Preface

“Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ”

— Philippians 3:8, 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, a young widow who carried her daughter into the Ecuadorian forest to live among the men who had killed her husband, an Irish missionary who made a home at Dohnavur, in South India, for children rescued from temple service, and a Scottish mill boy who crossed Africa and spent his last years exposing the East African slave trade. This eleventh volume tells the story of a man who began with almost every advantage his country could give, and spent the rest of his life giving the advantages away.

Charles Thomas Studd was born in 1860 into a family made rich by indigo grown in India. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge. Before he was twenty-two he was playing cricket for England, in the match at the Oval in August 1882 that gave the world “the Ashes.” Three years later he sailed for China as one of seven young men from Cambridge whose departure made headlines across Britain. Within two more years he had given away almost the whole of his inheritance. He worked in China for about nine years, served as a pastor in the hills of southern India for six, and then, past fifty, ill, and against the advice of doctors, went to the north-east of what was then the Belgian Congo. He spent most of his last eighteen years there, and he died there in July 1931. The mission he founded for that one corner of Africa grew into WEC International, which still sends workers around the world, and the churches that grew from it in Congo are still there.

Why Courage?

Studd’s courage is not hard to find. It took courage to stand on platforms in 1885 and tell rooms full of undergraduates that he was leaving the cricket field for inland China. It took a different kind of courage to write cheques for thousands of pounds before he even knew how much he was going to inherit. It took courage, of a kind that many of his friends thought simply foolish, to set out for the centre of Africa at fifty-two with asthma, a history of broken health, and a wife who at first did not want him to go.

But this book will suggest that his life also asks a harder question about courage. Studd believed with his whole heart that if Christ had died for him, nothing he could give back would be too much. He lived by that conviction more completely than almost anyone of his generation. He also expected others to live by it at his pace and in his manner, and when they did not, he could be harsh, suspicious and unjust. The same fierceness that carried the gospel into the Ituri forest drove away colleagues, wounded his own family, and brought the mission he had founded close to breaking in the year he died. Courage of his kind is not always the same thing as love, and the New Testament says so plainly. “If I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3, ASV). Studd gave his goods and gave his body. The question his life puts to its readers is what it means to do that with love, and what it costs when love grows thin.

How This Book Is Written

Like the earlier volumes, this book tries to be honest about its sources, and the reader deserves to know what they are.

The standard life of Studd is C. T. Studd: Cricketer and Pioneer by his son-in-law Norman Grubb, first published in 1933. It is a vivid book, and it is the source of many of the stories that are told about him. It is also still in copyright, and so this book has not quoted it, or followed its wording, at any point. Where a fact comes chiefly from Grubb and from nowhere else, this book says so.

Some older material is in the public domain and has been used. It includes the record of the Cambridge Seven that Benjamin Broomhall of the China Inland Mission published in 1886 and enlarged as The Evangelisation of the World in 1887; the published scores and records of Studd’s cricket; and Studd’s own tracts and rhymes published in his lifetime, such as The Chocolate Soldier, Quaint Rhymes for the Battlefield (1914) and Christ’s Etceteras (1915). Studd is quoted sparingly, partly because his voice was so emphatic that a little of it goes a long way, and partly because some of the sayings most often attributed to him cannot be traced to anything he published. The introduction explains which ones.

The book has also drawn on modern reference works and studies, including the entries on Studd and his colleagues in the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the diary of an American who worked beside him in Congo in 1914, and the histories published by WEC International and by the Congolese church that grew from his mission. Those works are used for facts and judgements, not quoted at length.

Three things need particular care. The first is that Studd’s story is told almost entirely by people who loved him or worked with him, and the African side of it has been recorded far less. This book tries to keep Congolese men and women in view as people who chose, argued, preached, carried, built and suffered, and not as scenery for a European hero. Where their names have not survived in the sources available, it does not invent them. The second is that Studd went to Congo only five years after the end of the Congo Free State, whose regime of forced labour had killed and maimed on a terrible scale, and he worked under Belgian colonial rule. The story cannot be told as if that did not matter. The third is that Studd’s last years included illness, morphine, broken friendships, a strained marriage, and a damaging quarrel with the people who ran his mission at home. Those things are told here as plainly and as fairly as the evidence allows, without either hiding them or making them the whole story.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes, all Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme, and further passages are woven through the story. Where Studd himself quoted the Bible, he used the King James Version, and his words are given as he wrote them.

The verse at the head of this preface is the one that best explains him. Paul had been, by the standards of his world, a man with every advantage, and he wrote that he counted all of it “but refuse, that I may gain Christ.” Studd read those words as a plain instruction and carried them out more literally than most Christians ever try to. He would not have wanted his life told as a success story, and it was not one, in any simple sense. It was a life spent, sometimes wisely and sometimes not, by a man who had decided early that Christ was worth everything. This book is an attempt to tell that life truthfully, so that readers can see both what it was worth and what it cost.