Amy’s missionary approach (part 2 of 3)

Who influenced her?

Education at home

‘The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.’ Amy’s parents brought her up in the fear of the Lord. In Chapter 2, we saw that the influence of her parental home (Figure 3) was with her for her whole life: the evangelical piety in Millisle and Belfast. Her mother’s support, even after the death of her father, was comprehensive; when she was in India her mother used to send the DF prayer letter, what is now called Dust of Gold, to friends all over England for prayer support for her daughter. For several months, Catherine Carmichael came out to Dohnavur in 1906 and later on Amy wrote to her children, ‘she loved you as her own grandchildren’. Others, too, influenced her although they themselves did not even know sometimes. ‘We can never be grateful enough for the loving friends who help us in many lands.’1473 Amy had many friends in India as well as in England. Some had influential positions in church and mission circles. She mentions Dr Eugene Stock (1836–1928) – ‘a long-tried friend’1474 – for more than 20 years the CMS secretary, who went through the whole manuscript of Walker of Tinnevelly.

Robert Wilson, Handley C.G. Moule, Andrew Murray and Arthur T. Pierson

If we are to be real missionaries, if we are to give our money as we ought to give, and give ourselves and our children, and pray as we ought to pray, and live as we ought to live, we must have nothing less than the power of the Holy Spirit flowing freely in us to overflowing. Oh, Keswick thou canst not do the right mission work unless the Holy Spirit fill every heart. O, Christ, we want to live and to die like Thee, for God’s Kingdom! Give Thine own Spirit within us! O, Master, we want to live and die that our God may be honoured! Let Thine own Spirit come down on this meeting, and fill every heart.1475 Among the influences that moulded the DF, the first one Amy mentions is Robert Wilson (1824– 1906), chairman of the Keswick Convention from 1890 to 1900. He organised in 1875, with Canon T.D. Harford-Battersby, the first convention in Keswick. Since the day Amy sailed to the East – 03 March 1893 – week by week, until his power to write failed, letters from Robert Wilson crossed the oceans. Amy felt very close to him and liked to call him the ‘Dear Old Man’ (DOM). In his letters to his ‘adopted’ daughter, he wrote about the latest work of the Keswick Convention in England and overseas; and with wise words he counselled and encouraged her ‘to keep first things first’.1476 These letters, which followed her to China, Japan, Ceylon and India, she treasured. In Dohnavur, Wilson’s Bible lay on her desk and in it was a fragment of a letter with these words: ‘Follow no voice, not mine or any other which is not His’.1477 When she had to make so many decisions, always and every time his advice to Amy was to wait upon the Lord and expect everything from him.

In 1895, when Amy stood on the platform of the Keswick Convention with some others who were also due to go into the mission field, it was the start of the third decade of the convention. About 3000 people attended the convention that year. The presence of Andrew Murray made the convention

1473. Amma’s Book, 50.

1474. Walker of Tinnevelly, X.

1475. Andrew Murray in his closing address at the 1895 Keswick Convention (in Sloan, These Sixty Years, 44). 1476. Cf. Gold Cord, 5. special.1478 He gave several addresses, which had a huge impact on all who heard him. Of his last address ‘That God May be All in All’ on the Friday evening, someone remarked: ‘It was an unforgettable night, the Heavens were opened, and we saw visions of God’.1479 Amy saw in him a spiritual guide and sought every opportunity to hear him and talk with him. He taught her a lesson she never forgot:

