Laid on the Altar

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.”

— Romans 12:1, ASV

A Surprise

In September 1891, while she was at home on furlough, the Foreign Mission Board of the United Presbyterian Church learned something that surprised almost everyone who knew her. Mary Slessor was engaged to be married.

Her friends had assumed that she had given herself entirely to Okoyong, and that there was no room in her life for anything else. They were half right. The story of her engagement is short, and Livingstone tells it with great reserve, but it is one of the most revealing episodes in her life. It shows what she wanted, and what she was prepared to give up.

Charles Morrison

The man was Charles W. Morrison, a teacher on the mission staff at Duke Town. He came from Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow, had been an active Christian worker at home, and had been accepted by the Board at once when he applied. Livingstone describes him as “a man of fine feeling, with a distinct literary gift.” He was, Livingstone adds, “in his twenty-fifth year.” Mary was about forty-two. Livingstone does not comment on the difference in their ages, and neither, apparently, did she.

They had met only a few times. Mary had been ill in Duke Town in 1890, and Morrison had been attentive and kind while she recovered. He was drawn, Livingstone says, to “the brilliant, unconventional little woman.” We can guess some of what drew her to him. He was a reader and a writer in a world where she had few people to talk to about books. Among the handful of possessions she kept to the end of her life were two battered novels, Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram and Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. On the flyleaf of one, in her handwriting, are the initials “C. W. M.” and “M. M. S.” In the other are their two signatures, one above the other. A photograph taken in 1891 shows her wearing an engagement ring.

They became engaged before she left for Scotland at the end of 1890. From the beginning there was one condition, and it was hers. She would not leave Okoyong. She had given her word to the people there, and she would not break it, even for her own happiness. If they married, Morrison would have to come and live at Okoyong. She thought he would make a good missionary, and that the two of them could share the work, one staying while the other went home on furlough.

On His Altar

While the Board considered the matter, friends wrote to congratulate her. Her reply to one of them is the heart of the story:

I lay it all in God’s hands, and will take from Him whatever He sees best for His work in Okoyong. My life was laid on His altar for that people long ago, and I would not take one jot or tittle of it back. If it be for His glory and the advantage of His cause there to let another join in it I will be grateful. If not I will still try to be grateful, as He knows best.

It is not a cold letter. It is the letter of a woman who wanted very much to be married, and who had decided beforehand what she would do if she could not have both. The phrase she used, “laid on His altar,” was the language of her Bible. It echoes the verse at the head of this chapter, where Paul urges Christians to present their bodies “a living sacrifice.” A sacrifice laid on the altar was not taken back. Mary Slessor believed that she had laid her life there years before, when she offered herself for Calabar, and later when she went into Okoyong. She did not think an engagement gave her the right to reclaim it.

Morrison, and perhaps Mary too, suspected what the Board would say. He asked her whether, if they refused to send him to Okoyong, she would come back to Duke Town to be with him. Her answer, written to a friend, was blunt:

It is out of the question. I would never take the idea into consideration. I could not leave my work for such a reason. To leave a field like Okoyong without a worker and go to one of ten or a dozen where the people have an open Bible and plenty of privilege! It is absurd. If God does not send him up here then he must do his work and I must do mine where we have been placed.

It is easy to read that as hard. It may be better to read it as honest. She did not pretend that the choice cost her nothing. She simply thought that one person’s happiness, even her own, could not weigh against the lives of the people of Okoyong, where she was the only missionary, when there were ten or a dozen stations on the coast with churches and Bibles already.

A Qualified Refusal

The Board’s answer was what Livingstone calls “a qualified refusal.” Morrison’s work at Duke Town was important, they said, and they could not approve his moving to Okoyong until full provision had been made for carrying it on. In effect, the answer was no.

When Mary was told, she said only, “What the Lord ordains is right.” Livingstone adds that she “apparently” dismissed the subject from her mind. The word “apparently” is his, and it is the only hint he gives that there may have been more to it than she showed.

What followed was sad. Morrison’s health broke down, and he had to return to Scotland. A specialist advised him not to go back to Calabar. He offered himself for the Church’s mission in South Africa, but there was no opening, and to the regret of the Committee, which thought highly of him, he resigned. Livingstone says he went later to America, and was living in a hut in the balsam woods of North Carolina when a fire destroyed the literary papers he treasured. The loss, Livingstone says, affected him deeply and hastened his death, which came soon afterwards. Livingstone gives no dates for any of this, and modern researchers have not been able to trace Morrison’s later life.

Popular books have often said that Mary Slessor never married because she was “married to Africa.” The truth is less poetic. She wanted to marry, and chose a man she thought would share her work. The Church would not let him join her, and she would not leave her people. His health failed. Whatever else they might have become to each other, those facts ended it. Livingstone closes the chapter with lines of verse about a solitary life lived “without cheer of sister or of daughter,” and says that she turned her face, alone, towards the future.

No Good Thing Withheld

It would be too easy to turn this story into a lesson that God rewards sacrifice with something better. Mary Slessor did not get something better. She did not marry. She went back to Okoyong and lived without a husband’s companionship for the rest of her life, often lonely, sometimes desperately so. Not long afterwards, overwhelmed by the work, she wrote, “I feel dreadfully lonely, and want a helper,” though the helper she meant was a fellow missionary, and in the end she did not ask for one because she knew how short-staffed the mission was.

And yet she did not think that God had cheated her. The psalmist says, “No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11, ASV). She seems to have believed that literally, and to have concluded that if God withheld marriage from her, then for her, in her place, it was not the good thing. That is a hard kind of faith, and it is not one anyone should demand of another person. But it was hers. In the last years of her life she urged the young women at home: “Don’t grow up a nervous old maid! … I’m a witness to the perfect joy and satisfaction of a single life, with a tail of human tag-rag hanging on.” By then the tag-rag included eight or nine adopted children, a host of rescued babies, and a whole district that called her Mother.

A Letter to the Church

That furlough of 1891 produced one other thing that deserves a place in her story. Recovering from influenza and bronchitis, she read in the Church’s Missionary Record an appeal from a fellow missionary for more craftsmen to be sent to Calabar. He added, in passing, that Calabar was not yet ready for anyone to teach trades to its people. Mary disagreed. She wrote a long letter to the editor, so exhausting to write that she hardly knew whether the words were spelled right, and it was printed under the name “One of the Zenana Staff.”

She argued that the people of Calabar were entirely capable of learning trades, and that their weakness, a lack of persistence, was explained by their history, in which life had always been governed by “force of circumstance.” Training them was too big a task for individual missionaries. It was a matter for the whole Church. “Let the science of the evangelisation of the nations occupy the attention of our sermons, our congregations, our conferences, and our Church literature,” she wrote, “and we will soon have more workers, more wealth, more life, as well as new methods.”

According to Livingstone, the letter stirred the Mission Committee into action, and led in time to the founding of the Hope Waddell Training Institution at Calabar in 1895, which taught trades and gave a secondary education to generations of young men of the Cross River region. How much the Institution owed to her letter is hard to measure. Others were thinking along the same lines, and it had many parents. Livingstone says that she never took any credit for it and never mentioned it in her letters.

In February 1892 she sailed back to Calabar, with Janie. The Congregational church at Topsham held a farewell meeting in her honour. When illness upset her plans for that furlough, she said something that sums up the spirit in which she went back: “We alter things for the good of our children, and God does the same to us.”