Dagon Must Stoop

RAVES and gardens: Weights and Overweights. Sometimes we pass backwards and forwards from grave to garden; then the scales are poised just evenly. Sometimes the grave appears to encroach upon the garden; then life’s equilibrium becomes disturbed. Sometimes what we thought was a grave blossoms into a garden; then there is an Overweight of Joy.

We were travelling home one evening, after a week’s itineration, when we saw a group of people standing on the steep slope which led from a village we were passing to the river we were skirting. The men stood in silence. The women wailed. Then they stopped, uplifted long arms, and tossed them as if parting from their dead.

You cannot live for unbroken years of intercourse with the East without becoming in some measure Easternised. Your ear is filled with the sound of the East, and its sights are in your eyes. You have breathed of its atmosphere, drunk of its spirit; what appeals to it appeals to you. You find yourself thinking its thoughts with it, instinctively, unconsciously; and

on some simple lines of thought, at least, the grave old

East thinks like a child. So we did what a child would have done — stopped the bandy, listened, looked, felt the appeal in the things sung, shared the hour’s life with the people there.

Presently the little knot of white and brown straightened out. There was a burst of wailing from the women. It ceased as the men streamed down the bank. The last light of day fell full on them and the burden that they bore. It was a grey-haired woman. The head lay on a mass of flowers; flowers crowned it,” drew round it, fell in long lines of colour down to the feet. But the dead face looked awful in the red glow; as it passed I remembered where I had seen it last, and saw, as if lit by that red glow, a stone verandah, an old woman sitting thereon, repeating Tamil poetry, a child in the street below, jumping up and down, and laughing as she quoted poetry.

This dead woman was that child’s grandmother. She had trained her eldest daughter, as her mother had trained her, for the service of the gods. She had trained and given her grandchild to the service of the gods. Her whole long life from its very start had been bent towards evil of the darkest sort. She had left that little once-innocent child to carry on her work. The thought of it was unbearable. The horror of contact with the unclean was upon us. We tried to turn full from it. “Drive on,” we said to the bandy-man. The light faded in the west, the clouds rolled up and blotted out the stars. Then from the river bank two tongues of yellow flame forked up where they were burning her. The bandy-man drove faster.

Before the ashes of that woman were cold on the bank, there was another funeral by the same river-side.

The Village of the Grove is built of mud or sand. Round it is a belt of jungle. Its people are yeomen, and accustomed to grapple with adverse circumstances, bare sand, scrub, and the like. Work in such places has an interest of its own.

Among the first there to respond to the teaching was a nominal Christian of some position. We call him Lighted Face now, because of the way the light shines out. Soon after his conversion he began to try to win others; and one of the first his brightened life attracted to enquire, was a young Hindu who for several years had been seeking the forgiveness of sins.

We so seldom meet anyone who feels his sins enough to seek forgiveness, that his story was a rare delight, and I give it as he told it to us before his baptism:

“I felt a burden like a great weight fastened to me, and I could not get it off. I went to my father, who had long before built a shrine wherein he worships every day. I asked him, ‘Father, what must one do to get one’s sins forgiven? ‘Said my father, ‘Learn a thousand stanzas of our ancient Tamil poetry, then your sins will be forgiven.’ I learned the thousand stanzas, and many more than those. I meditated on the wisdom contained in them. But my sins were not forgiven. Then I went to my father again; I told him the burden was heavy, as heavy as before. He advised me to find an ascetic and propound my question to him. I found one and pressed him hard. Driven to tell the truth, he confessed to me that he knew his own sins were not forgiven. Then I was indignant. Those who profess to know, know nothing. And I discontinued my search.”

Someone gave him a Bible about this time. But the giver was one who beat out life’s music harshly; the young man heard the discord. He hardly opened the book.

Then he met Lighted Face; the light drew him. The two men talked often together. Lighted Face persuaded him to listen outside the village prayer-room while hymns were sung, and the way he had sought in vain was shown. A chorus, repeatedly sung, charmed him, and he decided to find out who this Saviour so often mentioned really was, and what He could do. After the meeting Lighted Face led him to Mr. Walker’s tent. He left it a free man: “I knew I was free from the burden.”

After this, more nominal Christians and more Hindus were converted, and gradually a band of earnest young men gathered round Lighted Face, who proved to have powers of leadership folded up within him. The little band grew month by month, and became keon to win others.

The stir among the Christians led to a corresponding stir among the Hindus. They sent one of their number to be trained to read and explain the Eamayana. Evening by evening they met under an awning in the village square, and listened for hours to the singsong chant, broken by translation into colloquial Tamil. The Christians then organised public Bible readings on the same plan; the work went on in interesting and purely

Eastern fashion, and others, chiefly young men, were won.

