The girl from Millisle (part 2 of 3)
‘Please come and sit with me’
A vivid account of Ulster Presbyterian life of the time Amy was in her teens is given by Lydia Foster. In The Bush That Burned, Foster depicts the mid-19th century Presbyterian way of worship by reminiscing on youth impressions. Looking back she saw communities who shared a devout faith that they had to defend against persecution, which gave them a strong satisfactory doctrine. She remembers that psalm singing was one of the most honoured forms of Presbyterian worship and that pipe organs were banned from the churches.
‘Northern Ireland is staunchly Christian’ is the still banned remark of an OMF missionary in the 50s of the 20th century who went to Chefoo (China). ‘Yet’, she goes on, ‘Northern Ireland’s Christianity lacked sunshine.’153 A little more than 100 years earlier this was not Amy’s experience of Northern Ireland’s Christianity. As a young child, she lived in the world of the Bible and moreover she became familiar with the school of prayer, so she grew up in the soil of revival piety. ‘The Carmichaels were a family of considerable substance, godly, generous, well-intentioned people, much respected by all classes of society’;154 the sphere at the Mervue house was one of mutual love and ‘never were children happier’ than there.155 When Amy was in her seventies, she still remembered the solemn sound of her father’s voice reading at family worship, ‘like the rise and fall of the waves at the shore’, and ‘there is the sweet, sweet sound of my mother singing to her children’.156 She too remembered her first great grief. After her mother told her the story of Christ at Calvary, she rushed into the garden in a vain attempt to forget the thoughts ‘too dreadful to be borne’. ‘How could anybody hurt another so, especially One who was so good?’157 Here in Millisle her parents taught Amy the faith, which remained the mainspring of her life. The genetics of the Carmichael family with the strong daring faith and inventive talents were seen in all the best qualities that she inherited, in her future life and work in India.
Due to their mills’ business and the more than 100 acres of land to cultivate, Amy’s father and her uncle David had a considerable income, so they could afford to give their children private lessons at home and there Amy and the other children had a carefree life. In the community, the Carmichaels were known to do good with their money for widows, the poor and in social welfare. At home, the Carmichael children were raised in a lively evangelical faith and at home as in church they were instructed – in the two long Sunday services – in the Scriptures and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. That time children were usually in the church for the whole service (without drawing or colouring books to ‘occupy’ them) and had to be quiet throughout. When young, Amy heard many sermons, and she was very attentive: ‘I used to amuse myself by trying to finish the preacher’s sentence before he got half-way through’.158 The preacher must have noticed in her an attentive, expectant listener. Many years later in India she would write:
When we go to services, let us listen with keen expectation to what God, who knows exactly what our need is, has prepared for us. When the pure gold of the word of God is given, it lays a great responsibility on all who listen, lest they lose that precious thing. We cannot afford to lose one word.159
153. In S. Miller, I Can Trace A Rainbow (Singapore: OMF, 1988), 56 and 58. Sheila later wrote: ‘Living in the Far East, I am aware more than ever of the blessings that were mine in Northern Ireland. No amount of dissonance can take that from me’ (Miller, I Can Trace A Rainbow, 59–60).