First, ‘He brought me here. It is by His will I am in this strait place; in that I will rest’. Next, ‘He will keep me here in His love, and give me grace in this trial to behave as his child’. Then say, ‘he will make the trial a blessing, teaching me lessons he intends me to learn, and working in me the grace He means to bestow’. And last, say, ‘In His good time He can bring me out again. How and when, he knows’. Therefore, say ‘I am here (1) by God’s appointment, (2) in His keeping, (3) under His training, (4) for His time’.1480 Mr Robert Wilson died on 19 June 1905.1481 Amy called that day ‘Fatherie’s Glory Day’. Often letters from the DOM were sent to Dohnavur urging Amy to come back and see him. These letters tore her heart. Others, relatives and friends, also tried to persuade her to come to Britain. Mr Wilson, and others, had tried to break through her defences and persuade her to come home. ‘I hope thou wilt not let my present condition disturb any arrangements’, and in the next: ‘Do thy diligence to come to me before winter’, he wrote one fall.1482 These words went through her heart afterwards. She did not come before winter, that winter or any winter. Evangelically correct as Amy had been since 1892, in this instance one feels that although she was not exactly hiding behind one obligation to absolve her from another, she was caught in a most painful dilemma, with suffering the result whatever her choice. It was again in Keswick in 1895 she devoted herself to the work of God, now in India, strong in another’s strength. As a true determined Irish Presbyterian, she determined ‘to do or die’. ‘The strong man and the waterfall channel their own path’, as the proverb puts it. Amy was aware that her whole life, her decisions, where to go and what to do, every part of her life was under the scrutiny of God. God’s grace was sufficient in every detail, so taking up new challenges could only be done after long prayer and any practice undertaken had to be in keeping with a holy God. In listening to the Scriptures she became a true disciple.

‘A very beloved friend’

So Amy called the preacher, theologian and churchman, Handley Carr Glyn Moule (1841–1920). Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he later served as Dean of the school, for 19 years he served as the principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and thereafter from 1901 to 1920 as bishop of Durham. He is described as being ‘master alike of the Greek and the English tongues’.1483 While in Cambridge, he

1478. ‘The main feature of this Convention has been the presence of our beloved brother, the Rev. Andrew Murray from South Africa, whose addresses have come home with peculiar power.’ (Rev. Evan Hopkins in the ‘Life of Faith’, in Douglas, Andrew Murray and His Message, 163).

1479. In ‘The Visit of Dr Andrew Murray’ (in Sloan, These Sixty Years, 42). See also Douglas, Andrew Murray and His Message, 163: ‘I cannot describe to you the deep heart-searching teaching of Mr Murray’s evening addresses nor the power and authority with which they were delivered. Every word seemed to come straight from God with living power, and went right to the hearts of the people.’

1480. Windows, 10.

1481. Robert Wilson is buried in the small Quaker burial ground in the fields above his home at Broughton Grange. A simple stone bears the words ‘All one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:28). This information in I.H. Murray, Amy Carmichael, ‘Beauty for Ashes’ (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2015), 91.

1482. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 108.

1483. Sloan, These Sixty Years, 32. Of Moule’s commentary on Romans, in the ‘Expositor’s Bible’ series, Dr W.H. Griffith Thomas said: ‘In this will be found a statement of the doctrine of Sanctification as seen in Romans VI–VIII, which contains

Chapter 14

was a very well-known and beloved speaker – since 1886 – at the Keswick Convention.1484 He passed his 79 years of influence more as a giver than as a receiver. The adherence of Moule to the Keswick platform was a great accession of strength, for it brought into the movement one who had long been highly respected as a trusted Evangelical scholar and theologian:

His messages always brought the hearts of his hearers near to the living and the present Saviour, and they touched practical life on all sides, and to those who had the privilege of his personal friendship, what he was added power and influence to all he said or wrote.1485 From his pencil came a wealth of Bible studies, especially in the Pauline letters, and he never neglected his pastoral duties comforting and writing to people in need. Moule sent in 1915 his exposition to the Philippians to Amy in Dohnavur.

