3. THE VOICE
3.
THE VOICE
Amy glanced around. All she saw were people bustling along the street. Now she was frightened. Was this some kind of mystical experience? Surely such things didn’t happen to everyday people like herself. Not voices! Norman and Ernest showed no sign of having heard anything. She had to bite her tongue not to tell them. They would think she was crazy. That afternoon, back in College Gardens, she retired to her room. All the rest of the day she asked herself over and over whether God had spoken to her. Was such a thing possible? Wouldn’t a rational person think it was merely Amy scolding herself in her anxiety? But after many hours, she acknowledged that she had heard the voice. She was certain. The incident could mean only one thing: “‘the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.’ The meaning of that is plain enough,” she admitted.
And what had her work been? Gold or stubble? One charitable act had been required of her this day, and she had been mortified with embarrassment! Stubble! In His mercy God had warned her. Oh God, let me serve You with gold, she prayed. She would tell no one of the experience, but she would immediately begin to offer her gold—if she could presume to call the work she planned such an exalted thing.
First, Amy began to invite children of the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons to her home. There she regaled them with stories. They played games. Bible lessons were woven in the midst of the fun. She was not surprised when the children responded enthusiastically to her efforts. She had much experience entertaining younger children. Ethel, Alfred, and Walter attended, too, just as eagerly awaiting the fun as the others. But in her heart Amy knew these neighborhood children were privileged. They certainly deserved to know Jesus, but somehow it seemed that other children needed Jesus more. How could she doubt it? Hadn’t she seen that innocent urchin peering through the tea-shop window?
“Peering at sweets the poor little thing could not have.…” Amy remembered a verse from George Herbert: “‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’” Oh, why hadn’t she insisted to her mother that they invite the little girl into the tea shop for a sweet? And why did Amy not now invite the poor in to taste the Lord’s meat?
Amy went to the Belfast City Mission and volunteered to go into the slums with the Reverend Henry Montgomery on Saturday nights. Oh God, give me the strength and courage to make a difference, she prayed. Amy began to approach children who were loitering on the street. “Come with us and let us sing and tell stories,” she said to them with a warm smile.
THE MEAT OF GOD’S WORD WAS ALWAYS SANDWICHED IN THE MIDDLE OF FUN THINGS TO DO.
“What for?” they asked suspiciously.
“Fun,” she replied with a laugh. A handful of them did come! Of course, the meat of God’s Word was always sand wiched in the middle of fun things to do. Oh, indescribable joy! But not indescribable power. Her power came from Jesus. She knew that. The handful grew to dozens as the word spread. Why wander around with nothing do? There was a young woman over at the City Mission who knew how to have fun! Amy did not even mind being teased a bit. Teasing was just an impish form of friendship. Any difficult children she bore with a loving smile.
But she quickly corrected sins. “Don’t you know the words, child, of Saint Peter? ‘For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile.’ So don’t you go around telling stories on people.” Even then Amy was smiling.
Her efforts grew, always injecting the Word of God into the fun. Soon she was teaching a group of boys at night. She knew children did not love to be “organized,” but they did love to belong to an organization. She started another program she called “Morning Watch,” in which the slum children pledged to regularly read the Bible and pray. To seal the bargain, each child signed their very own gilt-edged blue pledge card. Every Saturday morning the Morning Watch children met to discuss their week’s successes or failures. And, of course, they had fun, too, so much fun that Alfred and Walter were soon Morning Watchers as well.
Her prayer group for girls soon became so large it had to be moved to Victoria College. Every night, Amy thanked God that He gave her such power with children. And Amy’s power also attracted older children, even some young women. These were the mill girls, the girls too poor to wear the fancy hats of the day. They covered their heads in public with their shawls and thus were called “shawlies.” Amy drew these girls and young women from the slums to the Presbyterian church on Rosemary Street. Almost hidden in her efforts to teach them hygiene and etiquette, she taught them to read the Bible and pray.