154. Seymour, Echoes of Millisle and District, 15.
155. Amma’s Book, 2.
156. Amma’s Book, 1.
157. Amma’s Book, 1.
158. Though The Mountains Shake, 4.
159. Whispers of His Power, 137.
She was nurtured by the preaching in church and the lively Christian fellowship at home and in the family. Recording later on she saw in her memory herself sitting on a sofa ‘wedged in between three grown-ups’, listening to their dealing with the Word of God and strong adherence to the hymnbook, ‘for was not the hymnbook almost as inspired as the Bible?’160 Young as she was, about 10 years old, she had a Prayer book in which she wrote down her prayers and the answers the Lord gave her.161 Her love for books already showed in her youth when she liked to read what she could get. Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress was in nearly every Covenanters home; Fox’s Book of Martyrs often gave her dreadful dreams about the Spanish Inquisition.162
Education at an elementary level was in the private schoolroom taught by a governess. Her name was Eleanor Milne. Amy loved her and called her ‘Sister’. She cared for what was lovely and good and she hated cruelty with a very bitter hatred. Amy still could in her old age remember ‘the flash of anger in her eyes’, when she saw people doing cruel things to animals. This governess told Amy many stories from the English martyrs, like Ridley and Latimer. She would write, ‘You, who are teachers, magnify your office. You are working in wax that turns to marble’.163 Amy’s love for all things created, and her grief if the smallest of animals were needlessly hurt, is a characteristic which went back to her earliest youth and which endured to the end of her life. The children in Dohnavur saw how she knelt for a small flower or animal and taught them to treat these tiny creatures well.
Through this godly home, these influences were mediated to her young and receptive soul and her parents’ convictions influenced her future life to a great extent. In this spiritual climate, very radiant characteristics were bred, but most of all her strength was bred in communion with God. The first memory of this tiny child, when she was just tucked in bed, was that:
This is an indented quotation:
[A]fter the nursery light had been turned low and I was quite alone, I used to smooth a little place on the sheet and say aloud, but softly, to our Father, ‘Please come and sit with me’. And that baby custom left something which recurs and is with me still [she wrote 60 years later].
She then learned a first lesson, which would ever be for her a certainty: ‘Our God is a God at hand’.164 Sunday was for churchgoing and Christian fellowship; no other work should be done. Church services in Millisle were ‘never less than two hours long’.165 Sunday was dedicated to God and this was the pattern she kept throughout her life.166 An old man, Robert Brown, still remembering Amy, told Houghton that on Sunday mornings the Carmichael family ‘filled the road’, and that he sat in the pew immediately behind the Carmichael family. Amy remembered that on the road he had tried ‘to slip a few peppermint lozenges into our hands as we went into the church’. Amy always remembered her
160. In Rose from Brier, 83.
161. About 60 years had passed when this first notebook turned up among some old papers, and Amy exactly remembered every detail of that prayer and the answer God gave her that rainy Sunday morning in Millisle. In Edges of His Way, 24 June, 90–91.
162. Whispers of His Power, 24 February, 47.
163. Amma’s Book, 12.
164. In Rose from Brier, 202.
165. Cf. the letter sent from Hemeratgoda, Ceylon, 25 November 1894 (in the PRONI archive), was written after the church service. The letter is illustrated with some drawings. One of the drawings is of a honey sucker. Under this sketch Amy wrote: ‘Not done on Sunday!!!’; see also Amma’s Book, 11 and 15.
166. Cf. in Matthews, ‘The Theological Contributions of Amy Carmichael’; in an interview, Nesaruthina Carunia said: ‘She was very strict about Sundays. No work and no play were allowed on Sundays, all had to attend worship’ (Appendix XI).
