The girl from Millisle (part 3 of 3)
Belfast: The emerging city
The Carmichael family moved from the small coastal village Millisle to an ‘emerging city’.202 They knew the area, because earlier, when Amy was very small the family had temporally lived at a place called Knock, near Belfast. The name of the house there was Glenview. At that time she liked to play outside and always was found along the water in the woods; with dolls and prams she would not play. One day she saw a poor man and threw her doll and pram out of the window for that poor fellow. ‘This may sound a generous gift. It wasn’t. I had no affection for dolls.’203
When David and Catherine Carmichael moved to Belfast, the city was booming. It was granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1888:
Granted city status in 1888, Belfast was emerging as Ireland’s largest and most dynamic urban centre and as a key player in the British industrial landscape. The rapid expansion of the linen industry, the growth of the port, the development of the shipbuilding industry and of related heavy and light engineering contributed to an explosion in population.204 Belfast is in every way a flower of late Victorianism. The city bloomed in the 19th century with its industrial revolution and the heyday of the linen trade, and the expansion of her dockyards greatly enlarged the glory of the Empire.205 It was a triumphal era of history, and her buildings reflect that mood. The shipyards symbolise the days when Belfast was world famous for its shipbuilding on which the whole city’s pride was built, and which would ultimately sink after the Titanic disappeared into the ocean in 1912. Belfast grew from a town of 53 000 inhabitants in 1831 to a typical Victorian city 70 years later of 349 000. As a city of immigration, Belfast saw the migration of many who had their birthplaces in County Down and County Antrim. ‘The port of Belfast was an important part of a global trading network that extended from the USA and the West Indies to Australia and Japan.’206 The sea carried Belfast’s goods, and its peoples, to the far reaches of the earth and that made the city the success story it was.207 In 1846 the Great Victoria Street railway station was opened,208 and from 1872 trams drawn by horses trafficked through the streets of Belfast. The Belfast Public Library and the Albert Bridge were built in 1890. In 1887 the numbers of telephone subscribers in Belfast was 419.209 By 1900 the prosperity and power of the city was virtually unrivalled among western European cities.210 Presbyterianism was very strong in the city. ‘Large churches in important thoroughfares; rich merchants and fashionably-dressed ladies worshipping in their high pews. Men of importance in the public life of the town holding the eldership.’211 In Belfast, the Presbyterians accounted for 34% of the
202. Cf. the subtitle of O. Purdue’s, ed., Belfast. The Emerging City 1850–1914 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013). 203. Amma’s Book, 9.
204. Purdue, ed., Belfast, XVI.
205. The shipbuilding yards at Harland and Wolff were world famous. This company alone employed up to 35 000 workers and was one of the largest shipbuilders in the world. In V. Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, Amy Carmichael and the Welcome (Belfast: Books 4 Publishing, 2013), 33. See also E. Gillespie, The Country Life Picture Book of Ireland (Feltham, Middlesex: The Country Life Books, 1980), 24–37.
206. Purdue, ed., Belfast, XX.
207. Purdue, ed., Belfast, XXIV.
208. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 72.
209. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 13.
210. See Dickson, Beyond Religious Discourse, 146.
211. Cf. Foster, The Bush That Burned.
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population, gathering twice per Sunday in one of their 32 churches.212 The supremacy of the Presbyterians was also reflected in their position of economic and social dominance. The connection between Scotland and the Ulster Presbyterians was shown in the new Assembly Buildings at Fisherwick Place and Howard Street, begun in 1901 and completed in 1905,213 still more than 100 years later Belfast’s most iconic building. The crown spire, most commonly associated with Scotland and, most famously, the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh, on the new building created an easily understood identifier.214 This population was closely followed by the Protestant Episcopalians, or members of the Church of Ireland, at 31%. The Roman Catholic share was lower at 24%. The modern industrialisation coexisted with pre-modern forms of social conflict. ‘Belfast was deeply divided, not just along class lines of religion but nationality as well.’215 The linen industry was the largest employer in Belfast by the late 19th century with a labour force of nearly 70 000, of which a vast majority was female.216 The powerful linen industry gave Belfast the nickname ‘Linenopolis’. Next to this, the city became a major centre of heavy engineering and shipbuilding. Nowadays Belfast’s historic area, Donegal Quay, tells about the changing face of the city’s harbour, which built well over 10 000 ships.
In Belfast Amy’s father’s money problems increased drastically. In his generosity, David Carmichael had lent some thousands of pounds to a friend in serious need, who at the very end was not able to repay the amount lent. Next to other losses in the mill business, and due to the cheap flour imports from the USA, Amy’s father could not afford to go on with the business. A trying and traumatic period it was for Amy and the family when her father, due to the infection of a severe chill, which developed into double pneumonia,217 died at the early age of 54 on 12 April 1885. Some days before, 08 April, a Wednesday – the traditional day in the Carmichael family for singing hymns – her father had asked his family to sing Ray Palmer’s (1808–1887) ‘My Faith Looks Up to Thee’, of which the last two verses ran:
While life’s dark maze I tread.
And griefs around me spread, be Thou my Guide;
Bid darkness turn today, wipe sorrow’s tears away,
Nor let me ever stray from Thee aside.
When ends life’s transient dream,
When death’s cold, sullen stream shall o’er me roll,
Blest Saviour, then, in love, fear and distrust remove- Oh, bear me safe above, a ransomed soul!218 When he died, that Sunday morning the church bells were ringing to call the people to church. Amy wrote, ‘The last thing I read to him was this from Milton’s Samson Agonistes. The words have been with me ever since.’
All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of Highest Wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
212. See Dickson, Beyond Religious Discourse, 11.
213. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 74.
214. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 74.
215. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 194.
