Things as They Are

“but we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by the manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:2, ASV

A Battle-Book

Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India was published in London by Morgan and Scott in April 1903. It was not a long book by the standards of the day, but it was an unusual one. It was made up of letters and sketches that Amy Carmichael had written home over about two years, gathered and arranged by the two friends who had visited her, and illustrated with their photographs. Each chapter was headed by quotations from missionaries of earlier generations, which Amy said were “meant to be read, not skipped,” and were “more worthful than anything else in it.”

She was clear about what kind of book it was. “The book is a battle-book,” she wrote in her introduction, “written from a battle-field where the fighting is not pretty play but stern reality.” She advised readers to take its harder chapters “alone in some quiet place with God.” And she explained its title. Her friends had urged her to “tell about things as they actually are,” and she had tried. But she felt that she had failed, because the reality she wanted to show was spiritual and invisible, and what she could describe was only its outward effects. She called those effects, borrowing a poet’s phrase, “the Dust of the Actual.” The book, she said, “only touches the Dust.”

What the Book Said

Most of Things as They Are is about the ordinary work of the band: the journeys by bullock cart, the visits to homes, the questions of the village women, the long afternoons in which nothing happened. It is often funny and always vivid. But underneath the anecdotes it makes an argument that was unwelcome to many readers at home. The argument was that the evangelisation of caste Hindus in South India was very hard and very slow; that most people who heard the gospel did not want it; that those who did often paid for it with the loss of everything; and that missionary reports which suggested otherwise were misleading.

She said this directly. “Do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing great things, as an everyday matter of course,” she wrote. “Do not expect every true story to dovetail into some other true story and end with some marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion.” She mocked, gently, the article which claimed that Indian women thought the lady missionary more divine than anything they had imagined, and another which said that Indian women never smiled. “We were surprised to hear it,” she wrote. “We had not noticed it.” She was as impatient with the sentimental picture of the longing heathen as with the triumphalist picture of the converted nation.

And in the later chapters she wrote about things that most missionary books left out: the persecution of converts, the deaths of some of them, and the dedication of girls to temples. She wrote about these things carefully, without lurid detail, and she said repeatedly that she was leaving most of it out. But she did not leave out the fact of them.

Too Dark?

A story is often told that the manuscript was first sent to a missionary society or a publisher, who returned it with the advice that it was too dark and should be toned down, and that Amy refused to change anything but the title. The story is widely repeated, and it fits the book’s own account of itself, but its details are hard to verify. What is certain is that Amy knew the book would be thought too harrowing, because she said so in the book. In the chapter called “Married to the God,” about a little girl taken to a temple, she wrote:

“We are told to modify things, not to write too vividly, never to harrow sensitive hearts. Friends, we cannot modify truth, we cannot write half vividly enough; and as for harrowing hearts, oh that we could do it!”

That passage is the heart of the book. She was not writing to shock for its own sake. She was writing because she believed that Christians at home would not pray as they ought unless they knew what they were praying about. “Oh, to care,” she wrote, “and oh for power to make others care, not less but far, far more!”

Eugene Stock’s Preface

The book carried a preface by Eugene Stock, the editorial secretary of the Church Missionary Society and its historian, one of the most respected figures in the missionary world. His endorsement mattered, and he gave it without reserve. “I do not think the realities of Hindu life have ever been portrayed with greater vividness than in this book,” he wrote, “and I know that the authoress’s accuracy can be fully relied upon.” He added a sentence that has often been quoted since: “What she says is the truth, and nothing but the truth; but it is not the whole truth—that she could not tell. If she wrote it, it could not be printed. If it were printed, it could not be read.”

Stock also made a point that is easily forgotten. He said that the picture was drawn “without prejudice, with all sympathy, with full recognition of what is good.” And he admitted that missionaries had themselves to blame for some of the false impressions at home, because reports naturally dwelt on encouraging cases. “It is not a book to be read with a lazy kind of sentimental ‘interest,’” he wrote. “It is a book to send the reader to his knees—still more to her knees.”