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grandmother’s love for flowers and that in Portaferry every Sunday morning before going to church she picked flowers and that she put the flower arrangement on a table in the church, ‘so we might have something lovely to look at during the long service’.167
David Carmichael’s children were seen as models of good behaviour, but it was not always easy for a child like Amy to behave as her parents wanted. When someone offered her a peppermint, she was told:
You must refuse politely. You must smile and say, Thank you very much, but my mother would rather I didn’t. […] That church was a little white-washed kirk, very unpretentious, and it was near the road on the end of the Irish Sea. We went there with the village people, but were not allowed to do the nice things they did. Many a time we enviously watched a fond mother extracting something – we know what it was – from a black kid glove during a long prayer or still longer sermon. It had probably melted a little in the hot palm, but that did not matter. Even in our pew, removed two or three pews from that bliss, we could sniff the delicious, promising smell that meant a white or pink lozenge, heart shaped or round, with ‘Forget me not’ or some other interesting words upon it. We could see the small girl or boy who sat next to that mother snuggle down, and economically lick a doubtless sticky finger. O to be farmer children! But such a solace was denied us.168 Years later Amy got a letter from the same Mr Brown who wrote:
‘I am sending a cheque for two pounds. I think I would like to give the children some sweets. With many thanks for this privilege, I remain yours in His will, Robert Brown’. – The name brought back with a rush, like a wind blowing over the sea, thoughts of old, unforgettable things: the old church by the road and the beat of the waves just below its windows; the old-time singing of the Psalms in the old Scots metrical version, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd I’ll not want’, ‘I to the hill will lift up mine eyes’ and many another sung to their own well-beloved tunes; the wise old face of the minister looking down upon us all – and the smell of peppermints.169 At home Amy’s parents made the Sunday ‘as happy as possible, for mother kept the best toys for that day’; the children even had toy telephones. Walking on a Sunday (except to the church) was seen as not right, but father Carmichael took his children out to the fields.170 That time in Northern Ireland no Christmas tree came into the house, but Amy’s parents had Christmas presents for their children. Amy’s grandmother in Portaferry had a Christmas tree, ‘a dazzling thing to my eyes’.171
During her whole life, she kept in her heart the preaching she had heard in the church: bound to the Scriptures and in the main strongly Christ-centred and of an evangelical and invitatory nature. The free grace of God and the centrality of the cross of Christ, with thrilling appeals to sinners to be reconciled with God, to receive the offer of the Gospel in one’s personal life and have a personal knowledge – the saving sight – of Christ, and the sanctification were all tendencies in the theological outlook of the preachers. Amy’s parents’ spirituality was not confined to their church pews only, for if we could look beneath the surface of their highly respectable Presbyterian church life, we encounter really God-fearing people, loving God and with a heart for the needy. Spiritually they waded into deeper waters: a personal knowledge of the redeeming grace and love for those around them. This made a tremendous impact on the expanding spiritual life of their eldest daughter. Home life and church life around her were well fitted to win an ingenuous girl. Though grace does not run in the blood, blood and tradition tell. The stern biblical training in duty and obedience, the bracing influence of the Calvinist creed and especially
167. Amma’s Book, 15.
168. Windows, 110. Cf. also Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 10–11.
169. Windows, 110–111.
170. Cf. Amma’s Book, 2.
the Spirit of Christ in the Carmichael home, the purity of the parents’ lives and the godly upbringing of the children; it was due to these that Amy and her six brothers and sisters grew up as strong Christians. Of the Carmichael home, it can be said that ‘godliness is profitable to all things’. The parents emphasised the beauty of the Word of God, to be applied to their own hearts and to the hearts of the children.
As has been stated before, when Amy grew up it was clear that she was a fun-loving person and always up to mischief. However, at home the reins were not held in a loose hand.172 Little Amy, with her four brothers and two sisters, received punishment when necessary as was the standard of that time: ‘people believed in the efficacy of the rod’. Next to five ordinary kinds of punishment, the child had to learn self-control. A firm rap on the hands was the most approved form of discipline, then you had to be polite and say ‘Thank you’. Worst was to drink ‘Gregory powder’:173
It was useless to say how sorry you were and that you would never do it again. That was not the time for promises. When mother had prepared the cup, you had to receive it with a ‘Thank you, Mother’. We were always sent to bed after ‘Gregory’. This was wise, as bed was the best place for such afflicted children. And all this was ‘to do us good’. She was a born leader and often led her brothers and sisters to do naughty things, like walking on the roof along the gutter or eating the poisonous seeds of a laburnum tree: ‘Let’s count how many we can eat before we die’. What then happened next was ‘Gregory’.174 ‘Children do appalling things. Their angels must be kept busy.’175 She learned a big lesson. One day, after she had done something and had to say ‘sorry’, but was not willing to, she suddenly saw her mother’s face and something melted inside her:
In one moment I was in her arms, soft and sorry and wanting to be good. It was the look on her face, such a grieved look that was too much for me. And often since then I have thought that if when we sin we could see the face of our Saviour as in a mirror, we should never have the heart to grieve Him again.176 Catherine told Bible stories and the children knew that the secret of her life was the power of prayer. She told them that God answers prayer always, and he hears always: at times it was with ‘yes’, at times with ‘no’ and at times he wants his children to wait and to trust him. As a child, Amy learned that God does not always provide in the way we expect, but that he is faithful and always provides in his way. The children saw the way their parents walked with God and they knew that when their parents were talking to God, they were talking to someone they loved. Still very young she started to read the Bible herself. One day she was reading Jeremiah 6. In her Bible she wrote in the margin: ‘V.14. This verse startled me when I was a little child of six. The first verse which I remember, which spoke to me. Millisle 73 or 74.’177 Amy could remember very well the sounds: ‘And there is the sweet, sweet sound of my mother singing to her children; and the merry sound of laughter and play’.178
Amy established a reputation for audacity, and in the town she was known for her acts of daring, giving her spirit of independence full scope. One day she led her brother to the top of the house
