Amy’s missionary approach (part 3 of 3)

Rev. Thomas Walker

The Tinnevelly missionaries were in Amy’s eyes ‘real soldier-missionaries’. The Walkers reminded her of the CIM missionaries in China and for her ‘Mrs Walker is especially lovely, and heart and soul a missionary’.1527 A small note of Amy about Thomas Walker goes as follows:

Born February 9, 1859. Sailed to India, October 10, 1885. Having lived, departed [Tamil idiom for ‘died’] 24 August 1912. To a man of his adventurous and ardent temperament nothing short of utter surrender would suffice. The Master Who demanded all was the Master for him.1528 He had been a splendid friend. When first the children’s work began he was at home, and his letters were doubtful, for he had never been in that which I have called the Underworld, and could not measure its needs.

1522. Ragland, 61.
1523. Ragland, 87.
1524. Ragland, 99.

1525. Ragland, 102. That boy never forgot it. One day, he, still a Hindu, a man grown, stood by a dying friend. In his agony, the dying man cried to light a lamp. Who would show him the way? Then his friend told the man of the open window, the look, the smile, the one great Word, ‘Jesus’ (in Ragland, 106–107).

1526. Ragland, 111.
1527. In a letter from Kotagiri, 31 May 1896, 3 (PRONI D/4060/1/1-D; D/4060/6/8).
1528. In the opening page of Amy’s first book about Thomas Walker, When God Came.

Chapter 14

But when, upon his return, he set himself to discover the true state of things, and knew them from the smile to be indeed a call, his attitude changed and he stood by us and was a shelter from the smile that somehow was harder to bear than the scourge of the tongue. […] Now he was suddenly taken from us. We had to do with out.1529 Who was that white man Star saw one day, when she had slipped away from home, and who stood there in front of the people at the well? Not understanding everything the little girl noticed that the words he spoke were very important. ‘He spoke about sin and the punishment of sin, and finished with God’s great love and the salvation that has been prepared for men.’1530 Star had seen and had listened to Thomas Walker (Figure 30), the CMS missionary, based in Tinnevelly. Walker had been the chairman of the council of the CMS, a position requiring much office work. On the Tinnevelly missionary scene, nominal Christianity was for Walker the most worrying thing: Christians lived like Hindus. Other problems arose and finally he felt he ‘could not go on turning the wheel in the direction it was turning’. He asked for replacement and his resignation was accepted. By the CMS he first was stationed in 1885 in Palamcottah, Tinnevelly, at that time the CMS’s headquarters. This district was Hindu in religion: approximately 3000 temples were in that area at that time, of which 42 were regarded as especially holy.

All this had happened by the time Amy arrived at Palamcottah. Walker, free from office responsibilities, started itinerant work in the villages in the Tinnevelly district. He saw in Amy a deep and uncompromising spirit of discipleship. Amy first met Thomas Walker when she was at a Keswick Convention where he was one of the speakers. She did not have much confidence in his ability as a good speaker. ‘I took my Tamil grammar study should the address prove dull in spite of the scholarship sure to be in it. […] My Tamil grammar remained unopened.’1531

Amy discussed with him how she could best learn Tamil and she tried to explain to him that she would rather live in a mud hut with the people around her instead of being among English people in a bungalow. Walker said:

‘You would not stand it for long’. I replied: I would rather burn out than rust out. ‘That should be as God wills’. My first thoughts: I don’t like you, was my immediate decision, ‘you don’t understand’. I withdrew in the deeps of myself and the rest of the walk was formal and uncomfortable. I did not like him at all. But I liked his wife […] and it was settled that I should go and stay with them in Tinnevelly and study Tamil.1532 No one so deeply influenced Amy as Rev. Thomas Walker. She lived and worked with Rev. Walker and his wife for 15 years.1533 Like Amy, Walker appreciated the sermons of Bishop Handley Moule,1534 who was a friend of Amy’s. Amy wrote three different books about Thomas Walker. He not only was her language teacher, but in him she saw a true God-sent missionary and we see that in her thinking about mission work, mission principles and theory he was her example. When he lived in Dohnavur he assisted Amy also in the bookkeeping of the Fellowship.1535 She heard him speak

1529. Nor Scrip, 29.
1530. Ploughed Under, 50.
1531. When God Came, 2.
1532. When God Came, 3–4.
1533. From the Forest, 40.
1534. Cf. Walker of Tinnevelly, 10.
1535. Cf. Nor Scrip, 101.

Source: © Dohnavur Fellowship. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jeremiah Rajanesan. Photographer unknown. FIGURE 30: Rev. Thomas Walker (1905).

Chapter 14

and preach several times and this, in her own word, ‘deepened’ her life.1536 We see many things Amy did or wrote that originated from Thomas Walker. Like Walker Amy was rather afraid of publicity, ‘as it opens up the way for pride’.1537 What she so admired in Thomas Walker, was his:

[S]tern denial of self, and the absolute severance from what was of the world.1538 A firm stand against everything un-Christian is absolutely essential in order to the progress of the Gospel in India. Let us raise the standard of ‘No Compromise’.1539 A letter home, written in 1899, shows something of his deepest longing:

We have been preaching sin and repentance, and there seems some movement, but how deep it is one cannot yet see. I am tired of the half conversions which are the order of the day in most places, in England as well as in India, and I am longing to see something like the reality of the ’59 revival.1540 These words of Thomas Walker’s Amy fully agreed with. She respected him, who could rejoice when he met ‘earnestness’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘unworldliness’. ‘It was always as if he were looking through the pressing, crowding, articulate Seen, to the great, quiet Unseen behind.’1541 Like herself, she saw in Walker the mountaineer, this ‘single hearted-man’, who had the vows of God on him and who did just one thing – This one thing I do!1542 He longed to be a sincere missionary; once he prayed:

That I may have wisdom to proceed aright, fluency of speech in the Tamil language, a yearning desire to win soul for Christ, and grace to be both in life and service all for Jesus.1543 He was a real itinerating evangelist, going out for the sake of the Gospel.1544 Walker had deep insight into Hindu life and thought. He could read the old Sanskrit and Tamil sacred works and discuss with learned Brahman. He knew ‘the real state of things’ in south India and even many non-Christians respected him. He knew of the cruelties and immoralities in Hinduism:

