Chapter V — Through The Regular Channels—Some Evangelistic Series
CHAPTER V
THROUGH THE REGULAR CHANNELS—SOME EVANGELISTIC SERIES
THE picture given in the preceding chapter must be corrected a bit, for while Gandhi has had a good deal to do with popularizing the latent sentiment lying in the soul of India, nevertheless it has been the missionaries and their associates who through these decades have, by their fine living and self-sacrifice and constant teaching, laid up this sentiment in the heart of India. I have constantly felt my own debt of gratitude as I have gone from place to place entering into other people’s labors. They sowed where I was privileged to reap. It was they who have had the harder part.
Some time ago I got hold of a phrase that has been of incalculable value to me: “Evangelize the inevitable.” Certain things are inevitable: no use to grumble against them—get into them and evangelize them. The labor movement throughout the world is inevitable. In England they more or less evangelized it so that it is very Christian in its spirit and outlook. We failed to do that in America so that the movement sometimes fell into the hands of men who were anti-Christian. This has been of incalculable loss. Some years ago I saw that the Nationalist Movement in India was inevitable. You could not scatter as much education and Christian teaching through India without there being an uprising of soul demanding self-expression and self-control. It is as inevitable as the dawn. We would have felt that we had failed if this had not come. When I saw the inevitableness of it I felt there was only one thing to be done—get into the movement and evangelize it. Stand down in those national currents and put Christ there.
That does not mean that we should get into the politics of the country and become politicians, but it does mean that the Indian Nationalist senses at once that we are in spiritual sympathy with the finest and best in his movement. That is all he asks for, but he does ask for that.
When I began this work nine years ago it was in a small way, hoping that this most difficult field would open. I have had no plans that I was not ready to scrap, if they did not seem to be vital, or did not work. There was one concern and one only: how could I help India to see in Jesus what I saw. Anything that ministered to that I wanted, anything that did not could go.
Since the Methodist Board took charge of my expenses and then gave me perfect freedom to work among all the different missions of India, I have covered several times the more important centers and many smaller ones.
We have had as chairmen of our meetings members of Legislative Councils, judges, lawyers, generals, college presidents, professors, and leading Hindus and Mohammedans of every type. We have had the meetings in the open spaces in the cool of the evenings, in Town Halls, Hindu and Christian college auditoriums, Theosophical Society halls and even in Hindu temple compounds. The reader will probably note that I have omitted Christian churches from this list. There is a real prejudice against them, so we seldom or never have meetings for Hindus and Mohammedans in them.
We have felt that we must hit the problem in two places: The church must be spiritualized and the non-Christian won to Christ. We have morning meetings for the Christians and night meetings for the non-Christians. These are tied together in purpose, for we know that we cannot spiritualize the church apart from its tasks. Experience and expression are the two sides of the Christian life, and one cannot exist without the other. Kill either and you kill both. So we have tried to get the church to realize its joyous privilege of soul-winning.
One task along this line has been to help arouse the Syrian Church in South India—a church of five hundred thousand that has been dead for centuries. They are now beginning to be keen and alive and the largest Christian audience in the world gathers at the time of the yearly convention, when in a single audience there will be thirty-five thousand people. These conventions have been marked with great spiritual power, and the church is now beginning to take its place in the evangelization of India.
In the meetings for non-Christians there have been large crowds in many places, and although it has been the most upset period of India’s recent history, yet we have not had the slightest disturbance of any kind in any single meeting in nine years. India has shown a beautiful courtesy and has treated me as a friend and brother, and I have tried to respond.