216. Purdue, ed., Belfast, 212.
217. See Roots, 34, where Amy writes about the sickness of her father.
218. Roots, 14. The hymn was composed by Ray Palmer in 1830. In The Keswick Hymn Book, 97.
The official announcement of David Carmichael’s death goes as follows:
The Carmichael Family of Millisle: Carmichael – April 12 (1885) at 21 College Gardens, David Carmichael, J.P. aged fifty-four years. His remains will be removed for interment in the Borough Cemetery on tomorrow (Wednesday) morning 15th inst., at nine o’clock. With very deep regret we announce today the sudden death of this gentleman, which took place on Sunday, at his residence College Gardens. […] He was born in a family deeply attached to the Presbyterian Church and his parents intended to devote him to the ministry and he was accordingly sent to the Belfast Academical Institution where he prosecuted very successfully the usual classical and mathematical studies, introductory to a university career. He went however, to business, but probably his early studies helped to form the decided literary taste which marked his whole life.219 Mrs Carmichael was strengthened through the strong assurance of Nahum 1:7: ‘The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble’. Years later, she marked in her Bible that verse again and wrote in the margin: ‘Found true all along the line ever since’.220 For Amy the loss of her father was a great blow. Her father had been an example for her.221 In the mourning period ‘we all wore black for two years and wrote on notepaper edged with black’.222 Out of childhood, Amy suddenly passed into young womanhood. Mother and daughter became inseparable and to her younger brothers and sisters she often acted as a second mother. One of her brothers later wrote his memory of that time – he was 11 years old – and about Amy he said: ‘My memories are of a wonderfully sincere, downright, unafraid and sympathetic sister’. Amy had the faculty of placing herself in the position of the one in trouble. Five years after the death of her father her younger sister Ethel wrote about Amy:
She lived an amazingly full life in those years, taking classes in painting and other subjects, teaching Eva and me during a period when we were not well enough to go to school and starting various ‘good works’. […] If anybody asked me what were the strongest impressions Amy made on me in her youth, I think I would say – her enthusiasms. She would kindle so quickly to anything that promised the betterment of the poor or unhappy. […] She was always able to see the positive and ignore the negative, and once she had an object before her which she was convinced was worth working for, no difficulty in the way would deter her.223 How to live a God-honouring life was the problem Amy struggled with for some time. She found the answer when in 1886 she went for a visit to Scotland:
[W ]here something happened that changed everything for me. ‘O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling’. Those words found me; it was as if they were alight. And they shone for me.224 Enlightened and revived, she re-consecrated her life to the Lord. She now rested in the Faithful One. She reckoned to use Taylor’s words ‘on God’s faithfulness’. Soon the family relocated in Belfast and her mother relied on her for help. Life went on rather smoothly and Amy grew into adulthood rather early due to the many responsibilities she had at home.
219. In ‘Historical Notes on Old Millisle and Neighbourhood’ (PRONI D/4031/33/1), 167.
220. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 19.
221. ‘I am very grateful to my father for teaching me never to give in to a difficulty’, in Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 24. 222. Fragments that Remain, 143.
223. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 19.
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The encounter at the old Victorian fountain
As mentioned in the Introduction, on my visit to Belfast I came across the old Victorian fountain that once influenced the whole course of Amy’s life. I had nearly the same experience Margaret Wilkinson describes in At BBC Corner I Remember Amy Carmichael. It was here in 1885 when 18-year-old Amy passed the same fountain – at that time it was just built – on her way home from church. More than 30 years later she could still remember what had happened that Sunday.
It was on a hot September day in 1918225 that Amy set out with several happy Indian children to trace their mountain river to its source. That moment tells of the beginning of the DF; she related why it took shape as it did, and how it came to be a little thing committed to the hand of God. Her thoughts went back 33 years and it was as if she experienced again what had happened then and what had left her unable to return to the ordinary:
It was a dull Sunday morning in a street in Belfast thirty-three years before the day when the children climbed their mountain stream. My brothers and sisters and I were returning with our mother from church when we met a poor, pathetic old woman who was carrying a heavy bundle. We had never seen such a thing in Presbyterian Belfast on Sunday, and, moved by sudden pity, my brothers and I turned with her, relieved her of the bundle, took her by her arms as though they had been handles, and helped her along. This meant facing all the respectable people who were, like ourselves, on their way home. It was a horrid moment. We were only two boys and a girl and not at all exalted Christians. We hated doing it. Crimson all over (at least we felt crimson, souls and body of us) we plodded on, a wet wind blowing us about, and blowing, too, the rags of that poor old woman, till she seemed like a bundle of feathers and we unhappily mixed up with them. But just as we passed a fountain recently built near the kerbstone, this mighty phrase was suddenly flashed as it were through the grey drizzle: Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble - every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide ---.226 ‘If any man’s work abide’: I turned to see the voice that spoke to me. The fountain, the muddy street, the people with their politely surprised faces, all this I saw, but I saw nothing else. The blinding flash had come and gone; the ordinary was all about us. We went on. I said nothing to anyone, but I knew that something had happened that had changed life’s values. Nothing could ever matter again but the things that were eternal.227 The icy stares of the ‘proper Presbyterians’ embarrassed her at first, but when the Lord moved in, the whole scene changed. Saul of Tarsus’s revelation on his way to Damascus at that moment was hers, in a different way, but as important for the course her life as it was for Saul. The words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 3 which flashed into Amy’s mind changed her life course completely. She went home with her brothers and that afternoon Amy, 18 years old, shut herself in her room and there, talking with God, she finally settled the pattern of her future life. The Lord she had met at school in Harrogate showed her clearly what would be the aim of her life. Her affection for the Lord Jesus Christ deepened and the love for the world of vain gaiety where Christ was nudged into an inferior place was definitely expelled.
This is the ‘pool’, the ‘origin’ of the whole Dohnavur story. From this pool flowed the stream, which is still running. From that moment onwards, nothing could ever be the same. Crucified with Christ, the world now became crucified to her, the world with its fascination and power, now that she had agreed with God. Christ’s disciple now, she had no programme, only a distinguished passion of devotion to her Lord.
225. Gold Cord, 1.
226. 1 Cor 3:12–14.
227. Gold Cord, 2–3.
In September 1886, during a spiritual life conference in Scotland, Amy encountered God in a way that deepened her outlook on life. Her expensive taste in food and clothing suddenly vanished. Weaned from the world, things that were important to her lost their significance. She stopped desiring the things she used to desire. This happened suddenly. Things began to matter that were there before, but not so strong. There was then no conflict of desire. This well-brought-up young woman realised that she no longer cared about trivial things in life. A singleness of purpose had entered her life, a willingness to do God’s work faithfully, even when nobody was watching. This led her in 1938 to write these verses for all workers – Amy calls them ’under-shepherds’228 – in God’s field:
If by doing some work which the undiscerning consider ‘not spiritual work’ I can best help others, and I inwardly rebel, thinking it is the spiritual for which I crave, when in truth it is the interesting and exciting, then I know nothing of Calvary love.229 In Belfast, after the long mourning period for her father was over, her mother said she would go with her to purchase a few pretty dresses and among them, of course, an evening dress for parties:
The long time of being ̔ in mourning̕ for our father was over. (In those days we wore black when one whom we loved entered into the Golden City. Strange wasn’t it?).230 Amy decided she could not have all these pretty dresses and go to parties. She was, in the words of Paul, ‘dead to the world’. To Amy, the world meant fashion, finery, luxury of any sort. She would follow him who had no home, no earthly possessions beyond the bare minimum. She would be dead to the world and its applause, to all its customs, fashions and laws. For a girl with her eye for beauty, it is the measure of her commitment that she did not hesitate to relinquish all that seemed to her inimical to the true life of discipleship. She saw another beauty the world could not give, she glimpsed the beauty not only of a life of total consecration, but of the one to whom she had delivered herself, so beautifully expressed by Lilias Trotter:
A path lies within our reach, that makes the ordinary Christian life look cold and colourless by contrast; a path leading even beyond that consecration in its lower sense, for this latter may be very subjective in tone, and may hold out the way of obedience chiefly as a means of rest and victory. It is to many of us a distinctly fresh life when God’s Spirit leads us to the objective side, lifting our gaze from the road beneath our feet to the form of Him who goes before, and riveting it there by his radiant beauty. […] Then the measure of the sunshine and shadow of our days will be simply in the shining or the veiling of His face. Nothing on earth will make up for the slightest dimming of that light; nothing will really matter that leaves it untouched.231 She was ready with all her heart and soul to ‘follow Him, Who went before’. Where he would lead her, she had no idea. The Lord did not give her full account of his leadings; she had to learn to wait and to learn several lessons in obedience and in fellowship with him, even then, when this meant to deny herself, and die as the corn of wheat to bring forth fruit. The preparation for her future work of selfless ministry, of caring for hundreds of children she rescued from moral and physical danger, she had to learn, just like Moses in his 40 years in the desert. Through those years she could utterly rely on the God who clothes the lilies of the field.
