The Cost of One Soul

“Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for my sake, and for the gospel’s sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.”

— Mark 10:29-30, ASV

“With Persecutions”

The promise of Jesus at the head of this chapter is one of the most generous in the Gospels. Those who leave home and family for his sake will receive a hundredfold, in this life as well as the next: houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, lands. But tucked into the middle of the list are two words that are easy to read past: “with persecutions.” The hundredfold comes, but it comes with suffering attached.

In the villages of Tinnevelly at the end of the nineteenth century, those two words were not a footnote. For a Hindu of caste, especially a girl or a young woman, to become a Christian was to leave house and family in the most literal sense. It could also mean danger. Amy Carmichael spent the years from about 1897 to 1901 learning what that meant, not from books but from the people she came to love. Much of Things as They Are is about them.

Seeds and Opposition

By the late 1890s the work of the band was beginning to show some fruit. Here and there, in villages across the district, individuals were showing real interest in the gospel. They were few, and most of them were young: boys in their teens, girls even younger. They listened when the band came, asked questions, learned texts and hymns, and sometimes said openly that they believed.

The response of their families and communities was swift. Amy described it in a chapter she called “The Prey of the Terrible,” after a verse in Isaiah about captives being delivered from the mighty. A girl who listened in the shadow of a doorway was sent away to relatives and then, it was said, carried off over the mountains. A clever boy of seventeen who took the gospel’s part in an argument with village elders was suddenly married and sent away. Another girl, known to be an enquirer, was passed from village to village among her relatives until she was too frightened to show any interest at all. “It is often like that,” Amy wrote. “Just at the point where the soul-poise is so delicate that the lightest touch affects it, something, someone, pushes it roughly, and it trembles a moment, then falls—on the wrong side.”

It is important to read these stories fairly. The families who did these things were not monsters. From their point of view, a son or daughter who became a Christian was being lost to them, their caste and their gods, and was bringing disgrace on the whole family. To break caste was, in their eyes, one of the worst things a person could do, and the effects would fall not only on the convert but on brothers and sisters whose marriages might become impossible. Many of the families acted out of love and fear as much as out of hostility. Amy knew this. She wrote of a boy whose father, who “loved him dearly,” nerved himself to flog his son, and of a mother who sat with her hair undone and wailed the death-wail for a son who had gone to the Christians. She did not pretend that the cost fell only on the converts.

Children Who Could Not Be Kept

There was a further difficulty, and it was legal. Under the law of British India, a minor could not leave her parents or guardians to live with others, and a missionary who sheltered an under-age convert against her family’s wishes could be prosecuted. The law was there for good reason: it protected children from being taken from their families by anyone with a claim on them, and missionaries were not exempt. Amy accepted the principle. “It would never do,” she wrote, “if anyone could decoy away a mere child from her parents or natural guardians.”

But she found its working cruel. When a convert came, the police had to be told, and one of the first questions was age. If a girl could prove that she was over sixteen, and in some cases eighteen, she was free to choose. If she could not, she had to go back. In the villages there were often no birth registers, and the horoscope that recorded a child’s birth was kept by the family, who could refuse to produce it or produce a false one. “The whole burden of proof lies upon us,” Amy wrote, and she felt it as an injustice.

She told the story of one girl, whom she called Treasure, who was eager to be baptised and was ready to stand before a judge and say so. Amy had to tell her that unless her age could be proved, the missionaries had no power to protect her, and that it would be worse for her if she came and was then sent back. Amy remembered the tears in the girl’s eyes, and the question she asked: “Would God let them take me away? Would He not take care of me?” Treasure stayed at home, and suffered for her faith there. Amy did not soften the account of what she suffered, and she left the reader with the question.

The First to Come Out

Not all the stories ended in loss. In these years a small number of converts did come out of their homes and join the band, some of them girls who were old enough to choose, others who came with the consent, however reluctant, of their families. They became the core of Amy’s first household. In Things as They Are she gave them translated names: Victory, Jewel of Victory, Golden, Star, Pearl and others. They lived with her and the Walkers, learned, prayed, and went out with the band to tell others what had happened to them.