“Ernest,” she said one day to her brother, who now worked on the railroad, “what do you know of the shawlies?”
Ernest hesitated. “But we are told never to gossip.”
“Then tell me what you truly know, for ‘the truth shall make you free.’”
So Ernest told her what he truly knew. That was horrifying enough. Unmarried shawlies with babies were common. Ernest had seen them with his own eyes. And common, too, was the crime of men molesting the shawlies. Often it came down to just how hard the girl could kick and scratch and scream. That Ernest had seen with his own eyes, too. And the gossip he couldn’t repeat was a thousand times worse. Many of the shawlies were mired in a living nightmare.
Amy’s heart ached. “We Carmichaels have so much, and they have so little.”
Amy knew she must try harder than ever to give these girls hope, but her own world was shaken again. Her father had looked ill for several months. In the spring of 1885, Amy, who was by now seventeen, saw him talking to Mother in the dining room. The subject was money, and Father had never looked so sick. He had loaned a very large amount of the family money to someone. It seemed now the family would never get it back. That bad judgment seemed to be crushing Amy’s father. Soon he was bedridden. On April 8, a Wednesday, the traditional day for singing hymns—he asked his family to sing “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.” The last verse ran:
When ends life’s transient dream,
when death’s cold sullen stream
shall o’er me roll,
Blest Savior, then, in love,
fear and distrust remove—
O bear me safe above,
a ransomed soul.1
Was it possible that Amy’s father sensed the end? He was only fifty-four years old. She had just traveled the year before with him in England. He seemed all right then. Yet on Sunday morning, April 12, David Carmichael died as the church bells were ringing. It was as if he willed it.
DAVID CARMICHAEL DIED AS THE CHURCH BELLS WERE RINGING. IT WAS AS IF HE WILLED IT.
“Surely Father built some gold on the foundation,” sobbed Amy in her room after the funeral.
She continued her labors, now dressed in the somber winter colors of mourning. The household rose at 4:50 a.m. these days. For breakfast they ate brown and white bread, fresh sliced or toasted, with marmalade. Often they had bacon, too; and on Sundays they had smoked fish called finnan haddie. Supper was usually bread, potatoes, and sausage or fish. With every meal they drank tea. Their table had suffered a little since Father’s death. No longer were Grandmother’s occasional offerings from Portaberry of turkey and such treats taken with an air of nonchalance. Now their arrival was an event of great interest.
But the Carmichaels were scarcely destitute. Many of the truly poor in Ireland virtually lived on potatoes. That was the reason the blight of the 1840s that caused the harvested potatoes to rot in their cellars was so catastrophic. The poor starved by the hundreds of thousands. No, the Carmichaels had never suffered like that.
In September 1886, Amy took a ship across the Irish Sea to Scotland to visit an old school friend.
“Come with me to Glasgow,” her friend urged her, “where the faithful are convening meetings there—along ‘Keswick lines.’”
“Keswick lines?”
Amy learned what “Keswick” meant. In 1875, in Cumberland, one of England’s most northern counties, a convention was held in a large tent at Broadlands, the estate of W. Cowper-Temple, in the village of Keswick in England’s tranquil lake district. One of the sponsors was Robert Wilson, a man wealthy from his coal mines in Cumberland. Also in attendance in that first meeting had been the writer George Macdonald. The purpose of the convention was a return to holiness and an opportunity for spiritual healing. All discussions of forming a new sect were forbidden. Discussions of doctrine were discouraged, yet an informal “Keswick” doctrine had developed over the ten years since then. Keswick participants generally rejected a common notion that, although the believer is justified in an instant, he must struggle for years for sanctification. Keswick people believed sanctification could come in an instant, too, in a “second blessing.”
Amy went with her friend to the meeting in Glasgow, certainly hoping and praying for such a moment. Neither speaker the day she was there affected her at all. But in the closing prayer, the minister paraphrased part of verse 24 of the book of Jude. “Lord, we know Thou are able to keep us from falling.”
