The Spaces Between
DAGON must stoop. “With him is an arm of flesh; but with us is the Lord our God to help us and fight our battles.” As the splendid sentence falls we see as in a scroll unrolled the future history of the world written in clear characters. And yet, to-day, if we quietly contemplate a map and count the countries, cities, towns, villages, so far as a map shows them, which are tinder Dagon’s dominion, those of us who have what Lord Selborne recently called an unholy thirst for statistics — of a somewhat different sort — will feel simply and utterly appalled.
Life is full of questions: even here — where happily much that perplexes it at home falls off like an encumbering garment — our uncomplicated day has its questions.
How is it, you ask yourself after studying things, so far as a Western may, from an Eastern point of view — how is it that everywhere the large East is being cramped into grooves wrought in the narrow West? What is there of the Oriental in our manner or our spirit? Why have we so systematically quenched the national, the natural? What are we aiming at as a Church? What is our hope for the future of these
people? How are we training them to meet that hope? Was no pattern ever shown to us as to Moses on the Mount? Or if we had a pattern have we lost it?
These last two questions came with persistency one Sunday morning during mid-service, to one who for some time had been out of the stream of English church life as it flows now in the main. Have you ever found yourself wondering, during such a service, what would happen if suddenly the Lord Jesus Christ walked in? Would His simplicity shame our ceremonial, or His radiance surprise our dulness? Would the little child taught to notice such things whisper to her mother, “How much better dressed we are than He.” Would another say, “Why has everything stopped? Were we not speaking to Him before?” Or would everything go on just as if He were not there? What would really happen, I wonder, if Jesus came to church to-day?
But beyond these questions lie others concerning the unevangelised, and our relation to them. Try to evade any one of these questions, and it follows you, lays a detaining hand on your shoulder, wheels you round till you front it again. There is no escape from it if you think at all.
The South Indian plain to the east of the Ghauts is as flat as land knows how to lie. To the west of the mountains there is a garden that rises and dips and spreads itself out in most refreshing fashion. Look at Travancore from the heights, it is an undulating ocean of green. There is not much green and no undulation on the eastern side. In certain states of atmosphere it is like a sheet of pink blotting-paper.
Perpetual flatness has a curious effect upon the undisciplined soul. It creates a sort of impatience, an unreasonable feeling that somehow one must get up somewhere, and look down on something. Sometimes we yield to this animal instinct and bump across country for one hot hour, and reach the rocks that have tumbled down from the foothills, and scramble up one of them high enough to command the plain, and revel in the realisation that after months of crawling on it one has not evolved into an insect, but is still a human being with a sense to delight in the beauty of the world, and a heart that can dance with the joy of living in it. Will you climb the rock with us now, and share the pleasure of the mountain view; and then look through our eyes, across the plain to the east, where the sky lies low on the land?
From the rock you see mountains rising almost sheer for four or five thousand feet. Some slope finely, some curiously. There is a single great round-headed block of precipitous rock to the south. Sometimes the sky-line is notched with rough-toothed granite. Sometimes the fall of the hills suggests the quiet folds round Derwentwater. There are forests climbing the ravines, and out-jutting crags, and furrowed scarps. There is all the familiar colouring of mountain scenery, enriched by the tropical brilliance of atmosphere which accentuates all colour. The plain upon which we look down at last, with feelings of such satisfaction, offers contrast in that round the rock foot it is dotted with the stiff myrtle green of palmyra palm, and squares of emerald where the young rice grows; but on the whole it harmonises perfectly with the dominant colour note of the hills, blue in all its varying tones, for its prevailing tint is a soft terra-cotta, caused by the peroxide of iron in the soil where it is not under cultivation. Close to the southern mountain a little lakelet looks up at the hills and the sky and doubles all the beauty. There is stillness on the rock. Only the call of a shepherd boy, unseen in the palm wood below, floats up tremulously. The vulgar, and the noisy, and the petty ways of men seem very far away.
