CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
THE SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY
The town of Ballymena is built in the middle of the County Antrim in the north of Ireland, and close by stands the sacred hill of Slemish, where Saint Patrick as a captive lad herded his master's pigs and sanctified the soil of pagan Ireland with his tears. Of that hill, the Apostle of Ireland said:
Now, after I came to Ireland, daily I herded flocks and often during the day I prayed; the love of God and His fear increased more and my faith grew and my spirit was stirred up; hardly a single day but I said as many as 100 prayers and at night likewise though I abode in the woods and the mountains.'
More than 1,500 years later, four young men met together in the shadow of Slemish in a barn to pray. To this prayermeeting is traceable the great evangelical awakening which added more than 1 million converts in a very few years to the British churches."
The recognized historian of this mighty movement, the _ subject of this treatise, could trace his physical and spiritual life. back through his mother and grandmother to this "Year of Grace 1859" that a full century afterwards the United Committee of Irish Churches asked him to help commemorate in a series of meetings throughout Ireland.®
His maternal grandmother Ellen Rock* was a.convert of the 1859. Revival that. brought strange happenings to, Ballymena, a market. town. west of Slemish. Not only were the churches of the town crowded daily, but the local factories were closed for days on end on account of conviction of sin.
At that time, Ballymena had a population of 6,000. Within six months of the outbreak of a startling revival of religion, secular observers had reported the extensive social, moral and religious improvements among the people.®
Ellen Rock was one whose life was transformed and whose repu-
tation for saintliness continued till her death. Edwin Orr never knew her but he had heard his grandfather speak of the great revival.
These seeds sown in the little boy's heart bore much fruit in later years. Here is seen a source of that longing for revival
that has characterized Edwin Orr all his life.
My mother, youngest daughter of a family brought up in the country district where the Irish Revival of 1859 first appeared, led me to Christ when I was a boy of nine, on my ninth birthday. She held the theory that a child's heart takes impressions like wax but keeps them like marble: so she believed that no child was really too young to trust the Lord for salvation. I honour her memory for this.®
Edwin Orr was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland on 15th January 1912. The 15th of January continued to be an important date in his life. On that date, nine years later, he was converted.
On that date, when twenty-five years old, he was married. On that date, his twenty-eighth birthday, he was ordained to the Christian ministry. And on that date, three years later, he became an Air Force chaplain.'
The Orrs are of great antiquity in Scotland, there having been a Baron Hugh de Orr noted by King Edward I in the thirteenth century. In 1606, sundry Orrs began to return to the Ireland from which they emigrated 1,000 years before. Some settled in the Clough district of Antrim.
Edwin's grandfather migrated thence in 1884 to Philadelphia and lived there for more than fifty years. He became a citizen of the United States. Edwin's father, William Stewart Orr, grew to manhood in the Pennsylvanian metropolis, being therefore a citizen of both Great Britain and the United States when he returned to Ireland where he married Rose Wright, a girl from the same part of the County Antrim in which he was born.* Edwin Orr inherited this dual citizenship—the beginning of his many international contacts.
Poverty through ill-health dogged the Orr family for a score of years, a series of afflictions bringing the family fortunes down to rock-bottom.® William Stewart Orr had broken his leg, and as he grew to manhood, tuberculosis of the bone set in.
His health suffered a sharp setback caused by a street accident, and he sank into a decline.
Rose Stewart Orr, mother of Edwin Orr, was reputed to possess the "second sight" for which the Celtic peoples are noted. She was what Ulster folk called "'a straight dreamer".
The family was accustomed to proceed by a local train from the city to the County Down? coast each summer for their annual vacation. It is of interest to Indian Christians that the saintly Amy Carmichael as a girl played on the same old rocks and beaches, for this was her home county too, long before she went to South India.
One night at home, Mrs. Orr dreamed vividly that, as the little train pulled out of a local station, Margaret Louise (their youngest child) was found to be missing. Her husband, William, assured her that he would get out at the next station and travel back for the three-year-old girl, and rejoin all the family at the sea-shore. In her dream, Rose Orr arrived at the destination with three children only, her husband and baby girl being missing.