Yes, “unto him that is able to keep you from falling,” she reflected. The rest of the verse in Jude popped into Amy’s mind. Yes, the Lord was able to present us in His glory without fault and with exceeding joy, too. Oh yes, glory and majesty, dominion and power, now and forever. Amy left the meeting slightly dazed. It was odd how some things moved her and some did not. It reminded her of the sermon she heard at Harrogate—completely forgotten now—that had been followed by singing the hymn “Jesus Loves Me.” That hymn thrilled her every time she thought of it. And sitting in a restaurant with her friend after the Glasgow meeting, the verse she heard struck her again: “Unto him that is able to keep you from falling.” Now it seemed momentous. Was this the instant? Was this her second blessing?
In the flyleaf of her Bible, she wrote at the top left the words, “Thou Shalt Remember.” Below that line she wrote “Glasgow Sept. 23, 1886.” Below that she wrote the part of verse 24 from Jude that now thrilled her so: “Unto him that is able to keep you from falling.”
“JESUS LOVES ME.” THAT HYMN THRILLED HER EVERY TIME SHE THOUGHT OF IT.
But was she transformed in any way? And how did one know? Long ago Charles Wesley had known his “second blessing,” because the next morning he had awakened so full of joy and love he was singing a hymn! But Amy had no such dramatic scene. When Amy returned to Belfast, the season of mourning for her father was over. Her mother took Amy to dress shops to update her wardrobe, but Amy spurned the new clothes. Such finery was vanity. All the frills and sashes and ribbons filled her with revulsion. Her thoughts echoed Saint Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.” Amy realized with a start that some very fundamental change had happened to her in Glasgow. She was bent on living and breathing God’s Word, bent on leading a new life of discipleship.
Her disdain for “the world and its applause” did not sour her enjoyment of her family. As a recreation, she proposed a family news “magazine” called Scraps. All seven siblings had to contribute under pen names. Norman was “Namron,” Ernest was “Oddfellow,” Eva chose “Lulu,” Ethel wrote as “Atom,” Walter was “Blanco,” and Alfred coined the acronym “SSI,” for Silly Silly Idiot. Amy had read somewhere that the “i-a-n” at the end of “Christian” should stand for “I am nobody,” so in Scraps, Amy became “Nobody.”
The eight siblings contributed anecdotes, cartoons, drawings, poetry, and anything else they thought worthy of an evening’s discussion. Amy—that is, “Nobody”—especially liked to contribute sketches and poetry. Her sketches were usually botanical: ferns, flowers, and grasses. One sketch revealed an ambition. She designed the dust jacket for a book titled Mill Girls and All About Them. Needless to say, she was the author on the cover. One example of her poetry in Scraps was:
Think truly, and thy thoughts shall be
Spotless with God’s own purity.
On every thought-bud let us bear
The stamp of truth, and love and prayer.2
“Nobody” was so bold as to publish character sketches of the Carmichaels in the Christmas issue of 1887. In describing the virtues of her brothers and sisters, Amy interjected that her own faults were so numerous and so outweighed other people’s faults that the less said of herself, the better! She concluded her study by lauding her mother as “perfect in every way” but pointed out that Mother was a woman shadowed in grief whose life they all had to brighten with their love.
In 1887 many of the “Keswick people” held meetings in Belfast and invited none other than Hudson Taylor. Taylor was the most famous missionary in the world, at least since the great David Livingstone had perished in Africa in 1873. Taylor had gone into China in the 1860s. His mission society was called the China Inland Mission. Most now just referred to it as the CIM. The CIM penetrated deeply into China; its missionaries wore native clothing and spoke native dialects. The society received enormous publicity in 1885 when the “Cambridge Seven,” a group of noted athletes from Cambridge University, volunteered to serve in China.
“THE LESS SAID OF HERSELF, THE BETTER.”
