Students and Soldiers

“preach the word; be urgent in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.”

— 2 Timothy 4:2, ASV

Home, 1894

The Studds came home to England in 1894 with four small daughters, the youngest a baby, and no money of their own. Their health was poor and their future uncertain. Charlie was thirty-three. He had been a famous cricketer at twenty-one and a famous missionary at twenty-four, and now he was a semi-invalid with asthma, a family to support, and no obvious work to do.

The years that followed are among the least known of his life, and they deserve more attention than they usually receive, because they show what he was like when there was no great adventure to carry him. He did not sink into self-pity, so far as the record shows, and he did not try to recover the fortune he had given away. The family lived simply, and, it seems, with help from relatives and friends. Studd spoke at meetings when his health allowed, and he went on believing, as he always would, that God would provide for those who trusted him. By the standards of most people of his class, the family was poor. By the standards of the poor, they were still very fortunate, and they knew it.

America, 1896–97

In 1896 Studd crossed the Atlantic. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which had grown in part from the stir his brother Kynaston had caused in American colleges ten years earlier, invited him to speak in the universities of the United States. He spent about eighteen months, through 1896 and 1897, travelling from campus to campus.

It was a remarkable opportunity for a man with his story. American students in the 1890s were fascinated by British sport and British gentlemen, and here was both, in the person of a former England cricketer who had given away a fortune for Christ. Studd did not talk about cricket for long. He talked, as he had always done, about the claims of Christ on the whole of a person’s life, and about the millions in the world who had never heard the gospel. The reports of these meetings are brief, and his own letters from the tour have not been published in a form available to this book. But the length of the tour shows that he was in demand, and it would be surprising if none of those who heard him later went overseas.

The tour also shows something about the kind of preacher he was becoming. He was not a polished speaker, and he had no gift for argument. His power lay in his directness, his evident sincerity, and the fact that he had already done what he was asking others to do. Students who heard him knew that he was not recommending sacrifice from a comfortable distance. He also had a habit, which would grow stronger with the years, of putting things in the most extreme and startling way he could, in order to shake his hearers out of complacency. To young people in the 1890s, that was part of his attraction.

A Movement of Students

The movement that invited Studd to America had grown up fast. In the summer of 1886, at a conference for college students convened by Moody at Mount Hermon in Massachusetts, a hundred young men signed a declaration that they were willing and desirous, God permitting, to become foreign missionaries. Out of that pledge grew the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, organised formally in 1888, with John R. Mott as its chairman. Its watchword was “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and over the following decades it sent many thousands of American and Canadian students overseas.

The story of the Cambridge Seven had been part of the background of that movement from the start, through Broomhall’s book and through Kynaston Studd’s tour of American colleges in 1885 and 1886. When C. T. Studd himself arrived ten years later, he came as a living link with the story that had helped to begin it all. For many of the students who heard him, he was the Cambridge Seven in person.

The movement was not without its critics, then or later. Some thought its watchword unrealistic, and some thought it too closely bound up with the confidence of a rising American power. But it is impossible to tell the history of Protestant missions in the twentieth century without it. Studd’s eighteen months on American campuses were a small part of that history, and one of the least known parts of his life.

India

In 1900, when his doctor agreed that he might try the climate of India, Studd took his family to Ootacamund, in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. Ootacamund, usually called Ooty, was a hill station: a town built by the British in the cool highlands where officials, soldiers and their families went to escape the heat of the plains. It had English-style houses, a lake, a club, and a racecourse. It was about as far from inland China as a missionary could get without leaving Asia.

Studd became pastor of the Union Church at Ootacamund, an interdenominational congregation of English-speaking residents, under the auspices of a body called the Anglo-Indian Evangelization Society. Most accounts date his ministry there from 1900 to 1906; one says seven years. His congregation was made up mostly of British civil servants, planters, soldiers and their families, along with people of mixed British and Indian descent, who were then called Anglo-Indians or Eurasians.

It was a strange post for him in many ways. India was the land from which his father’s fortune had come, and he felt, the accounts say, a sense that his family owed something to it. But his work there was not among the Indian people. It was among the British who ruled them, and their dependants. He preached the same gospel he had preached to Cambridge undergraduates and American students. The accounts that survive say that a good many people in the town were converted during his ministry, among them officials and soldiers. They say little about the Indian population of the Nilgiris, and it is not clear how much contact he had with them.

The six years in India were, by the standards of Studd’s life, settled and even comfortable. The family was together. The girls were growing up. He was preaching every week to a congregation that wanted to hear him. The mountain air, which was the reason for coming, seems to have given his health a respite. Many men would have been content to stay. He was not.

Restless

Studd had come to believe that the greatest need of the world was not for more preaching to people who had already heard the gospel, but for the gospel to be carried to those who had never heard it at all. He found that conviction in Paul: “making it my aim so to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, that I might not build upon another man’s foundation” (Romans 15:20, ASV). Ootacamund had churches and chaplains already. He began to feel that he was in the wrong place.

In 1906, again in poor health, he brought his family home to England. He was forty-five. For the next few years he spoke at meetings around the country, often on the claims of world evangelisation, and he waited for direction. He did not yet know where he was meant to go. He was quite sure that he was not meant to stay.

These years also need to be remembered for what they gave to the Studd family. For much of the time between 1894 and 1906 the six of them were together, as they never would be again. The girls grew up with their father at home, in England, America and India, and with both parents sharing their daily life. When Studd left for Africa, his daughters were young women, not children. That does not undo the cost of the later separations. But it means that the family he left behind had known him well, and that the bond between them, which survived so much in later years, had been formed in these quieter years when there was no great venture to carry him away.

Something should also be said about how these years looked from the inside. Studd was a man who thrived on crisis and adventure, and the years after China gave him little of either. He was ill, poor and without a clear task. He had been famous, and his fame was fading. Many men in his position have grown bitter, or tried to recapture the excitement of their youth in unwise ways. There is no sign that Studd did either. He accepted the work that came to him, in American colleges and in a hill-station church, and did it faithfully. Those twelve years are a quiet witness that his faith did not depend on drama.

In Season, Out of Season

Paul’s charge to Timothy at the head of this chapter is often quoted to young preachers, and Studd would have taken it as a description of his whole life. “Preach the word; be urgent in season, out of season.” There were seasons in Studd’s life when the preaching was easy and the crowds were large, as in 1885. There were others, in Lungan and in the years of illness after China, when it was very hard, and the results small.

The same verse ends with a warning that is easy to overlook: “reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.” Studd was always good at reproving and exhorting. Longsuffering did not come so easily. As he grew older, and as his sense of the urgency of the world’s need deepened, he became more and more impatient with Christians who did not share it. In Ootacamund that impatience seems to have been held in check by the needs of a settled congregation and the presence of his family. In Africa, in the years to come, it would not always be.