We have the eloquent among us who can reel off facts and figures till the very mind is giddy. “So-and-so is above detail,” says the admiring friend, as he listens to another talk in broad sweeps of sentences, which mass continents together in most masterly fashion.
But millions, however ingeniously manipulated, resolve themselves into units when you come to deal with them. Eventually the unit is the important thing. So let us look at just three towns; and lest even only three should produce an indistinct impression, let us look at these three towns as I saw them first, one in sunshine, one in sunset, one in moonlight.
The first town lies in a pastorate where the Christians are too few to evangelise one-tenth of their villages and towns. Once in two years, if it can, the men’s Itinerating band goes round and preaches in the village streets. The caste women, shut up in their houses, or if free, too shy to go near men, are not much reached by this. To the pastor’s knowledge, no woman has ever worked among the women there. We had been invited to visit one who once heard the outline of the
Crucifixion story read aloud from a Christian school-book, which her boy had chanced upon in a friend’s house. Through the friend she found out about us, and sent this word of appeal: “Where much food is, there no hunger is; where no food is, there is hunger.” So, thankfully we went.
Look at the town as you see it from the upper room where for an hour we have had the joy of pouring out living water upon a thirsty soul. She has gone downstairs at her husband’s call. She will return presently.
While we wait, look out on the red roofs in the quiver of noontide heat, on the shimmer of sunshine on the palms, on the sparkle of the river at their roots.
Her voice sounds on the stairs. It sounds lovingly, for she is speaking to her little sons; but there is a note of disappointment in it, and her face when you see it has lost something, it has lost hope. She draws you to the verandah that opens from the window. She points down to the roofs and the river. “My husband says he knows all about this religion. He says there never has been a Christian in this town. There is no place for a Christian in any house here. He says for me to listen is treason to my caste. My caste would be disgraced for ever if any of us became Christians.”
But surely the conquering Light would penetrate if it were brought to bear upon this town persistently and patiently? That is work which is not being done. There is no one at present to do it.
It is evening when we reach the second town. We are on our way to the third, and cannot stop. But we sing as we pass through the streets; sometimes a song carries far. As we drive through the Brahman street, a thoroughfare here, and open to all, some little schoolgirls run after the bandy, trying to pick up the words. Thereat a man rushes out upon them, disperses them, and orders us to drive faster. “Who wants Christian singing in this street?” The Temple gong booms out “Who “?
In one of the houses we are passing, some years ago
a boy was confined and guarded night and day. He
was beaten hard; drugs were mixed with his food.
When he slept, Vishnu’s mark was put on his forehead,
and the filthy water called holy, in which the idols had
been washed, was sprinkled upon him. He was treated
as an idiot, and a green paste, supposed to cure the
insane, was rubbed upon his head. One night his father
in great wrath took a knife, intending to stab him.” I
simply told him,” he says,” the words of our Master,
‘Fear not them that kill the body.’” Others interfered
then, and withheld the father from killing his son.
Violence having failed, it was proposed that a famous
magician from Travancore,” who could make one
paralysed, or truly insane, or possessed of a devil,”
should be sent for; wicked stories were told to the boy,
in order to break down the gates of his will from
another side. His sister and a little niece whom he
dearly loved were brought to try to win him back.
They fell at his feet, and clung to him, and wept.
Orthodox Hindus, educated Hindus, and even a nominal
Christian were brought to try to subvert his faith. They
argued with him in vain. At last the father professed
to agree to his being a Christian, reading his Bible, praying, even attending church, if only he would consent to wear the Vishnu mark, the trident on his forehead, and the Brahman thread upon his shoulders. But God gave it to him to detect the snare in that delusive proposal, and braced him utterly to scorn it. After four months of confinement and mental strain, the boy was so reduced that it was thought he could not live long. It was very hot weather, and the jailers themselves found it irksome to keep guard in the little inner room; so, thinking he was too weak to escape, they allowed him to sleep unfettered on the verandah. One early morning, in the dark before the dawn, he felt as if an angel awakened him out of his sleep. He rose up, knelt clown, and prayed for strength to walk. He was surrounded by people, but they did not wake. He dropped silently down into the street; strength came; the morning star, he says, was shining over his path. He ran through the streets, across the plain eleven miles to the Mission-house, and was safe.
