Hampden DuBose

“Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.”

— Hebrews 12:11, KJV

A School in Florida

In 1941, when she was fourteen, Elisabeth Howard left home for a boarding school in Florida. The school was the Hampden DuBose Academy, a small Christian boarding school then in Orlando, which later moved a few miles north-west to Zellwood. It had been founded in 1934 by Dr Pierre W. DuBose and his wife, and it took its name from his father, Hampden Coit DuBose, a Southern Presbyterian who had spent most of his working life as a missionary in the city of Soochow in China.

The academy was a school with a missionary purpose. Many of its pupils were the children of missionaries serving overseas, and others came from Christian families who wanted an education in which faith was not an extra but the foundation. The school was small enough for everyone to know everyone else. Its days were structured from rising to lights-out: chapel, lessons, study hall, meals, work, recreation and evening vespers, each in its place. For a girl from the Howard household this was not entirely strange. But the school also had a character of its own, and it was stamped by the personality of the woman who ran it.

Mrs DuBose

Mrs DuBose was the headmistress, and by every account she was formidable. She was a Southern lady of the old school, with exacting standards of dress, deportment, speech and manners, and decided views about what a Christian young woman ought to be. She believed that good manners were a form of consideration for others, and that awkwardness and self-absorption were faults to be corrected rather than temperaments to be indulged. She did not hesitate to tell her pupils so.

Elisabeth arrived at the school tall, gawky, and so shy that she could barely speak to people she did not know. Mrs DuBose singled her out. Elisabeth, who later described herself as a tall and very shy girl of fourteen on arrival, remembered being told plainly that shyness was not a virtue to be indulged, and that she must learn to engage with other people. The girl was frightened of her headmistress. But she took the warning seriously, and she set herself to change.

It was not a gentle education, and some of what the school prized, the ladylike graces of the American South, the careful attention to appearances, may seem to a later age to have been of doubtful importance. But Elisabeth came to believe that Mrs DuBose had done her a great service. She had been made to understand that shyness, however painful, is a form of preoccupation with oneself, and that a Christian has a duty to look outward, to put others at their ease, and to do the uncomfortable thing that love requires. She learned to stand straight, to look people in the eye, to make conversation with strangers, to speak in public, and to carry herself with a composure that later observers often mistook for natural self-possession. It was not natural. It had been learned, at some cost, at Hampden DuBose.

She also learned something of the discipline of the inner life. The school expected its pupils to read the Bible and pray daily on their own, not merely to sit through chapel, and it expected them to think of their lives as belonging to God. Elisabeth seems to have taken all of this with the earnestness that marked her whole adolescence. She kept notebooks. She marked her Bible. She began to think seriously about what God might want her to do with her life.

A Spiritual Mother

The most lasting gift of Hampden DuBose, however, came through the evening vespers. Mrs DuBose was a great admirer of Amy Carmichael, the Irish missionary who had gone to South India in 1895 and founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a community that rescued children in danger of being given to temple service and raised them as its own. By the 1940s Amy Carmichael had been an invalid for a decade, confined to her room after a fall, but she was still writing, and her books of devotion, poetry and missionary narrative were widely read. Mrs DuBose quoted from them often at vespers.

Elisabeth was captivated. She found in Amy Carmichael a voice unlike any she had heard: severe and tender at once, utterly without sentimentality, uncompromising about the cost of discipleship, and yet full of a kind of gaiety. Amy Carmichael wrote about the missionary life as it actually was, with its disappointments, its loneliness and its unglamorous daily duties, and she insisted that the love of Christ asks for everything. In her little book If, a series of searching tests of the heart, each of the short entries ends with the same refrain: “then I know nothing of Calvary love.” For a serious girl of fourteen, already wondering whether God might be calling her to the mission field, it was strong and heady reading.

Elisabeth later spoke of Amy Carmichael as her first spiritual mother, and the influence lasted for the rest of her life. More than forty years after those vespers she wrote a full-length biography of her, A Chance to Die, published in 1987. Some of the qualities readers most associated with Elisabeth Elliot, her suspicion of emotionalism in religion, her insistence on obedience whether or not one feels like it, her readiness to accept suffering as part of the Christian’s portion, and her plain, unadorned style, can be traced back in part to the books she first heard read aloud in a Florida chapel.

1944

Elisabeth stayed at Hampden DuBose for three years. They were the years of the Second World War. The United States entered the war in December 1941, a few months after she arrived, and by the time she graduated the war had reached into almost every American family. Florida filled with training camps and airfields. The war did not touch the school directly, but it gave an edge of seriousness to the talk of giving one’s life to God that she heard at chapel.

She graduated in 1944 with a changed manner. She was still reserved. She would always be reserved. But she had learned to master her shyness instead of being mastered by it, and she had begun to believe that God had work for her to do in the world. She had settled, too, on what that work might be. She wanted to translate the Bible into languages that had never had it, and for that she would need a thorough knowledge of the language in which the New Testament had been written. In the autumn she went to Wheaton College, in Illinois, to study Greek.

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of discipline that seems grievous at the time and yields its fruit afterward. Elisabeth did not enjoy everything about Hampden DuBose, and she was frightened of its headmistress. But she lived to be grateful for both, and the fruit of those three years was visible in her for the rest of her life.