Where is it (the Gospel) so sorely needed as in a continent where satan has constructed his strongest fortresses and displayed the choicest masterpieces of his skill? […] And so I repeat, if God is calling you, buckle on your sword, come to the fight, and win your spurs among the cultured sons of India.1545 He himself felt fully dependent upon God and liked to pray with Jeremy Taylor, ‘Lord, do Thou turn me all into love, and all my love into obedience, and let my obedience be without interruption’.1546 Walker was sure that in no other country but India the forces against the Gospel were so great and so combined. ‘For here it has to face and overcome the combined resistances of the Caste system,

1536. This One Thing, 75.
1537. This One Thing, 35.
1538. Walker of Tinnevelly, 12.
1539. T. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians (London: CPCK, 1919), 26.
1540. This One Thing, 97.
1541. This One Thing, 204.

1542. This One Thing, 182 and 187. ‘The voice of my departed Lord, Go! teach all nations! comes on the night air and awakes mine ear. Why stay I here? The vows of God are on me, and I may no longer stop to play with shadows or pluck earthly flowers, till I my work have done and rendered up account’ (This One Thing, 16).

1543. This One Thing, 39.

1544. ‘And the Iyer baptised her as he did all our converts, though he repeatedly declared he was not sent to baptise but to preach the Gospel’ (From the Forest, 67).

1545. Thomas Walker, quoted by Amy (Things As They Are, 249).

1546. This One Thing, 50. entrenched heathenism, and deeply subtle philosophies.’1547 For a Hindu to become a Christian it meant to give up everything – everything!1548

He knew India as few knew it; he was wise as few are wise; and he had the rarest gift of never failing in a crisis. […] He had sympathized with us in a way, which halved every grief and doubled every joy.1549 We focus a little more on Thomas Walker. Walker, just like Ragland, was the spiritual son of Charles Simeon of Cambridge University and deeply loved by thousands in Travancore and Tinnevelly. His deep determination of utter devotion impressed Amy. ‘Of all plans for insuring success, the most certain is Christ’s own – becoming a corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying.’ His remarkable ministry in Travancore and at Dohnavur,1550 since 1902, was well-known. ‘He stood for the highest always and everywhere. […] He was very quiet and un-self- advertising.’1551 He was ‘a brilliant linguist with a remarkable knowledge of Tamil’,1552 gifted in street preaching, in counselling, and in Bible exposition to missionary groups. In the 1905 revival, which spread over many parts of India, Walker was heavily involved, preaching and praying in many meetings.1553

Did Walker influence Amy in the formation of the Sisters of the Common Life? In writing to his sister – in 1888 – he already wrote about itinerating work, but he thought the mode of work was wrong:

We preach and preach to hundreds and hundreds of people, but find little or no response. […] What I long for is a little community of bachelor missionaries to be always at work in the district, sharing each other’s sorrows and joys and living a life of greater simplicity than we do at present, trying to stir up native Christians to real self-denial, which is little understood by them. […] I believe in a good, warm, strong force in aggressive work.1554 This Walker wrote because he did not see any interest in the Gospel in south India, ‘in fact, my opinion is that sense of sin is a very rare article indeed in India’.1555

Walker’s attitude when something official had to be done, such as the CMS Centenary services, was typical. Walker wrote – and Amy felt the same – ‘I wish all the Centenary services were over. I am afraid of all this fuss and noise, “Down in the dust” is our proper place and attitude’.1556 Walker’s imperative need for quiet and privacy was also dear to Amy. Walker did not want to sit for photos. When someone asked him to have his photo taken he excused himself: ‘I pointed out the incongruity of the request, and begged, as kindly as possibly, to be excused. How fond we all are nowadays of publicity, autobiographies and photographs’! Amy too did not like to have her photograph taken.1557

1547. In Things As They Are, 83.
1548. Things As They Are, 86.
1549. Ponnamal, 90.

1550. The main reason to move to Dohnavur at that time was that this was a suitable place for an ordination class, to teach divinity students and to do evangelistic work with them (This One Thing, 115).

1551. Gold Cord, 8; When God Came, 5.
1552. Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 123.
1553. Cf. Dyer, Revival in India, 95.
1554. Walker of Tinnevelly, 95 and 97.

1555. Walker of Tinnevelly, 104. ‘The god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not. It is partly, I think, that they have lost all sense and conception of what true holiness means’ (Walker of Tinnevelly, 106). 1556. Walker of Tinnevelly, 222.

1557. Walker of Tinnevelly, 268. It was very difficult to get a photo of Amy. She even erased her face in a group photo taken during her stay in Japan.

Chapter 14

He came into conflict with the office bearers of the CMS in India who wanted to shut him up in a clerical job. He refused:

We have been too much occupied with outward organization and missionary routine; we have not sought for our Indian brethren, as we should, a Spirit of life from God; we have not loved them, wept over them, wrestled in prayer for them as we ought to have done. Lord, we blame ourselves today. We are very guilty, we missionaries, before Thee in this thing. Our strength has often been expanded over the externals of our work, and we have failed to attain, in any adequate degree, the main object of our mission: that immortal souls might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Help us all to make a fresh start. O Spirit of life, breathe upon our congregations. Breathe upon these slain, that they may live.1558 In a letter home in 1889,1559 he wrote ‘We want less of policy and more of downright, straightforward Gospel work in reliance on the Spirit of grace’. Walker was a strong opponent of introducing Western church systems in new churches on the mission field:

They were not of the essence of the Gospel. And we are warned hereby to beware of oppressing the infant Churches of the mission-field with our own national rules and customs and ecclesiastical systems and accretions. We Westerners often carry to eastern lands denominational shibboleths and Church organisations, which are not of the essence of the Gospel. Very solemn were St. Peter’s words, ‘Why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples?’1560 The Hindus have to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the Gospel in those who profess to have received it. The evangelisation in India, according to Walker, ‘will be immensely accelerated’ when missionaries are been keen on these things: to be in the country showing they had received the Christian message straight from God and in life and work live according to the Gospel1561:

