Preface

“Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.”

— Matthew 18:14, ASV

The earlier volumes of this series told of a Chinese church leader who died in a Communist labour camp, an American who prayed his way through the villages of the Punjab, a Dutch watchmaker who hid Jews behind a false wall, a Scottish mill girl who went alone up the rivers of Calabar, an African bishop who had once been sold as a slave, an Indian widow who built a home for thousands of outcast women, an Oxford don who was found by God against his will, and an American widow who carried her small daughter into the Ecuadorian forest. This ninth volume tells the story of an Irish woman who went to South India in 1895, never came home, and spent more than half a century making a family out of children whom nobody else was able, or willing, to keep.

Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born in 1867 in Millisle, a village on the coast of County Down, and died in 1951 at Dohnavur, a village near the southern tip of India. Between those two places lie a Belfast mission hall for mill girls, a slum in Manchester, a country house in the Lake District, fifteen months in Japan, a few months in Ceylon, a bullock cart on the rutted roads of the Tinnevelly district, and a compound of red-tiled nurseries under the mountains, which grew in her lifetime into the Dohnavur Fellowship. The children there called her Amma, which in Tamil means “mother.” When she died, that one word was all they put over her grave.

A Link with the Last Volume

Readers who have come to this book from the volume before it will notice a thread between them. In 1987 Elisabeth Elliot published a long biography of Amy Carmichael, and took its title from a saying attributed to her, that missionary life is simply a chance to die. Elisabeth Elliot had read Amy Carmichael since her student years, and she found in her a writer who would not pretend. The two women never met. One was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and the other in the year of the General Strike. But they shared a conviction that a missionary story should be told as it happened, without the gilding that home audiences liked, and that God is honoured by the truth more than by a flattering account of his servants. This book tries to tell Amy Carmichael’s story in that spirit.

Why Courage?

Some of her courage was of the visible kind. She went out to Asia after a mission board had turned her down on grounds of health. She spent years travelling with a band of Indian women through villages where a foreign woman was a curiosity and the gospel was an offence. She took in a runaway child who belonged, by local custom, to a temple, knowing that the women who had kept her could bring the law down on her for doing it. For half a century she sheltered children at risk of the same fate, and she was threatened, slandered and taken to court for it.

But this book will suggest that there were quieter kinds of courage in her life, and that they may have cost her more. There was the courage to write home the truth when her readers wanted good news. Her first book about India, Things as They Are, published in 1903, told English Christians that most days on the mission field ended exactly as they began, and that conversion in caste India usually meant the loss of everything. Some readers in England did not believe her. There was the courage to stay. She never took a furlough in fifty-five years, and she buried many of the people she loved most in Indian soil. And there was the courage, in her last twenty years, of lying in one room in pain, unable to walk far, and going on with the work by prayer and by pen.

How This Book Is Written

Like the earlier volumes, this book tries to be honest about its sources. Amy Carmichael was a prolific writer, and her own books are the first source for her life. Those published before 1929, including Things as They Are (1903), Overweights of Joy (1906), Lotus Buds (1909) and Walker of Tinnevelly (1916), are in the public domain in the United States, and this book quotes from them, chiefly from Things as They Are, which is in the Ochorus library. Her later books, including Gold Cord (1932), her history of the Fellowship, and the little devotional book If (1938), are named so that readers can find them, but they are not quoted here, out of respect for the rights that may still attach to them in some countries.

The two standard biographies are Frank Houghton’s Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, published in 1953 by a writer who was given access to her papers, and Elisabeth Elliot’s A Chance to Die. Both are still in copyright. This book has used them only as guides to facts and dates, and it does not quote or follow their wording. It tells her life in its own words. Where the sources disagree, or where a well-known story rests only on a later retelling, this book says so.

Two subjects need particular care. The first is the system of temple dedication that Amy Carmichael spent her life opposing, by which some girls in South India were given in childhood to temples and brought up to a life that ended, for many of them, in sexual exploitation. That is the hardest part of her story. This book handles it honestly, without graphic detail, and with respect for the Hindu people among whom she lived, most of whom had nothing to do with it and many of whom opposed it. Indian reformers fought it too, and it was Indian legislators who finally outlawed it. The second is that Amy Carmichael was a woman of her time and her empire. She sometimes wrote about Hinduism in language that is painful to read, and she ran Dohnavur with an authority that some who worked with her found hard to bear. A Christian biography should neither hide that nor make it the whole story.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes, all Scripture is quoted from the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme. Amy Carmichael herself read the older Authorised Version, and where the words she remembered differ from the ASV, this book points it out.

The verse at the head of this preface is the end of a parable about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to look for one that has gone astray. Jesus said, “it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” Amy Carmichael built her life on that sentence. She was not a strategist of mass movements or a leader of crowds. Her work, as she saw it, was to go after one child, and then another, and then another, because each one mattered to God. This book is the story of how she did it, and of what it cost.