I said there had been no disturbance, but there was one on one occasion, but that was based on a misunderstanding. The Non-Cooperators, the extreme Nationalists, saw the officials of the city going into our meeting and thought we were having a pro-government meeting. They surrounded the building, stoned it, rushed the doors and yelled their national yells for three quarters of an hour. I requested some men to hold the doors, and above the din and noise I talked on brotherhood and good will and the coming of the Kingdom, while the storm raged on the outside. It was a lovely time to talk about it! But the next day when the Non-Cooperators found out what kind of a meeting we were having they came and personally apologized, and said that they themselves would attend the rest of the meetings. They did so, and one of them, on the last night of the meeting, dressed in his simple white homespun, the sign of the Nationalist, arose and read a paper thanking me for what I had said to them about Christ. That was the nearest to a disturbance we had had in nine years. The gentle courtesy of the East is a beautiful thing. For instance, after speaking for a number of nights in a Theosophical Society hall it was a fine courtesy for the secretary of the Society to garland me publicly, though everything I had said cut straight across the ideas of theosophy.
In view of what I have said above the criticism of Bernard Lucas is just when he remarks, “We have attempted the task of winning India for Christ as though it were a country of barbarians, whereas it is a country of cultured and civilized people with a submerged tenth of barbarians.” It is usually about that submerged tenth that we hear in our general missionary talks, which taken alone can hardly be called a fair representation of the situation. At the same time, I realize that my presentation needs the balance of the other facts.
I know when I stand before an audience of Hindus and Mohammedans that they are inwardly challenging every word I utter and every thought I express; and I know if I gain an inch in their souls, I will have to fight for it, but all the time there is courtesy and friendliness, even in moments of deepest disagreement. Such treatment can fairly be claimed to indicate culture.
Now for a few glimpses into some of the evangelistic series. I select these out of the hundreds we have had throughout India.
We went into the great city of ———. It was an exceedingly difficult proposition, for there was a great university there which was supposed to propagate Hindu culture and religion. On the other hand the city was held in the grip of ancient thought and many a superstition. But we were amazed and delighted to find that the president of the university graciously consented to become chairman of one of our meetings. There were large crowds each night. At the close of the meeting one night the students of the university came and asked me to come over to speak at the university. I was surprised beyond measure and said, “My brothers, you don’t want me over there?”
“Oh, yes, we do,” they replied.
But I pressed a little further: “Do your professors know about it?” “Yes,” they said, “they want you to come.”
“But,” I still persisted, “what do you want me to speak about?”
One of them answered and said, “If you don’t mind, we would like you to speak about Christ.”
Well, I assure you, I didn’t mind!
Another spoke up and said, “We would like you to speak especially about the cross.” I like to speak especially about the cross! I went over several times, and on the first occasion was introduced by the Hindu chairman, a professor, in these words. “I have been attending the public meetings, but I haven’t been interested in the speaker as much as I have been interested in the Person concerning whom he has been speaking. Young men, no such personality as that of Jesus has ever appeared in human history. He is the greatest character that has ever been in our world. Now, to-day is a Hindu festival, and we can begin the festival in no better way than to hear again about this Person.” The striking thing was that I could see no sign of resentment on the faces of the students. Knowing the bitterness and prejudices of the past, I could scarcely believe my ears, for we were at the heart of orthodoxy.
In the same place I was invited by the Theosophists to speak to them in their hall. At the close their leader said, “We may not agree with what Mr. Jones is saying, but we can certainly all try to be like Jesus Christ”—which is a good deal!
In ——— the meetings were in the Town Hall. The next to the last night of the series the leaders of the Non-Cooperation movement in that place publicly presented a request at the close. They said that the next day was the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s going to jail and it was their big day, that they were going to have a great meeting of ten thousand or more on the public commons, and they had come to ask us to put these two meetings together. They asked me to speak on the same topic announced for that next night and said they would furnish an interpreter. I strongly desired to go, for it was such a gracious invitation and meant so much, for it was their greatest political gathering and they wanted me to give a Christian address! But the next night I wanted to give an invitation for personal allegiance to Christ. Very reluctantly I had to decline their invitation. Notwithstanding the fact that the other meeting was going on at the same time, our meeting was packed to its capacity. At the close of the address I did what I have only dared to do this last year. I asked these leading high-caste men to take their stand publicly for Christ. I told them frankly that I would leave the question of baptism and the Christian Church to their consciences, that I would give them my own view, namely, that I believed that inwardly and outwardly one should belong to Christ, but, having said that, I would leave the matter to their consciences as they read the New Testament, and in its light decided what they should do. But I urged that here and now they should make Jesus the Lord and Saviour of their lives. On that proposition between thirty and forty of the leading citizens, lawyers, doctors, and so on, stayed. That aftermeeting in which we prayed and instructed them and had them repeat a prayer of confession and surrender to Christ after me, was one long to be remembered, for the melting sense of God that was upon us.