If we want India to be evangelized, we must be up and doing. There is much danger in our midst of congregations settling down into a state of ease and indifference to the condition of the non-Christian world around them.1562 Walker was determined that nothing should ever hold him to conventional methods of work. ‘I feel I have reached a point when my obedience to the Committee is in danger of clashing with my obedience to God’.1563 He questioned himself and others by asking: ‘Are you sure that you are turning the wheels in the right direction?’1564 Amy says that he was a ‘very quiet man and un-self advertising’, but ‘that he was a man with a message of power’.1565 Walker was a man easy to get on with, but he had strong views and definite beliefs, and an obstinate determination to go the way he believed to be right, together with a high standard of discipleship for himself and for those who shared his life. He was soaked in the Scriptures and life in India had given him deep insight into the thinking, life and vagaries of the Indian people. Being fluent in Tamil he could reach the people’s hearts and by experience he had learned not to

1558. W.M. Smith in the introduction of T. Walker, Missionary Ideals, X and XI.
1559. Walker of Tinnevelly, 109.
1560. In T. Walker, Missionary Ideals, 88.

1561. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians, 112. Cf. too This One Thing, 32: ‘Let no one come to India who is not prepared to love her people. We British have done much for India, more than she as yet recognizes; but we have not loved enough.’ 1562. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians, 49. ‘But the history of the Tinnevelly Mission makes me dread anything like making too much of a mission-field. When we begin to praise ourselves, God allows disaster to come and humble us’ (This One Thing, 55).

1563. This One Thing, 74.
1564. This One Thing, 56.
1565. When God Came, 5.

put trust in outward things. One thing was in his heart: the spiritual welfare of the thousands of people living in the villages, worshipping the idols. With so much immorality being in their religion Walker emphasised that a true knowledge of Christ and strict morality are one. To love Christ is obedience to his Word too. ‘He had mourned over the low ideals of what should have been a living Church […] He grieved when hungry sheep looked up and were not fed.’1566

There was something apostolic about this missionary. Nothing could keep him from his set purpose. He would give himself to preaching Christ wherever he might be, but he disliked to be restricted by the rules of precedent which so easily became law in the conduct of a mission station. Walker was not a man to talk, discuss, make plans and formulate resolutions, some of which perhaps were put into effect, but the majority of which were laid on the table or placed in a drawer to be dealt with on some future and uncertain occasion. When necessary he attended meetings and conferences. When there was a lot of talk of church organisation and mission work, but nothing practical was done, then Walker listened and his body sat truly in the audience, but his spirit wandered up and down along Indian roads. He saw himself sitting in a bullock cart on his way to the hundreds of still unreached villages of India. He feared that God’s open doors were overlooked. ‘Away with custom and ceremony! Let us cry to God.’1567 Why wait until the opportunities have passed, and so many have to die, without ever having heard the good news. ‘There’s an amount of machinery – but life?’, he once said, when he saw that the wheels of the Church were turning busily and things looked so imposing, so that most people were satisfied with this.1568

In 1897 the decision was taken. He left the office in Madras and moved to the south, first to Pannaivilai from where he itinerated the whole district. In that year Amy heard him preaching on a Sunday evening and of that sermon she wrote:

A certain nervous mannerism in the speaker which would have been disturbing if the subject had been less finely handled, was forgotten – all the personal and the trivial was forgotten; this present world with its puny powers seemed as nothing, a shrivelled leaf. Only the Eternal was important. That was the sense of the hour; it deepened life for at least one who heard. But the preacher never knew.1569 In his preface to Amy’s Overweights of Joy, we see a missionary who came up with the cold facts of the religious state of the Indian Church. There was a total indifference to the glad tidings of the Gospel and he referred to Dr Miller, speaking of the Hausaland people in Africa at the Keswick Convention of 1903, with reference to the situation in India: ‘Make no mistake. They do not want the Gospel; but they need the Gospel’.1570

He never quit the Anglican Church but the strictness of using the official Anglican Prayer book and rituals presented too many limitations for him, because they were hindering him from following the guidance of the Spirit.1571

1566. When God Came, 5.
1567. This One Thing, 172.
1568. Cf. This One Thing, 211.

1569. Walker of Tinnevelly, 183. ‘And now began those wonderful days when vital religion was preached Sunday by Sunday, and the place was alive with a sense of stir and a new brightness’ (Ponnamal, 7).

1570. T. Walker in the preface of Overweights of Joy, VII. ‘It is true also, absolutely true, that here, in Southern India, we are “skirting the abyss,” an abyss which is deep and foul beyond description, and yet is glorified, to Hindu eyes, by the sanctions of religion. […] India has not yet been won’ (p. VIII).

1571. Cf. the strictness of the CMS in the interview Dr Murray Webb-Peploe had with the board members of the mission committee of the CMS, who had to decide whether he could be accepted as one of their missionaries. ‘He asked me how much I knew about the Prayer Book. I said, “I’m afraid very little, but I do read the Bible”. He said, “My dear boy, however can you convert the heathen if you don’t know the Anglican Prayer Book?”’

Chapter 14

While doing his Tamil studies – as Amy was doing at that time – Sherwood Eddy, who for some time lived with the Walker family – ‘this godly family home’ – characterised Walker as ‘a kind of ascetic Christian John the Baptist, who spent hours in prayer when on his missions’.1572 Walker felt the battle and travail for souls, never changing the terms of the message that he propagated: ‘the Cross is still the Cross’.1573 Walker was Amy’s language teacher and he taught her thoroughly and seriously. When his father died, and the news reached him, he was busy teaching. He first finished his lesson and then told her what had happened. ‘His explanation? “Not even the sorrows of love could be allowed to interrupt the service of love”.’1574 In his sermons he was clear:

He never aimed at soothing souls with those safe, comfortable sentences which disturb nobody and do nothing; he said what was in his heart in words as direct as he could find. […] In his sermons he was first informing and then inflaming’.1575 On 17 February 1898, Amy passed the language exam: ‘Hallelujah! Hurrah! The exam is passed! I am free for souls at last!’1576 She saw that now for her the real battle could start, now that she was able to converse in Tamil with the Indian Tamil speakers. This was the life Amy had longed for, for her it was ‘blissful work’, and it reminded her of the work she had done in Hirose (Japan). In the itinerating work she came into many villages, saw and heard things so contrary to a life of holiness. ‘She experienced a sense of evil worse than in Japan.’1577 Her big question always was: ‘In what way has this work to be done to touch these men and women for God?’