One of the most important of them was Arulai, a girl from a Hindu family who came to faith in these years and came to live with Amy. Arulai would grow into one of the most trusted leaders of the Dohnavur Fellowship, and Amy came to rely on her as on few others. Her story is a reminder that the work of these years was not only loss. Some of the seeds that seemed so fragile became trees.

The cost to the converts was nonetheless real. They had left their families, often without their blessing. They had lost their place in their communities. They lived as members of a small, embattled Christian household, dependent on the missionaries and on one another. Some of them had to endure years of hostility from their families, and some were never reconciled. In such circumstances it was not surprising that some fell away. Amy wrote that converts were “a responsible joy,” and she meant both words.

Two Boys

One story from these years shows both the joy and the cost more clearly than any other. Two boys from Hindu families had come to faith and joined the household. The younger was an only son, heir to considerable property. When he decided to follow Christ, his father flogged him twice, and when he finally left home his relatives came in a crowd to the bungalow and sat in a circle around him, pleading with him to return. They offered him a house, lands, his inheritance at once, and a bride with a rich dowry, and they promised him freedom to worship as he pleased if only he would come back and save his caste. “I will not go back,” he said.

A year or so later both boys were baptised together, with others, during a holiday by the sea. Amy called them Shining of Victory and Shining of Life. A few weeks later both died of cholera, one after the other, in the same order in which they had gone down into the water. The younger boy died in the presence of his parents and of Hindu neighbours who taunted him that this was his reward for breaking caste. Too weak to say much, he pointed upward and tried to sing a line from one of the band’s choruses. His mother wailed; his father stood silent, looking at his son.

Amy did not pretend to understand it. “Was it worth the pain it cost?” she asked. “Such a short time to witness, was it worth while?” Her answer was not an argument but a statement of faith. In their short time each boy had found one other boy, who might never have been found if the cost had been counted too great. And she believed that if the boys themselves could be asked, “they would tell you Jesus’ welcome made it far more than worth while.” It is the answer of the promise at the head of this chapter: a hundredfold, with persecutions, and in the world to come eternal life.

Publicity and Peril

One lesson of these years would shape the rest of Amy’s life as a writer and as the head of a mission. She learned that publicity could be dangerous. Supporters at home wanted stories of converts, with names and pictures, and missionary magazines printed them gladly. But in Tinnevelly, she found, a convert whose story was told could be traced, and a family that learned of a child’s interest in Christianity could act to stop it. “A certain connection has been observed between publicity and peril,” she wrote, and “we have learned by experience to fear any attempt to photograph spiritual fruit.”

That was why she changed names in her books, and why she sometimes left stories untold. It was also one of the roots of the reticence that would later mark Dohnavur, which made no appeals, published few details, and guarded its children from visitors and cameras. Critics sometimes saw that reticence as secrecy, or as a way of avoiding scrutiny. For Amy, it began as a way of protecting people whose lives might depend on it.

A Question for Readers

Modern readers may find these chapters of Things as They Are hard to read, and not only because of what they describe. Amy wrote as a partisan. She believed that Hinduism held its people in spiritual bondage, and she described Hindu families who opposed conversion as instruments of the devil. She did not often stop to ask how the same events looked from the other side, or to acknowledge that Christian families, too, have sometimes responded to a child’s change of faith with fury and cruelty. Some of the worst stories she reported came to her second-hand, and she could not verify them.

Yet she was not simply a polemicist. She recorded the courtesy, hospitality and intelligence of the Hindu people she met, and she often wrote of them with affection. She admitted the faults of Indian Christians and of missionaries. And she was right about something that is easy to forget in a more comfortable age: that for many people in many places, following Christ has meant losing everything else. Jesus did not hide that cost from his disciples. Amy Carmichael did not hide it from her readers. The next chapter tells how one small girl, who had nothing at all to lose, found her way to the Christian household at Pannaivilai, and changed the direction of Amy’s life.