Such a dream filled her with deep foreboding.
That year, in the month of November, her little baby girl Margaret Louise died in a great diphtheria epidemic that swept the world after the First World War. A year later, her grieving father (who never recovered from the blow) died also. The baby girl told her mother, as she was taken to the isolation hospital, that she was going to be with Jesus; her father died in calm acceptance of the will of God, in his last hours predicting the coming of world-wide television (in 1922!) as a preparation for the expected coming of Christ. So in the summer of 1923, Rose
Orr and her orphaned children arrived at the little village on the coast of Down, just as she had dreamed.
The Orrs lived on the County Down side of Belfast, south of the River Lagan, in a four-bedroomed house on Ormeau Road,
@ main artery running out to the towns of Ballynahinch and Saintfield. It was regarded as a "nice suburb'. When death removed the breadwinner, it seemed that the family would have to move, but a legal prohibition against raising rents made it possible for the Orrs to remain on in the house that they had occupied since pre-First World War days. This meant that they were assumed by neighbours to be better off than they were. Actually, they all suffered want in both clothing and food.
Rose Orr did her best to keep the children's clothing mended, but new clothes were a rarity. Any gift given by friends to the children went for "something useful". But there were times that the family felt too poorly dressed to go to church, slipping instead into a little mission hall.
Food was of the plainest. To this day, Edwin Orr has a lack of interest in some foods which other folk regard as staples, because he was not used to them. Usually, he was served the "top" of the egg boiled for his older brother who was working and thus in need of greater nourishment. They had plenty of potatoes, which Edwin always relished, and porridge and milk which he did not. His brother Alan had grown to six feet; he and his younger brother with less food available for the growing stage fell short of five feet seven.
William Orr died when Edwin was ten years!" old. He does not remember much about his father, but his early writings give glimpses of the deeply religious life led by the members of his family.
Alan Stewart Orr, a talented artist, developed tuberculosis and was forced to give up his job to battle for life. At twentysix, he lost the battle. Edwin in later years remembered
:#8 My mother, sister, and brother and I had come to say good-bye to my dying brother, Alan. His death a couple of days later (in hospital) was the end of a six years' battle against disease.
Alan asked us to sing something for him; many a time had our family sung together at home, but these circumstances were different—each one of us was afraid of breaking down.
So Alan decided to sing something himself ... the words of Charles Wesley's lovely hymn:
O for a heart to praise my God, A heart from sin set free, A heart that's sprinkled by the blood So freely shed for me.
Edwin Orr's surviving brother and sister both suffered breakdown of health, but neither of them became consumptive, their health becoming good in adulthood, both of them serving in an arduous military service in the Second World War. Rose
Stewart Orr, worn out with nursing a dying husband and a
sick family, was sent to a sanatorium for a lengthy period, leaving her orphaned children to fend for themselves.14 She recovered her health fully, but died during the war period, in 1942.
The middle son, Edwin, was the most delicate of all the children, not having had a proper meal in the first fourteen years of his life. Predisposed to tuberculosis, he never fell victim to the scourge. For six years previous to reaching his majority he supported the family, the boy becoming a man before his time. He left home in 1933. His good health was unimpaired after another ten years of arduous labour as an evangelist, and, when he applied for a commission as a chaplain in the Air
Force in 1943, his health was perfect.15
The doctor who examined him for a commission asked him to read the eye-chart, which he did very deliberately. The doctor looked at him quizzically and said: "Now read it backwards!" Orr read it backwards—to the doctor's great surprise, whereupon the candidate told him cheerfully "I learned it by heart backwards as well as forwards!'' The doctor passed him, but prescribed glasses to withstand the shock of combat conditions.