In Keswick they took note of the move of Rev. Walker from the office to the dusty roads of Travancore. At the Convention Week of 1897, Robert Wilson read a letter from Amy, dated 26 June 1897 from Palamcottah, south India, in which she mentions her itinerary work together with the band of Thomas Walker:

It is a new move this of Mr Walker’s. If there could be a moment’s prayer [at the convention] that God would move among the Christians of this great district (Tinnevelly) stirring them to wait upon Him for a deeper and more living life, it might – it surely would – make a difference out here! Could Keswick give two minutes to that prayer, or one-minute silence after the request? That would mean most real praying perhaps.1578 When Walker was a young curate at St. John’s, Stratford, he considered ‘Keswick’ teaching ‘something to be regarded with caution’,1579 but in India he saw it differently and eventually Walker was affiliated with Keswick, after the Keswick Council asked the Walkers to be their missionaries. For Amy it was a surprise:

1572. Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 123.
1573. This One Thing, 202.
1574. This One Thing, 46.

1575. Walker of Tinnevelly, 19 and 20. ‘Isn’t it better to lead someone to heaven than to have people admire you on earth? Live for Him Who died for you, and first trust Him with your soul’ (Thomas Walker in Walker of Tinnevelly, 22). ‘For him it was anathema when people only praised his sermons’ (When God Came, 6).

1576. In Scraps, 17 February 1898.

1577. In Elliot, A Chance to Die, 123. In chapters 15 and 16, Elliot gives a vivid account of Amy’s itinerating work. 1578. TKW (1897): 82. Walker himself once said:- ‘Here is the key to the whole position. India will never be awakened except by prayer’ (This One Thing, 82). ‘Better, far better, do less work, if need be, that we may pray more; because work done by the rushing torrent of human energy will not save a single soul: whereas work done in vital and unbroken contact with the living God will tell for all eternity’ (This One Thing, 83).

1579. Walker of Tinnevelly, 17–18.

There had been a time when the Iyer (as the people called him. Iyer means, teacher) had watched the Keswick movement with half-doubtful eyes. Would the Convention end in being merely a religious ‘talky-talky’, a spiritual picnic, or would it lead men and women out to the needy fields of the world? When it began to do so, he began to believe in it.

At first, Walker hesitated but at last consented to be more connected with Keswick, ‘hoping for more prayer of the vital sort because of this link with that great gathering of the Lord’s people’.1580 The main reason for Walker to join Keswick was when the Keswick Council started to undertake mission work to obey the Lord’s last command.1581 Walker and his wife visited the Keswick Convention during their furloughs in 1904 and in 1911, where in the latter he heard Webb Peploe’s Bible readings, which were for him ‘strong and helpful’ and for the rest, ‘the missionary prayer meetings were for him the best hours of the week’.1582 During the Keswick Week he mostly liked to go into the woods to pray for without the quiet he could not live.

Another point was that in the first years of his mission work Walker was rather reluctant to accept the Keswick view of holiness, but he gradually changed his mind. In 1900, he even wrote a letter to the Keswick Mission Council to ask the CMS to assign him as one of the Keswick missionaries. The council complied with his request and it was proposed and agreed to pay him 175 pounds annually.1583 Since then Walker also worked for the Syrian Church in Travancore.1584 The yearly conventions in Travancore with Walker as the main speaker often saw an attendance of some 20 000 people.1585

He emphasised the independence of the Indian Church. He saw all the unhappy divisions of the home church rapidly introduced in India, and so the spread of the Gospel was hindered.1586 For him the Philippian church was the example: an infant church not subsidised from foreign sources, a strong and active congregation, self-supporting and independent:

And here in India, we fall far short of so inspiring an example. We live as a Church in a sort of parasite existence. […] Indian fellow-Christians! Out of our poverty, if need be, like the Philippians of old, let us give with a liberal hand for the support of our congregations and for the spread of the Gospel.1587 The elaborate rituals in Islam and Hinduism appeal to the senses of the people in India. Our task is to draw ‘a sharp line of demarcation between the external systems of non-Christian religions of the country and the essentially spiritual character of the Gospel’.1588 Christians are ‘called unto holiness’, but

1580. This One Thing, 95. No wonder Walker was in first instance a little bit reluctant to accept the Keswick invitation because conferences were not in Walker’s line. His general thoughts about conferences was, ‘too much talk, too little prayer’ (This One Thing, 95).

1581. Cf. Walker of Tinnevelly, 175–176.
1582. Walker of Tinnevelly, 428.
1583. KCMMB, Keswick Mission Committee report, 05 October 1900.

1584. See This One Thing, 106–107: ‘What I find in Travancore is a crowd of people, thinking themselves converted, and coming to meetings to enjoy Scripture teaching, but sadly lacking in practical godliness, and with little or no zeal for the conversion of others. There seems to me an absence of real power, and it distresses me. […] It seems to me that the people are as much in danger from excess of emotion here as the Tamils are in danger from lack of it.’ 1585. In When God Came, 7.

1586. For Walker’s view on this issue, see Walker of Tinnevelly, 148.

1587. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians, XL. Walker wrote on the Philippians – ‘the Joy Epistle’ – and Acts. The chief feature of both these books is their India atmosphere as Dr Eugene Stock noticed. See This One Thing, 195. 1588. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians, XLI.