228. In If, VII.
229. If, 43.
230. Amma’s Book, 15.
231. In P. St. John, Until the day breaks…. The life and work of Lilias Trotter (Carlisle: OM Publishing, 1994 [1990]), 10.
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At that time, like many other young women of independent means, Amy became involved in volunteer service. After the Harrogate experience and other encounters with God, Amy was as impulsive as ever, living her life as in a whirlwind, trying to help and assist the needy. Amy was both devoted to evangelism and she had a deep compassion for the poor. Her heart was apprehended by a great love, a love that compelled her to live differently.232 She longed to relieve the deep need of the less fortunate around her. The almost profligate giving of herself mirrors the very radical teaching of her Saviour. She came into contact with Dr Henry Montgomery of Belfast City Mission, who used to take her through the streets on Saturday evenings. He said little, but left the signs of poverty and evil to make their impression on the soul of Amy. Still young, 18 years old, she also used to visit the streets around her home on Sunday afternoons, and brought children to the children’s meetings in her own home. Never did the children leave the house without having had something to eat. When doing street work she was not tempted to anger, and usually spoke calmly and gently. Together with the daughter of Dr Montgomery, Eleanor, and two other girls she went to a night school on Monday evenings, and helped to teach a lively group of boys. The classes ended with a ‘good-night service’. With two of her brothers, she was also involved in the morning watch. It was her initiative to spend each morning in prayers and Bible readings with other people. Those who participated enjoyed it, as one member of this group writes: ‘Amy saw to it that there were no dull moments, and we all loved her’.233 Her sympathies were drawn forth for the myriad of girls working in the mills who were suffering due to long working hours, little payment, not having any possibilities for proper education and who were in moral danger. Her work was seen by William Johnston, pastor of Townsend Street Presbyterian Church and founder of the Presbyterian Orphan Society, who admired her work. Amy could also often be found at the YWCA in Donegal Square. During these years we see a young woman who threw herself wholeheartedly into serving others.
The tin tabernacle
‘Millies’ they were called, the many girls working in the mills, together with their other denigrating name ‘shawlies’ because they covered their heads and upper body with a shawl. Wealthier women always wore hats. These girls were often rather unrefined or had no social skills. On Sunday mornings Amy had her class for the ‘shawlies’. Sometimes the sensibilities of the respectable people were shocked. Amy knew that these poor and underprivileged girls were so vulnerable to fall for many temptations they faced in their home life. She pressed her brother Ernest, who at that time worked as an apprentice in the Northern Counties Railway shops, to tell her about the conversations of the men he met during his work. She was horrified by what she heard from him, and she longed even more that the mill girls might grow up in purity and true Christian life.
Dr Park, the pastor of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, where the Carmichaels had attended since their coming to Belfast, agreed that the ‘shawlies’ could meet every Sunday morning in the church hall. In this work Amy was assisted all along by her mother. It was a work based on faith in God alone, and he met the needs in most remarkable ways. In the evenings there were several meetings with Bible study and practical work, for instance needlework and elementary housekeeping.
232. Cf. the way more than 100 years later Katie Davis, the American young lady who rescued many children, left her comfort zone and gave herself for the children in Uganda: ‘Jesus wrecked my life, shattered it to pieces, and put it back together more beautifully. […] And if one person sees the love of Christ in me, it is worth every minute. In fact, it is worth spending my life for’ (Davis, Kisses from Katie, XVIII and XIX).
She later told the Dohnavur children that ‘those were happy days’.234 But many church members of Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church were not amused that the numbers of girls attending the meetings in their church hall increased. Some of these girls were very loud in their talking; they ‘seemed to address God in their coarse and common vernacular’, which the decent Presbyterians felt was unbecoming. Members made their objections known to Dr Park who supported Amy 100%:
However, God, who makes the wrath of man to praise Him, used these unwelcome and discontented complainers so that, instead of hindering Amy’s outreach amongst the mill girls, they would actually be the harbinger of a new work that God would unfold for Amy in the near future.235 The work grew and grew until she needed a hall that could seat 500. She saw an advertisement in The Christian, a monthly publication for the churches, for an iron hall that was available for 500 pounds. And so the work of the ‘Welcome Hall’ began, which is now the Welcome Evangelical Church. When Amy was about 10 or 11 years old she was asked to collect money for the ‘Bird’s Nest’, a Christian orphanage in Dublin, and as she was staying with her grandmother, she took the collecting card to her various friends in Portaferry, asking them to help. She also met with opposition and some refused to give anything. ‘Why not ask the Lord to make those who love him help the children whom he loves, instead of asking money from those who don’t love him?’ So she and others decided to pray for 500 pounds. Amy came into contact with a Miss Kate Mitchell who wanted to do something in memory of a friend. She talked with Amy and tried to find out more about the work of the mill girls.236
Kate Mitchell wrote to Amy saying that she wanted to donate 500 pounds for the hall. Now they prayed for a piece of land, and one of the mill owners hearing of this request granted her a piece of ground on the corner of Cambrai Street and Heather Street. The hall was put up, and the Rev. Park came to dedicate it. Invitation leaflets had been printed and sent out to many people to attend the opening of ‘The Welcome’ on 02 January 1889. This work was a branch of the YWCA for ‘the mills and factory girls’. We see Amy’s reason for the opening of the hall in the invitation (Figure 5).
‘The Welcome’ was the name of the hall, a most appropriate name for this new venture, in view of the many reproaches Amy and her friends had experienced from many church members of the Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church. Here in The Welcome was no distinction by social class. Amy and Miss Mitchell mixed with the girls and sat beside them when activities were held.
During the dedication service, Amy, 22 years old, sitting, not on the platform but in the middle of the hall among the people237 – did she not like to be called ‘Nobody’ in the Scraps? – over and over read again the words printed by hand in large letters, and hung in a long strip just above the platform: ̔ That in all things He might have the pre-eminence̕.
On that occasion Amy said: ‘As truly, as truly as I knew how, I wanted those words to be fulfilled’.238 The work in The Welcome opened with a mission conducted by two students from the Moody Bible Institute. Here D.W. Whittle’s well-known hymn, composed in 1883, ‘I Know Not Why God’s Wondrous Grace’239 was for the first time sung on the British Isles.
234. Amma’s Book, 14.
235. In Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, 36.
236. Kate Mitchell was the daughter of a wealthy linen baron who lived in Olinda, Craigavad, near to Bangor on the County Down coast.
237. In Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, 42.
238. Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, 43.