His official correspondence was always large, amounting to an average of 30 to 40 letters a day in the Durham years.1486 Many, all over the world sought his spiritual help and the letters he wrote to little children, aged persons, bedridden invalids and so many more became the treasured possessions of the recipients and were read and reread, refreshing their souls. Some of his letters went even as far as to Dohnavur.1487 After Ponnamal’s death the compound was empty for Amy and one day it was mail day and with a pile of letters before her, she was longing for a special letter which could comfort her. She opened a letter and then: ‘I could hardly believe he [Bishop Moule] had written to me in his own handwriting, and as I read I found the comfort of the day before repeated and enriched.’1488 In 1917 he wrote the foreword to Amy’s Ponnamal:

Read it, and give God thanks for it, and read it again and often. It will be friend and helper to your faith, a kindling fire to your missionary thoughts, prayers, and efforts, a window through which you will see ‘the real India’1489 as it is not often seen, and a picture, wonderful and beautiful, of the life of the Lord lived in His missionary servants, and in the Indian sisters whom they have brought into His all-loving power and keeping.1490 She also had Moule’s Letters And Poems – ‘a dear book’ Amy wrote on the first page – Moule’s The Second Epistle to Timothy, which she re-read in 1947, and his Colossian Studies, ‘reread Oct. 1947’.1491 Amy had met bishop Moule at the yearly Keswick Convention. Moule, with his broad view had a great interest in mission and, with his sensitive way of feeling, in the sufferings of others. Amy, writing about the often incomprehensible way of God’s dealings with his children, one day quoted Moule who wrote to her

(footnote 1483 continues...)

the essential principals of holiness associated with Keswick, put forth with all the scholarship and spirituality characteristic of the author. As long as that book is studied, the theology of holiness as set forth at Keswick cannot fail to receive due attention’ (in S. Barabas, So Great Salvation. The History and Message of the Keswick Convention (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 174–175.

1484. For a biographical sketch of Moule’s life, especially about his spiritual experience when he came in contact with Keswick, see Barabas, So Great Salvation, 169–175.

1485. Sloan, These Sixty Years, 32.

1486. See the preface of J. Battersby Harford, ed., Letters and Poems of Bishop Moule (London: Marshall Brothers Ltd, 1921), V.

1487. In Letters and Poems of Bishop Moule, we find portions of three letters to Amy, 33–35, and two to Arulai, 35–36. 1488. Dohnavur letter no. 1, January 1916, p.12, (PRONI D/4061/30/1).

1489. See A.T. Pierson, The Acts of the Holy Spirit (London: Morgan & Scott, n.d.), 115.

1490. In foreword of Ponnamal, V.

1491. The book is in the Dohnavur library. H.C.G. Moule, Colossian Studies. Lessons in Faith and Holiness (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1898). when he felt lonely after his daughter and his wife had died. When she had read the letter, Amy commented:

So near is the eternal Comforter that the strangely un-Christian view of death of our half-pagan age does not come into the picture at all. The wife is not ‘lost’. She is just ‘upstairs’.1492 Amy was in line with the mission thoughts of A.T. Pierson (1837–1911):

Pierson’s belief that world evangelization would usher in Christ’s return was the key to his passion for mission. He authored the watchword of the SVMU, ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation’. He promoted missions through hundreds of books, articles, speeches, and The Missionary Review of the World which he edited (1888–1911), the most important nondenominational mission journal of its day. After attending the London Centenary Conference in 1888, he began to spend time in England as missions advocate and interim pastor at Charles H. Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle. He acted as elder statesman to the emerging ‘faith mission’ movement, influencing among others the Africa Inland Mission and the Oriental Missionary Society.1493 Pierson’s absolute surrender to God’s will, revealed in Christ Jesus, attracted her. On her first missionary journey, she had some of Pierson’s books in her suitcase. In Japan she was a regular reader of Pierson’s The Divine Enterprise of Missions.1494 Amy saw that she was not the one only responsible for the work, because a missionary is according to Pierson a co-labourer with God (1 Cor 3:9), a co-sufferer with Christ (Col 1:24) and a co-witness with the Holy Spirit (Jn 15:26 and 27). Ours is to keep in touch with the Triune God and we have to know, ‘that it is such a solemn thing to work with God’. ‘The more one realizes that unspeakable holiness the more utterly one abhors and “retracts”’.