Among the most vehement opposers was a lad of eighteen or twenty, notably strong in badness, and impossible to approach. He came to open-air meetings and public Bible readings and broke them up. He excelled in all sorts of crude wickedness. He feared nobody, and cared for nothing. So when one afternoon in the middle of an open-air meeting the whisper was passed, “That boy is here,” we prayed, and the message went straight to his heart.

His baptism day stands out marked. Baptism with us is very simple. We all go down to the nearest water, and stand on the bank or shore while those about to be baptized witness in a few words to their Saviour. Then the one who is going to give baptism walks into the water, and those who are to be baptized follow him out, till the water is deep enough to cover them when they stoop as they do in their ordinary bathing. Nothing could be less distracting or more significant of the inner meaning of baptism. It is a thought clothed in a transparent deed. Out in the open air somehow formality seems shy of spoiling the service. It all feels living and real.

The nearest water to the Village of the Grove is the famous Copper-coloured river, counted sacred here. On the opposite bank a Brahman town brought its groups of spectators, clusters of women on the flat housetops, and groups of men on the steps leading down to the river. All the Christians came with the five new converts, and we stood together on the sand on the edge of

the sunset-tinted water. All nature seemed in sympathy. There was such a radiance of beauty in the light and the colour on the river. It was as if God were looking down and shining a smile through to us, and we could not help looking up and smiling back to Him.

For some months all went well. The Village of the Grove does not expel converts, but it persecutes them. The boy’s conduct was so changed that the people despaired of ordinary means of coercion, and tried others; he gave way, only a little, but enough to dull the edge of his joy and his confidence in God.

There is an Indian story of a king whose life was so blameless that no way could be found by which an evil spirit who wanted to ruin him could enter in. At last, one day when he was bathing, the king left one small spot unwashed. It was only the size of a thorn-tip, but it was all the demon asked. The story says he entered

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by it, and marred the good king’s life. Some minute point was compromised by the boy. The Hindus boasted their victory. Then the boy sickened with fever, and his relations took possession of him, and would not let the Christians near. “He is ours now. His her.rt is ours. You will see no more of him,” they said.

The Grove villagers do nothing by halves. The Christians knew that great pressure would be brought to bear upon the boy. He would need their help, they knew, and they could not go to him. A week or two passed, and most unsatisfactory accounts of his condition reached them. He had yielded to his people. He would die a true Hindu. A day or so later he died.

There are lines in Milton’s Samson Agonistes which often invigorate us. They are too strong to bear abbreviation, so I quote in full. Samson is speaking to his father before the last scene when he pulls the house down upon the Philistines:

“All the contest is now

‘Twixt God and Dagon. Dagon hath presumed,
Me overthrown, to enter lists with God,
His deity comparing and preferring
Before the God of Abraham. He, be sure,
Will not connive, or linger, thus provoked;
But will arise, and His great name assert:
Dagon must stoop, and shall ere long receive
Such a discomfit, as shall quite despoil him
Of all these boasted trophies won on me,
And with confusion blank his worshippers.”

Manoah answers:

“With cause this hope relieves thee, and these words
I as a prophecy receive; for God,
Nothing more certain, will not long defer
To vindicate the glory of His name
Against all competition, nor will long
Endure it, doubtful whether God be Lord,
Or Dagon.”

We heard at once of the boy’s death. There was nothing to show that God had conquered. It seemed far more probable that Dagon having won so much had won all.

But on the evening of the same day the Hindus went to the Christians and said, “Take away his body. Bury it with your Christian rites. We could do nothing with him. He belongs to your God and to you.” They admitted they had wrestled with him up to the last. Weak, dying, he had struggled hard against them. They “HlS UNCONTROLLABLE INTENT” 219

had considered him defeated because he had given in at first. They found, to their confusion, they had entered lists with God. The Christians carried their brother forth and buried him with singing.

We felt it good to know it. Naturally the relatives would have suppressed the truth, which reflected no glory upon Dagon. But they told the truth; and we who had sorrowed, hurt by the doubt, rejoiced when we heard it. Perhaps somewhere there is a heart that is troubled though it need not be, hurt by a doubt that would pass if it knew all. We are children of limited vision, often distorted vision. God may see a garden where we only see a grave.

Sometimes two events or scenes are linked together in one’s mind by very force of contrast. Those two so different funerals are like two pictures hung together in the Picture room. When the woman with her silent mouth seems to say hopeless things, the boy sings: Dagon having overthrown Samson has entered lists with God. Can we doubt as to the end of such a conflict? No smooth sayings can take away the fact of sin: the woman’s face is dark. But the boy: look on, look on to the end. “The End crowns all.”