Humdrum
"A missionary's life is more ordinary than is
supposed. Plod rather than cleverness is often the
best missionary equipment."
_Rev. J. Heywood Horsburgh, China._
"Truly to understand the facts of work for Christ
in any land, we must strip it of all romance, and
of everything which is unreal."
_Miss S. S. Hewlett, India._
THERE have been times of late when I have had to hold on to one text
with all my might: "It is required in stewards that a man be found
_faithful_." Praise God, it does not say "successful."
One evening things came to a climax. We all spent a whole afternoon
without getting one good listener. We separated as usual, going two and
two to the different quarters of a big sleepy straggly village. Life and
I went to the potters. Life spoke most earnestly and well to an
uninterested group of women. After she had finished one of them pointed
to my hat (the only foreign thing about me which was visible--oh that I
could dispense with it!). "What is that?" she said. Not one bit did they
care to hear. One by one they went back to their work, and we were left
alone.
We went to another quarter. It was just the same. At a rest-house by the
way I noticed a Brahman, and went to see if he would listen. He would if
I would talk "about politics or education, but not if it was about
religion." However, I did get a chance of pleading with him to consider
the question of his soul's salvation, and he took a book and said he
would read it at his leisure. And then he asked me how many persons I
had succeeded in joining to my Way since I began to try. It was exactly
the question, only asked in another form, which the devil had been
pressing on me all the afternoon. After this he told me politely that we
were knocking our heads against a rock; we might smash our heads, but we
never would affect the rock.
"Rock! Rock! when wilt thou open?" It is an old cry; I cried it afresh.
But the Brahman only smiled, and then with a gesture expressing at once
his sense of his own condescension in speaking with me, and his utter
contempt for the faith I held, motioned to me to go.
Outside in the road a number of Hindus were standing; some of them were
his retainers and friends. I heard them say, as I passed through their
midst, "Who will fall into the pit of the Christian Way!" And they
laughed, and the Brahman laughed. "As the filth of the world, the
offscouring of all things, unto this day."
We walked along the road bordered with beautiful banyan trees. We sat
down under their shade, and waited for what would come. Some little
children followed us, but before we could get a single idea clearly into
their heads a man came and chased them away. "It is getting dark," he
said. "They are only little green things; they must not be out late." It
was broad daylight then, and would be for another hour. Some coolies
passing that way stopped to look at us; but before they had time to get
interested they too remarked that darkness was coming, and they must be
off, and off they went.
We were left alone after that. Within five minutes' walk were at least
five hundred souls, redeemed, but they don't know it; redeemed, _but
they don't want to know it_. Sometimes they seem to want to know, but
however tenderly you tell it, the keen Hindu mind soon perceives the
drift of it all--Redemption must mean loss of Caste. One day last week I
was visiting in the Village of the Red Lake. Standing in one of its
courtyards you see the Western Ghauts rising straight up behind. The Red
Lake lies at the mountain foot; we call it Derwentwater, but there are
palms and bamboos, and there is no Friar's Crag.
That afternoon I was bound for a house in the centre of the village,
when an old lady called me to come to her house, and I followed her
gladly. There were six or eight women all more or less willing to
listen; among them were two who were very old. Old people in India are
usually too attached to their own faith, or too utterly stupid and dull,
to care to hear about another; but this old lady had been stirred to
something almost like active thought by the recent death of a relative,
and she felt that she needed something more than she had to make her
ready for death. She was apparently devout. Ashes were marked on her
brow and arms, and she wore a very large rosary. It is worn to
accumulate merit. I did not refer to it as I talked, but in some dim way
she seemed to feel it did not fit with what I was saying, for, with
trembling hands, she took it off and threw it to a child. I hoped this
meant something definite, and tried to lead her to Jesus. But as soon as
she understood Who He was, she drew back. "I cannot be a disciple of
your Guru, here," she said; "would my relations bear such defilement?"
Being a Christian really meant sooner or later leaving her home and all
her people for ever. Can you wonder an old lady of perhaps seventy-five
stopped at that?
The little children in the Village of the Warrior are not allowed to
learn. The men of the place have consulted and come to the decision. The
chill of it has struck the little ones, and they do not care to run the
chance of the scolding they would receive if they showed too much
interest in us. The mothers are as friendly as ever, but indifferent.
"We hear this is a religion which spoils our Caste," they say, and that
is the end of it. In the great house of the Temple Village they listened
well for some weeks. Then, as it gradually opened to them that there is
no Caste whatever in Christianity, their interest died.
How much one would like to tell a different story! But a made-up story
is one thing and a story of facts is another. So far we have only found
two genuine earnest souls here. But if those two go on--! Praise God for
the joy on before!