We have had some of our meetings in some very remarkable places. In ——— we had them in the palace of Tippu Sultan, the old Mohammedan king and tyrant. I stood right under the throne when I spoke. It made a splendid sounding board in more ways than one. The last night I asked those who would give themselves to Christ to meet me in a little room in the rear. It filled up with seeking Hindus—some of them in earnest—a few who had come to challenge and quibble. I found out later that the room was the place where two British generals had been chained to their guards as prisoners of the tyrant. One of them was named Sir David Baird. When word went to his old mother in Scotland about her son, the dour old lady, knowing her boy, said, “Well, God have mercy on the poor chap that is chained to our Davy!” But in the very room where men had been chained to their guards as prisoners Christ was making men free, and in the palace hall where an autocrat had sat with a kingdom founded upon a bloody sword we were announcing a new kingdom founded not upon the sword, but upon the very self-giving of the Son of God at Golgotha.
At one place a non-Christian literary society asked to have the meetings under their auspices and charge. A non-Christian literary society having charge of Christian evangelistic meetings! Incongruous, but glorious! They secured the Maharaja’s theater for the addresses. They said they were going to get the prince as the chairman of the meeting the first night. They naïvely suggested that he was hard hit by drink, but they thought they could keep him sufficiently sober to be chairman that night! We cannot be squeamish about those things, we have to take what we get, glad to put out our gospel in any situation we can, and since we thought the prince needed it, we were very glad to have him come. The prime minister was the chairman the second night and on down the line to lesser officials. There were about a thousand of the officials of that leading native state present each night. It was literally like witnessing before kings and governors for His name’s sake. When the prince arose for his chairman’s remarks everyone was rather nervous as to what he would say, for he was rather a free lance, and said about what he wanted to say. He kept up his reputation for surprises by saying, “I do not understand why the speaker has gone so far off to talk about corruption in government; he needn’t have gone to China to talk about corrupt officials; he could have come right here.” Every official jumped as though he had been shot. Just then his secretary, who was an influential man in the state, and who was on the platform with us, hurriedly passed over a note to the prince. He read it and then announced, “My secretary says I need not say anything more!”
He invited me to come over to see him at the palace the next day. I went. I begged him to give up drink and give himself to Christ, told him what Christ had done for me. He said, “Mr. Jones, I can’t do it. The fact is that I was almost a Christian when I first went to England, for Christianity appealed to me because of its sense of brotherhood; but I was educated there with Macaulay in one hand and a whisky bottle in the other. But I will make you this promise. I am going to America, and since you have prohibition in America I won’t be able to get it then, so I will give it up when I go there.” The whole world is bending over in expectancy to see what we are going to do with this matter of prohibition. If we should fail, it would set back the clock of moral progress for fifty or a hundred years. We must not fail. Thus does evangelistic work in the Orient depend upon conditions at home.
Nine years ago Dr. John R. Mott was speaking in the fine hall at ——— to a non-Christian audience. In the midst of his address he used the name of Christ and the audience hissed him. Nine years later we were in that hall with one topic for six nights—“Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.” The audience increased every night until the last nights they were standing around the doors and windows. I gave the invitation to those who would surrender themselves to Christ, leaving the question of baptism to their own inner convictions, to come and take the front seats. I felt at the time that if one would come I should be grateful, for William Carey had said that if one of these high-castes should ever be converted, it would be as great a miracle as the raising of the dead. But that night between a hundred and a hundred and fifty came forward on that proposal. Cut it down to its lowest possible significance, and yet we have left the residual fact that in the hall where the name of Christ had been hissed nine years before men now stayed to pray in that same name. It was not the difference in the speakers, for everything was in favor of the first speaker; it was the difference in the attitude of India toward Jesus in the meantime. “The psychological climate” has changed. It was a new day.