172. Amy tells of all the punishments children – and she too! – received at that time in Roots, 6–7.
173. Gregory powder: ‘a formulation of rhubarb powder used as a laxative or purgative’, named after Dr James Gregory who first made it. Often also mixed with magnesium and ginger. Cf. Collins English Dictionary, 2012. 174. Amma’s Book, 7.
175. Amma’s Book, 8.
176. Amma’s Book, 9.
177. Amy’s Bible (1895). Jeremiah VI:14: ‘They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, peace, peace; when there is no peace’.
178. See Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 5.
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enclosure. In this perilous position they were discovered by their parents. Of her two brothers closest to her in age she confessed that more often than not it was she who had led them into trouble.179 Later she confessed in one of her letters: ‘I never found patience easy, being by nature a most impatient mortal’ and being confined to her bed in older age she says, ‘even one week in bed seemed impossible’.180 Throughout her life she was fond of animals. She tells, when she was a child, that there was a cat at home called Daisy and a collie called Gildo. She had a pony, Fanny, and although the pony at first frightened her, her father taught her how to hold the reins and ‘never to nag’, ‘how to ride with a light rein and yet never lose control’. ‘I am very grateful to my father for what he taught me never giving in to a difficulty.’ All that she had learned then came in useful long afterwards, ‘for in some ways people are rather like ponies’.181 Amy’s view of the world was intensive. She saw the colours, of which blue was her favourite, because it could express what no other colour could. Nearly all her books were bound in blue cloth:
One day, I walking in a gallant wood,
New-dressed in all her bravest greenery,
Felt stirring in me dull listless mood,
That murmured pensively,
Till from my eyes fell scales; the wood was blue
With blue, blue flowers; carpets odd gentian spread
On mossy open floors, and speedwell grew
Low in a lupine bed.
Forget-me-not was there; blue India pea
Strewed sapphire on the bushes; blue-bells played […]
And overhead in tassels and festoons
A gayety of blue was everywhere,
And frail convolvulus, like pale blue moons,
Hung in the pale blue air.182
When she was in India, Thomas Walker, in 1911, came back for furlough, and he, too, loved the colour blue. It was a joyful welcome and happiness, for Amy as well as for the children. There were presents for all the children:
He had sent blue Cambridge ribbons to the family to be worn as shoulder knots, yards of it, wide and narrow. […] Everything was bright that day; the expectation that Mrs Walker would soon follow prevented the disappointment of her absence from shadowing the place; it was all blue sky, blue ribbons, blue garments – for the children were in his favourite blue – all that the happy colour seems to express as no other colour can, filled the day.183 From a very early age, perhaps even as a toddler, Amy experienced a sense of God’s presence. Here Amy learned a fundamental lesson: for her life work, prayer became the foundation of her ministry. She never asked people to give money to support her mission work. She asked God only. Mother Catherine not only taught the children the Bible, she exemplified it, having a deep love for God and an intimate personal faith in Jesus Christ. The Carmichael children saw that to believe was not only with the heart, but they saw the real effects in charity and compassion for the needy and the sick. Catherine gave the
179. M. Wilkinson, At BBC Corner I Remember Amy Carmichael (Belfast: Impact Printing, 1996), 5. 180. Candles in the Dark, 66.
