The Thorn and the Needle

“Wherefore we faint not; but though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:16, ASV

A Body Worn Out

By the late 1920s Studd’s body was failing. He had suffered from asthma since his years in China. He had lived for more than a decade in the tropical forest without proper rest, on a poor diet, in a climate that wore down young and healthy Europeans within a few years. He had suffered repeated bouts of illness of the kind that were common among missionaries in central Africa. And he had developed the gallstones that would, in the end, cause his death. Gallstones can cause attacks of intense pain, and without surgery, which was not available to him at Ibambi, there was little that could be done but to endure the attacks and relieve the pain.

Studd had always pushed his body past what was sensible. Now he could do so only at great cost. He was in his late sixties, often in pain, and often too ill to move. Yet he would not stop working, and he would not go home.

Morphine

It was in these circumstances that he began to use morphine. According to the account given by Norman Grubb, a doctor who was passing through the region recommended it, and Studd, who wanted above all to keep on working, agreed to try it. In his last years he took it regularly.

The facts of this have never been hidden by his family. His biographer recorded them, and modern reference works mention them without fuss. It is the interpretation that has been disputed, both in his lifetime and since.

To his critics, at the time and later, it was a scandal. The founder of a mission that demanded heroic self-denial was taking a narcotic drug every day. Some called him a drug addict. The controversy was not helped by the fact that his supplies of the drug, according to some accounts, had to be brought into the colony by means that critics regarded as smuggling, and that may not always have been declared to the Belgian customs. In the atmosphere of the late 1920s, when the international campaign against the opium and morphine trades was at its height, and when Studd’s own mission was demanding total holiness of its members, his use of morphine was easy to portray as hypocrisy.

To his defenders, it was medicine. Morphine was the standard treatment for severe pain in the 1920s, as it remains in many circumstances today. A man in his late sixties with gallstones and chronic asthma, living hundreds of miles from a hospital, might very reasonably be given it by a doctor, and might very reasonably take it. That he took it in order to go on working, rather than in order to escape, was in their view a sign of his devotion, not a failure of it.

What Can Fairly Be Said

A biography written nearly a century later cannot settle whether Studd was, in the medical sense, dependent on morphine. Anyone who takes the drug regularly for a long period becomes physically dependent on it; that is how it works, and it is not a moral failure. Whether his use went beyond what his pain required, and whether it affected his judgement, his moods or his relations with others, cannot be known from the sources available here. It would be unjust to assume the worst, and dishonest to pretend there is nothing to discuss.

Some things can fairly be said. The first is that there is no sign that Studd tried to hide it. He was not a man who did things in secret, the people around him knew, and his family recorded it. The second is that he lived in genuine and often severe pain, and that the Bible nowhere forbids the use of medicine to relieve it. Paul told Timothy, who seems to have suffered from stomach trouble, to “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23, ASV). The principle is plain enough. Christians are not called to refuse the help of medicine. The third is that a drug such as morphine, taken over a long period by an old, sick and isolated man, may well have affected his temper and judgement, and that some of the harshness of his last years may have owed something to it, as well as to pain, exhaustion and grief. That is not certain, but it is possible, and it should make those who judge him a little more careful.

The fourth thing to be said is about the people who criticised him. Some of them were right to be concerned, and right to say so. A mission’s leader is accountable for his conduct, and a drug that affects the mind is not a private matter in a leader. But some of the criticism also seems to have been unkind, and to have been used as a weapon in quarrels that had other causes. Studd had made enemies by his severity. When he became weak, some of them were not gentle with him. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1, ASV). That instruction applies whether or not Studd’s morphine was a trespass at all.

It is also worth remembering that Studd was not the only person at Ibambi who suffered. His colleagues, many of them young, lived with malaria, dysentery and exhaustion, and some of them saw their own health ruined. The Congolese Christians among whom he lived had far less access to medicine than he did, and their pain, which was at least as great as his, was seldom relieved by anything at all. A balanced account of his last years must hold all of that together.

Above all, it is worth remembering that Studd’s last years were years of genuine suffering, borne far from home, without his wife, and with very few comforts. Whatever view one takes of the morphine, the pain was real. The psalmist prayed, “Have mercy upon me, O Jehovah; for I am withered away: O Jehovah, heal me; for my bones are troubled” (Psalm 6:2, ASV). It is a prayer that Studd, in his last years, had every reason to pray, and those who judge him should remember that it is a prayer most of us will one day pray as well.

Morphine in the 1920s

To understand the controversy, it helps to know how morphine was regarded in Studd’s last years. Morphine had been isolated from opium early in the nineteenth century, and with the invention of the hypodermic syringe it had become the most powerful painkiller available to medicine. It was widely prescribed, and widely abused. By the early twentieth century governments had become alarmed at the spread of addiction, and a series of international agreements, beginning with the Hague Opium Convention of 1912 and continuing with the Geneva conventions of the 1920s, sought to control the trade in opium, morphine and cocaine. In Britain the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 brought morphine under strict legal control.

By the late 1920s, therefore, morphine was both an ordinary medicine and a dangerous drug, surrounded by laws, suspicion and moral alarm. Doctors prescribed it freely for severe pain, but anyone who used it regularly outside a hospital was likely to be suspected of addiction. A missionary who carried his own supply into a colony, and used it daily in the forest, was bound to attract attention.

None of this settles the question of Studd’s own use. It does show why the matter became so explosive, and why, in the climate of the time, both his critics and his defenders felt so strongly about it.

A Strange Irony

There is an irony in this part of the story that is hard to miss. The Studd family’s fortune had come from India, the same country that grew the opium the British exported to China. As a young man Studd had worked in a Chinese province where opium ruined many families, and where Chinese Christians ran refuges for addicts. Now, at the end of his life, he was himself taking morphine, a drug made from the same plant, every day.

It would be cheap to make too much of that irony, and cruel to make it a judgement. But it is a reminder that no human life is as tidy as a sermon, and that the great missionaries of the past were bound up, in ways they did not always see, with the world of empire, trade and medicine around them. Studd was a man of his time in his drugs as in much else.

The Inward Man

Paul knew what it was to be ill. He spoke of “a thorn in the flesh” that God would not take away, though he prayed three times, and of God’s reply: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, ASV). He spoke of the outward man decaying, and the inward man being renewed day by day.

In Studd’s last years, the outward man was decaying fast. Whether the inward man was being renewed is a question about which those who knew him disagreed. His family and closest colleagues believed that it was; that the old man in pain at Ibambi, writing, praying and translating late into the night, was more surrendered to God than ever. His critics saw a man whose virtues had turned hard and whose weaknesses had become a scandal. Perhaps both were partly right. The gospel does not promise that God’s servants will grow more attractive as they grow older and sicker. It promises that his grace will be sufficient. It was sufficient for Studd in the sense that matters most: he did not give up, and he did not stop trusting. Whether it made him gentle is a different question, and the next chapter will not make it easier.