Edwin Orr studied in the Ormeau Park School. Hugh Logan, the Principal of the school, stated that the Orr family was the most intelligent that ever passed through his classrooms and that of that family Edwin was the ablest student, combining intellectual gifts with religious fervour.*®
When he was thirteen years of age, Edwin Orr enrolled in the College of Technology in Belfast on a scholarship. A man named Fletcher taught English Literature at that college.?'
'He asked his class to write as homework an essay on "Give me. neither riches nor poverty'... With heavy irony, he said he wanted it in prose, not in poetry! Edwin thought he would play a trick; he wrote some verses on the subject and handed them in to his teacher. He also handed in an essay in prose because on second thoughts he anticipated ironic comment from his
English teacher. Mr. Fletcher told the class he was very disappointed with the essays. He then asked Orr's permission to read aloud his composition. Not knowing what the teacher was going to say, Edwin agreed, with fear and trembling. Mr. Fletcher then read the poem with such understanding and feeling that B
Edwin was surprised. His class mates copied it and took it home. The Principal of the college recommended Orr for a literary scholarship, but he was unable to make use of it, for family reasons. An enterprising London journalist Watts visited
Belfast later on in search of material on Orr's early life. He unearthed a few of the verses which had survived:
Full wealth untold is true delight When happiness is in its purse; A hoard of gold, when hid from light, Is miser's shame and miser's curse.
The lust of gold, the lure of gems, _ The customs of mankind on earth, Conspire to hold our diadems As graded rules of sterling worth.
The standard set since Genesis, "The metal and the Man are one,"
Makes us forget time's menaces To pile up gold till we are gone.
So where on earth is reason's rule?
For lucre's golden purse is crowned, And human worth is lucre's tool To gild the Man in fetters bound.
So then of diamonds give me none:
Life's corn and wine suffice for me; But give me sky and earth and sun And Ill supply necessity.1® These verses were prophetic of Edwin Orr's attitude towards money all through his life. We shall on many occasions consider how this outlook determined his actions. He toiled for his
Master in the spirit set forth in this poem.
Even as a boy, Edwin had many unusual interests outside his school or college studies." Among the books of history and travel, his favourite book was Washington Irving's Life of Mahomet and His Successors. He had read this book thirteen
_ times before he was eleven years old! As an Irish lad, he could have had no opportunity to come in contact with Islam, an altogether new and strange world, far removed from his daily round. This close study of non-fictional books was part of the preparation for Edwin Orr's future career as a writer.
Long before the modern adventures in space travel he wrote an imaginative account of life in Mars in rhyme. He wrote in his fourteenth year a novel based upon General Allenby's conquest of Palestine. It was circulated among his intimate friends as a serial, but never published.?°
Although he was fond of outdoor sports, he did not take much part in them; as he was the youngest boy in his class, he often was bullied by older lads. He, however, devised a lot of mischief and left it to his fellow students to carry out. Years later, he received a letter from an outstanding missionary in China, Henry Montgomery Brown, who also had been a member of this "very wicked" class of boys which terrorized its masters.
"T'm sure," he wrote, "that our old Headmaster would have been dumbfounded had he discovered how many of us became ministers, preachers, and missionaries!'' Strange, but many did.
Edwin was very happy following the courses in the College of Technology. His intellectual powers were unfolding. His studies were congenial and he did well in them. He received both from his teachers and his fellow-students the respect and admiration that are given to clever boys. He says his years in college were among the happiest years in his life.2! He reached the Matriculation standard of London University (or Junior
College level of American Universities) when a domestic catastrophe put an end to his pleasant pursuits. This was the illness of his older brother Alan, an illness that proved fatal.
Edwin was compelled to become breadwinner of the family in his fifteenth year. Young men of his age were continuing in college but for Edwin Orr the Lord had other plans. His education did not follow the usual pattern. For six years, he worked as a clerk in a bakery with its hard grind from morning till evening. Commented Sidney W. Murray, a. government official who knew the Orrs, '"The family had a hard time struggling and any extra schooling had to be done during the evening classes." Thus Orr studied first in the school of adversity.