181. Cf. Amma’s Book, 3.
182. Pools and The Valley of Visions, 39–40.
183. This One Thing, 208.
children every opportunity to develop these God-given gifts and she wanted her children to see the needs of others and then act to meet them.
At home Catherine taught the girls to cook and to sing and she made hospitality a way of life. Rev. Beatty was the family’s minister and Amy would have learned a lot about India from his brother who was a missionary in India. On one of his visits home, he came and lived in a house next to the manse for a year, and his wife used to tell the children stories on a Sunday afternoon about India. Amy would often stay behind and beg to hear more.
The ambivalence between a worldwide horizon and the strict reference to the Calvinistic Presbyterian way of life at home might have shaped the atmosphere in which she grew up. What the parents intoned piano, their eldest daughter sang fortissimo. In Amy̕ s early teens we already see her develop into an unconventional self-confident young woman, who did not allow herself to be squeezed into any mould and by no means into any system. She examined the Scriptures and by prayer she waited for God’s answer. The cosy Victorian world of Amy’s childhood was the formation time of DF’s respected leader.
In this way little Amy grew up in a God-fearing home in a little village along the Irish coast. She always had nice and loving memories of Mervue House where a solid foundation was laid for her future life; she was 12 years old when the spell of her childhood was broken. Soon the life that she knew, being nurtured in a controlled environment, was to be rocked by several events that would change her life forever.
The great world around Amy was becoming a swiftly changing scene at the time she went from us in 1951; her life was caught up in the currents of violent change and prolonged disquiet in the East and the West. During her lifetime she saw and experienced many changes in the world around her and she pitied those who suffered during the revolutions and the two world wars in which her country, too, was involved. The strong foundation she had during her life, generally speaking, was due to her upbringing in Millisle, which had been pious, orderly, settled, and deep-dyed in the Ulster Presbyterian Irish life. Very early, she had already what she years later would prize so much in the Quakers, ‘a cool and tender frame of spirit’.184
Harrogate: Drawn into his fold
Amy, educated at elementary level by a private governess at home in Millisle, as a teenager went for further education to Harrogate (Yorkshire)185 to a Wesleyan Methodist boarding school, called Marlborough House in those days, where a Miss Kay was the principal. Harrogate was in the uplands, a town known in England for mineral springs, and many British people visited the place to enjoy the recuperative powers of the springs. While Amy went to Harrogate, two of her brothers at the same time attended the King William College, Isle of Man. For Amy’s parents to send their daughter to an institution running on Wesleyan Methodist lines was obviously not a problem. They could cope with those who believed the Bible as the word of God and accepted Christ Jesus as their Saviour. ‘We hardnosed Ulster Irish do not puzzle over questions like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin” Amy told her startled classmates.’186
184. See Gold by Moonlight, 37.
185. Harrogate that time was also associated with the famous Clergy Daughter’s School at Casterton, immortalised by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre.
186. In S. Wellman, Amy Carmichael, Selfless Servant of India (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 1998), 18.
