The Chocolate Soldier

“Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life; that he may please him who enrolled him as a soldier.” — 2 Timothy 2:3-4 (ASV)

Studd came home early in 1915 to a country at war. Hundreds of thousands of young men had volunteered, cheered through the streets, and men who didn’t go were often treated with contempt. Scilla recovered. Studd threw himself into meetings, calling Christians to give themselves to reaching the world as completely as soldiers were giving themselves to the war.

His best-known writing came out of these years: a short, angry tract called The Chocolate Soldier. A chocolate soldier was a toy that melts as soon as it gets hot, and Studd used it for Christians who look like soldiers of Christ but melt at the first touch of hardship. The tract declares that heroism is the lost chord of Christianity. It compares the church, unfavourably, with airmen, polar explorers and the volunteers of the war, and argues that if Christians had their pluck, everyone on earth could hear of Jesus within ten years. It ends by asking each reader whether he will be a shirker or a fighter for Christ.

There’s real power in that. Christians who admire a soldier’s courage often expect to follow Jesus without any courage at all. Paul used the same picture: “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier.”

There’s also something troubling, and readers a century later feel it more. Millions of young men died in that war, some shamed into volunteering. The tract praises their courage with no hint of the horror, and borrows the recruiting sergeant’s contempt for shirkers to recruit for Christ. Many of the Christians it scolds had families to feed and debts to pay, and no fortune behind them, not even one given away. The tract has no word for them.

Studd had another voice. In 1915 he wrote Christ’s Etceteras, a pamphlet that became the seed of his mission’s rules. In it he described his band as the humblest of helpers, Christ’s etceteras, going to places no one else reached, not to compete but to fill the gaps. It’s one of the gentlest things he wrote. When he thought about his own mission, he could be modest. When he thought about the church at large, he could only shout. Later the shout grew louder, and it landed on his own colleagues.

The meetings found recruits, some of them working men and women the older missions would never have taken. They were brave, many were very able, and some served for decades. Others found the life he demanded more than they could bear. Studd called people to heroism and offered them hardship. The people who answered were not the kind to be easily told what to do, and Studd expected to be obeyed. It was an explosive mix.

In 1916 he sailed again for the Congo with his daughter Edith and a party of recruits. Scilla stayed to run the mission at home. Studd was fifty-five. So far as the record shows, he never saw England again. He and Scilla would meet only once more, for a few days.

Back in the Congo he lived in a house built in the local way, ate local food, and worked far into the night, rarely taking a day off. His colleagues found it exhausting, and some found it frightening. He had little patience with illness or rest in others, though he was constantly ill himself. Edith married Alfred Buxton in the Congo in 1917. In 1920 his youngest, Pauline, came out with her husband Norman Grubb. Their baby son Noel died on his first birthday and was buried at Nala.

A good soldier of Christ serves a Saviour who “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” The chocolate soldiers in the tract were real. So were the ordinary, scared, slow Christians Jesus also loves.

One thing to do this week: think of someone you’ve quietly judged as weak or lazy. Ask them one honest question about what their life is like right now, and listen to the answer without fixing it.