239. Daniel Webster Whittle (pseudonym El Nathan), 1840–1901. This hymn was first published in D. Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos and since then in more than 216 other hymnals.
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Source: © Welcome Evangelical Church. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jonathan Clarke. Photographer unknown. See also Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 28; Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, 44–45.
FIGURE 5: The Welcome Hall invitation, ‘Come one Come all to the Welcome Hall and come in your working clothes’. [Agenda: Sunday - Bible Class (4:30 pm) and Sunbeam Band Meeting (5:30 pm); Monday - Singing Practice (7:30 pm) and Dinner Hour Prayer Meeting (1:20 pm); Tuesday - Night School (7:30 pm); Wednesday - Girl’s Meeting (7:30 pm) and Dinner Hour Prayer Meeting (1:20 pm); Thursday - Mother’s Meeting (4:00 pm); 240 Friday - Dinner Hour Prayer Meeting (1:20 pm). First Wednesday of the month Gospel Meeting – All welcome.]240
240. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 28; V. Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle, 44–45.
Without knowing it, Amy received a special training for her future work in India. Among the wretched, the unhappy and despairing, she found that something of infinite value was entrusted to her to convey to them. Her one anxiety was to get these girls in touch with Jesus Christ. In the first weeks, after the opening of ‘The Welcome Hall’ many girls received the Lord as their Saviour. This work kept Amy busy; looking at the weekly schedule, we are impressed by what was done then and there.
For the maintenance of the building and the supply of the material for the activities, there was no regular support, but Amy trusted God to provide what was needed. And he did! For it was here that Amy learned to trust the Lord for provisions and whenever she needed money for ‘The Welcome’ (Figure 5), she prayed for it and it came. Throughout her life she had this principle: only look to the Lord for help. The work grew and others offered to help. She did not accept assistance from just anyone. After studying her Bible in Ezra 4 she learned that only God’s people could do this work. Later, in recruiting new workers for Dohnavur, people from Australia, Canada, America and New Zealand offered to come. She then first talked with the Lord and after they arrived, Amy watched them and some were advised after some time to leave:
What I want you to notice specially is the great kindness of our Lord. He led me into this truth at the very beginning, and He has kept it as a settled thing in my heart ever since. Nothing that I have told you made for a superior attitude, as some said it would. It was just the opposite. It had, and it has, a very humbling influence.241 Young as she was, she was the leader and showed great ability in organising the meetings in ‘The Welcome’. She had the gift of involving others and the generosity to give them full credit for their work. One of her sisters said that Amy usually reserved the Gospel service for herself:
Frequently I played the hymns for her, and so heard the Gospel message, clearly give, full of power and the longing of her heart for the conversion of those rough but attractive girls. […] She was often depressed in the tram afterwards as we returned home, but was cheered by a word of comfort, leaving results with the Lord.242 Amy’s mother released her daughter wholeheartedly and unreservedly to this work. Her greatest act of love was when she completely gave Amy to God when she had heard his call to the mission field. She let her daughter go into and under God’s hands. While in Belfast Amy also learnt a very important lesson for her future work:
She once went to Portaferry, where her grandmother lived and took there a collecting card to her various friends there and asked them a help for The Bird’s Nest, a children’s orphanage in Dublin. There was one who had just built a new house for himself. He refused to give anything. Perhaps it was the repulse of that refusal that set me thinking. Why not ask God to help little children He loves instead of asking for help from people who don’t love Him? Later on many other thoughts came, and in the end I settled that it is enough to ask our Father only for money for the work.243 Within a year of opening ‘The Welcome’, Mr Jacob Wakefield MacGill, from Manchester City Mission, invited Mrs Carmichael to come to Manchester, together with her daughters. Amy’s mother consented to work in Manchester as superintendent of a rescue home associated with Star Hall, a mission outreach located in the Manchester Ancoats area. Here Amy would work among the factory girls, the same type of work she had done in Belfast. When Amy with her mother and sister left Belfast, Miss Mitchell took
241. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 28.
242. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 29.
243. Roots, 20; Gold Cord, chapter XVII, 121–126.
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charge of ‘The Welcome’, and left her lovely home every day to work among the girls.244 Amy never could forget the work in ‘The Welcome’. In 1848 she wrote: ‘Every foot of that place is dear to me. Everything concerning it was prayed over. […] I never, never forget “The Welcome” and my beloved girls.’245
The way churches and mission organisations raised money was secular in Amy’s eyes. In Scraps is a long piece on the subject:246
We must have money. We can’t build spires ninety feet high without it, we cannot decorate our churches with elegant windows without it, we cannot issue costly programmes for our social meetings without it, we can’t furnish our sanctuaries with real polished mahogany without it. […] How are we to get it? You may touchingly plead for the 865,000,000 heathen abroad. You may paint a picture terrible and true of the state of the home heathen at your doors. You may work yourself into hysterics over these and other intensely real realities but you won’t get the money. So another plan must be devised. We shall get up a fancy fair.
And she goes on a little while about what churches and mission organisations do to get some money, what people do to give for this work and that because you get in return nice cakes and so forth, in return some money will be brought in. She comes to Exodus 35:22, where Moses urges the people to give to the new tabernacle. Three things were important about those donations:
1. as many as were willing-hearted
2. brought their own possessions
3. unto the Lord.
Then Amy quotes three Bible verses:
1. ‘Isn’t all the silver and the gold Mine?, said the Lord.’ (Hag 28)
2. ‘Ask, and you will receive.’ (Jn 16:24)
3. ‘My God shall supply all you need.’ (Phil 4:19)
Amy discovered three principles about giving:
1. Is the work for which we want the money chosen work for us, or our chosen work for him? If the former, will not he see after the money necessary? If the latter, then how can we expect anything better than we have?
2. Can we expect a blessing to follow money giving grudgingly?
3. Should we not see that our root is right, before expecting flowers and fruit?
These thoughts surprisingly are nearly the same as Taylor used for the CIM, but Amy arrived at them from her regular Bible studies. Throughout her life, she never laid aside these principles. And the Lord never left her with empty hands and baskets.
Scraps: A family magazine
The Carmichael family, mother and children, was very close and usually the atmosphere at home was a joyous one. It was Amy who proposed a family journal. The board members were the mother and the children. Scraps would be the name of the journal. Mother unanimously was elected president for 1887, Amy as secretary. Each member had a ‘nom de plume’. Amy signed her contributions ‘Nobody’. The
244. Information on the further history of ‘The Welcome Hall’ since 1890, in Maxwell, Amy’s Tin Tabernacle. 245. Roots, 25.
246. See Scraps. Also in Elliot, A Chance to Die, 25–27. object of Scraps was ‘for the improvement and amusement of the members’.247 When reading through all the contributions we see how they were teasing each other in a nice way or encouraging each other. In one of the contributions in 1888 it is worthwhile to notice that ‘the family generally have not quarrelled more than three times a day’. Amy’s brother Norman, writing under the name ‘Namron’, gives us a vivid impression of what happened and whom he encountered in streets of Belfast. He sees the ‘shawl shrouded girls of every height and age’, and ‘the shawl covered barefooted mill girl’. Norman speaks of:
[P]oor men, rich men, beggar man thief, all pass us in ceaseless flow, till we wonder where all come from and where all go to, we pass the poor men with their jailing story telling faces, we pass the rich men (and are passed by them). A wet cold stormy night, the sea ebbing house wards, and little shivering tag-ragger news boy, quite a common boy, very dirty, very hungry, very wet.