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From an academic point of view, the three years in Harrogate were not years for Amy to remember with joy. Only botany, geology and literature were lessons she enjoyed. Other subjects were dull for her. The students were hedged around with ‘numerous petty rules and restrictions’. ‘Few teachers made our lessons shine’, of whom Mr Grindon, her botany teacher, was one. He went on plant searching with the children.187 Due to the freedom and atmosphere she had had at home in Millisle, it was very difficult for her to cope with her new environment. After 60 years, a schoolfellow remembered Amy as a ‘rather wild Irish girl who was often in trouble with the headmistress, as she was something of a rebel’. Among the girls she was the leader. However, she was also remembered as being ‘very kind to, and popular with the little girls’. As we will see later on in her way of doing mission work in Japan and India, she could argue – for the sake of the Gospel – against conventions made by men, and sometimes thought it better to shock the prim and proper by unconventional behaviour.188 Most likely, she was irked by the many petty rules of Harrogate’s schooling system. Not to say that Amy was proud of this kind of doings. In Gold Cord it was sufficient for her to say little about the Harrogate years. Homesick, she had been in Harrogate with mixed feelings. She also regretted afterwards that she had not listened enough to her father who wanted her to work hard at her Latin. ‘I wish I had’, she confessed:
Many things happened which should not have happened, because I hadn’t learned to set to, and work at things which seemed to me dull and not useful. This was great pity. I have often been very sorry about it. Once, just once, I got in serious trouble with the authorities. […] If I told you much it would not help you, for I was not at all I want you to be.189 One event in Amy’s life that had a dynamic impact on her life and ministry was her experience of being sure of her new life in Christ. Spiritually, it was in Harrogate that she came – probably in the spring of 1884 – into her deeper life experience of surrender to God during the activities of the Children’s Special Service Mission (CSSM). Years later, she would write:
For long ago Mr Edwin Arrowsmith took the children’s service in Harrogate, and to that service the children of a certain school went. In the quiet at the end, a sense of the great love of God came to a child kneeling there. It was the single watered moment of an arid three years.190 She writes:
My mother had often talked to me about the Lord Jesus, and often, as I sat on her knee with her arms about me while she sang, ‘Jesus, the very thought of Thee’, and ‘It passeth knowledge that dear love of Thine’, I had felt the love of the Lord Jesus, and, as it were, nestled in His love just as I nestled in her arms. But I had not understood that there was something more to do, something that may be called coming from Him, or opening the door to Him, or giving oneself to Him. I don’t remember what the speaker, Mr Edwin Arrowsmith, spoke about, but after his address he told us to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’191 and then
187. Roots, 13.
188. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 16.
189. Amma’s Book, 13. It was in 1882, the year a comet appeared. Amy and the other girls there wanted to see it but were not allowed. As a ringleader Amy led them all at night to the roof of the school. Amy was afraid to be expelled from school, but she was pardoned. Wellman writes what happened afterwards in the dormitory: ‘Back in the dormitory, Amy said breezily, “Well girls, now you can tell your grandchildren you saw the great comet of 1882.”’ (Wellman, Amy Carmichael, 20). See also in Walker of Tinnevelly, 16, where Amy writes about Thomas Walker’s viewing of the comet. 190. Nor Scrip, 15. More than 30 years later a member of the Arrowsmith family in Harrogate, whom Amy did not personally know, sent a cheque. That money was used for a new nursery.
191. Composed by Anna Bartlet Warner (1827–1915). The song appeared in 1860 in the novel Say and Seal. to be quiet. During those quiet few minutes, in His great mercy the Good Shepherd answered the prayers of my mother and father and many other loving ones, and drew me, even me, into His fold.192 Now she fully understood what Christ had done for her, and what was to be her response to it all. Her life changed, she, the weak and defeated, exchanged life for Christ’s life. She knew now that Christ was asking her to give him her heart, and to yield up her life for his use. Her spiritual life, of which she became fully aware at that time, now followed a deep, hidden channel laid in her early life. A life of complete trust and rest, prepared to go the way the Spirit would guide her. This poem became full reality for her:
Upon a Life I did not live
Upon a Death I did not die
Another’s Life, Another’s Death,
I stake my whole Eternity.193
For once and for all Christ and his redeeming love and sacrifice on the Cross for her was her focal point, of her personally and for her future work. Still a young teenager her heart was for the Lord and she embraced him who had met her with his overwhelming love. Many lost sheep, elderly and young, in her further life would be shepherded by her to Christ and find refuge under his wings. Irrevocably, the great transaction was effected which eventually would change the current of her life, which was destined to become influential towards the same transformation in many other lives:
Home of our hearts, lest we forget
What our redemption meant to Thee,
Let our most reverent thoughts be set
Upon Thy Calvary.
