What Is

Down came the rain, and the plains smoked. Indoors Ragland wrote letters, did accounts, and unpacked his box from home, a precious box from Cambridge long looked forward to. One can almost see his careful hands taking the first of his four old silver prize cups and the plate to match from their tissue paper wrappings, his pleased kind eyes examining every detail, almost feel the warm heart-glow over this sign of unforgetting affection (for the plate was the gift of the Master and Fellows), and follow him to the holy quiet Communion with his Lord and the newly-won disciples, those joys of missionary life that pass the reach of words.

There was one black day. To enter into it with the man whom we have taken for friend we must come close to him if we can.

See then a boy with eager thoughtful face, eyes that look keenly, wistfully too, into the eyes of the man who talks with him. Go with him to his home, a big Indian house with many rooms one opening out of the other, with barred windows, and huge iron-bossed doors. Each door has its massively made lock and key: Indian houses can keep secrets well. The boy knows it, knows what is threatened if he confesses Christ, turns like a hunted animal but with a courage no hunted thing ever had, to face it all, confesses his new Master, Christ the Lord, escapes, how he hardly knows himself, from death by slow poison, or a living death from mind-destroying drugs, reaches his friend, the Englishman whose heritage is liberty and who understands his hunger and his thirst for spiritual liberty; tells him all, asks, though his strong home-love pulls him hard, for shelter for awhile.

But may the Englishman give him this one little thing, shelter?

His age? His father has his horoscope, so he cannot get it, and it can be manipulated and caused to prove him too young to have a mind of his own. Not too young, though, for a forced marriage if he is not already married (and this fact holds ten times more fatally if the young confessor be a girl), not too young for any shame if the will of his people decree it, and he lies helpless and bound in their hands in one of those low, thick-walled,. dim-lit rooms, whose doors, as we saw, can be locked, while the brain-drugging poisonous stuff is forced into his mouth.

Do you see it all, reader? If you saw him (if you saw her), saw the appeal in those eyes, not the flintiest soul could pass by unmoved. Ragland had such a one in mind who had fought through a few months previously, suffered, shown himself true. There had been legal trouble and the case had appeared before the High Court, Bombay. The decision had been in the boy’s favour. It was held that one who showed himself fit to make his choice should be allowed to choose. And the Court had set him free.

Now, eight months afterwards, the High Court, Madras, had ruled in a similar case that age and not intelligence must decide the question, and a precedent was established which holds to-day.

Ragland thought of the boy recently delivered by the Bombay ruling. What if he had come under the Madras Court? He thought of two new enquirers, lads who knew their own mind, and were ready to lose lands and all their possessions rather than be untrue to Christ. He knew that the proof demanded of age over eighteen is usually unobtainable; for rural India knows nothing of birth records, and * even where they are kept there are ways by which they can be suitably cooked.

Ragland, clear-seeing man that he was, looked straight down through the avenue of the years that day, saw the sorrows that advanced in silent procession, spiritual tragedies with no light in them, and he grieved exceedingly, touching for the first time in his life rock-bottom of pain.

For no distress of our own, no distress in the life of one beloved who has hold on the comforts of God, nothing can approach for sheer torture the sight of a soul that has just begun to turn towards good being overwhelmed, driven back, trampled under strong feet into pollution... How long, O Lord, how long?... And those to whom such words sound too great for the occasion have either never loved much, or never tracked far along the covered roads wherein men walk in this present, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. There are books which say otherwise, we have all read them; and the old Vedic prayers touch the heart with their beauty; but nevertheless it is true that Hinduism, as we know it in its outworkings, presents no mere ‘ different angle of vision something to be approached delicately and never offended, but a deadly, cruel, subtle and awfully compounded power, with a face set straight against holiness and goodness and the white light of God. And nothing can recover a man, body and soul, from its entangling folds, but the compelling love of the Lord who died and rose again for our salvation.

In the north too, that autumn, the news was ominous, the Mutiny was being dealt with, and terrible things in righteousness had to be done for the sake of the peace of the land. And the home news was bad. Was there any unholy connection between this new order in the Madras High Court and Lord Stanley’s antimissionary speech in Parliament? Do lightflung threads run unseen between events like these? Is there a wireless telegraphy in the spiritual realm, a far more potent force than ours? And are these mysterious powers most active when the floods roll up against the Lord’s warriors?

Who knows? Only we know that the despotisms, empires, forces that control and govern the world, the spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against us in the heavenly warfare, are as real at this hour as they were when St. Paul described them; meet them and you know it. Yield but for a moment to the spirit of the age, question the existence of these darker facts, suck honey from the flower of fancy as regards our enlightened times, and suddenly, even as you taste of its sweetness, the gates of the ages swing back on their hinges and eyes are given to you that can see, and you see what IS. Only, thank God, you also see what shall be, and take courage and fight on, be it with but the stub of a sword.

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Let the victors when they comCy
When the forts of folly fally
Find thy body by the wall,

—Clough.

O Christian worker, Christian soldier, Christian pilgrim, in the midst of your ‘ contest ’ and your ‘ running ’ to-day, or in what seems the midst of it, for the end may all the while be just upon you, take heart from the thought that even so for you, if you are true to the blessed Name, it shall one day be. The last care will have been felt — and cast upon the Lord, the last exhausting effort will have been made, the last witness under difficulties borne, the last sorrow faced and entered, the last word written, the last word spoken. And then the one remaining thing will be to let the Lord, ‘the Man at the Gate lift thee in, and give thee rest.

Bishop Moule.

Note on II. Timothy 4, 6, 8.