Hudson Taylor and George Müller

Though different people helped to shape Amy’s mission view, some men seem to rise above others. In 1885, Amy met James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), the founder of the China Inland Mission for the first time. She heard him pleading for the millions who every month passed away beyond the reach of the Gospel. Taylor gave the advice:

If we would be soul-winners and build up the Church, which is His Temple, let us not this: not by discussion nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him.1495 Amy fully agreed, for in her work she never argued or engaged in fierce debate. Wherever, anywhere, anyhow, always she put Christ in the front. Taylor’s very intimacy with Christ was well known. ‘It will be service with Jesus as well as for Jesus’.1496 Amy followed Hudson Taylor in his vision of an interdenominational mission in million-peopled Asia. She also shared Taylor’s longing to bring the missionaries and the Church back to prayer and to live in this work by faith alone. To ‘look up’ rather than to look at circumstances and the fact that mission work has to be evangelistic rather than institutional gave Taylor as well as Amy openness to the people to listen to the consolations of the Gospel. Amy’s expression ‘The Cross is the attraction’ is an echo of Taylor’s saying:

1492. In Gold by Moonlight, 38.

1493. Dana L. Robert, 1998, ‘Pierson, Arthur Tappan’, in Gerald H. Anderson (ed.), Biographical dictionary of Christian missions, New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 536.

1494. From Sunrise Land, 103.
1495. In J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion. China’s Millions (London: CIM, 1950), 24.
1496. J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion, 18.

Chapter 14

There is a needs-be for us to give ourselves for the life of the world. An easy, non-self-denying life will never be one of power. Fruit-bearing is cross-bearing. There are no two Christs, an easygoing one for easygoing Christians, and a suffering, toiling one for exceptional believers. There is only one Christ. Are you willing to abide in Him, and thus bear much fruit?1497 Amy also felt the influence of George Müller (1805–1898) of Bristol. She ordered her work in Dohnavur on the same basis, never asking for financial help as she winged her petitions to the God of all grace. Müller with his institutions wanted to form these according to the apostolic model, in which the scriptural pattern was the sole guide, and the Holy Spirit recognised as the sole administrator. The emphasis both men – Taylor and Müller – laid upon the complete dependency on God to provide means for the work was also Amy’s way in Dohnavur. She waited for ‘God’s sparrows’ to provide for all the needs of the Fellowship.

Thomas Gajetan Ragland

In India, the Tinnevelly missionary Thomas Ragland (1815–1858),1498 who sailed for India in 1845 in service of the CMS, was the first Englishman to camp among the people of India. Amy gave an account of his life and pioneer work in Ragland, Spiritual Pioneer (1922). Amy had a deep respect for Ragland and was always quoting him. Ragland was the first missionary to settle in Dohnavur. In a letter home, he wrote ‘Dohnavur, a beautiful spot in the south-west corner of Tinnevelly, close to the last high rock of the Ghaut Range’.1499 As the CMS secretary in Madras he visited Tinnevelly and had been struck by the contrast between the south and the north of that district. In the south mission stations were to be found every few miles, and there were flourishing and stable congregations. The north was completely the opposite, with scattered congregations here and there. There was no single missionary stationed there. Ragland became convinced that the solution to this disparity lay in the development of a band of evangelists, who were pledged to constant itineration and who were to preach the Gospel in the thousands of towns and villages. Ragland was a mathematician, and the precision of his mind is reflected in the plans he drew up. His way of working was ‘to press home the message by personal conversation, and to render its effect permanent by the sale of literature’.1500

He died in 1858 and, as his fellow workers said, the indirect cause of his death was exhaustion from over-exertion. After his death at Satchiyapuram, a small village in Sivakasi Taluk in Virudhunagar district, Tamil Nadu, the itinerancy was not allowed to die out. Amy and also the Walker family saw the need to follow in the footsteps of Ragland.