How forceful the darkness seems, as one thinks over such a story in the very town where it happened, and might happen again to-day; how, as if it were living and wicked, it struggles to eclipse the light, and force it out to shine elsewhere. The glory of sunset rests on the temple tower, streams round the town, wraps it in beauty; but the swiftly moving Eastern night is upon us before we are out of reach of the rumble of the gong, and the clang of the cymbal, and the rattle of the drum from the temple; and these sounds of Vishnu’s worship chase us out of the town.
The moon has risen when we reach the third town.
You can see the central temple tower outlined dark and sharp against the sky. The long streets stretch all silver white, the palms that line the Brahman street are like plumes of shining silver. It is all so purely silvery that the very town seems silver-washed, and the people in their white garments in the white light seem almost other-earthly, too pure for earth. But look closer. These many people who fill the streets at this late hour are returning from a festival. Each man has a mark on his brow. The moonlight shows it distinctly. It is the print of Vishnu’s foot. Our spirit is stirred within us as we pass through the quiet crowd. Vishnu’s foot is everywhere. Next morning, when we ask about the place, we hear that only two converts, young men, have ever been known to come out as Christians. Both found it impossible to live there afterwards. There is no witness from within where that town is concerned.
The Christian traveller naturally wishes to see the work that is being done. He is shown it and rejoices. He is rarely found studying life as it is outside the mission centre. The mind retains most vividly what the eye has seen most frequently, and so we usually find that the impression left upon the visitor is that India is a land studded with mission stations, netted with organization, sprinkled with stars.
And yet, if guided by one who knew, he had gone a little way from the beaten track, he would have seen many a wide expanse of country where little or nothing worth calling work is being done. He would have seen all his eye could hold of the millions who are quite out of reach of light, or else — and this is sadder still — strangely unaffected by the light in their vicinity. He would have seen that we have hardly touched the thin fringe of the great darkness.
But perhaps, if he talked chiefly with those whose Missionary lot is cast on the inner side of the halo that circles the star-clusters God has scattered through this night, he would be puzzled by what seems contradiction in evidence. Those of us who live inside the little Christian circle are usually so engrossed by its many and pressing claims, that we are hardly likely to see far beyond its borders. This explains much he may hear. Let him, as we said, take a guide, and go out beyond the familiar constellations, and wander awhile in the spaces between. Then, if he has eyes to see, and a heart to feel at all, he will find his very soul scored with scars that never can be erased. God give us hearts that will care more, and eyes that are clearer to see past the edge of the halo rim, over the walls of our compounds, away up through His wide world, till we feel as we never felt before the overwhelming enormousness of the work that is not being done, in places where souls are sitting in a darkness which does not pass.
We are up on the rock-top still, resting in the utter peace. The sun has set. It will soon be after-glow. The plain looks immense in the gloaming, the mountains very high. Five minutes pass. We watch the clouds slip down the bare slopes of the nearer hills. There is a hush as if mountains, plain, and sky, were waiting for something sure to come. It comes, gently at first, then with a majestic sweep as the pent-up
BUT IT is THERE 229
energy of light breaks forth and floods the atmosphere. Then the sky flames out in a fan of fire, and the russet reaches of burnt hill grass, and the patches of reddish earth on the plain, kindle suddenly, and the mountains, half emerging from clouds that are golden now, stand solemn in their purple. All the world seems full of song, with shapes and colours for music and words, as the sky grows blue in the east, and pales into opal above. To the west it still burns and flames, and the glory of it lingers on the plain as we come down. We almost quite forget the dark in this loveliness of light.
But it is there: we see it personified, down below. For set in a hollow, jutting jet black from the black of the shadow, with outstretched hand that grasps a knife, is a single hateful threatening form, the idol of the rock.