and there to arrange with her (the opportunity, she believed, would be given) to walk out of the town there and then, in faith that the eyes of the people they would meet would be kept from seeing them. To that poor ignorant woman the thought was overwhelming. How could she dare do such a thing? She did it.

She went to the stream, found Sixfaced there, had a chance for a word alone. The girl, in utmost simplicity, believed God would work a miracle and “blind the eyes” of the people, her caste men, she knew they were sure to meet. Together these two walked straight from that stream, through the streets, and out of the town. When we heard it we hardly believed it; it sounded so impossible.

For three long miles they walked along the highway leading from that town to the village where we used to live. There they were welcomed by the pastor and his wife. There they heard the good news that next day Mr. and Mrs. Walker were expected, en route for Dohnavur, from Ceylon. “Lord, thou knowest we cannot protect this girl, if her people come in strength,” the “REJOICE WITH ME” 179

pastor prayed, “hinder them that they may not come till the Iyer and the Animal arrive from Ceylon.” This prayer was answered. The uncle was hindered in his purpose to gather his castemen and carry his niece off by force. Knowing nothing of the circumstances, Mr. and Mrs. Walker came just in time to stand by Sixfaced through the ordeal of facing her relations. Legal questions were not raised. Four days afterwards the joyful jingle of bullock bells brought us all out in expectancy. Such moments in missionary lives are Overweights of Joy.

Far more than Overweights! Oh, the joy that cannot be measured when the Shepherd says, “Rejoice with Me!” Can any words describe it? “I have such an intense recollection of the joy that comes in the work at times,” writes a Japanese missionary, “that I am half afraid of giving exaggerated impressions to people at home. Some people do seem to think it so extraordinary. Of course there are disappointments and discouraging times, which come very often. Still I don’t think there can be any other joy in the world quite like the joy of being with Christ when He finds a soul that has been out in the dark all its life.”

There was much to hear; and as we heard it told so simply, we felt as if this unknown one had sung her part in the martyr’s song —

“But I, amid the torture and the taunting,

I have had Thee. Thy hand was holding my hand fast and faster,

Thy voice was close to me;

And glorious eyes said, ‘Follow Me, thy Master; Smile as I smile, thy faithfulness to see.’

Perhaps this is too noble a song to fit in lips so ignorant. She did not know enough to rise so high.

Sometimes so many agencies are used towards the conversion of a soul that we almost lose sight of the arm of the Lord for the sleeve which covers it. But here it was laid bare. Surely that child was kept and led by a Power most evidently Divine that all “may know that this is Thy hand; that Thou, Lord, hast done it.”

Sixfaced (now called Gladness) had everything to learn. When for the first time she heard the full story of our Lord’s crucifixion she was broken-hearted. We read it to her slowly, verse by verse, from the 19th chapter of St. John. She had never seen it pictured; but as the words of that ancient writing dropped into her soul, they became spirit and life; it was as if a picture were being drawn and coloured before her. Together we sat in silence at the foot of the Cross, looking.

C. H. Tyndall, in his book Electricity and its Similitudes, shows how the intellectual and physical deficiency which makes us insensible to the finer forms of electrical energy about us, is analogous to our spiritual insensitiveness. If only we had an “electric eye,” an “electric sense,” what a world of wonder would open to us. If only the spirit within us were more sensitive to spiritual impressions, what surprises God could give us, what passion of joy! Or perhaps an unspeakable awe would fall such as fell upon us then; for as we sat together, suddenly the denseness of the flesh seemed to become thin. Almost that keener sense was given, almost that vision “HE SAYS HE WILL GO BACK WITH ME” 181

that pierces through sense, till, aware by some quick apprehension of a Presence moving somewhere near, our very soul trembled. The moment flashed for us and passed. No effort of will could recall it. Perhaps such moments long detained would be too intense for the mortal in us. We turned again to the usual. But that moment’s mark has not passed.

The devotee to whose simple courage we owed so much did not feel courageous. She would have been astonished had she known we thought her so. She feared to return to the town. Some child might have seen her with the girl, though apparently no grown person had. A child can talk. She dreaded the vengeance of the caste. She knew only too well what a mob of infuriated men and women can do. She knew, too, what can be done without a mob, in secret. She, an unprotected widow, to live among those people! At first she felt she could not; it would be like living over a smouldering fire. But she prayed. Then she said in a quiet, matter-of-fact fashion: “He says He will go back with me “; and she went back. When we heard about it we thought it heroic.

Think of what she was. God called the dry land Earth. We described the dry land poorly:

“Fuller for him be the hours 1
Give him emotion though pain 1
Let him live. Let him feel / have lived.
Heap up his moments with life.
Triple his pulses with fame!”

Take these five lines. Divest them of every iota of force. Reverse them. Let them lie out languid, nerveless. There you have the type we have tried to show — the lifeless, the dry land God called Earth.

God said, “Let the earth bring forth tender grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself. And it was so.”