O Lord beloved, Thy Calvary
Stills all our questions. Come, oh come,
Where children wandering wearily
Have not yet found their home.194
Many members of the established churches found strength and comfort in the familiar rites and rituals of their respective denominations, and religion did not go beyond the institution of personal faith. Amy had been raised in a family of faith, instructed in biblical stories and heard of Christ’s great love for sinners; she had experienced her parent’s personal faith in Christ and now, here in Harrogate, she saw the full reality for herself: faith rooted in Christ that brought her soul into blossom. Years later in Dohnavur she wrote:
Do you not think that a great deal of what we call faith is not worth the name? It is too flimsy to be called by so strong a word. Faith is the steel of the soul.195 Looking forward, especially the last verse of the hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I Know’ resonated in her heart:
192. Amma’s Book, 13. The song Jesus Loves Me, written by Anna Bartlett Warner (1820–1915), was not only taught in many Sunday schools and sung to sick children, but became mostly the first song missionaries worldwide taught to new converts. Amy often used this song in Japan, Ceylon and Dohnavur.
193. Horatius Bonar, in Amma’s Book, 13. The chorus of this poem is: ‘I build on what Thy cross has done for me; There both my death and life I read, my guilt, and pardon there I see.’
194. Gold Cord, 164.
195. Edges of His Ways, 23 June 90.
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Jesus loves me! He will stay
Close beside me all the way.
Thou has bled and died for me;
I will henceforth live for Thee.196
This great factor in Christian experience was the one the Lord brought about in her life, viz. the reception of the Holy Spirit who did in her what he did for her, and surely her natural life was transformed into a spiritual life through obedience. This obedience to God meant that some time or other she had to enter into desolation for a time. Amy would experience this very soon as dark clouds appeared above the Carmichael family in Millisle.
While Amy was in Harrogate changes were taking place in the milling industry in Millisle, forcing Amy’s father to move. First, the family lived for a while at a place called the Knock,197 near Belfast, and then they moved to Belfast, where the family settled in College Gardens. Various factors, such as competition with the increasing American flour import, made the move a clear decision for her father and uncle. The Carmichael brothers had built a new mill near the Dufferin Dock, and Amy’s parents decided to move to Belfast to be close to the new mill. Due to the economic circumstances and complete with heavy competition in the flour industry the financial problems heaped up and money at home decreased drastically. Amy’s parents could no longer afford to pay the boarding school fees for their children. With this loss of money, Amy’s further plans to continue her studies at Harrogate were dashed. She left Harrogate and her brothers were withdrawn from King William’s College. From Harrogate she took with her the rich spiritual blessing God had given her and also her more matured leadership qualities which she would very soon need in the family and the rescue work in Belfast. In short, of the Harrogate years we can say ‘she had come into a desert as a pilgrim, and away from the distractions of human love at home, she had found God’.198
Soon after she left Harrogate, her father took her on a trip to London. There she saw the Tower, the Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, the British Museum and the Kensington Museum. ‘Sunday found us in St. Paul’s for morning service. I was not impressed by that church, Westminster Abbey moved me far more.’ Her father took her to the great singers, and the notable people of the day, to the House of Commons (where they saw William Gladstone), and others things worthy to view. ‘But most of these things you will find in books, so I will go on to Belfast, where we lived in a pleasant place called College Gardens’,199 located near the university and the Botanic Gardens. Here Amy went to Victoria College200 to study music, drawing and painting. Wilkinson says that these years in her teens shared with her father were surely education in the broadest sense and is one of the strong influences, which helped to make Amy the woman of wide interests whom I came to know.201
196. In K. Osbeck, Amazing Grace: 366 Hymn Stories for Personal Devotions (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1990), 73.
197. Here Amy for the first time met the Quakers. Many Sundays she spent several hours with Mrs Bell, ‘the lovely Quakeress’. See Amma’s Book, 9.
198. Wellman, Amy Carmichael, 21.
199. Amma’s Book, 14.
200. A voluntary non-denominational independent institution founded in 1859 by Mrs Margaret Byers and established in Wellington Place. Initially called the Ladies Collegiate School Belfast, it soon required high reputation for academic excellence and sporting prowess. It is now one of the longest established girls schools in the British Isles. 201. M. Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 8.