Into These God Infused a Willingness

But it was a very sick man who landed in England in the good month of roses, and made his way slowly with his family to the south of Hampshire. Egypt or Nice was ordered, but he wanted his own country, and the doctor consented on condition he went south at once if he got worse. The various splendours of the sea, those four months round by the Cape, had done much for him, but no one believed he would ever return to India.

Just as he arrived home the two young Cambridge men, R. R. Meadows and David Fenn, who had answered to his call, were -about to sail for Madras. He saw them, and his heart went out to them, went out with them indeed, as they sailed away leaving him, as it seemed, wrecked on the shore.

‘ There shall be no Alps,’ Napoleon said, and the road across the Simplon was constructed through a district formerly almost inaccessible. ‘ Impossible’, Napoleon said, ‘ is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.’ Napoleon and Ragland — the two names do not fraternize. Who can hear Ragland talking in that crude fashion about fools? But he had no more idea than Napoleon of giving in. He calmly kept the required exercises for his B.D. and settled down to Tamil study.

Some years later while in camp he made himself a plan by which he covered the Tamil Bible once a year, the New Testament three times, the Gospel of St. John four times and the Psalms twice. No one could say he had not the use of his Tamil sword; but it was long before he got the freedom of the language. Idiomatic colloquial is a matter of time and opportunity.

One gain was his at home. He got intO’ touch with keen men and started a Prayer meeting at Cambridge: ‘ Oh that they (meetings for prayer) were multiplied through the land! It is for want of roots such as these to suck in grace from Him that is full of grace, that the church and missions especially, languish.’

It is not difficult to live through those months of waiting with Ragland while his people tried to show him that he could not go-It was useless:

He saw a hand they could not see
That beckoned him away,

He heard a voice they could not hear
That would not let him stay.

‘ Break through, O Lord, and show Thysellv Oh, speak aloud that they may hear! ’ Have we not cried the words in the loneliest hour of our lives? And it seemed as if no answer came. We had to go on alone. But if by the grace of the Lord we were held on in obedience, did not the day come when they too saw and heard and were satisfied?

In the autumn of ’53, knowing he was needed there and being able to meet his own charges, Ragland sailed for India. To be ill in India can never be easy. It is a land to live for, and (most joyfully) to die in, but it is not a land to be ill in, unless one can command seclusion and quiet, and few missionaries can do that. To return thus in weak health meant suffering. That mattered nothing to him. He believed that it should not be counted a strange thing but a natural to suffer in the service of the Lord.

It is not Christ only that must suffer, he said. The work of bringing souls to glory is one which Christ shares with us and He calls us now to share with Him, and to be content to share with Him, some part at least of His self-denial and suffering, and not only content but ready, forward — ‘ I had almost said, <5^ ambitious to suffer, The words did not break forth like froth upon the tumbling waters of speech. They occur in a sermon preached at Cambridge shortly before he sailed, and must have been weighed and measured and steeped in prayer before they were written down.

Continuing earnestly, he spoke of Ridley and Latimer and the less known John Bradford who wrote from prison facing painful death, ‘ Oh what is honour here but baubles? What is glory, in this world but shame .f* Why art thou afraid to carry Christ’s cross? Wilt thou come into His kingdom, and not drink of His cup? ’ and again in the very fire turned to one who suffered with him saying, ‘ Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a happy supper with the Lord this night.’ ‘ Into these, three hundred years ago, God infused a willingness to become as corn of wheat,’ he said, and then, ‘ If it had not been for a long chain of persecution and of shame and of humiliations and of labours and of self-denials and of prayers with strong crying and tears, we should not have the gospel; and we cannot expect in any other way than by adding one link to that chain to have the glory of handing it down to others. If we refuse to be corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying; if we will neither sacrifice prospects nor risk character and property and health; nor when called relinquish home and break family ties for Christ s sake and His gospel; then even supposing that we do not thereby prove that we have not the root of the matter in us that we have nothing at all to do with Christy we shall abide alo7iel

So he returned to India to live five glorious years and die a glorious death. I write in the speech of the angels, not in man’s. Granted he played dice with his life, was it not worth while? God forbid that we should be too careful of our lives, or of what means so immeasurably more, the lives of our beloved.

/ have lived

To see inherited my very wishes

And the buildings of my fancy,

—CORIOLANUS.

Fire and heat, snow and vapours, wind and stor7n, fulfilling His word,

O fire-swept ^nountain slope,

I never saw thee so,

Thy grass is green as youngest hope.

Thy woods aglow.

Ruby and blood-red sard —

Art thou all precious stone? —

Budding in jewels, jewel-starred
With flowers fresh-blown.

Never this carnival
Of colour to desire
But for that fierce effectual
Swift flame of fire,

O Fire a7td Heat whose breath
Scorches the shrinking soul,

Blmd, blmd I stood aid saw as death
Lifes aureole.

As death I saw, being blind;

But now, or Fire or Frost,

In your great mystic touch I fiid
Life I thought lost,

—Dohnavur Songs.