A Poor Exponent of Faith

“Straightway the father of the child cried out, and said, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

— Mark 9:24, ASV

On a Log Among the People

An old friend from her Dundee mission days, J. H. Smith, was collecting testimonies for a book called Our Faithful God: Answers to Prayer, and he asked Mary Slessor for hers. She wrote it sitting in the open air:

My life is one long daily, hourly, record of answered prayer. For physical health, for mental overstrain, for guidance given marvellously, for errors and dangers averted, for enmity to the Gospel subdued, for food provided at the exact hour needed, for everything that goes to make up life and my poor service, I can testify with a full and often wonder-stricken awe that I believe God answers prayer. … I am sitting alone here on a log among a company of natives. My children, whose very lives are a testimony that God answers prayer, are working round me. … Food is scarce just now. We live from hand to mouth. We have not more than will be our breakfast to-day, but I know we shall be fed, for God answers prayer.

It is a confident statement, and she meant it. But it would be a mistake to stop there, as popular books often do, and make her a saint who never doubted. Livingstone, who had her letters, knew better, and so do we.

Unanswered

To someone who complained that God had not answered his prayers, she wrote: “You thought God was to hear and answer you by making everything straight and pleasant. Not so are nations or churches or men and women born; not so is character made. God is answering your prayer in His way.” And to another, in the same mood, she wrote the sentence that we met in the first chapter of this book: “I know what it is to pray long years and never get the answer. I had to pray for my father. But I know my heavenly Father so well that I can leave it with Him for the lower fatherhood.”

She did not pretend that every prayer was answered in the way she wanted. The prayer of her girlhood, for her drunken father, never was. Her faith was not that God always gives what we ask. It was that God can be trusted when he does not.

A Poor Exponent

Nor did she pretend that her own faith was strong. “I am a poor exponent of faith,” she said. “I ought to have full faith in our Father that He will do everything, but I am ashamed of myself, for I want to ‘see,’ and that sends faith out of court. I never felt more in sympathy with that old afflicted father before in his prayer, ‘Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’ Every syllable suits me.”

The words at the head of this chapter were spoken by a father whose son had been tormented since childhood. The disciples could not help, and when Jesus came, the father said, “If thou canst do anything, have compassion on us, and help us.” Jesus answered, “If thou canst! All things are possible to him that believeth.” And the father cried out, “I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” Jesus healed the boy. He did not wait for the father’s faith to be perfect. He accepted the faith the man had, doubts and all.

That was the faith of Mary Slessor. It was real and it was mixed. She had seasons of darkness that today we might call depression. We have met them in this book: the first Sunday in Okoyong, when she was on the edge of tears; the time after the smallpox when she had “no heart for anything”; the years alone at Akpap, when she wrote “All is dark except above.” Before her last public meetings in Scotland in 1907 she wrote, “I am suffering tortures of fear, and yet why is it that I cannot rest in Him?” In 1909, covered in boils and unable to sleep, she said, “Only sleeping draughts keep me from going off my head.” Late in life she spoke of times “when I’m not well and the doldrums come very near.”

Her comments in the margins of the book of Job show how she read her own experience. When Job cries out against God, she did not think he was rebelling. “His plaint was a relief to his own spirit, and an appeal for sympathy,” she wrote. Beside one chapter she wrote, “The atmosphere is clearing; the clouds are scattering … the spirit swings back on its pivot and begins to see God.” And further on: “Right, Job, turn to God! Leave it to Him. The fit of depression will pass when you have sounded the depths, and profit will follow.” She was writing about Job. She was also writing about herself.

Talking to Her Father

Her prayers were not formal. At a tea-table in Scotland after a tiring journey, she was heard to say, as if speaking to someone in the room, “Thank ye, Faither. Ye ken I’m tired.” When a lady asked her how she had come to such closeness with God, she said, “Ah, woman, when I am out there in the bush I have often no other one to speak to but my Father, and I just talk to Him.” At a meeting of women missionaries in Duke Town, when everyone was laughing and chattering, it struck her that they ought to be praying, and she said so, and they all got up and went into the next room to pray. Sometimes she called her household to prayer at odd hours, and when Jean protested that the time was long past, she said, “Jean, the gate of heaven is never shut.”

She believed profoundly in the prayers of others. She was sure, she said, that the only explanation for how she had survived so many dangers, and why so many people had submitted to her, was that she had been prayed for more than most. “Prayer-waves pulsate from Britain all through Calabar,” she wrote. “Pray on, dear one. The power lies that way.” She also said, “Praying is harder work than doing, at least I find it so.” Paul, who knew the same difficulty, wrote that “we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26, ASV).

Her own prayers for her friends grew simpler as she grew older. She used to ask for many particular things for them. In the end, Livingstone says, her prayer was only this: “Lord give them Thy best and it shall suffice them and me.”

The Bible With a Pen

She read her Bible every morning from first light, about half past five, with a fine pen in her hand. She underlined the key words and wrote in the margins, and would sometimes spend three days on a single chapter. When one Bible was full she began another. Several of them survive, crowded with her notes. Some of those notes are short enough to remember:

God is never behind time.