In one contribution, titled ‘Under the surface’, Amy was inspired by one of the poems of Miss Havergal, describing life on and under the surface: ‘Little we know when we glance on the surface’; ‘Let us not rest with the outward seeing. Pleased or not, though it be, let us dig deeper until we reach truth and reality.’ Here we already meet the missionary who in India dug deeper until she found the truth of what really happened with the girls and boys dedicated to the gods. And when she saw the people she saw the emptiness of their lives without Christ. Here is one of her thoughts in Scraps after she met Taylor of the CIM in Belfast:
Think truly, and thy thoughts shall be spotless with God’s own purity.
On every thought-bud let us bear the stamp of truth, and love and prayer.248 Does it not stir up our hearts to go forth and help them, does it not make us long to leave our luxury, our exceeding abundant light, and go to them that sit in darkness?249 Sometimes a play was performed at home and we read ‘that it would meet with our sincere approval if the money thus realized was devoted to the most charitable of all charitable objects “The Amy’s Millgirls Society”’.250 So the whole family supported Amy in her work at the ‘Welcome’. In one of Amy’s editorials in Scraps she set out her attitude to the life of faith. At length she wrote about Moses and Aaron appealing to the children of Israel to make their contributions for the building of the tabernacle in the wilderness. She pointed out that Moses did not organise a bazaar or a sale of work to raise funds for God’s house. She quotes Exodus 35:22, from here she drew the abovementioned three principles:
And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing hearted, and brought bracelets, and earrings, and rings, and tablets, all jewels of Gold: and every man that offered, offered an offering of gold unto the Lord. The Carmichael children read a lot as we can see in Scraps. Often the contributors refer to Shakespeare, Ruskin, Kingsley, Coleridge, Havergal and others. Due to the loss of family capital for the widowed mother it was not always easy to make ends meet financially. But the children were prepared to help. In order to save money the children resolved and wrote down that they would ‘eat for one week one soupplate full of porridge and one cup of milk (for the youngest one) and for the elderly one teacup’. ‘This we promise to continue to stick to matter how tempted we are by other materials and also no matter how disagreeable.’ The children with their initials signed this promise. Separately the elder children added ‘also that we do without any lunch for one week’.251 In 1887 Taylor paid a visit to Belfast. At a meeting,
247. Scraps, (18 March 1887 onwards).
248. Scraps (vol. 2, January 1888).
249. In Wellman, Amy Carmichael, 32.
250. Scraps, (vol. 1, 23 April 1887), 1.
251. Scraps, (vol. 1, 23 April 1887), 3.
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sponsored by the Keswick Convention, Taylor told that every hour 4000 Chinese enter the gate of death without ever having heard the precious name of Jesus. In Scraps 20-year-old Amy wrote:
Does it not stir up our hearts to go forth and help them, does it not make us long to leave our luxury, our exceeding abundant light, and go to them that sit in darkness.
Listen! Listen, English sisters Hear an Indian sister’s plea-
Grievous wails, dark ills revealing
Depths of human woe unsealing
Borne across the deep blue sea.
We are dying, day by day,
With no light, no cheering ray.252
We see a harmonious family ready to help each other in a God-fearing atmosphere.
Broughton Grange: Turning the corner
Amy became acquainted with the Keswick Movement, and it was there that she learned of a close deeper walk with the Lord. The first contacts were in September 1886 when a friend invited her to attend the Glasgow Convention, a convention in a Keswick style. This is what she experienced there, and it was so important to her that she wrote down the date in her Bible – 23 September 1886:
The hall was full of a sort of grey mist, very dull and chilly. I came to that meeting half hoping, half fearing. Would there be anything for me? Could there be anything? I don’t remember feeling there was anything (my fault) in either of the two addresses. The fog in the hall seemed to soak into me. My soul was in a fog. Then the chairman rose for the last prayer. […] ‘O Lord, we know Thou art able to keep us from falling’. Those words found me. It was as if they were alight. And they shone for me.253 That time God spoke very clearly to her. One year later, a similar convention was held in Belfast. It was here that she and her aunts met Mr Robert Wilson, the co-founder of the Keswick Convention and James Hudson Taylor, the founder of the CIM.254 Amy until then had never heard of Mr Wilson. Meetings were held in Belfast at the Exhibition Hall and Mr Wilson had asked the people to write questions on paper:255
My aunts had questions. I got a nice pink card with gold edges – we wanted to be polite to the speakers – and wrote a list of questions, the kind of questions good Presbyterians would ask, doctrinal and argumentative. […] After the meeting to our surprise Mr. Wilson found us out, and asked if he might call. When the family was sat round the fire, Mr. Wilson asked ‘May I read something’, and then he read a joyous hymn written by Frances Ridley Havergal. The poem was written by her after she came into the life of restful faith: ̔ Master, how shall I bless Thy name, | For love so great to me: | For the sweet enablings of Thy grace. | So sovereign, yet so free | That have taught me to obey Thy Word, | And cast my care on Thee.̕ […] After he had read all the verses he asked ‘May we pray together?’ After that he shook hands and said Goodbye. Not one question on the pink card had he answered and yet all the questions were answered. We did not expect to see Mr. Wilson again, but
252. In Elliot, A Chance to Die, 20.
253. In Elliot, A Chance to Die, 16.
254. In the margin of his Bible at Zephaniah 3, under the date 04 September 1887, Robert Wilson had written, ‘Belfast with Hudson Taylor’. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 31.
255. We follow here Amy’s words in Amma’s Book, 19–20. somehow we became friends, and when he returned home he wrote to us and we wrote to him. So simply, so without observation, do we turn the corner of the road of life, but as yet we did not know that we had turned the corner.