Ragland taught Amy to look ‘under the surface’. What is really going on in the daily life of the people? In his student years at Cambridge, the words of Henry Venn pierced through his heart and he never forgot the ultimate goal when doing mission work:

1497. Hudson Taylor in G. Howard Taylor, Faith Venture, A shorter life of Hudson Taylor (London: CIM, 1960 [1932]), 156. In the midst of his work in China, Hudson Taylor wrote: ‘Cross-loving men are needed’. In Faith Venture, 165. 1498. Thomas Gajetan Ragland was born in Gibraltar in 1815. He graduated with a BA from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1842 as fourth Wrangler. He was ordained deacon and priest at Ely the same year, and elected a Fellow of his college. He proceeded to an MA in 1845, and took the degree of BD in 1853. In 1845, he accepted the position of secretary of the Corresponding Committee of the CMS in Madras, and he retained that appointment for nine years. It was not until 1854 that he commenced direct evangelistic work. In that year, assisted by two younger Cambridge men, David Fenn and E.R. Meadows, he founded the North Tinnevelly mission. The Venerable Archdeacon Thomas Thomason Perowne, in 1861, wrote a memoir of his life and work. See T.T. Perowne, A Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Gajetan Ragland: Fellow of the Corpus Christi (London: Halliday, 1861).

1499. Ragland, 24.

1500. In Neill, God’s Apprentice, 102.

Let us but get a glimpse of things unseen and eternal, and see the King of Glory establishing His reign through the whole earth, and calling many officers to join His royal camp and court, and we shall feel in what true honour consists.

Ragland’s missionary call cut straight across the hope of marrying one day. He ‘held it as a secret between him and the Lord’.1501 The high standard of duty Ragland had attracted Amy. His discipline and joy, his going his own way with God, were the rules he walked by. This pioneer could not work with narrow bounds; they would turn into ‘pin-cushions, and more pin than cushion’.1502 Ragland did not want missionary literature:

[W]hich paints the picture with the devil out of it’.1503 ‘Where all Christ’s dear servants only made willing to be as corn of wheat to fall into the ground and die, I should be content and thankful.’1504 ‘Of all plans for ensuring success, the most certain is Christ’s own – becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground and dying.’1505 A very important thing of getting to know the people is ‘to have a knowledge of their intimate talk’: don’t go on speaking English, but if you want to understand, ‘listen and love enough’.1506 During Ragland’s time in Dohnavur’s bungalow, the story ‘Cry a Little for Me’ was written. This title was a request from a sick 3-year-old child to his father before he died. Amy added, ‘Many a young child, and with deeper reasons, might have said it. But for this comforting more is needed than tears.’1507 He was in Dohnavur to escape from the office work they wanted him to do, but he felt that the preaching of the Gospel and leading people to Christ had the priority. ‘There was one tingling wild desire to fly it all, to fly to some distant place where there was no office or committee meeting or polite society.’ People had sucked him into daily routine, but he wanted to break free somehow. Today they say he was a visionary, but ‘something had happened within him, a new passion had awakened; the lava still flowed’.1508 Madras was so narrow for home, passing thousands of people without the opportunity to say something:

He was tired of the big mission-house with its comings and goings, the many servants who had to be looked after, the time that had to be spent as it seemed to no profit at all.1509 He wanted to live in a house with only one servant and resign to work among the people. The Lord had other plans for him:

It will not open! Through the bars, I see the glory and the mystery. Wind upward ever.1510 And here again we meet and touch. Which of us in the hour of our greatest decision or of our sharpest disappointment looked upon it as a little thing?1511

1501. Ragland, 3.
1502. Ragland, 4.
1503. Ragland, 11.
1504. Ragland, 15.
1505. Ragland, 16.
1506. Ragland, 16–17.
1507. Ragland, 26.
1508. Ragland, 39–39.
1509. Ragland, 43.
1510. Ragland, 44.
1511. Ragland, 44.

