Fire

“And it shall be in the last days, saith God, I will pour forth of my Spirit upon all flesh: And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, And your young men shall see visions, And your old men shall dream dreams: Yea and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days Will I pour forth of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

— Acts 2:17-18, ASV

News from Wales

In the last weeks of 1904, news reached India of a revival in Wales. In chapels across the Welsh valleys, ordinary people, many of them young, were praying for hours, confessing their sins publicly, and being converted in their thousands. Ramabai read the reports with joy. She had prayed at Keswick for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Christians of India, and she wondered whether this might be the beginning of an answer.

In January 1905 she told the girls at Mukti about Wales and asked for volunteers to meet with her every morning to pray for revival in India. About seventy came forward. In A Testimony she described what they prayed for.

I was led by the Lord to start a special prayer circle at the beginning of 1905. There were about seventy of us who met together each morning and prayed for the true conversion of all the Indian Christians, including ourselves, and for a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all Christians of every land.

Note the words “including ourselves.” They did not pray for revival as something for other people. They prayed for themselves first.

The circle grew. By June, Dyer records, five hundred and fifty were meeting twice a day. Ramabai asked for volunteers from the Bible school to give up their ordinary studies and go out to preach in the villages, and thirty young women offered themselves. They were meeting daily to pray for power for their work when the revival came.

Fire

Minnie Abrams had been teaching the girls about the baptism of the Holy Spirit as “power for service.” One morning, late in June 1905, she was woken by one of the older girls. “Come over and rejoice with us,” the girl said. One of the young women had received the Holy Spirit. “I saw the fire, ran across the room for a pail of water, and was about to pour it over her when I discovered she was not on fire.”

When Abrams arrived, all the girls in that compound were on their knees, weeping, praying, and confessing their sins. The next evening, as Ramabai was teaching from the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel “in her usual quiet way,” the whole congregation broke into prayer, so loudly that she had to stop. Girls of every age wept and confessed their sins. Some saw visions. Some prayed for hours.

“From that time,” Minnie Abrams wrote, “our Bible school was turned into an inquiry room. Girls, stricken down under conviction of sin while in school, or in the industrial school, or at their work, were brought to us. Lessons were suspended, and we all, teachers and students, entered the school conducted by the Holy Spirit.”

For days, and then weeks, Mukti was transformed. There was prayer all night in the compounds. Girls who had come out of famine and abuse confessed thefts and lies and hatreds, and made restitution, and were filled with joy. The girls called it a “baptism of fire,” a burning sensation that the girls said was almost unbearable, followed by peace. Hundreds prayed aloud together, the sound rising and falling “like the rolling thunder.” One of the workers wrote of a twelve-year-old girl whose plain face had become radiant, and who did not know it: “She is occupied with Jesus.”

Ramabai’s Part

It is worth noticing what Ramabai herself did, and did not do. According to Macnicol, she took little part in the more dramatic experiences. She once felt the Holy Spirit like a burning flame within her, and once, praying alone, she found herself speaking some sentences in Hebrew. When the girls prayed with loud crying, she prayed with them, but quietly. She did not lead the way in the ecstatic side of the revival, and she did not discourage it.

At first she did not want it publicised. About a month after the revival began she was asked for permission to publish an account of it, and refused, fearing that publicity would spoil the work. She fell into a time of depression. When the workers prayed together about it, she came to believe that she had been wrong to withhold the glory from God. She allowed the story to be told, and accounts were printed in the Bombay Guardian and elsewhere.

Then she did something characteristic. She took a band of her girls to Poona, and there, before Europeans and Indians, Christian and Hindu, she confessed that she had “neglected her opportunities of preaching Christ boldly.” After that, praying bands went out from Mukti to orphanages, schools, and mission stations across western India, led by Minnie Abrams, by Manorama, and by others. Their purpose, Ramabai said, was “prayer for the Christian people living in the places to which the bands go.” “Our work will bear lasting fruit,” she told them, “if we pray more and work less.” Before long, some seven hundred girls and women were involved in the praying bands, and about sixty went out every day. A circular letter asked Christians everywhere to pray by name for others, and in time more than twenty-nine thousand people were being prayed for by name at Mukti. “When we were Hindus,” she explained, “we used to repeat one or two thousand names of the gods daily. … Why should we not, as Christians, be able to pray for many hundreds of people by name?”

In November 1905 she closed the school and all ordinary work for ten days of prayer. It ended, a worker wrote, in a “tremendous time of ‘house-cleaning,’” when things that had been stolen were returned to their owners.

Tongues

The revival at Mukti began in June 1905. That was nearly a year before the famous meetings at Azusa Street in Los Angeles in April 1906, which are often counted as the beginning of the Pentecostal movement. For that reason Mukti is sometimes called one of the sources of Pentecostalism, and historians of the movement have written about it at length.

But it is important to be accurate. The revival of 1905 was marked by repentance, confession, prayer, visions, and joy. Speaking in tongues, which Pentecostals came to see as the sign of the baptism of the Spirit, did not appear at Mukti until December 1906, after reports of Azusa Street had reached India. The historian Gary McGee has traced this carefully. Minnie Abrams’s little book The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, printed at Mukti in 1906, was later read by missionaries in Chile and helped to begin a Pentecostal movement there.

Ramabai herself never made tongues a test of anything. When the revival’s physical features were criticised by Christians who watched from outside, she defended them in the Mukti Prayer Bell in 1907, but she put them firmly in their place.

Love, perfect divine love, is the only and most necessary sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But other gifts, such as the power to heal, to speak with tongues, to prophesy, are not to be discarded. Indeed we should seek from God such gifts as will enable us to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ with power and draw men unto Him. I have to learn a great deal more than I know at present. So I shall wait upon the Lord and ask Him to teach me and lead me as He will.

“I looked upon these features with much concern for some time,” she admitted, “but did not try to interfere with God’s work in any way.”

Not everyone was convinced. An Anglican missionary who studied the revival concluded that its physical accompaniments were largely “to be explained physiologically rather than as due to the direct influence of the Holy Spirit.” But he also concluded that Ramabai had “showed herself wonderfully wise in the way she fostered and guided the entire movement,” and that its permanent results were real: “the true conversion of hundreds of women.” Paul had written to the Corinthians, who also prized spiritual gifts, that without love they were nothing: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1, ASV). Ramabai had learned the same lesson.

Daughters and Handmaidens

The words at the head of this chapter are from Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, quoting the prophet Joel. God’s Spirit would be poured out on everyone, “your sons and your daughters,” and even on servants: “on my servants and on my handmaidens.” In the Hindu world Ramabai grew up in, a woman was forbidden to study the Vedas, and was taught that she could not attain liberation as a woman. At Mukti in 1905, the Spirit of God fell first on famine orphans and former child-widows and outcast girls, and they went out across India to pray and to preach. It was, she believed, exactly what Joel had promised. The handmaidens were prophesying.