Foreword

The reader for whom it is worth while to write,
makes it the habit of his mind to read the Foreword
to his book: all through this book it is taken for
granted that reader and writer have met upon this
first page, and that having met, each understands
the other.

The question which I as writer have had to face
and answer is this: Why add another to the pile of
the world’s books?

Something had to be written; this was evident
before the end of September 1912. If an attempt
had not been made by someone authorised, something
unauthorised would have been run through the
press by affectionate hands and floated out upon the
world; and there was reason to fear that what
would have been written might hardly have been in
accordance with the memory of one who utterly
abominated fulsome speech.

“Too much paint “: it was his summary of the
biography of a great and good man, written by a
devoted relative. The man himself stood up, when
he got the chance, fine in his native grandeur of
deed and character; but the paint spoiled him.

In India we do not paint our teak: we let it show
its grain. Poorer stuff is painted: teak asks for no
pretence; and this book deals with teak. It does
not profess to show a ready-made saint: to do any
thing of the sort would be to dishonour the memory
of an honourable man. But it has tried to show
something of the fashioning of a saint, whose vocavi FOREWORDtion called him to live a holy life — not in the ease of
religious seclusion, nor in the midst of those rare
heroic circumstances which emphasise the glory side
of existence, but along the dusty levels of commonplace ways. Journal, letter, and reminiscence
show the grain of the wood. There has been no
painting, no pretence.

A second answer to that question was found in the wish of fellow -missionaries. This is not a usual wish, for a missionary’s severest critics are his fellows; he is one of themselves, they consider him with discrimination, quite impartially, and they see no halo, only an ordinary exterior usually much the worse for wear.

“• Greatheart is dead they say;

But the light shall burn the brighter,

And the night shall be the lighter

For his going;

And a rich, rich harvest for his sowing: ’

these lines from John Oxenham express what I think about him,” so a Tinnevelly missionary wrote between college classes early in 1913. “If the book is a quarter the inspiration his life was, it will be well worth doing,” wrote another. When missionaries write thus about a fellow-missionary, he must be worth knowing.

But the word which compelled, and gave assurance of help for the difficult work, was briefly this: ‘Write the things which thou hast seen.”

And yet how very little after all can be written. We call a book a “Life” which deals with the material substance of doings and sayings. A fragment would be a truer name, for at most it can be little more; the spiritual, the innermost, remains a secret still. Something of “Walker of Tinnevelly” may be shown in the pages of this book, but he himself will be else where. No pen may intrude into the private place

FOREWORD vii

where the real man was, and where the springs rose
which fed the river of being.

That river, so far as may be, has been traced from its source to the splendid moment when it suddenly found itself received into the ocean. In other words, the book is a frank return to the older method of biography. There is no attempt made in these pages to do the reader’s thinking for him. He is left to do it for himself. The story of the boy, student, curate, missionary, is told straight on, for the most part, year in and year out, with as little as possible of the biographer and as much as possible of the man him self. The newer writing, with its clear grouping of subjects, is undoubtedly more popular than the older, — which has only one thought, to leave the reader with his man and let him get to know him in his own way — but the man of this book liked the old method better: for as to dates, he liked to know where he was at any given point of a book; and as to subject-matter, he liked to do his own grouping and to make his own pictures. Perhaps there remain among us some who feel as he did; if so, the book will find out its own. In any case, it seemed impossible to the writer to do otherwise than what has been done for Walker of Tinnevelly.

As to data for facts: A journal kept from
1st December 1885 to 19th August 1912 (with two
well-defined breaks) has been a guide from Chapter III
to the end, and letters lent by his family and friends
contribute to the truth of the book. Extracts from
such sources are often condensed; where a word of
explanation seemed required, such is put in square
brackets; and in some few cases, where no good
purpose would be served by tracking foxea to their
holes, or worthy persons to their home addresses,
initials have been changed, in obedience to an instinct
which urged that he would wish it so to be.

