Preface

“but God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that are strong”

— 1 Corinthians 1:27, ASV

The first volume of this series told the story of Watchman Nee, who spent his last twenty years in a Chinese prison. The second told the story of John Hyde, whose courage was spent on his knees in the Punjab. The third told the story of Corrie ten Boom, whose family hid Jews behind a false wall in Haarlem. This fourth volume goes back further in time, and further from the places where most of its readers live. It tells the story of a Scottish factory girl who spent almost forty years in the forests of south-eastern Nigeria, and who died there, in a mud-walled room, in January 1915.

Mary Slessor was born in Aberdeen in 1848 and grew up in the slums of Dundee. From the age of eleven she worked at a loom in a textile factory. She had almost no schooling. She was small, shy of public speaking, and so timid about ordinary things that she would not cross a busy city street alone. At twenty-seven she sailed for Calabar, on the coast of what is now Nigeria, as a teacher for the mission of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. She learned the Efik language so well that people who heard her said she spoke it better than they did. She walked, barefoot and usually alone, into districts where no missionary had lived. She took in twin babies whom their families had been taught to throw away, and she sheltered their mothers. She sat as a magistrate in a British colonial court. She raised a household of adopted African children. Long before she died, the people of the Cross River were calling her “Everybody’s Mother.”

Why Courage?

Her courage is the easiest part of her story to see, and it is real. She stood between armed men who were about to fight. She sat for nights beside prisoners who were to be made to drink poison. She walked through the forest in the dark to reach a dying chief whose people were ready to kill his household if he died. None of it came naturally. She wrote to friends that her courage often threatened to “take wings and fly away,” and that nobody guessed it.

But this book will suggest that there was a harder courage in her life than facing armed men. There was the courage to go on for years with almost nothing to show for it. Her first district saw no baptisms for fifteen years. The African friend who did most to protect her never became a Christian. Many of the babies she rescued died in her arms. She quarrelled with the Church that sent her, and more than once she was tempted to cut herself loose from it. She was often ill, often lonely, and sometimes deeply depressed. She kept going, not because she was sure of success, but because she believed that she had been sent, and that the results belonged to God.

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 main source is the biography by W. P. Livingstone, Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary, published in 1916, the year after her death. Livingstone worked chiefly from her own letters, and he printed long passages from them. His book is now in the public domain, and so, unlike the Corrie ten Boom volume, this book is able to let Mary Slessor speak in her own words. Her letters are vivid, funny, sometimes sharp, and often moving, and they are quoted throughout.

Livingstone was an admirer, and he wrote in the manner and language of his time. His book is also more honest than many later retellings. He kept her doubts, her illnesses, her temper, and her failures. This book draws on him gratefully, and also checks him. It uses the Scottish civil records of her family, the census returns, and the work of modern historians in Scotland and Nigeria. Where the popular story says more than the evidence, this book will say so.

Two things in particular need care. The first is that Mary Slessor lived and worked at the time when Britain was taking control of southern Nigeria. She depended on British officials, and she sometimes welcomed their power. She also defended African people against them, and against her own Church. A Christian biography should neither hide that story nor pretend that she stood outside it. The second is that the language used about Africans in her day, including sometimes her own, was often contemptuous. This book quotes that language only where it is needed to understand her, and it does not adopt it.

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. Mary Slessor read her Bible every day from before dawn, with a pen in her hand, and she filled its margins with comments. Some of them appear in these pages.

The verse at the head of this preface is Paul’s: “God chose the weak things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that are strong.” It is not a flattering verse. Paul was not saying that God likes weak people for their own sake. He was saying that when God does great things through unlikely people, nobody can mistake where the power came from. Mary Slessor would have agreed. Near the end of her life, when she was given a royal honour, she wrote that she was nothing more than “the unworthy, unprofitable, but most willing, servant of the King of Kings.” She knew what she was, a factory girl from Dundee. She knew, too, that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves” (2 Corinthians 4:7, ASV). This book is the story of that treasure, and of the earthen vessel that carried it.