We went again to the potters' village and sat on the narrow verandah and
talked to a girl as she patted the pots into shape underneath where the
wheel had left an open place. She listened for awhile; then she said,
"If I come to your Way will you give me a new seeley and good curry
every day?" And back again we went to the very beginning of things,
while the old grandfather spinning his wheel chuckled at us for our
folly in wasting our time over potters. "As if _we_ would ever turn to
your religion!" he said. "Have you ever heard of a potter who changed
his Caste?"
Caste and religion! They are so mixed up that we do not know how to
unmix them. His Caste to the potter meant his trade, the trade of his
clan for generations; it meant all the observances bound up with it; it
meant, in short, his life. It would never strike him that he could be a
Christian and a potter at the same time, and very probably he could not;
the feeling of the Caste would be against it. Then what else could he
be? He does not argue all this out; he does not care enough about the
matter to take the trouble to think at all. He has only one concern in
life--he lives to make pots and sell them, and make more and sell them,
and so eat and sleep in peace.
But the girl had the look of more possibility; she asked questions and
seemed interested, and finally suggested we should wait till she had
finished her batch of pots, and then she would "tell us all her mind."
So we waited and watched the deft brown hands as they worked round the
gaping hole till it grew together and closed; and at last she had
finished. Then she drew us away from the group of curious children, and
told us if we would come in three days she would be prepared to join our
Way and come with us, for she had to work very hard at home, and her
food was poor and her seeley old, and she thought it would be worth
risking the wrath of her people to get all she knew we should give her
if she came; and this was all her mind.
She had touched a great perplexity. How are we to live in India without
raising desires of this sort? It is true the Brahmans look down upon us,
and the higher Castes certainly do not look up, but to the greater
number of the people we seem rich and grand and desirable to cultivate.
The Ulterior-Object-Society is a fact in South India. We may banish
expensive-looking things from our tables, and all pictures and ornaments
from our walls, and confine ourselves to texts. This certainly helps;
there is less to distract the attention of the people when they come to
see us, and we have so many the fewer things to take care of--a very
great advantage--but it does not go far towards disillusioning them as
to what they imagine is our true position. We are still up above to
them; not on a level, not one of themselves.
The houses we live in are airy and large, and they do not understand the
need of protection from the sun. The food we eat is abundant and good,
and to them it looks luxurious, for they live on rice and vegetable
curry, at a cost of twopence a day. Our walls may be bare, but they are
clean, and the texts aforesaid are not torn at the corners; so, whatever
we say, we are rich.
Identification with the people whom we have come to win is the aim of
many a missionary, but the difficulty always is the same--climate and
customs are dead against it; how can we do it? George Bowen struck at
English life and became a true Indian, so far as he could, but even he
could not go all the way. No matter how far you may go, there is always
a distance you cannot cover--yards or inches it may be, but always that
fatal hiatus. We seem so undeniably up, far up above them in everything,
and we want to get to the lowest step down, low enough down to lift lost
souls up.
[Illustration: "I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he
wrought a work on the wheels." The vessel the potters are making here is
worth about a halfpenny, but it is perfect of its kind. The moulder
never lifts his hand from it from the moment he puts a lump of shapeless
clay on the wheel till the moment he takes it off finished, so far as
the wheel can finish it. If it is "marred," it is "marred _in the hand_
of the potter," and instantly he makes it again another vessel as it
seems good to him. He never wastes the clay.]
On and on, if they will let us, time after time, by text and hymn and
story, we have to explain what things really mean before they are able
to understand even a fraction of the truth. The fact that this girl had
thought enough to get her ideas into shape was encouraging, and with
such slender cause for hope we still hoped. But when after some weeks'
visiting she began to see that the question was not one of curries and
seeleys but of inward invisible gifts, her interest died, and she was
"out" when we went, or too busy patting her pots to have time to listen
to us.
Humdrum we have called the work, and humdrum it is. There is nothing
romantic about potters except in poetry, nor is there much of romance
about missions except on platforms and in books. Yet "though it's dull
at whiles," there is joy in the doing of it, there is joy in just
obeying. He said "Go, tell," and we have come and are telling, and we
meet Him as we "go and tell."
But, dear friends, do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing
great things, as an everyday matter of course. Our aim is great--it is
_India for Christ_! and before the gods in possession here, we sing
songs unto Him. But what we say to you is this: Do not expect every true
story to dovetail into some other true story and end with some
marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life
end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned.
We do not find, as a rule, when we go to the houses--the literal little
mud houses, I mean, of literal heathendom--that anyone inside has been
praying we might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the
other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines
were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life
is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It
is very prosaic at times.