Chapter 14

in our country creed and practice are so widely and disastrously dissociated from each other.1589 He held the word ‘Puritan’ in honour.1590

As has been said before, Walker was Amy’s language teacher. Mastery of the difficult Tamil language was for him of supreme importance and had to be attained, if the Gospel is to be understood, translated and communicated cross-culturally. Since all culture is expressing of belief, a missionary should be aware that any adaptation or adoption of different cultural elements is prohibitive. Walker drew a sharp line and Amy agreed with him and always presented the Cross of Christ, even to upper Brahman groups when this was a thorn in their side. For communicating God’s interpretation of reality to the Indian people, Amy approached them in their native tongue.

For Walker, as for Amy too, Hinduism was not neutral; at its best it was an exercise in suppressing the knowledge of God. So to master the language and to know the culture had top priority for Amy,1591 for she longed to tell of the Saviour of the world, to those she met in south India. Missionary work is not truly Christian unless it implies a radical change in the life of the hearers of the message.1592

The last Sunday in Dohnavur was a day with a glory upon it. For months, on Sunday afternoons when he was at home, Walker had been studying the Psalms with the English-speaking members of the Dohnavur family. There had been many interruptions, but on that last Sunday he came to breakfast with a smile. ‘Do you know where we are in the Psalms?’ he asked and he quoted the verse preceding the doxology in Psalm LXI, which closes the first book: ‘Thou upholdest me … and settest me before Thy face forever’. ‘Isn’t that a good place to leave off?’ ‘Before His face for ever.’1593 He left Dohnavur in good health, and upon his arrival at Masulipatam, where the meetings were to be held, he visited some friends. At night he wrote in his journal: ‘Tired’. The next day he suffered from ptomaine poisoning,1594 and when they asked him for a word for his wife, he was too weak to answer. In a moment, when he thought to be alone, he said loudly: ‘I’m so happy’. In the still hour between the night and morning of 24 August, a word came that only his ear heard: ‘The Master is come and calleth for thee. […] Be of good comfort, rise; He calleth thee. And he, casting away his garment, rose and came to Jesus.’1595 A few weeks before his death he went through a very bitter time and then he had said, ‘I think to see the Lord will be heaven’. A few weeks afterwards he saw him.1596

Fifty years after his death, Nancy Robbins (MD) in Dohnavur, wrote of Thomas Walker, ‘The impact of his faithful life and earnest teaching has left its mark on the district’.1597 It is good to read that

1589. Walker, The Epistle to the Philippians, XLII.

1590. Cf. When God Came, 10.

1591. Amy knew the details of Hindu culture and the religious chants and lyrics. There were regions of language she did not know, but generally, she knew a lot and could communicate in Tamil. Once a lady was singing a weird song all about idolatry, full of sin and sorrow: ‘So far I followed her, for I knew the poem well’ (in Things As They Are, 31). 1592. Here we can think of Samuel Zwemer, the ‘apostle to Islam’, who admonished us: ‘Preach to the Muslim, not as a Muslim, but as a man […] as a sinner in need of a Saviour’, quoted in L.L.V. Werff, Christian Mission to Muslims (Pasadena, CA: The William Carey Library, 1977), 250.

1593. This One Thing, 216.
1594. A food poisoning caused by bacteria or bacterial products. See www.rightdiagnosis.com
1595. This One Thing, 218.
1596. See When God Came, 15.
1597. In Greater is He, 21.

ultimately, after Walker’s death in 1912, the Hindus in the Tinnevelly district were talking of him ‘as a man Heaven-sent’.1598

Walker’s death was a huge blow for Amy. No one had so deeply influenced Amy as Thomas Walker. In her own words, he ‘deepened’ her life.1599 We can see that many things Amy did or wrote originated from him. Amy was left with some trusted friends, of whom Ponnamal was one. She writes:

Ponnamal knew what Mr Walker had been to me, she knew I would be feeling just bereft. She comforted me, telling me now God would be more to me than ever, for He knew I had no arm but His, no help but in Himself. Today she came with a new thought. I believe there is a secret in this matter. God knew he was a could-not-be-done-without one. And yet God said, ‘Do without’. There is a secret in it. A secret – it does not matter whether or not it is explained. ‘What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this’ (Jn 13:7 NKJ) is a most loving word; but I sometimes feel it will be just as perfect whether or not it is explained, because we know our Father, so we know His secrets cannot possibly contain anything but love.1600

The message

In recollecting what had happened in Japan Amy wrote that the first thing she had learned was ‘the awful power of the enemy and one’s own powerlessness, and how we need to know ourselves as dust, nothing, less than nothing’. One needs to be ‘close to the Cross, close to his heart, committed to him, without a “but,” and “if,” or a limit’:

And I learned in a very humiliating way that if one is not being upheld every moment of the day, a fall is certain. Something of this I had learned at home, but Japan taught me how much more there was to learn.1601 She re-learned that the call of God asks for a constant communion with God. Charles Kingsley’s words crossed her memory:

Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt;
Do what thou dost as if the stake were Heaven,
And that thy last deed e’er the Judgment Day.

This all, ‘to make childhood what it should be for all children, there was many an hour where I was just a child with you. And even now the child is still alive in me. I think it will always be’.1602 Just before she went to Matsue, something happened, ‘that belongs, I think in a vital way to our D.F.’. In a walk along the sea with another missionary she learned that missionaries, – what she could not imagine before – often lived in ‘unkindness, loneliness, unlove’. They could even live ‘without praying together’. What about John’s words: ‘Beloved, let us love’, and what of our Saviour’s, ‘This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you’?

1598. Walker of Tinnevelly, 123.
1599. This One Thing, 75.
1600. Fragments That Remain, 146.

1601. Amma’s Book, 37. After an evening of fun talk with other missionaries a word, straight from the Bible, came to her: ‘I am against them that cause My people to err by their lightness’. ‘It was a burning moment.’ Fun was not wrong, she knew, but that evening it was not the time for it, she thought.