Good is good, but it is not enough; it must be God.

The secret of all failure is disobedience.

Blessed the man and woman who is able to serve cheerfully in the second rank, a big test.

Slavery never pays; the slave is spoiled as a man, and the master not less so.

It were worth while to die, if thereby a soul could be born again.

She read the Old Testament as if it were set in Calabar. Beside one passage she wrote, “this happens in Okoyong every day.” When Laban and Jacob set up a heap of stones and said, “Jehovah watch between me and thee,” she wrote, “Beautiful sentiment, but a mbiam oath of fear.” Of Jael, who killed a sleeping enemy with a tent peg, she wrote, “Not a womanly woman, a sorry story; would God not have showed her a better way if she had asked?” Of part of Deborah’s song: “Fine poetry, poor morality.” John was her favourite book. Beside the verse about the crowds looking for Jesus, she wrote, “The secret of our failures in winning men; they don’t find Him with us.”

One more note from her Bibles has become famous, though it is not in Livingstone. Later biographers report that she wrote in one of them the words “God and one are always a majority.” It was not her own saying. It was an old proverb, already in print in the 1860s and attributed by some to the American reformer Frederick Douglass. But she wrote it down, and it fits her.

“Not Goody-Goody at All”

In her last years her friends noticed that she was growing gentler. She had always known her faults. “I don’t half live up to the ideal missionary life,” she said. “It is not easier to be a saint here than at home. We are very human, and not goody-goody at all.” Livingstone says she was often “deep in the valley of humiliation over hasty words spoken.” She began to say things she would not have said when she was younger: “My opinions may not just suit every one, and it is possible other people may be right and I far wrong.” Of a very serious young missionary she wrote that what was needed was “one to laugh, to hitch on to the yoke, and joke over all that we don’t like.”

She refused to take credit for her work. “I have lived my life very quietly and in a very natural and humble way,” she said. “It isn’t Mary Slessor doing anything, but Something outside of her altogether uses her as her small ability allows.” When a friend wrote that her reward would be a starry crown in heaven, she answered, “What would I do with starry crowns except to cast them at His feet?” It is the spirit of Jesus’ words to his disciples: “when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10, ASV).

A Royal Honour

In 1913 that humility was put to a test. Some of her friends in Calabar, missionaries and officials, had been trying for two years to have her work publicly recognised. J. K. Macgregor wrote an account of her life for the government. When Sir Frederick Lugard became Governor-General of the newly united Nigeria, he sent a strong recommendation to the Colonial Secretary in London, and she was chosen, with the approval of King George V, as an Honorary Associate of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. The badge was a silver Maltese cross, to be worn on a black ribbon on the left shoulder.

When the official letter came, she said to herself, “Now, who has done this? Who am I, and what is my distinction that I should have it?” She told no one. When the badge arrived in Calabar, her friends knew she would never come down to receive it unless she were cornered. So they wrote telling her that she surely would not want to receive it secretly, and that it was her duty to come, and they enclosed a telegraph form already filled in with the single word “Coming.” They knew she would have no peace until she had sent it. She sent it.

The night before she left, she read the story of Peter’s denial to her household and told them that Peter had fallen because he followed Jesus “afar off.” “Eh, bairns,” she said, “it’s the wee lassie that sits beside her mother at meal times that gets all the nice bittocks. Keep close to Jesus the Good Shepherd all the way.”

The presentation was made in the Goldie Memorial Hall in Calabar, in front of the European community and the students of the Hope Waddell Institute. She arrived in an old cotton dress, a straw hat, and cloth shoes, and sat with her head in her hands while the Provincial Commissioner spoke about her. When she rose, she could not at first find any words. Then she turned to the African boys and girls in the hall and told them in Efik to be faithful to the government, because at bottom it was Christian, and friendly to the missions, as the badge proved.

That remark, which Livingstone records with approval, belongs with the other evidence of how closely she identified British rule with Christianity. It was a sincere belief, and she had seen much good done by men she trusted. It was also a belief that the history of the following century would not bear out, and it is not one this book can share.

Then she spoke in English. The day before she had watched soldiers in a mock battle and had been struck that the officers always went in front, leading their men. “If I have done anything in my life,” she said, “it has been easy because the Master has gone before.” Afterwards she wrote to friends in Scotland: “Don’t think that there is any difference in my designation. I am Mary Mitchell Slessor, nothing more and none other than the unworthy, unprofitable, but most willing, servant of the King of Kings.” And as the congratulations poured in, she fled to Ikpe. “I shall never look the world in the face again,” she said, “until all this blarney and publicity is over.”

Help Thou Mine Unbelief

The honour did not change her faith, and neither did her doubts. Both are part of her story. She could write that her life was “one long daily, hourly, record of answered prayer,” and in the same years call herself “a poor exponent of faith.” She could sit on a log with nothing but breakfast in the house and say she knew they would be fed, and lie awake at night unable to rest in God. The psalmist knew the same double experience: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him” (Psalm 42:11, ASV). A faith like that is not less than a faith without doubts. It may be more honest. It is certainly more useful to the rest of us.