Taming the Roughs

“And the common people heard him gladly.”

— Mark 12:37, ASV

Wishart Church

Outside the factory, Mary Slessor’s life was the Church. She went to the Sabbath morning fellowship meeting and the week-night prayer meetings. She taught a Sunday school class of what she called “lovable lassies,” and she added, looking back on it, “I had the impudence of ignorance then in special degree surely.” She took a monthly tract paper, the Monthly Visitor, round the homes of the district. However tired she was after ten hours at the loom, she was not absent from any meeting. “We would as soon have thought of going to the moon as of being absent from a service,” she wrote shortly before she died. “And we throve very well on it too.”

Wishart Church stood in the middle of a slum. Narrow arched passages, called pends, led off the Cowgate into tall tenements with stone stairs climbing outside the buildings to landings and crowded rooms. Out of these dark courts poured crowds of boys and girls who ran the streets day and night with no one to govern them. Mary loved them, Livingstone says, in spite of their roughness. When the church decided to open a mission for them, and took a room at 6 Queen Street, nearly opposite one of the worst of the pends, she volunteered to teach.

The Roughs

It was dangerous work. The older boys came to the meetings to wreck them. “That little room,” she wrote later, “was full of romantic experiences,” and she remembered how some of the older men on the mission staff would surround the “smaller individuals,” herself among them, when they left at night and faced the crowd outside. One of those men was J. H. Smith, who became her lifelong friend and counsellor. When the mission grew, it moved into a shop under the church, and she had charge of classes for boys and girls on Sundays and weeknights. She and a few others tried preaching in the open air, and the roughs pelted them with mud.

From these years comes the best-known story of her youth. Livingstone tells it without naming a witness, and it rests, as far as we know, on her own later telling. A gang had decided to break up the mission. One night they closed in around her in the street. Their leader had a lead weight tied to a length of cord, and he swung it round her head, closer and closer. She stood still. The weight grazed her forehead, and she did not flinch. At last he let it drop. “She’s game, boys,” he said, and the whole gang followed her into the meeting. Years later, Livingstone adds, a photograph of a man with his wife and family hung on the wall of her house in the African bush. It was the young man who had swung the lead. He had done well in life, and he had sent her the picture in gratitude.

Livingstone tells a second story, of a bully who stood outside the hall with a whip, driving the younger lads into “Mary Slessor’s meeting” but refusing to go in himself. She asked him what would happen if they changed places. He said he would get the whip across his back. She turned her back to him and said she would bear it for him if he would go in. He threw down the whip, went in, and gave himself to Christ that day.

These are good stories, and later books have added names and details to them that no source contains. It is fair to tell them as Livingstone told them, as stories she and her friends remembered, without claiming more certainty for them than they have. What is not in doubt is the kind of courage they describe. It was not the courage of someone who felt no fear. Throughout her life Mary Slessor was afraid of crowds, afraid of speaking in public, and afraid of cows in fields. It was the courage of someone who stayed where she was when she wanted to run. The mission in Queen Street was her first training for the forests of Calabar.

One of Themselves

A new congregation in the city, Victoria Street United Presbyterian Church, started a Sunday morning service for young people under a layman named James Logie. Mary offered to help as a monitor. Logie saw her ability, and they became close friends. He was the kind of friend a poor young woman rarely finds, a man with education and standing who took her seriously and wanted her to succeed. “He is the best earthly friend I have,” she wrote. For the rest of his life he looked after her money affairs.

Before the Sunday meetings she would go through the dark passages of the tenements, knocking on doors, waking the lads, and pleading with them to come. They adored her, Livingstone says, with a shy loyalty, and many of them changed. She visited their homes, and she went “not as one who was superior to the inmates, but as one of themselves.” She would sit down by the fire and nurse a baby, or take a cup of tea at the table. Paul wrote of his own ministry, “To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak: I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22, ASV). Mary Slessor did not have to become poor to reach the poor of Dundee. She was one of them already, and she never forgot it.

She was criticised for being unconventional. On Saturday afternoons she would take her class of rough boys out of the city into the countryside, which respectable church workers did not do. She loved the green fields, and she thought the boys should see them. It is a small thing, but it is the first sign of a pattern that would run through her whole life. When she thought something was right and useful, she did it, and she let other people worry about whether it was proper.

Learning to Think

She read everything she could borrow. Not all of it suited her. One book much admired in Scottish homes was Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, which urged its readers to practise meditation. A friend found her looking gloomy and asked what was the matter. “I canna meditate,” she said, “and Doddridge says it is necessary for the soul. If I try to meditate my mind just goes a’ roads.” Her friend told her not to worry about meditation, but to go and work, “for that’s what God means us to do.” She took the advice. It was a lesson in knowing herself. Some Christians are made for quiet contemplation, and she was not. Her prayer would always be the prayer of a busy woman, spoken in the middle of the work.

Another friend, wanting to test her, lent her Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a difficult book. When he asked her about it, she said it was grand. She had sat up reading it and had not noticed the time until she heard the factory bells calling her to work in the morning. From then on her reading grew wider and deeper. She learned to argue with the freethinkers she met on her visits, and she learned to write. Papers she read at the church’s fellowship association were remembered for their good sense and their fervour. Her style, Livingstone says, was formed by the Bible.

The Common People

She was often asked to speak at meetings in other parts of the city, and she dreaded it. Once a friend went with her to such a meeting, but she could not be persuaded to go up onto the platform. Instead she sat in the middle of the hall among the people and gave a quiet talk on the words of the verse at the head of this chapter: “And the common people heard him gladly.” Her friend wrote that the common people heard her gladly too, and crowded round her afterwards to ask her to come back.

It is fitting that this is the first Bible text we know she spoke on. Mark says that when Jesus taught in the temple, the religious experts argued with him, but the ordinary crowd listened with delight. He spoke their language. He told stories about sheep and coins and bread. He did not stand above them. Mary Slessor would spend her life among people whom the respectable world despised, and she would find, again and again, that they heard the gospel more gladly than the respectable did.

She was still shy. She would be shy all her life. But she had found that she did not need a platform. She could speak sitting down, among the people, in their own words. It was a way of speaking that would carry her into the yards of African chiefs and the huts of outcast women, and it began in a hall in Dundee, where a factory girl sat in the middle of the crowd and talked about Jesus. “For God gave us not a spirit of fearfulness; but of power and love and discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7, ASV). She was not free of fear. But she was learning that fear did not have to decide what she did.