Chapter 14

Never shall I forget that walk by the grey sea. And though I never thought then of what our Father had in His heart for me to do, one thing I knew, I must, God helping me, draw others into love. Unlove is just impossible.1603 Amy knew – she had learned it from Ragland – that in religious India not theology but custom reigned supreme. An evangelical, she kept close to the central doctrines and the great roots of the Christian faith, and never grew tired of the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus. She grew up with firm creeds, ordered expositions of the Christian faith. She could refer to her Puritan blood and the importance it had for her to stand firm in her belief. Without this, you cannot ‘describe the nebulous attitude of mind of many a one today’.1604 But she never put the creed as the test on the outside. For her the inside, the relation with the living God, came first. To see Jesus Christ, and that is always the great surprise in Christian belief: that what he claims to be is a reality for the believer:

What we need is more common honesty. God listens to our words however expressed, strips them bare of accessories, musical or devotional, peels off all the emotion; searches through for the pith at their heart, caring just for the white thread of Truth. If we are, as we declare we are, not our own but wholly Another’s feeling will not affect duty either way.1605 A creed is necessary and assists the explainer of the Scriptures in being able to build up Christians in their intimacy with Jesus Christ. In his first epistle the apostle Peter does not say ‘give an explanation’ of what belief is, but ‘a reason of the hope that is in you’ (1 Pt 3:15). In thinking upon this chapter, Amy writes: ‘Within each one of us is what the Bible calls “the hidden man of the heart” (v. 4). A glance does not show it.’ Then, referring to the myrtle leaf – when crushed, it gives a nice aroma:

We are known what is in us when we are tried, crushed, and what is inside, cannot be explained with words put in a creed, but ‘crush’ the Bible, read it through and through, and the Lord will give the ‘aromatic perfume’, and faith will be manifested in what I do and the way I talk about others and look at them, like Jesus, ‘loving, serving, seeking and saving the lost’.1606 But, ‘we have to leave our sin before we can truly taste the heavenly food’.1607 Was Amy ever discouraged when her message was not received well? She answers:

No, not discouraged. It is written that our Lord came to His own and His own received Him not. The disciple is not above his Master, not the servant above the Lord. But we are sad. Why sad?

Because of what those who refuse are missing.

What are they missing?

Light, life. For in Him is life and the life is the light of men. This is what He offers. It is grieving when His loving offer is rejected. Do you press any to change their religion?

No; we do as the fore-runner of our Saviour did. He said to all who would listen, Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world.

But you are glad when people become Christians; is that not so?

Yes, if they be renewed in the spirit of the mind. No, if they merely turn from one religion to another. We do not think that nominal Christianity is a blessing to India.1608

1603. Amma’s Book, 38.
1604. Things As They Are, 245.
1605. Overweights of Joy, 55–56.
1606. Whispers of His Power, 14–15 February, 38 and 41.
1607. Overweights of Joy, 83.
1608. In The Starry Cluster, 11.

The urgency of the message was underlined with the ultimate consequence – repent because Christ is coming! Visiting and preaching to the people the band was often confronted with a lot of opposition. ‘See the scoffing faces; hear the revealing rained upon us as we close. What has stirred up such a sea of scathing scorn? The proclamation of the coming King.’1609 Sometimes, having little time, or knowing how precarious opportunities were to talk to someone, as happened sometimes with Star, ‘I took her directly to the heart of all things, the Cross’1610:

One must approach them here with the utmost sympathy, and yet we cannot lower the standard and offer them Christ without His Cross. Nor can we dress that Cross in flowers, and hide the thorny Crown. […] We believe discipleship involves open confession, and disentanglement from the devil’s web of caste,- and caste so permeates every action in a Hindu home that no woman can break it without being at once recognized as a Christian, and this implies the Cross.1611 She did not argue and ignored religious controversies. When she opened the door of her talking with the people, she closed the door of her study. She would not deny the value of reasoned defence of the faith. For her the Christian faith reposed upon an adequate foundation of its own, and it did not need to borrow support from science or philosophy. She was happy she could preserve the unclouded serenity of mind, and invest at once all her capital of faith in fruitful work. Amy tried, wherever she possibly could, to get into the houses, and talk to the women alone. ‘This is by far the best way to get at them; here as elsewhere, it is soul to soul dealing which tells.’1612 ‘Soul to soul’ was her mission strategy; in private conversation, like Jesus did in John 3 and 4, she focused upon the real issues in life.1613 Souls are not won lightly or in masses:

We are not speaking of so-called mass movement towards Christianity among the lower orders – a thing we wholly distrust, but of individual conversions to Christ among those who, by their very position as members of a caste are entrenched within the central citadel of Hinduism.1614 During her itinerary work, she was more for strengthening rather than for extending the work.1615 She converted doctrine into evangelistic action. Life and religion for her were one thing. She was not directly interested in those who were chiefly interested in the intellectual side of Christianity.

Her message was simple, direct, and very plain. One can say in entire harmony with the women behind the message. She was unconventional, and what others did not do, she did. ‘Naturally, as always in such cases, we kept to the elementary.’1616

Missionaries should always ask themselves ‘whether they really are preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ as He means we should’.1617 Like the one from whom she learned a lot, Thomas Walker, she

1609. From the Fight, 21.
1610. Ploughed Under, 53.
1611. From the Fight, 41.
1612. From the Fight, 20.

1613. ‘There is often much opposition, and the seed seems thrown away; but we think of Him Who preached by the wayside, and “at the head of the noisy streets… at the entering in of the gates,” and we rest on the strong “shall doubtless” of the promise of our God. […] We told her the true God loved her, but she laughed in a horrid laugh; we tried and tried again to get one ray of sunshine in, but the shutters were shut too close’ (From the Fight, 21 and 23).

1614. From the Fight, 26.
1615. From Sunrise Land, 121.
1616. Overweights of Joy, 12.

Chapter 14

did not shrink from being honest to the Gospel and to the people, by telling them that only Christ is the Saviour and without him people do not have eternal life.1618 When possible, she went in her talk with the people, especially to one person, ‘directly to the heart of all things, the Cross’.1619 ‘Our God asks for faithfulness, nor for compromise: Sow not thy field with mingled seed.’1620 No matter how busy she was, she always had a heart at leisure for the humblest. As God and her own conscience were theatre and spectators enough, she knew how to value obscure and unnoticed service.

