P.S. We would like to quote a poem which we are very much interested in
telling you:
"What is that that ye do, my children?
What madness has seized you this morning?
Seven days have I labored among you,
Not in word alone, but showing the figures on the
board.
Have you so soon forgotten all the definitions of _Loci_?
Is this the fruit of my teaching and laboring?"
Co-operative Housekeeping.
Co-operation is needed not only in "being good," but also in eating and
drinking and keeping clean. There are school families in India where
every member from the "queen" to the most rollicking five-year-old has
her share in making things go. The queen takes her turn in getting up at
dawn to see that the "water set" is at the well on time; five-year-old
Tara wields her diminutive broom in her own small corner, and each is
proud of her share. There is in Indian life an unfortunate feud between
the head and the hand. To be "educated" means to be lifted above the
degradation of manual labor; to work with one's hands means something
lacking in one's brain. Not seldom does a schoolboy go home to his
village and sit idle while his father reaps the rice crop. Not seldom
does an "educated" girl spend her vacation in letter writing and crochet
work while her "uneducated" mother toils over the family cooking.
Girls, however, who have spent hours over the theories of food values,
balanced meals, and the nutrition of children, and other hours over the
practical working out of the theories in the big school family, go home
with a changed attitude toward the work of the house. Siromony writes
back at Christmas time, "The first thing I did after reaching home was
to empty out the house and whitewash it."
Ruth's letter in the summer vacation ends, "We have given our mother a
month's holiday. All she needs to do is to go to the bazaar and buy
supplies. My sister and I will do all the rest."
On Christmas day, Miracle, who is spending her vacation at school, all
on her own initiative gets up at three in the morning to kill chickens
and start the curry for the orphans' dinner, so that the work may be
well out of the way before time for the Christmas tree and church.
Golden Jewel begs the use of the sewing machine in the Mission bungalow.
All the days before Christmas her bare feet on the treadle keep the
wheels whirring. Morning and afternoon she is at it, for Jewel has a
quiver full of little brothers and sisters, and in India no one can go
to church on Christmas without a new and holiday-colored garment. One
after another they come from Jewel's deft fingers and lie on the floor
in a rainbow heap. When Christmas Eve comes all are finished--except her
own. On Christmas morning all the family are in church at that early
service dearest to the Indian Christian, with its decorations of palm
and asparagus creeper, its carols and rejoicings and new and shining
raiment. In the midst sits Jewel and her clothes to the most seem
shabby, but to those who know she is the best dressed girl in the whole
church, for she is wearing a new spiritual garment of unselfish service.
[Illustration: Tamil Girls Preparing for College]
[Illustration: The Village of the Seven Palms]
The Indian Girl's Religion.
To the Indian schoolgirl religion is the natural atmosphere of life. She
discusses her faith with as little self-consciousness as if she were
choosing the ingredients for the next day's curry. She knows nothing of
those Western conventions that make it "good form" for us to hide all
our emotions, all our depth of feeling, under the mask of not caring at
all. She has none of that inverted hypocrisy which causes us to take
infinite pains to assure our world that we are vastly worse than we are.
What Lotus feels she expresses simply, naturally, be it her interest in
biology, her friendship for you, or her response to the love of the
All-Father. And that response is deep and genuine. There is a spiritual
quality, an answering vibration, which one seldom finds outside the
Orient. You lead morning prayers and to pray is easy, because in those
schoolgirl worshippers you feel the mystic quality of the East leaping
up in response. You teach a Bible class and the girls' eager questions
run ahead so fast that you lose your breath as you try to keep pace.
The following letter was written by a girl just after her first
experience of a mountain climb with a vacation camp at the top. "Now we
are on Kylasa, enjoying our 'mountain top experience.' This morning
Miss ---- gave a beautiful and inspiring talk on visions. She showed us
that the climbing up Kylasa could be a parable of our journey through
this world. In places where it was steep and where we were tired, the
curiosity we had to see the full vision on the top kept us courageous to
go forward and not sit long in any place. She compared this with our
difficulties and dark times and this impressed me most, I think.
