Scilla

“Salute Prisca and Aquila my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life laid down their own necks; unto whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles”

— Romans 16:3-4, ASV

An Irish Girl

Priscilla Livingstone Stewart was born on 28 August 1864, in or near Belfast. Most accounts give her birthplace as Lisburn, a linen town a few miles to the south-west of the city; some give Belfast itself. Those who knew her as a young woman described her as warm, quick and full of fun, with an Ulster directness that never left her. Her family and friends called her Scilla. Her middle name, Livingstone, was a reminder of the most famous missionary of the age, though there is no evidence of any family connection with him.

She became a committed Christian as a young woman, and offered herself to the China Inland Mission. The Mission had appealed for a hundred new workers to be sent out during 1887, and “the Hundred,” as they were called, were a mixed company, many of them young women, many of them without any of the advantages of the Cambridge Seven. Priscilla Stewart was one of them. She reached Shanghai in 1887 and, after a time there, was sent inland with three other young women to work at a town called Ta-ku-tang, on the great Poyang Lake in Jiangxi.

The Hundred

The appeal that brought Priscilla Stewart to China was one of the boldest in the history of missions. In 1886 Hudson Taylor and his colleagues in China, meeting to pray about the needs of the provinces, asked God for a hundred new workers to be sent out in the course of 1887. The Mission then had fewer than two hundred missionaries in the whole of China. Taylor published the appeal and, true to his principles, did not ask for money to send them. By the end of 1887 a hundred and two new missionaries had sailed.

A great many of the Hundred were women, and many of them, like Priscilla, were sent to live and work in inland cities. That itself was controversial. Most missionary societies of the time thought it improper and dangerous for unmarried women to live in the interior of China without the protection of a missionary husband or father. Hudson Taylor disagreed. He believed that Chinese women could be reached only by women, and he trusted the women he sent. Some of the most effective missionaries in the Mission’s history were single women living in Chinese towns, far from any European.

Priscilla Stewart came out of that tradition. She was not a missionary’s wife who happened to have a calling of her own. She was a missionary who happened, after a year in China, to become a wife. That order of things is important to understanding her, and her later role in the mission she and her husband built.

Courtship

How and where she and Charlie Studd first met is not recorded in any source available to this book, and the story of their courtship has been decorated by later retellings. What seems clear is that he fell deeply in love with her, and that he pursued her in his usual way, with complete conviction. Each of them later insisted, with some humour, that the other had done the proposing. He always said that she had proposed to him. She did not agree.

By early 1888 they were engaged. Then she became seriously ill, with pneumonia according to the modern accounts, and he went to her, though he was himself recovering from an illness of the lungs. The Chinese Christians around them, it is said, took a practical view of the matter. A young man had come a long way to see a young woman who was very ill, and in their eyes, that settled it. They ought to be married at once.

They were married in the spring of 1888, most accounts say at Tianjin, in the north. The ceremony was performed by a Chinese pastor. Some accounts name him as Xi Shengmo, the former opium addict who led the churches of southern Shanxi; that cannot be confirmed from the sources available here, and it should be treated with caution. The date usually given is 7 April 1888. Bride and groom are said to have worn their ordinary Chinese clothes.

It is worth pausing on that detail, because it is unusual. In the 1880s an Englishman of Studd’s class who married in China would normally have done so before a consul or an English chaplain, in English clothes and with an English ceremony. The Studds, so far as the accounts allow us to see, did it the other way round. Their wedding belonged to the Chinese church, and a Chinese minister pronounced them man and wife. It was a small sign, but a true one, that they understood themselves to be members of the church they had come to serve.

Three Thousand Four Hundred Pounds

Before the wedding, Studd gave his bride the money he had kept back from his inheritance, about three thousand four hundred pounds. It was meant to give her some security. She did not keep it. According to the accounts, she decided that she wanted to begin married life as he had done, with nothing but God to depend on, and she gave the whole sum to the Salvation Army.

The story is usually told with dialogue invented by later writers, and this book does not repeat it. The facts are simple and remarkable enough. Two young people in their twenties, with every reason to want some security for a family they hoped to have, chose to have none. Their marriage would test that choice many times over, in illness, in the births of children far from any hospital, in the deaths of two sons, and in years of separation. Neither of them ever seems to have said that they regretted it.

The choice of the Salvation Army as the recipient of that last gift is worth a moment’s thought. In 1888 the Army was barely ten years old under that name. It was noisy, unconventional and widely despised by respectable church people, and it was one of the very few Christian bodies of the time in which women preached, led congregations and held command on equal terms with men. Catherine Booth, the wife of its founder, was one of the best-known preachers in England. Whether that weighed with Priscilla Stewart is not recorded. But a young woman who had come to China to preach the gospel herself, and who would later lead a mission in all but name, chose to give her marriage portion to a movement that let women do exactly that.

The gift also showed something about the two of them as a couple. Studd had kept the money for her, as a husband of his class was expected to do. She refused to let him. From the very beginning of their marriage she was not content to be protected. She wanted to share his risks, and she did, for forty years.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes wrote, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, and hath not another to lift him up” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, ASV). In their years together in China and India, Charles and Priscilla Studd lifted each other up more than once. They were both ill, often at the same time, and both lost children. Each depended on the other’s faith when their own ran low. It is worth keeping those years in mind when reading the later story, in which they were so often apart. The partnership that sustained the mission in Africa had been forged in a Chinese city, in illness and grief, long before anyone outside the family knew or cared what became of them.

Fellow-Workers

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s greeting to another Priscilla, called Prisca for short, and her husband Aquila. They were tentmakers, Jewish Christians who had been driven out of Rome, and Paul lived and worked with them in Corinth. They travelled with him to Ephesus. In Rome they opened their house to the church. Paul calls them his “fellow-workers,” and in the New Testament Priscilla’s name is usually put first, which suggests that she was the better known of the two, or the more gifted teacher (Acts 18:26). They had risked their necks for him.

The marriage of Charles and Priscilla Studd was in many ways a partnership of that kind. She was not simply his wife; she was a missionary in her own right, with her own call, her own gifts and her own strong opinions. In China she worked among women whom he could not reach. In England, years later, she would become the organiser, speaker and fund-raiser on whom his whole African mission depended, travelling and speaking in spite of a heart condition that left her at times an invalid.

It would also be a marriage of long separations, and those separations would cost both of them deeply. For the last fifteen years of his life they were together only once, for a visit of a few days. That story belongs to a later chapter. In 1888, newly married and with nothing in the bank, they went inland together to make a home in a Chinese city that did not want them.