The method

‘Carefulness in writing about souls’ was one of Amy’s principles. Mission magazines want stories of conversions and tend to dress them up a little, which can put the people about whom they are writing in a position they do not like. She learned that lesson in 1893 on board the ship that sailed from the London docks on 03 March.1621

When reading Young’s The Success of Christian Missions she put in a sharp remark when she read about mission progress in India:

It must, of course, be expected that there will be a large proportion of a semi-educated body whose religion will consist more in the observance of external forms than in a change of heart and life.

She wrote in the side-line: ‘But why baptize these masses en masse?’ Amy knew that people from the villages in south India never came to the Lord in a mass, but always one by one.1622 When others were talking about mass conversions, she doubted. She quoted a visitor who said, ‘Christian churches counted by their thousand, their members by the million; whole districts are Christian, entire communities are transferred’. And we look at one another, and ask each other, ‘Where?’1623 Often the Tinnevelly district, with many Anglican communities, is declared as Christian, but Amy knew that the majority of the people were Hindu. Referring to her itinerating work to reach the individual people she said that among the masses so many were nominal Christians and ‘a nominal thing is dead – then you are terribly weighted down and handicapped, as you try to go forward to break up new ground’.1624 Amy did not go after the millions:

We have to come down to the little town, the village, the street, the individual. None of us can be in more than one place at a time. […] But it is good and joyful too, to get an opportunity to stand effectively in even one small town.1625 [The people] have to be reached one by one.1626 In her talking to the people, she had the same principle as in her writing: she was honest and told them the full truth and consequences, even when talking to children:

1618. Thomas Walker ‘talked about sin and the punishment of sin, and finished with God’s great love and the salvation that has been prepared for men’ (Ploughed Under, 50).

1619. Ploughed Under, 53.
1620. Ploughed Under, 147.
1621. See the immediate cause of this principle in Roots, 4–5.

1622. Windows, 48. Here Amy remarks that the CEZMS missionaries reach many women who live behind the big walls. ‘Though our work is chiefly for the walled from whose strongholds our children come’ (Windows, 49). 1623. Things As They Are, 287.

1624. Things As They Are, 288.

1625. Gold Cord, 335.

1626. Amy, in a letter written from Kotagiri, 31 May 1896, 3 (PRONI D/4061/1/1-D; D 4060/6/8).

I told them [two small children] as much as I could of His love for them, and promised in His Name that He would take care of them and strengthen them to suffer for Him; for the stern law of suffering would, I knew, touch their lives at once, and I dared not hide it from them. To prepare them to face it, to put them on the track of winning through, that was my one business; and often I wonder, when about such work, where in the history of our religion we first dropped the painful Cross, and forgot to go back for it.1627 Once she wrote to friends in England the story of how children were treated in their homes: parents or relatives threatened the children and punished them when they showed interest in the Gospel. Some children were imprisoned at home, while others were threatened by their fathers that pepper would be put into their eyes if they would not give up their wish to be Christians. Some fathers twisted the wrists of the children, and there were many other punishments, known and unknown, because many ‘secret things were done in every village in India’:

About this time a letter came from home asking for a book for children. […] After a few weeks it came back again. ‘It was too harrowing’, the friend who was deputed to write to me told me. It must be ‘modified, even for grown up people’. But I did not see how I could ‘modify’ the truth; and after all, what did the word mean? Did it mean turn the pepper into flour, and the wrist-twisting into pats, smother the misery of the cross with flowers? But what good would this do? Besides how could one? So I put the unwanted manuscript back in its envelope and wrote across it words I had read a week or two before in ‘Aurora Leigh’,- You must not pump spring water unawares Upon a gracious public full of nerves.1628

The Holy Spirit

‘Praise God for the illuminating power of His Spirit, without whom our words were as idle as tales.’1629 ‘Missionaries have to abandon the idea, that instantaneous spiritual receptivity is something often seen. […] But every sunrise shines with hope’. Before the missionary can talk to someone, they knew ‘that through some previous dealing of the Spirit is ready to discern the truth’.1630 In times of despair and troubles, ‘nothing but the fullness of the Holy Spirit will carry anyone through’.1631

And the fruit? Amy took a lot of pain in winning souls to Jesus Christ. Her way of dealing with the people was one of nearness, with a capacity to empathise. Her way of being among the people was not a hard, metallic way of dealing with the people. This never had the stamp of the Holy Spirit on it. However, those rescued during her ministry must have been numerous. See what happened with the captain of the ship to Japan, the many conversions in Japan, and Ceylon, and the numerous children rescued from a sinful, miserable life:

Where, then, is our love? Do we count our lives too dear unto us to risk them under loop holed walls? Is Christ’s battalion the only one in which it is counted too much to die?1632 Many times Amy heard talk of people about missionary life, that would be ‘so nice’, just ‘a leisure time’. First after arrival in a new country, there ‘was a bit of a shock’ and then ‘gradually we got accustomed to it, and even content’. The danger is, that ‘we sometimes strangle our souls’. But Amy did not want to get accustomed

1627. From the Forest, 17.

1628. From the Forest, 23. This happened when she had written Things As They Are. See From the Forest, 21. 1629. Overweights of Joy, 12.

1630. Overweights of Joy, 35.

1631. Overweights of Joy, 58.

Chapter 14

to the spiritual situation in that new country. Often it was more slogan than fact when it was said, ‘spiritual men for spiritual work’. ‘What of people to whom the preacher had nothing to give?’ You have to expect conversions!1633

Referring to her work ‘of the little mission-hall in Ireland’1634 she gave the reason why things in Dohnavur were done in the way they were day by day. The book of Ezra in the Bible, chapters 3 to 6, had shown her the way she had to go.1635 Those working with her had to have a spiritual call. She felt herself to be a missionary who was leading the Dohnavur Fellowship ‘back to the ways of the acts of the apostles’.1636 One night Amy could not sleep: all through the night the tom-toms thumped. She lay awake and looked and this is what she saw:

I stood on a grassy sward, and at my feet a precipice broke sheer down into infinite space. I looked, but saw no bottom; only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled, and great shadow-shrouded hollows, and unfathomable depths. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth. Then I saw forms of people moving single file along the grass. They were making for the edge. There was a woman with a baby in her arms and another little child holding on to her dress. She was on the very verge. Then I saw that she was blind. She lifted her foot for the next step … it trod air. She was over, and the children over with her. Oh, the cry as they went over! Then I saw more streams of people flowing from all quarters. All were blind, stone blind; all made straight for the precipice edge. There were shrieks as they suddenly knew themselves falling, and a tossing up of helpless arms, catching, clutching the empty air. But some went over quietly, and fell without a sound. Then I wondered, with a wonder that was simply agony, why no one stopped them at the edge. I could not. I was glued to the ground, and I could not call; though I strained and tried, only a whisper would come.