"When we came up it was dark and I was supposed to come in the chair,
but I did not wait for it, because I was very curious to go up. When I
came to a place very dark, with bushes and trees very thick on both
sides, I had to give up and wait until the others came. When I was
waiting I saw the big, almost red moon coming, stealing its way through
the dark clouds little by little. It was really glorious. I thought of
this when Miss ---- talked to us, and it made it easier to understand her
feeling about that.
"So much of that, and now I want to tell you about the steep rocks I am
climbing these days," and then follows the application to the big "Hill
Difficulty" that was blocking up her own life path.
God in Nature.
Love of nature is not as spontaneous in the Indian girl as in the
Japanese. Yet with but a little training of the seeing eye and
understanding heart, there develops a deep love of beauty that includes
alike flowers and birds, sunsets and stars. A High School senior thus
expressed her thoughts about it at the final Y.W.C.A. meeting of the
year.
"Nature stands before our eyes to make us feel God's presence. I feel
God's presence very close when I happen to see the glorious sunset and
bright moonlight night when everybody around me is sleeping. I think
Nature gives a much greater and more glorious impression about God than
any sermon.
"Whenever I felt troubled or worried, I did not often read the Bible or
prayer book, but I wanted to go alone to some quiet place from where I
could see the broad, bright blue sky with all its mysteries and green
trees and gray mountains with fields and forests around them.
"I think Nature is the best comforter and preacher of God. When we are
too tired to learn our lessons or to do our duty, we can go alone for a
safe distance where God waits for us to strengthen us. It is hard for me
to sit and think about God in the class room, where everybody is
speaking, and the class books and sums on the board attract my
attention, or make me feel useless because I was not able to do them as
nicely as others in my class. But, if we go away from all these, our
friend Nature jumps up and greets us with new greetings. The cool wind
and the pretty birds and wonderful little flowers and giant-like rocks
help us to feel the presence of God. We cannot appreciate all these when
we are walking with the crowd and talking and playing, but, if we are
left alone when we go out to see God, then even the stones and tiny
flowers which we often see look like a mystery to us. In thinking about
them we can feel the wisdom of God."
Crude as the English may be, the spiritual perception is not so
different from that of the English lad who cried,
"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky."
Religion Made Practical.
Religious feeling and expression may be natural to the Indian mind, but
how about its transfer to the affairs of the common day? It is a hard
enough proposition for any of us, be we from the East or the West; to
make the difficulty even greater, the Indian girl is heir to a religious
system in which religion and morals may be kept in water-tight
compartments. Where the temples shelter "protected" prostitution and the
wandering "holy man" may break all the Ten Commandments with impunity,
it is hard to learn that the worship of God means right living. Harder
than irregular verbs or English idioms is the fundamental lesson that
the Bible class on Sunday has a vital connection with honest work in
arithmetic on Monday, the settling of a quarrel on Tuesday, and the
thorough sweeping of the schoolroom on Wednesday. Right here it is that
we see "the grace of God" at work in the hearts of big girls and
middle-sized girls and little children from the villages. When classes
can be left to take examinations unsupervised, a big step forward is
marked. When before Communion Sunday the "queens" of their own
initiative settle up the school quarrels and "make peace," one has the
glad feeling that a little bit of the Kingdom of God has come in one
small corner of the earth.
[Illustration: BASKETBALL AT ISABELLA THOBURN COLLEGE, LUCKNOW]
"Among you as He that serveth."
Religious emotion may find one of its normal outlets in personal
right-living. That is good as far as it goes, but yet not enough. It
must seek expression also in making life better for other people. The
Indian schoolgirl lives in the midst of a vast social laboratory,
surrounded by problems that are overwhelmingly intricate. What is her
education worth? Nothing, if it leads to a cloistered seclusion;
everything, if it brings her into vital healing touch with even one of
its needs.
