The Squire Who Sold His Horses

“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house.” — Acts 16:31 (ASV)

Charles Thomas Studd was born on 2 December 1860 at Spratton, a village near Northampton in England, the third son of Edward and Dora Studd. His family and friends called him Charlie. The world came to know him by his initials: C. T.

The Studds were rich, and it’s worth asking where the money came from. His father had made a fortune as an indigo planter in Bihar, in north-eastern India. Indigo was the blue dye that coloured half the world’s uniforms and work clothes. The work in the fields and the vats was done by Indian peasants, often on terms that kept them in debt and gave them little say over what they planted. In the year Charlie was born, the cultivators of the indigo districts of Bengal rose up against the planters. Charlie grew up on money other people had sweated for. He would spend his adult life giving it away.

In 1871 his father leased Tedworth House, a big country house on the edge of Salisbury Plain, and laid out a racecourse and, for his boys, a cricket ground. He raced horses, and in 1866 his horse Salamander won the Grand National. The family went to church the way people of their class did. Nobody expected it to change anything.

All the Studd boys went to Eton, and Charlie, like his older brothers Kynaston and George, made the cricket eleven. Eton had a religion of the games field that critics nicknamed muscular Christianity: play hard, never complain of pain, never let your side down, never look soft. There was good in it, like courage and loyalty. But it despised weakness and made fear hard to admit. Charlie soaked it up, and some of it never left him.

Then his father changed. Probably in 1875, a friend persuaded Edward Studd to hear D. L. Moody, an American shoe salesman turned evangelist who was drawing huge crowds in London. He went expecting little and came away a new man. He gave up racing, kept a horse for each of his elder sons and sold the rest. He filled the great hall at Tedworth with benches and invited preachers to hold meetings for the neighbourhood. His sons, home from Eton, were embarrassed. When their father asked them in the holidays whether they were saved, they did their best never to be alone with him.

Edward Studd died in July 1877, a Christian for only two or three years. He never saw what came of his prayers.

The next summer a Christian friend of their father’s was staying at Tedworth. The accounts don’t agree on his name, so we won’t guess it. He caught Charlie alone and asked whether he was a Christian. Charlie said he believed in Jesus as much as anyone. The visitor pressed him: did he believe that Christ had died for him, and that God promises eternal life to whoever believes? Then he had it, and he should thank God for it. Charlie saw, as he told it later, that doubting the promise would mean calling God a liar. He knelt and thanked God, and joy and peace came. By family tradition Kynaston and George made the same decision that same day, each without telling the others. Not every account agrees, but by the end of 1878 all three counted themselves Christians.

Paul and Silas told a frightened jailer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house.” That isn’t a promise that faith passes automatically from parent to child. The jailer’s family heard and believed for themselves. But God loves to work through families. A father’s prayers opened a door, and his sons walked through it a year after his funeral.

Maybe you’re the embarrassed one, dodging a parent who talks about God too much. Maybe you’re the only one in your house who prays. Either way, prayers don’t stop counting when the person who prayed them is gone.

One thing to do this week: ask an older Christian in your family or church how they came to faith, and who prayed for them. Then pray by name for one person in your own family.