Chapter 14

‘Let me be a corn of wheat’, he wrote during a difficult time. He longed for a change:

My secularities begin to be a drudgery.1512 And after long pondering he put into words thoughts which had grown up in his heart with his dear Lord, and asked not only to be set free entirely from all other work, but to be given for fellow workers men to whom the Cross is the attraction.

He went off south, that bullock-cart having been his home now for nine years. His heart walked after his eyes. He saw people never having heard the Gospel. ‘Why must they go on without hearing? Was there no way by which they could hear?’1513 ‘This itinerating work had never been tried in the whole of India. […] Impossible, no, not with God. These people must be reached’.1514 By this work many people could be reached:

And it fell to the lot of his spiritual successor, Walker of Tinnevelly, to help forward the first women’s band. […] Sacrifice? Burning fires of eager love, then the plunge into the iciest water; thus are God’s sword-blades.1515 In a kind of ‘spiritual arithmetic’,1516 he gave a personal word to each letter he wrote; and he kept a prayer roll of his fellow missionaries.

‘The routine of business was saturated in the loving and spiritual, and the work never became mechanical.’1517 In his prayers, he examined himself and humbled himself before the Lord. When it was difficult, he used to say, ‘look up, and go on, and try not to make it harder for others’. He was always dealing with ‘real things’:

I want a settledness, a settled holy fear of sin and, if it might be, continual upholding of my going in the Lord’s ways, that my feet slip not, never, never.1518 Ragland broke new ground, when he resigned from his sending church and took only what the Lord might give to him. He knew it might be little, but he never urged his colleagues to do the same. This was 14 years before the birth of the CIM. ‘But Ragland and Hudson Taylor were blood brothers.’1519

What attracted Amy to Ragland was that in servants for Christ he looked for vaira (diamonds). He was not content with less. In the heat of the fight many give in soon:

He was up against a power that had never been attacked, much less conquered, a power that knew how to use every element of difficulty and discouragement, climate and other, in this tremendous warfare.1520 He wanted men with no reservations and with no ‘buts’. He already saw the creamy smoothness: missionaries who wanted an easy life, avoiding the ‘sham battlefields’. Ragland wanted the real thing and he knew: ‘The call finds them, thrills through them. They rise and obey, and a joy that passes the joy of the morning lightens upon them and abides’.1521

1512. Ragland, 45.
1513. Ragland, 48.
1514. Ragland, 45–48.
1515. Ragland, 49–50.
1516. A Henry Venn expression. H. Venn (1817–1889) was the honorary secretary of the CMS.
1517. Ragland, 31.
1518. Ragland, 36–37.
1519. Ragland, 53.
1520. Ragland, 53
1521. Ragland, 55.

His itinerary plans were accepted. He was persuaded not to resign from the CMS, but they set him free and other men would go with him. This work would be done under the care of the CMS. People at home tried to show him that he could not do the work in this way and that he was too weak. It was useless: ‘he saw a hand they could not see that beckoned him away. He heard a voice they could not hear that would not let him stay’.1522

Ragland knew that true conversion in India is not in the masses. ‘The fruit was all hand-picked, and never made much show […] and Ragland was not out to pile numbers in reports, but to win souls for Jesus Christ’.1523

Thomas Ragland, called ‘his Lord’s dear lover’,1524 living near the town of Siva’s Benares on the plains of north Tinnevelly, was called home on 22 October 1858. A boy was looking through an open window of the bungalow unnoticed by the one inside. He heard the last word Ragland spoke, one word he recognised, ‘Jesus’, and ‘saw a smile that no passing of the years could blot from memory’.1525 From Ragland Amy learned not to waste time and to live a life that is all poured forth. To fall into the ground as the corn of wheat and die, and in that way to bring forth much fruit:

But all through life I see a Cross,
Where sons of God yield up their breath:
There is no gain except by loss,
There is no life except by death,
And no full vision but by Faith,
No glory but by bearing shame,
Nor Justice but by taking blame,
And that Eternal Passion saith,
‘Be emptied of glory and right and name’.1526