Changes came in the happy Carmichael family, as mother and two daughters moved to Manchester. This move was made in response to an invitation from the leader of the Manchester City Mission, J. Wakefield MacGill.256 For the last time, before they left for Manchester, mother Catherine with all the children was at home in Belfast. While reading Psalm 133 in India, Amy could remember that memorable day and she wrote, ‘Sunday before Easter Sunday. 1885. Our last together as an unbroken family. We said this Psalm together then. College Garden. Belfast.’257 On 03 December 1887 she was in Knock Dara, Ireland, with Mrs Bell, and they talked about her work. Amy, nearly 20 years old, thinking of the future and afraid of what lay before, heard the word of God:
But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am only a youth, for to all to whom I send you and you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord. [In her Bible she wrote in the margin of this verse] First launch into the deep.258
It was of course difficult for Amy to loosen the ties from the work in ‘The Welcome’. Her four brothers also left the house and eventually all went abroad.259 When one of her brothers sailed:
[T ]wo of us went with him to see him off. Somewhere on his ship, I saw this, ‘Though the day be never so long | At last it rings to evensong’. On our return journey by train we skirted the shore. I was looking out of the carriage window at the sea and thinking of that brother, when, as the train flashed passed, I saw written in huge letters on a boulder, ‘God is Love’. It was a cold bleak day, and in spite of ‘At length it rings to evensong’, my heartfelt cold and bleak. But there was warmth and blessed comfort in that, ‘God is Love’.260 In Manchester Amy lived in very poor and shabby conditions in a slum area to do the evangelistic work,261 ‘in exactly the sort of place I should have chosen if I had been asked to choose’, among the factory girls in Ancoats. Her mother became lady superintendent of a rescue home.262 Here Amy met down-and-outs in all their undisguised misery. In this industrial, seafaring town, with many houses of bad reputation, many were living in darkness and shame, and the profession of young girls was to sell their bodies to visiting men. In the cellars and attics wretched families lived and the public houses were crowded with men, women and children; she had to find her way among these sin-seared people. Often Amy went through the poorer streets of Manchester where evil men sometimes threatened her life. Often there were fights at night. She must have had an angel as guard there. Here in Manchester she lived beyond the bare minimum, dead to the world and all its vanities. God prepared Amy with her eye for beauty for her future work here.
256. In the hymn books Consecration and Faith and the Keswick Hymn-Book the missionary hymn ‘Coming, Coming – Yes, They Are’ is written by MacGill.
257. In the margin of Psalm 133 in Amy’s Bible (1895).
258. In Amy’s Bible (1895).
259. Ernest went in 1889 to New Jersey, Norman to British Columbia in 1890.
260. Poem of George Tankervil (±1500–1555); Amma’s Book, 20.
261. Amma’s Book, 21.
262. First Mrs Carmichael and her daughters settled at Lymn, Cheshire, but later set up a house at 47 Halliwell Lane, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, while Amy rented a home (particularly for use at weekends) close to the hall in Ancoats. A place ideal for her purpose – except it was very filthy. Her sister writes, ‘Well I remember that awful room’ and Amy herself writes of the ‘most loathy sort of insect which used to crawl through the tin walls from our next door neighbour’s house into ours’. In Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 33.
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Amy, just over 20 years old, of medium height, with dark brown wavy hair matching her brown eyes, had started her new work in Ancoats, with her vivid nature and enthusiasm. Sometimes she visited her mother, who was living in a cottage in the country, and once hooligans of Ancoats threatened her life. A woman, standing in her open door, saw her in the midst of the mob and she ran out, caught her hand and brought her into her kitchen. In India she would write in her Bible: ‘Only safe on the high places when He setteth me on them, Ancoats, March 1890’.263 Working and living in poor conditions herself, with just the necessities to survive, her luxuries in the realm of mentality, she grew in spiritual things. Her training here was rather severe. She writes, ‘Uncle Jacob (Mr McGill) had no patience with people who weren’t ready at a moment’s notice’; ‘you had to learn to do without a quiet room for preparation’; but ‘I have thanked God for that training’.264
Leaving Ireland, she took with her the treasures of home fixedly rooted in the Word of God. Her eyes on the one necessary thing: a desire to live not for earthly gain but to live for other ends. She, as a young woman, loved the beauty of the world around her and there was a friendliness too, and willingness to do anything to give her hands to others for help. The burden to reach out to the downtrodden of society, to love them and to win them to Christ, would become her life work. Love was her motto and constant pursuit for the rest of her life.
When she was in Manchester Amy’s two youngest brothers stayed with Mr Wilson at Broughton Grange, his majestic estate near Cockermouth, Wordworth’s town. Broughton Grange, the 11-bedroom house, was built by Mr Wilson in 1859 and from Broughton Grange you have a magnificent view of the Derwent river. Ten miles to the west, Solway Firth flows into the Irish Sea, and to the east range the beautiful Cumbrian mountains. Amy also often stayed there, but never forgot to go to her mother too. Gradually Amy ‘slipped into an empty place’ and became like a child to Mr Wilson. It was here she met many persons who were connected with the Keswick Convention and eventually she visited the Keswick Convention in 1888. ‘The friends made then, and afterwards at Broughton Grange, were friends worth having.’265
After the death of her father, Amy found in Mr Wilson a father figure and a spiritual mentor. Robert Wilson owned coal mines in Cumberland and was a co-founder of the Keswick deeper Christian life conventions in England. Mr Wilson’s wife had died in 1884 and his only daughter, Rachel, about the age of Amy, had passed away as well. At the 1885 Keswick Convention, Mr Wilson spoke a characteristic parting word to all who had attended the meeting. He said:
As God comforts us that we may pass it on, I want to say that I have found Him a very present help in trouble, and that He has kept me in perfect peace, and has given me a song of praise in the midst of deep sorrow. Pray for me that I may help others who are in sorrow with the same comfort He has given me.266 The connections of the Carmichael family with the Wilson family resulted in the request from Mr Wilson, who was very lonely, to her mother if Amy might come and live in his home and be his secretary. Due to the hard work in the Ancoats area Amy’s physical condition was very low and she needed a complete change of environment to get new strength. Amy agreed to stay with Mr Wilson and doing this she overcame his loneliness. For Amy, Mr Wilson became the DOM (Dear Old Man). While never
263. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 18:33, ‘He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to stand on the heights’ (NIV).
264. Amma’s Book, 21. See also Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 17.
265. Amma’s Book, 22.
266. W.B. Sloan, These Sixty Years. The Story of the Keswick Convention, 1875–1935 (London: Pickering & Inglis, 1935), 31–32. officially adopted, she used the hyphenated name Wilson-Carmichael as late as 1912.267 Broughton Grange (Figure 6) would be another turning point in Amy’s life. She saw it like this:
I can see that it fitted into the Plan; it was part of the preparation for something out of sight. For if ever I was to do the things ‘before prepared’ (see Eph 2:10 margin) certain great lessons not learned yet had to be learned, and Broughton Grange was the appointed school.268 In 1888, for the first time, Amy visited the convention in Keswick where she dedicated afresh her life to the Lord. After the convention she wrote: ‘It was an unforgettable time; it meant a new committal of one’s whole life’. She liked to read news from various mission fields. One of the first missionary books she ever read was about the ‘Cambridge Seven’ who went to the mission field in 1882. From 1888 she lived with the Wilson family in Broughton Grange. From the garden, there was (and is) a wide view over the river Derwent and here the big decision in Amy’s life took shape. This place in the beautiful Lake District was lifelong remembered: ‘In Cumberland, where I used to live, […] “the Lord keep us
Source: © J. (Hans) Kommers.
FIGURE 6: Brouhgton Grange, home of Mr Robert Wilson near Cockermouth in Cumbria.
267. After Amy had offered herself to the CIM, she was once with Mr Wilson in the house of Miss Henrietta Soltau and it was there that Mr Wilson ‘said in the dear “thee and thou” of Quaker speech, “Thee must sign thy name ‘Carmichael Wilson’ to the CIM papers”. A little later he said, “Thee had better write ‘Wilson Carmichael”’; and that is how it came to pass his name was in my name. […] After he had gone it became a little difficult in some small ways, and as I saw he would not misunderstand and be hurt, I went back to my own name’ (Amma’s Book, 24). Her second name Beatrice she did not use any more after having read Dante in the Manchester Free Library: ‘and came out into the street afterwards wondering what the people who brushed past me would be like if they had seen his visions, had felt too high for me, and so had tucked itself out of sight’ (From the Forest, 68).