Doubt and Confirmation

The book sold well. It was reprinted in August 1903, and again in the following years. But it also provoked doubt. Some readers in England could not believe that things were as bad as she said. Some called the book pessimistic. Others objected not to its facts but to its argument: that it was wrong to draw children away from their parents, or to break up families in the name of religion.

Amy took the objections seriously. In a chapter called “Three Objections” she set them out fairly. Readers had asked by what right missionaries pressed their religion on people who did not want it, and whether a convert should not stay at home and live quietly as a Christian there, rather than divide her family by leaving. One correspondent had written that girls who left their parents “richly deserve all they suffer.” Amy did not dismiss these questions. “We frankly admit that these objections and proposals are naturally reasonable,” she wrote, “and that what they state is perfectly true.” She agreed that the right thing was for a convert to live among her own people, and she called the breaking of family ties “a very cruel thing.” Her answer was that in caste society, as she had seen it, a convert was often not allowed to live at home as a Christian, and that she could not tell such a one to give up Christ.

When the fourth edition was being prepared, a number of experienced missionaries from other parts of South India sent notes confirming the book’s accuracy, and they were printed at the front of later editions. A Baptist missionary among the Telugus wrote that there was not a line in it “that cannot be duplicated in this Telugu Mission.” Others agreed. One of the notes came from an Indian woman whose voice carried more weight than any missionary’s. Pandita Ramabai, the Marathi scholar and reformer who had founded a home for widows and famine girls at Mukti, and whose life is told in the sixth volume of this series, wrote: “While I was reading Things as They Are, I fancied I was living my old life among Hindus over again. I can honestly corroborate everything said in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus.”

A Hindu Reader’s View

A fair account of the book must also ask how it would have read to a Hindu. Amy Carmichael wrote as an evangelical missionary, convinced that the religion around her was the work of spiritual darkness. She called one chapter “Deified Devilry.” She described images of the gods as hideous, and temple festivals as revelry. She spoke of Hindu ascetics and priests in harsh terms. She sometimes generalised from the worst things she had seen or heard to the religion as a whole, as when she wrote that the practices she described were “Hinduism—not in theory of course, but in practice.”

A devout Hindu reading those pages would have had every reason to object. Hinduism is not one thing but many, and most Hindus in Tinnevelly, as everywhere, had nothing to do with the abuses she described and would have condemned them. Hindu reformers of her own generation were campaigning against child marriage, the mistreatment of widows, and the very temple practices that she attacked, and they did so in the name of a purer Hinduism. Missionary writing that blamed the religion itself for every evil made their work harder, and fed a resentment of Christianity that has not disappeared.

It is only fair to add that Amy was capable of seeing beyond her own polemic. She wrote with real admiration of the intelligence, courtesy and humour of many of the Hindus she met. She recorded their objections honestly, and sometimes conceded their force. She described the grief of Hindu parents with compassion. And her purpose was not to win an argument but to rouse prayer. But the reader today is right to notice the hard edges of the book, and to read them as part of the history, not as the last word on the people she lived among.

The Manifestation of the Truth

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Paul’s defence of his own ministry. He had renounced craftiness, he said, and would not handle the word of God deceitfully; instead, “by the manifestation of the truth” he commended himself to every person’s conscience before God. It was a claim to honesty, in a world where religious teachers were often suspected of trickery.

Things as They Are was Amy Carmichael’s attempt to live by that verse. She would not commend the missionary cause by pleasant fictions. She would tell the truth, as far as she could see it and as far as it could be printed, and leave the result to God. She did not see everything, and she sometimes saw through the lens of her own convictions. But the book’s honesty about the work itself, its slowness, its failures and its cost, was rare in its time, and it remains bracing today. Three years later, wanting to show the other side of the picture that the first book had not had room for, she published a sequel called Overweights of Joy. The title said that the joys outweighed the sorrows. She never said the sorrows were unreal.