Long ago the “father of Protestant Christian missions,” England’s own William Carey, had astounded the English with the enormity of the unsaved heathen population in the world: 557 million souls! “If God wants to convert the heathen, young man,” cried a detractor, “He will do it without asking advice from you—or me!” But the detractor’s resistance was trampled by the thousands of missionaries who went forth to India, China, and Africa. Still, the number of unsaved souls in the world grew even larger. Now it was Hudson Taylor who cried from the rooftops: the total was a staggering 865 million. Even more heartbreaking was the fact that, every day, fifty thousand of these souls died unsaved. Fifty thousand every day!
In Scraps, Amy wrote, “Does it not stir up our hearts to go forth and help them, does it not make us long to leave our luxury, our exceeding abundant light, and go to them that sit in darkness?”3
Amy was there at the 1887 meetings in Belfast with her mother and aunts to hear it all. Her aunts were outspoken and invited Robert Wilson, the coal tycoon and one of the first organizers of the Keswick meetings, to come to their house for a visit. Wilson obliged and seemed intensely moved by the joy in the Carmichael home. He read his hosts a poem by Frances Havergal, a very gifted hymnist who had recently died at the young age of forty-three. She was called the “consecration poet,” because of her dedication to living in Christ. Wilson was a huge, bearded man, making his gentleness and taciturn speech all the more noticeable. A Quaker, he simply retreated into silence if pressed into an unpleasant exchange. Amy respected his silence. His blue eyes and pinkish face seemed as innocent as a child’s. The humility in one of his anecdotes especially impressed her.
“If stone in the quarry is hammered again and again, which blow splits it? ‘All of them,’ you would say. And in the same way you must never say, ‘I won that soul for Christ,’ because it was won by the first witness for Christ and the last witness for Christ and all those in between!”
Early in 1888, Mother announced during one of their evening get-togethers that their funds were almost gone. Amy felt no sorrow at all. God’s Word prevented any self-pity. Jesus Himself said it in the book of Matthew:
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
“SEEK YE FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD.” WHAT COULD BE MORE CLEAR THAN THAT?
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God.” What could be more clear than that? Amy learned that Robert Wilson had lost his only daughter, Rachel, a young lady about Amy’s age. Perhaps that was why he looked at Amy in such a fatherly way. She was certainly struck by the fact that Robert Wilson was very nearly the age of her own departed father! When he had left the Carmichael home, Amy felt very strongly in her heart that she would see Robert Wilson again. Months later, she received a letter from him.
“Robert Wilson has invited me to the 1888 Keswick meeting!” she cried.
“You must go,” said her mother.
In Keswick, Amy confirmed all she had heard. All doctrinal distractions were to be avoided. The object of Keswick was sanctity. The self must be subdued. Conquer the smallest sin. Put away all bitterness and rancor. Abide every hour in Christ. Call on divine power to strengthen every weakness. Robert Wilson and his friends could scarcely rub elbows with a firebrand like Hudson Taylor and not feel an obligation to save the heathen. When the Keswick Society decided to start the funding necessary to send forth missionaries sometime in the future, Amy found herself strangely excited.
Do I dare think of myself as a candidate for such an honor? she wondered.
Yet Amy became more agitated, too. Didn’t the call to evangelize the unsaved heathen interfere with what she was doing in Belfast? It seemed so. In the flyleaf of her Bible this time she wrote from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “And he said unto me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” When she wrote the words, she repeated “of Christ,” revealing her confusion and troubled thoughts. And she added part of a verse from Psalm 121: “from this time forth, and even for evermore.” She had omitted the first half of the verse: “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in.” Why? she wondered later. Could she not put to paper the thought of “going out”? Was such a thing too much of a commitment? Did she love her work in Belfast too much?
If the Lord calls me to go forth, am I unwilling? she asked herself.
Back in Belfast, Amy soon was having a problem with her shawlies that she would never have imagined at the beginning of her efforts.