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from forgetting”’.269 She learned much from her close stay with Mr Wilson. In Broughton Grange visitors regularly came to see Mr Wilson; Amy had come there at the centre of evangelical life, piety and activity. Mr Wilson was a leading person among the Quakers in and around Keswick. She remembered the Saturday evenings in Broughton Grange, where Mr Wilson – for the preparation for the worship on Sunday – used to pray ‘We thank thee, O Saviour, for the much incense of thy merits’ and ‘this phrase sank deep into my mind, and all these years has stayed with me’.270
In August 1888 she promised to write for Miss Nugent some articles for Living Waters.271 She remembered one occasion at Keswick where Mr Moody preached on the prodigal son, in which the father said to the older son ‘Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine’. Mr Moody said, ‘I never saw it before. Oh, the love of God’s love. Oh, the love. God’s love.’ Tears rained down his cheeks. Amy never forgot that spiritual truth, ‘all that I have is thine’ (Lk 15:31). It reinforced her faith that God knew her needs before she asked and wanted to supply them by faith.
‘All rays in this one centre meets’
From early childhood to a mature woman we can trace the spurs of God’s dealings with her. The strict Presbyterian upbringing in her youth, and her later dealings with Quakers and Keswick evangelicals, combined with her strong determination and ‘in’ for new visions, with her quiet loving unselfishness and thought for others, made her a person of her own. The records of her early life reveal a mind extraordinary well stored with Scripture and the need and claims of the foreign mission field early laid hold upon Amy’s heart.
She could enjoy the beauty of nature and had no objections to a nice joke; however, she would not amuse herself at the expense of others, and by nature not made for the chit-chat side of life, she took no pleasure in it. The spiritual fibre under the unassuming manner made her a lovely person among many of Mr Wilson’s friends. At Broughton Grange (Figure 6) Amy learned to drop church labels, and to think only of the one true invisible church, to which all who truly love the Lord belong. ‘Suppose He came tomorrow what would labels matter? […] Why think much of them now?’272 Mr Wilson belonged to the Friends, but he had a wide view. On Sunday mornings he went to the Friends Church and in the evening to the Church of England. Amy wrote: ‘I grew to value the quietness of the Friends’ way of worship and also to care very much for the beauty of the Church of England ways’. For her spiritual training Amy saw the value of participating in a local church. She underlined these words in The Stewardship of the Mystery: ‘A rightly constituted assembly is the very best training centre, and draws out or makes demands upon every kind of gift and grace’. But in the margin she wrote: ‘True, but if the one called has not had great help? We have proved then what the Lord can do.’273 Does Amy suggest here that she had not had support from the Irish Presbyterians? During her years in India she got more support and encouragement from English evangelicals than from Ireland where she had grown up. In the same book she wrote next to the words ‘no college or institute can provide a young Christian with spiritual measure’, ‘True’.274
269. Thou Givest … They Gather, 198–199.
270. Thou Givest … They Gather, 63.
271. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Isaiah 41:13.
272. Amma’s Book, 22.
273. In Austin-Sparks, The Stewardship of the Mystery, 174. The book is in the Dohnavur library.
274. See on p. 174.
For the Keswick Convention Mr Wilson had chosen the motto All One in Christ Jesus. From Mr Wilson Amy learned to read the Bible in a new way:
All thoughts, all searches to this centre tend,
All rays in this one centre meet.
Here as of old the wise men journeying spend
Their treasures at Thy feet.
There is no record but doth hint of Thee.
All history else were false and vain.
The stones Thy Kingdom preach; loosed with this key
All hardest things are plain.275
In Wilson’s house Amy learned what silence meant. Mr Wilson was not only the chairperson of the Keswick Convention but also of other conventions and often heard opposite things and different opinions. To talk about all these things could do harm, he knew and he used to keep silent. When he spoke or wrote letters it was ‘in the know’ and he had to learn to be careful to be silent. Others trusted him, because they knew their words were safe with him. ‘It is a temptation to say, “O yes, I knew that long ago”. Learn to be a deep well. A deep well does not talk.’ From him Amy learned never to say ‘I won that soul’. No one can think of himself so:
What blew broke the stone? The first one and the last one, and everyone between. And I learned something of the unimportance of the earthly things as compared with heavenly. It is in the three inscriptions over three doors in the Milan Cathedral. Above one is a carving of roses and the words, ‘All that pleases is for a moment’; over another, a Cross, and the words, ‘All that grieves is but for a moment’; over the great central door only the words are carved, ‘Nothing is important but that which is eternal’.276 Amy also learned a lot from Andrew Murray:
Abiding in Christ is not a work we have to do as the condition for enjoying His salvation, but a consenting to let Him do all for us, and in us, and through us.277 Andrew Murray (1828–1917), the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, came to South Africa early in the 19th century. He was deeply influenced by the Dutch pietistic movement called Réveil while a student in the Netherlands, and became the epitome of an evangelical pietist. Murray was also a mystic, influenced by both St Bernard of Clairvaux and by the English 18th century Anglican devotional writer William Law,278 who was influenced by John Wesley.279 Murray was a regular speaker at holiness conventions and it was in Keswick in 1895 that Amy met Murray at the convention there. Amy shared with him the same devotion to Christ, along with his contemplative spirituality.
275. Amma’s Book, 23.
276. Amma’s Book, 23.
277. A. Murray, 1978, ‘Abide in Christ’, in The Best of Andrew Murray, ed. S.W. Sorenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Honor Books, 2005), 67.
278. William Law (1686–1761) in 1711 was Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later on family tutor. He preached through his books. Best known of his earlier works were A Treatise Upon Christian Perfection, 1726, and A Serious Call To a Devout and Holy Life, 1728.
279. ‘I confess that in all my reading, I have never found anyone who has so helped me in understanding the Scripture truth of the work of the Holy Spirit. And it is because I know of no one who has put certain aspects of needed truth with the same clearness, that I cannot but think that he is a messenger from God to call His church to give the blessed Spirit the place of honour that belongs to Him’; John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, William Wilberforce and Thomas Scott each described reading William Law as a major turning-point in their life (“An Introduction to William Law”, last modified 28 December 2012, http://www.passtheword.org/William-Law/wl-intro.htm).
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This also found expression through leadership, energising missions, evangelism, establishing schools and activating diaconal service. His literary output was prodigious. Of Murray’s devotional books, Abide in Christ and The Holiest of All are perhaps among the most well-known embodying his evangelical piety and mysticism.
