“I Had Not Found Christ”

“The people that sat in darkness Saw a great light, And to them that sat in the region and shadow of death, To them did light spring up.”

— Matthew 4:16, ASV

A Quieter Story

While the storms of the Sharada Sadan were raging in public, a quieter story was unfolding in private, and Ramabai later came to see it as the most important thing that happened to her in those years. She told it in A Testimony in 1907. It is the heart of that pamphlet, and it deserves to be heard in her own words.

It began, she said, when she came home from America. For years she had studied “other books about the Bible,” and not the Bible itself. Now she put them aside. “I gave up the study of other books about the Bible after my return home from America and took to reading the Bible regularly.”

It did not make her happy. It made her miserable. “Following this course for about two years I became very unhappy in my mind. I was dissatisfied with my spiritual condition.”

Building from the Top

One day she went on business to the Bombay Guardian Mission Press, and picked up a book called From Death into Life. Its author, William Haslam, had been a clergyman of the Church of England with a good parish, busy with every kind of church activity. One day a woman of his congregation told him that he was “trying to build from the top.” She meant, Ramabai explained, that he had never been converted. He had the religion without the life. It was the beginning of his conversion.

It changed Ramabai’s understanding of herself. “I read his account of his conversion and work for Christ, then I began to consider where I stood and what my actual need was. I took the Bible and read portions of it, meditating on the messages which God gave me. There were so many things I did not understand intellectually. One thing I knew by this time, that I needed Christ, and not merely His religion.”

That sentence is the key to her whole testimony. She had believed the creed. She had been baptised and confirmed. She had argued with Anglican sisters about the Trinity. She had lectured on Christian love to American audiences, and founded a school that was attacked for being too Christian. And she knew, when she looked honestly at herself, that something was missing. “I realised that I was not prepared to meet God, that sin had dominion over me.” She had not received, as Paul put it, “the Spirit of adoption,” and had “no witness of the Spirit” that she was a child of God.

The Burden

“What was to be done? My thoughts could not, and did not, help me.”

I had at last come to an end of myself, and unconditionally surrendered myself to the Saviour, and asked Him to be merciful to me and to become my Righteousness and Redemption, and to take away all my sin.

Only those who have been convicted of sin and have seen themselves as God sees them under similar circumstances can understand what one feels when a great and unbearable burden is rolled away from one’s heart.

In a tract she published in Bombay in 1895 or 1896, she described the same experience with more physical detail. She had been brought to see, she wrote there, that hers was “only an intellectual belief — a belief in which there was no life.” “I repented long; I became very restless and almost ill, and passed many sleepless nights.” Then the burden rolled away.

She dated it, in 1907, to “sixteen years ago,” which is 1891, eight years after her baptism. It happened, then, in the same year as the first great storm over the Sharada Sadan in Poona, when the papers were accusing her of deceit and disloyalty. We do not know the exact day. She did not want us to. “I shall not attempt to describe how and what I felt at the time,” she wrote. What mattered was not the moment but the result.

Sitting in Darkness

She tried to describe it with an image from the Gospels.

I do not know if any one of my readers has ever had the experience of being shut up in a room where there was nothing but thick darkness, and then groping in it to find something of which he or she was in dire need. I can think of no one but the blind man, whose story is given in John 9. … I can give only a faint idea of what I felt when my mental eyes were opened, and when I, who was “sitting in darkness, saw great light,” and when I felt sure that to me who, but a few moments ago, “sat in the region and shadow of death, light had sprung up.”

She was quoting the words at the head of this chapter, Matthew’s quotation of Isaiah’s prophecy of the dawn in Galilee. She could have chosen a hundred verses. She chose one about people who had been sitting in darkness, which is what she believed she had been doing, first as a devout Hindu and then as a Christian without Christ.

Good News for a Woman

What struck her most was that salvation was free, and that it was for women.

All her life she had been taught that happiness had to be earned by merit, through rituals, pilgrimages, and gifts to Brahmans. As a woman, she had been taught that liberation was simply not available to her. She might, by serving her husband as a god, earn a better birth, and in some distant future life be born a Brahman man, and only then begin the long work of attaining release. And the Christianity she had first embraced had not really changed that picture. She had thought, she said, that forgiveness depended on repentance and resolution, and that baptism itself washed sin away. These, she wrote, were ideas “akin to Hindu mode of religious thought.”

Now she read the Bible differently. “The Bible says that God does not wait for me to merit His love, but heaps it upon me without my deserving it.” She quoted Paul: “But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ASV).

How good, how indescribably good! What good news — for me, a woman; a woman born in India among Brahmins, who hold out no hope for me and the like of me. The Bible declares that Christ did not reserve this great salvation for a particular caste or sex. …

No caste, no sex, no work, and no man was to be depended upon to get salvation, this everlasting life; but God gave it freely to any one and every one who believed on His Son.

There is a direct line between this discovery and everything she did afterwards. The famine children she rescued, the widows she sheltered, the women she took from the streets, did not have to earn anything. Neither had she.

The Holy Spirit

In the years that followed, her faith deepened again. In about 1895 she read the life of Amanda Smith, an African American evangelist who had been born a slave. When Amanda Smith was converted, she said she had been delivered twice: once from slavery and once from sin. Ramabai wrote that she too had been delivered twice: “first delivered from the slavery of man’s opinions, from the fear of man which holds so many of my dear people, and a second time from the bondage of sin.”

Reading Amanda Smith’s account of her spiritual life, Ramabai felt her need of “the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit.” She heard an English evangelist, Gelson Gregson, preach in Bombay on the text “I am crucified with Christ,” as her Bible put it, and in April 1895, at a camp meeting at Lonavla in the hills above Bombay, she asked him to pray with her. Later that day, she wrote, she became conscious of the Spirit’s presence in her. A year later she brought fifteen of her own girls to the same camp meeting.

The First Baptisms

In the summer of 1895, a group of girls at the Sharada Sadan asked to be baptised. Ramabai was in an impossible position. She had promised her American supporters that the school would not make converts, Her biographer Helen Dyer says she would have preferred them to wait while they were pupils. By her own account to Boston, she gave the permission they asked for, but told them that she could not keep them in the school after baptism unless her American friends consented. Some twelve girls were baptised, in the Methodist church in Poona. On 26 July 1895 six of them wrote to the Association in Boston.

We are very glad to be able to tell you that our hearts have been quite changed and made new by the gracious Lord, and we came out and confessed our faith in Christ. This we have done out of our own free choice. No human being could have wrought this change in us, and no one could have induced us to become Christians. To God alone we give the glory, and hold no one except ourselves responsible for our change of faith.

They offered to stay on as servants, and did. They signed themselves “your grateful children.” Their names were Vittiabai, Sarasvatibai, Sukhadabai, Manikarnikabai, Rukminibai, and Bhimabai. They were the first fruits. There would be many more.