She went on, telling that she saw some sentries set at intervals along the precipice, but the intervals were too great. Another group was sitting under a tree and one would stand up to help. The others said, ‘You must wait for a definite call to go’, or ‘There is no need for you to go’. Then they sang a hymn. Suddenly Amy heard through the hymn the voice of a million broken hearts and ‘a horror of great darkness was upon me, for I knew what it was – the Cry of the Blood’. The millions unsaved, living in superstition, in darkness, in the power of the devil, were laid on her heart. Once at night, not able to sleep again:

One seems to feel the shadow of a darker darkness, a deeper slumber brooding over the place. And all around it is so; and thinking wider, it is so; this great round world seems rolling on, away from the Love-light of God. One by one its lands pass before me.

She then prayed for Africa and China, with a million a month dying without God:

India. With her twenty million widows. That alone was enough to touch any woman-heart surely! Japan. With its thirty million unreached yet. […] We know them on our map. But do we know them in our heart? wrapped in the death-gloom tonight.

Her heart came to rest when she also knew that night: ‘That God is in the field when He is most invisible’.1637

Why are we in the West so reluctant to see this need, why does nearly no one want to go to the mission field, why are we sitting so cosily as Christians in our churches, and singing our hymns and doing some

1633. Gold Cord, 6–7.
1634. Gold Cord, 6. She refers to the work done in Belfast for the mill girls in ‘The Welcome’.
1635. Gold Cord, 7.
1636. Gold Cord, 8.
1637. From Sunrise Land, 164–165.

welfare work to assist the mission workers, why do we see so many dying ‘not knowing what is on the other side’? Very often missionaries on furlough are disappointed in what is called ‘interest in missions’ in their home countries. And if there is any interest, people want to hear good news from the front. If there is nearly no news or even bad news, ‘there is a perceptible cooling off; an honest story of defeat is told, and discouragement results’. Mission for them is a ‘sort of decorative afterthought’.1638

Amy had the same experience Hudson Taylor had had that Sunday morning, 25 July 1865, in Brighton, when he could no more bear the singing and the fellowship of hundreds of churchgoers while far away in China every month a million people were dying without ever having heard of Christ. ‘God forgive us! God arouse us! Shame us out of our callousness! Shame us out of our sin!’ She experienced what Paul must have seen when he wrote to the converts: ‘That ye sorrow not even others which have no hope’. ‘How callous we are, how superficial our sympathy.’

Who is stirred by the commendation of God to go? For how many have we come too late? Do we not know the purpose for which we were saved – and as such tremendous cost? Oh for a baptism of reality and obedience to sweep over us! O to be true to the hymns we sing and the vows we make! God make us true’. And she continued:

And if we call ourselves soldiers, and sing, and pray, and talk on these lines, and yet are not in burning earnest, is it not possible that the thing we all agree to dislike is resident among us?1639 For her, benevolent societies, concerts, clubs, tea gatherings and such activities were extraneous to spiritual life and were the sign of a dead church rather than a living one. She was frustrated when someone would write to her: ‘We have had such a nice meeting’. Lots of trivialities, but nothing:

[T]o hear of sin unchecked, need unmet, woes uncomforted, death unlighted. Perhaps the tea and the cake (possibly by way of benediction), closed with little entertainment, the curio-examining, interrogation showering, the interchange of sentiment regarding the heathen in general and their representative now on view, in particular, were exceedingly ‘nice’. But it is puzzling.1640 Amy was rather harsh – as it seems – when she says:

One can see its pretty rounds of sociabilities; afternoon teas, tennis parties, concerts and lectures; kindly little interests in beings, doings and dressings. Permeated pleasantly, doubtless with the odour of sanctity, for we go to church, teach in the Sunday-school, visit a district, and take an interest in missions’.1641 These remarks, written nearly at the end of her stay in Japan, she wrote to friends and family in England, with the urgent appeal:

Dear one, it is to you, to you the Master speaks, forgive me for pressing it so. Will you not face these things with Him now? What will you wish you had done, when the King comes?1642 In the story of Linnet’s conversion we see a glimpse of Amy’s thoughts about human activities:

But then, it was not an organization or an institution (clumsy words for stodgy things) that had won Linnet’s allegiance, but the Lord, our Redeemer, the Saviour of the world.1643

1638. Overweights of Joy, 52.
1639. Overweights of Joy, 53.
1640. From Sunrise Land, 174.
1641. From Sunrise Land, 174.
1642. From Sunrise Land, 175.
1643. The Widow of the Jewels, 83.

Chapter 14

Amy felt she was ‘a servant… separated to the Gospel’. And immediately she turns to us and asks ‘Are we honest towards God?’ She felt for the people of India, but:

[F]eelings will not save souls; it cost God Calvary to win us. It will cost us as much as we may know of the fellowship of His sufferings, if those for whom He died that day ever to be won.

Once in Japan she was invited to a wedding of one of the staff members. She described the clothes of the bride and the groom with their nice clothes, rich and chaste:

At first I was haunted with wonderings – Is it right to spend time so? Is it right to go for feasts and silks, when the world pressing all around us is dying, darkly dying? At last peace came in the remembrance that this marriage gladness pictured the coming of the King, the Bride prepared to meet Him.1644

‘The victory that overcomes the world is not human love, but Christian faith; it is not won by the natural heart, but

by the recreating cross’.

Forsyth, in Chambers, The Complete Works, 680.