The Religion Without Christ

“prove all things; hold fast that which is good;”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21, ASV

Cheltenham

In September 1884 Ramabai moved from Wantage to Cheltenham, the spa town in Gloucestershire, to the Ladies’ College founded and run by Dorothea Beale. Miss Beale was one of the great pioneers of women’s education in England, a devout Anglican, a thinker, and a formidable personality. At Cheltenham Ramabai taught Sanskrit and studied mathematics, natural science, and English literature. It was the first formal schooling she had ever had.

A student at the college remembered her at Miss Beale’s Saturday Scripture classes, where they studied the opening verses of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.” Ramabai, already troubled with deafness, sat on a high stool beside the Principal “with her aurophone touching her teeth,” following every word. She was not an easy pupil. Another woman at the college remembered that her mind became clouded with religious doubt, and that she went away to fight the battle alone, and came back joyfully to tell Miss Beale “of faith restored.”

She owed Miss Beale, and the sister at Wantage, almost certainly Sister Geraldine, who became her “spiritual mother,” a great deal, and she said so. “I owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to her and to Miss Beale,” she wrote of her “spiritual mother.” “Both of these ladies took great pains with me and taught me the subjects which would help me in my life. … Their motherly kindness and deeply spiritual influence have greatly helped in building up my character.”

But gratitude did not mean agreement. The years at Wantage and Cheltenham were years of argument.

The Quarrels

Ramabai’s letters from these years, and those of Sister Geraldine and others about her, were preserved by the sisters and published in India in 1977. That collection is still in copyright, and this book knows it chiefly through the work of modern scholars who have studied it. What they describe is a long struggle.

Ramabai had been baptised as an Anglican, but she did not accept everything the Anglicans taught. She questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, and whether Christ was fully God. She questioned eternal punishment. She objected to the Athanasian Creed, with its warnings that those who did not believe it would perish. She would not give up her vegetarian diet, which she had kept all her life. She wanted her cross inscribed in Sanskrit. She asked why she should accept the teaching of one church over another, when the Christians she met disagreed so much among themselves. And she refused to let the sisters, or the Canon who had founded their order, or the Bishop of Bombay, direct her life and work.

Sister Geraldine, who loved her and considered herself responsible for her soul, treated much of this as pride and heresy. The sisters wanted Ramabai to return to India as a teacher in their own Anglican mission. Ramabai wanted to be free. The historian Antoinette Burton has described the relationship as “less a question of sisterhood than a struggle for authority.” When the sisters warned her about her doubts and her independence, she answered, in a letter preserved in the 1977 edition of her correspondence and often quoted by modern scholars, that “the door of the Universal Church of God is not shut against me.”

It is easy to take sides in this quarrel. Some modern historians admire Ramabai as a free thinker resisting the authority of a colonial church. Some Christian writers see a proud young convert who had not yet learned humility. Both are partly right. She was proud, in a way; she had been honoured by pandits, and she was not used to being told what to think. She was also right to refuse to be governed by people who, however kind, did not understand her country and assumed they knew best. And the sisters, however possessive, loved her and prayed for her, and she knew it. Years later, it is said, she still kept Sister Geraldine’s photograph on her wall.

No Special Sect

In 1895, looking back, she described her faith in these years in a little tract published in Bombay.

I believed the Apostles’ Creed, and all the essential doctrines of Christianity. My mind was at rest; and I trusted in God, believed on Christ, and prayed in His name. I did not adhere to any special sect, nor do I now. It was enough for me to be called a Christian, on the ground of my belief in Christ as the Saviour of mankind.

She went on:

I had many doubts and many difficulties in the matter of belief. So many sects, so many opinions, so much want of spirituality and much shallow talk in the name of religion. All these troubled me very much, and I began to see much the same in the picture of Christianity as I have been accustomed to see in that of the Hindu religion. But all this time I was conscious that God was leading me; and I determined not to take the opinion of men as my ground of belief, and went on reading the Bible only and trusted in God’s mercy.

That is a significant confession. She had left the Hindu religion partly because its authorities contradicted each other, and because they told her things about women she could not believe. Now she found the Christian authorities contradicting each other too. Her answer was not to abandon Christianity, nor to submit to whichever church had baptised her. It was to go to the Bible itself. “I determined not to take the opinion of men as my ground of belief.”

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians: “prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Ramabai was proving all things. She was not being contrary for its own sake. She was a scholar trained in a tradition of argument, and a woman who had learned at great cost not to accept what she was told without examining it. The Bereans in Acts were praised because they “received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the scriptures daily, whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11, ASV). That was what she was trying to do.

What Was Missing

Later she came to see these years differently. It was not that her questions were wrong, she thought, but that she had been looking in the wrong place. In A Testimony she wrote that for years after her baptism she had studied “other books about the Bible,” and had not studied “the Bible itself as I should have done.” She had also held on, without realising it, to ideas she had brought with her from Hinduism.

I thought that repentance of sin, and the determination to give it up, was what was necessary for forgiveness of sin: that the rite of baptism was the means of regeneration: that my sins were truly washed away, when I was baptized in the name of Christ. These and such other ideas, which are akin to Hindu mode of religious thought, stuck to me. For some years after my baptism, I was comparatively happy to think that I had found a religion which gave its privileges equally to men and women; there was no distinction of caste, colour, or sex made in it. All this was very beautiful, no doubt.

“All this was very beautiful, no doubt.” But something was missing. She had found a religion that treated women and men as equal before God. She believed its creed. She had been washed in its water. What she did not yet have, she came to believe, was a personal trust in Christ himself as her Saviour.

It is worth hearing, too, how a sympathetic outsider saw her. Max Müller, the Oxford scholar of Sanskrit, who admired her, wrote to her American supporters in 1895, when she was under attack, that “in all essentials she had been a Christian even while she was still a Brahman,” and that she had joined a church chiefly because “she felt the necessity of belonging to some communion, to be one with her friends.” It was a kind judgement, and a mistaken one. It explained her conversion as a matter of sympathy and loneliness. Ramabai herself would have said that it was neither. It was, at this stage, a matter of conviction without life. The life came later.

To America

Late in 1885 or early in 1886 a letter came from America. Anandibai Joshee, a young Brahman woman from the Maratha country, a relative of Ramabai’s, was about to graduate in medicine from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the first Indian woman to do so. She invited Ramabai to her graduation.

The sisters did not want her to go. Nor did Miss Beale. There was talk of a government educational post for her in India. But after some weeks of painful indecision Ramabai accepted. In February 1886 she sailed for America. Manorama, not yet five, went with her at first, but was soon sent back to England, to live with the sisters at Wantage, who cared for her for the next three years.

It was, in its way, one more act of independence. And it would change her life again.