Like Andrew Murray who never got loose from his Scottish Presbyterian background, so it was with Amy. The strict Presbyterian piety at home in Millisle was interwoven in her latter thinking and writings. Like Murray she too was influenced by the evangelical pietistic movement. By the Christian atmosphere at Mr Wilson’s home and her Keswick experiences to ‘drop labels’, the quietness of the Friends’ way of worship and the spiritual beauty in the liturgy of the Church of England, she developed a strong evangelical faith. The many encounters with Christians from several parts of the world rejoicing together in the fullness of Christ at Keswick opened for the staunch young Presbyterian girl from Ireland the door for a fuller Christian experience. She represented a blend of Quaker piety with evangelical fervour. Amy became the epitome of evangelical pietism, which was seen in the old evangelical mystics, influenced by a number of mystics like Mme Guyon, Bernard of Clairvaux, François Fénelon, Père Didon, Geert Grote, Thomas à Kempis and many others. Here she learned to abandon her own self for the sake of God. She experienced that to lose your life is to gain it.
In Broughton’s Quaker atmosphere, Amy adhered to the typical Quaker practice of listening for the inner voice of God. However, she cautioned against trusting the inner voice rather than Scripture and stressed the need for discernment, by avoiding negativism and making positive confessions of the Word of God and recognising the reality of spiritual conflict. She dropped her measuring rods for God and for men, in everything prepared to be led by the Word of God. The Lord would advise her and she did not want to be taken up with precedents and preconceptions of church and mission. Theology was a good thing, but God was for her greater and consequently so was her relationship with him. True to her God who gave her the initial inspiration in her youth, now devoted to Christ, not to principles. Jesus’s life was manifest in her mortal life. In Amy’s experience, God was very near to her and she often expressed whom God was for her in a very intimate way. Even amidst temptations, in times of sickness and other difficulties, she could say:
The entrance to the wood is dark. But we quickly pass through into light. The long, pure rays of that conquering light are interwoven with the tall stems of the trees, even as warp and woof, threads bright and dark, are interwoven in the web of our lives. But it is the bright threads that we shall see most clearly when we look upon this finished web. We are called to light, not to darkness. […] Our roof is like the roof of the forest, transparent. So verily, there is no roof; we live under open heavens. […] We have far too poor a conception of the intimacy with our God which He desires should be habitual.280 As she grew into maturity, we see a young woman blending intensive Bible study and reading with strong faith, holiness and practical Christian living. The devout life was diligently cultivated, and she cherished an aversion to a wooden orthodoxy, and a tottering morality in alliance with Christian life. Her view of church and mission life was based on her simple, literal interpretation of Scripture and application of it to daily life. Traces in her family show Presbyterian and even Puritan ancestors, while contacts with Anglicans, Quakers and Baptists gave her a distinctive religious tolerance; Keswick brought for her all these influences together.281 This made her a friend of all who fear the Lord and no stranger to ‘the religion of the heart’.282 A combination of providential leadings finally indicated India as God’s appointed field.
280. Gold by Moonlight, 21–22.
281. See the next chapter.
282. The expression is of John Wesley (‘The Way To The Kingdom’, Sermon 7, 06 June 1742).
The way Amy practised her faith in God reminds us of that other woman who was one of them, who about 100 years before paved the road for more evangelical fervour, more practical Christianity instead of the unmovable doctrines and teachings of the Established Church, which were done by many almost automatically without any emotion. The ‘heart’ was absent, and this created a form of nominal Christianity. The upcoming evangelical movement held an aversion to religious or doctrinal strife. Amy went to the mission field without labels, without prejudices. She shunned controversy and divisions, and she would have agreed with the words of her ‘sister’ Hanna More283 who wrote in her diary on 08 July 1803:
My very soul is sick of religious controversy. […] Christianity is a broad basis. Bible Christianity is what I love. […] A Christianity practical and pure, which teaches holiness, humility, repentance and faith in Christ; and which after summing up all the Evangelical graces, declares that the greatest of these is charity. Charity of course is the old-fashioned term for love.284 Amy was endowed with a very practical nature. She was a risk taker, not afraid of entering new challenges, a woman of independence and firm resolution, leaning on God’s guidance, prepared to encounter difficulties and to surmount them. She was a type of woman at her best, full orbed in Christ, ascending the hill of the Lord with clean hands and a pure heart. Covenanter spirit, rooted in firm Biblical preaching and staunch adherence to Reformation principles, but open to God’s leading into unknown ways, heart and eyes open, even when within sight of the better country, ‘the one thing desired’. For those who would live for many years together with her in Dohnavur, the fellowship on earth was to them a taste of the joys of the world to come. Through trials and setbacks she experienced that – like her Covenanter forefathers – the deepest joys even carried the shadow of the Cross. Some of the Presbyterian iron has been always in her blood. The song of all the redeemed in the great day of triumph – ‘worthy is the Lamb that was slain’ – was never far from her. How deeply she loved her precious Lord and Saviour! And just like her forefathers, how greatly at heart she had those still unreached with the saving Gospel. With daring faith she would tell about her Lord in the strongholds of the devil, believing that the kingdoms of the world are to become his, and his name called upon the rising of the sun to its going down. Whether it was in Japan, the land of ‘the rising sun’, or in Kanyakumari, the very tip of India, where she had often seen the setting sun, everywhere her work was to uplift Jesus Christ and to enlighten the poor pagan world.
As Amma (mother), she prayed and lived for ‘her’ Indian children, the priceless jewels of her life, in a brave, godly, inspiring way, bringing up her children, succouring the helpless with the comfort with which she had been comforted by God. Throughout her long, busy life, she always wedded all her thoughts and doings together with that mystical thought and experience. When the child who had sat with her mother in a Belfast teashop reached maturity, no one could have imagined at that time that she would emerge as one of the most fascinating women of her time. When she entered what would become her life work, we see a young woman, who had a clear vision, not the world’s estimate but God’s. She looked forward and from then on, she took God at his word, believing he had spoken, Jesus had acted on it, and this she believed and that settled it. She had been led to see the claims of the Lord upon her life. Now ears open for God and a heart full of compassion, open for the world, and feet knowing the way to the throne. The call to service she had heard was the echo of her identification with God. He had brought her into a relationship with himself; she had heard his voice and understood what he wanted her to do. She would do it out of sheer love to him. To understand her openness to the world and entering inter-denominational mission involvement, Ian Dickson gives us an interesting explanation
283. Read about her in Prior, Fierce Convictions.
284. Prior, Fierce Convictions, 155.
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about the Ulster Presbyterian sermons in Amy’s time, when he writes: ‘evangelicalism had the potential to sap the energies of denominational life by involving local church members in the activities of the wider evangelical community’.285
Her story as a missionary will be revealed in the many events of her life, intertwined with God’s sovereignty, and offers us the possibility to see the Lord working out in human beings the impossible into the possible, and to show the way to anyone who wants to make a difference not only in time but also for eternity.
285. In his Beyond Religious Discourse, 66.
From prayer that asks that I may be Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee, From fearing when I should aspire, From faltering when I should climb higher, From silken self, o Captain, free Thy soldier who would follow Thee.
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified) From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
Give me the love that leads the way, The faith that nothing can dismay, The hope no disappointments tire, The passion that will burn like fire,
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.
Gold Cord, Introduction.