In this same city I was invited to speak in a non-Christian college, and the students gave up a cricket match in order to attend. In another place the Hindu students wanted an extra meeting for themselves. We could find no time, for I was speaking four times a day. They decided to have it at seven o’clock in the morning. The theme was “How to Find a New Life!”
The Hindu clerks of a certain city wanted an extra meeting, and since no other time could be found they came out at 7:30 A. M . before going to their offices.
The Non-Cooperators had captured the municipality of ——— and were in charge. The whole city was dressed in white home-spun khaddar, the sign of the Nationalist. When one went into the city with other than white garments on he felt like a speckled bird. Riots had taken place nearby, and feeling was running very high. The British official in charge of the district warned us that if we went into the city for meetings, he could not be responsible for our safety. But we felt we should go, and went. One of the missionaries wrote to Mr. Gandhi and told him that I was giving addresses in the city, and asked him to kindly write to his Nationalists and ask them to come. He wrote back immediately, for he is very prompt in his correspondence, and said that we would be very happy to have his people come, in fact, had written them to that effect. When they got this word they came to us and asked if they could not take charge of the meetings. I told them that I was not going to talk politics, but Christ. Nevertheless, three of the leading Hindu Nationalists signed the notices that went out calling the meetings. The hall filled up immediately, so we had to go out into the open air. I saw at once that a good many of my hearers did not understand English. Let me say parenthetically, that I speak almost entirely in English to these non-Christian audiences, for nearly all the intelligentsia know English, since the medium of instruction in the high schools and colleges is English, so that you can use the best you have and it is none too good. But I saw at a glance that some of my audience was not English-educated. I turned to my chairman and said, “I am not sure what I should do, for I do not know Gujarati [that was the local language]. I only know Hindustani, and there is no Christian here to interpret for me.” He promptly replied, “I shall be very happy indeed to interpret for you if you like.” Here was a very long cry from the expectation of suffering violence at their hands, as the official had feared, to their taking charge of our meetings and interpreting our message! I wondered how I would get my Christian message through my Hindu brother, but I remembered that David Brainerd used to preach through drunken interpreters to the American Indians and the power of the Spirit rested upon the meetings in spite of this, and I believed God would do the same thing for us, as our fine, clean Hindu friend interpreted our message. And he did! The next night they gave me another interpreter, also a Hindu, and we gave the message of the cross through him.
At the close of the meeting one night I asked if they would like me to pray. I never pray publicly without asking their permission, and I have never had them refuse. At the close of the prayer a Mohammedan gentleman came up to me and said, “That was very disrespectful tonight—you had those people sit down while they prayed They should have stood up in the presence of God!”
“All right,” I replied, “to-morrow night they will stand up.”
When I finished the next night I again asked if they would like me to pray. They assented, so I asked them to rise. Now, it was the custom there that whenever they rose for the close of a meeting they always gave their national yells, so when they rose for the prayer across the audience went tremendous waves of “Bande Mataram” and “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”—“Hail to the Motherland” and “Hail to Mahatma Gandhi!” Between my evangelistic appeal and my prayer we had the national cries. A glorious mixture! Somehow it didn’t jar, and when it quieted a bit I went on with my prayer as though nothing had happened. But India is nothing unless she is mixed—she mingles life and religion in a glorious confusion. I rather like it so!
At the close of the meeting I suggested that I could not get close enough to them in these big meetings and asked if we might have a Round Table Conference with the leading citizens of this city. They assented, so the next day we met in the national school. I put off my shoes to the side and sat among them on the floor in pundit style. I saw that some of them had been parading the public streets, for they had placards on themselves on which was written:
“Don’t pay your taxes to this Government.”
“Go to jail with joy.”
“The tears of the weak will undermine the strongest wall.”