viii FOREWORD

Naturally there has been cause for reserve; for many of the events with which the records deal are too recent or too intimate for telling. And those who knew him best will miss something of the clash of arms, in the story of this man who was somehow perpetually being forced into conflict; for but little of that conflict is described. And for this reason: most of the various rocks of diverse opinion round which at different periods of his life his thought revolved in strong current, are for the time being under water: the tide of thought has flowed over them: they are not at the present moment challenging the expression of every man’s opinion. To insist therefore upon the reader’s concerning himself with them whether he will or no, seemed to the writer likely to frustrate the intention of this book, the spiritual intention. And it seemed also — to revert to the martial figure — that even if it were in each case possible to set forth the casus belli, the result might be to raise a dust of words which would perhaps obscure that which those who read will most desire to see — the personality of the man who fought, his earnestness, his integrity, his greatly increasing happiness, his faith, simple as a child’s but valiant as life. These are the things that last when other things are forgotten.

And another thought has been with me too. Is it not true that in this clamorous world, in the midst of the weariness and strife, there are some who are glad to turn sometimes into byways of quietness, glad to meet in those private ways men from whom it may be they must differ in public, glad to get to know them underneath and above all difference, in that mystic communion of spirit which will surely be one of the joys of heaven?

This, then, has been the guidance so far as the
writer understood it. It would be a poor end to the

FOREWORD ix

writing if even one reader being drawn in thought
into controversy, and touched unaware by the
bitterness of it, should lose the sweetness of a new
friendship begun here to be continued There.

Some who have read the book in MS. feel that
more might have been said of his co-operation in
the work for the Temple Children of India, which
grew up during the last few years of his life.
It has been tempting to say more; but I have
purposely refrained, beingdesirous to obliterate the
personal, and have tried ,to use that, and all the
fifteen years’ good comradeship only as background,
my whole intention being to make the central figure
stand out clear. But here for once in plain language
I rejoice to feel free to say what a comrade he was:
strong, wise, full of a sympathy which in the midst
of some large endeavour could stop to care for the
smallest detail of the work alongside. What it owes
to his courageous championship through its first
very difficult years no words can tell, nor can words
tell how he is missed.

This book-writing has not been easy. Some
times the difficulties were inseparable from my
subject, warp and woof of the texture of the life I
had set out to show. Sometimes they concerned
others, and then it was as if the field I had to cross
were strewn with nets: “Mine eyes are ever looking
unto the Lord, for He shall pluck my feet out of
the net” was the word which came on the first of
such occasions, and it continued its ministry all
through. Always there were hindrances, just
simple and ordinary: the crush of other duties
around one, the impossibility of assured quiet for
even an hour at a stretch, the lack of invigorating
influences — for who finds the Plains of India invigorating? But I have been splendidly helped.
Often on perplexing days the post came to the
rescue with a letter which I would gratefully put
into a photograph frame kept on my writing-table
for this pleasant purpose; and there it would live
for awhile, looking kindly at me through the glass,
and saying in a friendly sort of way, “Don’t give
up, don’t be afraid: go on.” Above all, there has
been the backing of one’s own household and fellow-missionaries, without which it would have been
impossible to do the work at all. For no word is
truer than Westcott’s, in his Introduction to the
Gospel of St. John, that the fulness of sympathy in
common labour brings light and fresh power of
vision, and not only materials for thought.

Three South Indian C.M.S. colleagues whom I may not thank by name, and Dr. Eugene Stock of England, long-tried friend, have had the patience to read through the whole in MS., a task which perhaps no one but the writer can fully appreciate. I think of this, and of much else, and feel what poor things at best words are; but I pack all that can be put into them when I say, May these uncounted loving-kindnesses be remembered by the One who is not unrighteous to forget; and should ever ripe grain be gathered from the seed now to be sown, may everyone who has helped to sow it, have a large good share in the eternal pleasure of harvest. With which hope, and genuine prayer, I will, as the writer of the 2nd Book of Maccabees puts it, “make an end: and if I have written well and to the point in my story, this is what I myself desired; but if meanly and indifferently, this is all I could attain unto.”

AMY WILSON-CARMICHAEL.

DOHNAVUR,

TlNNEVELLY DISTRICT,

S. INDIA.