The spirit of Christian social service opens many doors. There are
Sunday afternoons to be spent with the shy pupils of the High Caste
Girls' Schools at the opposite end of town. In the outcaste village
beside the rice fields we may find the other end of the social
scale--twenty or thirty little barbarians whose opening exercises must
start off with a compulsory bath at the well.
Vacation weeks at home are bristling with opportunity--the woman next
door whose forgotten art of reading may be revived; the bride in the
next street who longs to learn crochet work; the little troop of
neighbor children who crowd the house to learn the haunting strains of a
Christian lyric. A cholera epidemic breaks out, and, instead of blind
fear of a demon-goddess to be placated, there is practical knowledge as
to methods of guarding food and drinking water. The baby of the house is
ill and, instead of exorcisms and branding with hot irons, there is a
visit to the nearest hospital and enough knowledge of hygienic laws to
follow out the doctor's directions.
Rebecca teaches a class of small boys in the outcaste Sunday school that
gives preliminary baths. On this particular Sunday, however, she starts
out armed not with the picture roll and lyric book, but with a motley
collection of soap and clean rags, cotton swabs and iodine and ointment.
"Amma," says Rebecca, "in the little thatched house, the fourth beyond
the school, I saw a boy whose head is covered with sores. May Zipporah
teach my class to-day, while I go and treat the sores, as I have learned
to do in school?" So Rebecca, following in the steps of Him who sent out
His disciples not only to preach but also to heal, attacks one of the
little strongholds of dirt and disease and carries it by storm. No young
surgeon after his first successful major operation was ever prouder than
Rebecca when the next Sunday evening she rushes into the bungalow, eyes
shining, to report her cure complete.
Is there somewhere an American girl who longs to "do things"? A little
plumbing--or its equivalent in a land where no plumbing is; a little
bossing of the carpenter, the mason, the builder; a great deal of "high
finance" in raising one dollar to the purchasing power of two; a deal of
administration with need for endless tact; the teaching of subjects
known and unknown,--largely the latter; a vast amount of mothering and a
proportionate return in the love of children; days bristling with
problems, and nights when one sinks into bed too tired to think or
feel--there you have it, with much more. More because it means
opportunity for creative work--creative as one helps to mould the new
education of new India; creative as one reverently helps to fashion some
of the lives that are to be new India itself. More too, as the rebound
comes back to one's self in a life too full for loneliness, too
obsessing for self-interest. Does it pay? Try it for yourself and see.
One bright noon in North India, sixty years ago, a young missionary on
an evangelistic tour among the villages paused to rest by the wayside.
As he paced up and down beneath the tamarind trees, pondering the
problem of India's womanhood, shut in the zenanas beyond the reach of
the Gospel which he was bringing to the little villages, there fell at
his feet a feather from a vulture's wing. Picking it up, he whimsically
cut it into a quill. Thinking that his sister in far-away America might
like a letter from so strange a pen, he went into his tent and wrote to
her. He told her of the millions of girls shut up in those "citadels of
heathenism," the zenanas of India,--a problem which only Christian women
might hope to solve. Half playfully, half in earnest, he added, "Why
don't you come out and help?" As swift as wind and wave permitted was
Isabella Thoburn's answer, "I am coming as soon as the way opens!"
Already a group of women, stirred to the depths by the words of Mrs.
Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, returned missionaries from
India, were forming a Society to help the women and girls of Christless
lands. At the first public meeting of this Woman's Foreign Missionary
Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women were
present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, when they
learned that Isabella Thoburn,--gifted, consecrated, wise,--was ready to
go to India, they exclaimed, "Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have
not the needed money in our hands to send her? No, rather let us walk
the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of
more costly apparel!" Thus was answered the letter written with the
feather from the vulture's wing by the wayside in India. In 1870,
Isabella Thoburn gathered six little waifs into her first school in
India, a one-roomed building in the noisy, dusty bazaar of Lucknow. From
this brave venture have grown the Middle School, the High School, and
finally in 1886 the first woman's Christian College in all Asia, housed
in the Ruby Garden, Lal Bagh. Here for thirty-one years Isabella Thoburn
lived and loved and labored for the girls of India.