One would have thought that in an atmosphere of this kind, with the whole thing nervous with national excitement, there would be no spiritual response to my message. Here was a real struggle going on. Would they respond at all? On the contrary, there was a fine spiritual sensitiveness. Incidentally, may I say that I have been struck very forcibly with the difference in what happens to the spiritual natures of men who are engaged in warfare with military arms, and those with weapons of non-violent passive resistance. While there are many notable and noble exceptions, it is a truism to say that in war carried on by physical arms the men who are engaged in it are brutalized—the more so, the more efficient. On the contrary, I have found that the men who threw themselves in with Gandhi and really practiced his program were spiritualized; it deepened their sense of moral values and made them self-sacrificial. Nothing could be a greater condemnation of the one type and a commendation of the other than the respective effects upon the personalities engaged in them. Here I sat before men—very determined men—who were willing to lose their all in the fight they were making with a system of government from the West to which I belonged, and there was no hatred, only a heightened moral and spiritual appreciation and sensitiveness.
I talked to them of my Master. In the midst of the discussion I used the phrase the “Christ of the Indian Road” and I noted how they kept referring to it again and again. It had caught their imagination. He seemed so intimately theirs. He seemed to have come in from the Indian Road and had sat upon the floor with us there in the quietness of that Indian twilight. In the discussion we talked of India and her need. I did not talk to them as though India were foreign to me, for it was no longer so. I was born in the West and love it, but India has become my home; India’s people have become my people; her problems, my problems; her future, my future; and I would like to wear upon my heart her sins if I could lift her to my Saviour. I told them I wanted to be thought of as at least an adopted son of India. I turned to them and said: “Brothers, what can we do with these sixty million outcastes? They are a millstone around our national neck. Our country will never be strong until we lift them. How can we do it?”
A thoughtful Hindu rose and said, “It will take a Christ to lift them.”
As we sat there in the soft light of that Indian evening every one of us felt that he was right. It would take a Christ to lift them. But some of us went further and included ourselves in it—it would take a Christ to lift us too, and not all of those who felt this way were avowed followers of this Christ.
The Indian people are an intensely religious people, and when the wealth of this wonderful spiritual capacity is placed at the disposal of Jesus the product will be beautiful indeed. One day some prominent Hindus came to me and said, “They are having a government fair at K ———.” (It was very like our County Fair at home with exhibits, agricultural displays, horse racing, sports, wrestling, etc.) “It is all very good, but there is no religion in it. We have come to ask if you won’t come and put some religion in it.” I asked what they would like me to do and they replied, “We want you to come and give some addresses in the Durbar Tent.” I gasped, for the Durbar Tent was the official tent where the government officials held their functions. I told them to go on and get it if they could. They returned indignant. “The idea,” they said, “the official said to us that we could not have the addresses in the Durbar Tent, for that would seem to imply that government was back of religion, but we could have them in the Wrestling Pit with its tiers of seats all around. The idea of putting religion into the wrestling pit! If we can’t put it in the Durbar Tent we won’t have the meeting at all!” We had no meetings. But I had the feeling as I talked with those men that when India really accepts Christ he will not be put off on the edges of life. He will be put at the very seat of government to control and mold and possess all.
The last night I was in India before sailing for the present furlough I was addressing an eager crowd of non-Christians in ———. It was the last night of the series, and the situation became tense and electric as I asked them to then and there make a personal decision for Christ. I was in the midst of my appeal when a Hindu suddenly stopped me and said: “Wait a minute, sir, you ask us to become Christians. Before you go on will you tell me what you are doing in regard to the question of the rights of Indians in America? Tell us that before you ask us to follow Christ.” I was compelled to stop and explain just my position in the matter; told him how some of us had signed a protest to the Department of State and so on. He seemed satisfied, but note this: before I could go on and finish up my appeal I had to make myself right on that whole racial situation. I could not advance another inch without that.
You can see from these little windows I have thrown open what an amazing evangelistic opportunity presents itself. There has never been anything so big and challenging. But we cannot advance into it, cannot handle it with any degree of moral and spiritual authority, until we right ourselves upon some of these great racial issues.
That leads me to my next chapter, a chapter which I dislike to face, but the whole program of the evangelization of the East depends upon our taking a Christian attitude toward the nations of the Orient.