A Weaned Child

“Jehovah, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; Neither do I exercise myself in great matters, Or in things too wonderful for me. Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child with his mother, Like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

— Psalm 131:1-2, ASV

The Man Himself

We have followed Samuel Crowther’s life from Osogun to Lagos. Before we ask what it meant, it is worth pausing to look at the man himself: what he was like to live with, how he prayed, and what kept him going. The sources are uneven. Much of what we know of his character comes from his family and admirers, and they remembered what they wanted to remember. But there is also his own voice, in fifty years of journals and letters, and it is consistent.

Humility

Everyone who knew him spoke first of his humility. It was not a pose. It showed itself in small things. When he was addressed in letters as “My Lord,” as English bishops were, he had his son add a postscript to his reply: “Please address me Right Reverend Bishop, and never as My Lord.” If there was only one chair in a room and a schoolmaster came in, the bishop would get up and give him his seat. Dandeson once asked him why. “People, seeing me standing,” he said, “will very soon go and get me another seat, but will not be so quick, if ever they did think of getting one for a schoolmaster.”

He answered every letter himself, by hand, however trivial, and kept copies of both his letters and the replies. Looking up once from a pile of letters from people he did not know, he said: “These sort of letters should be carefully answered to lead the writers to a higher aim and nobler thoughts.” He taught his children to say “thank you” for the smallest kindness.

Paul told the Philippians to do “nothing through faction or through vainglory, but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself” (Philippians 2:3, ASV). Crowther took the instruction almost literally. The psalm at the head of this chapter is one of the shortest in the Bible. “Jehovah, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty.” The psalmist compares his soul to a weaned child with its mother: no longer crying for what it wants, but content to be near her. It is a picture of a man who had stopped demanding things of God and of others, and had learned to rest.

“I Know My Place”

His humility had a harder side, and it should not be passed over. In January 1884, in the middle of the troubles over the mission, he wrote to the society’s secretary a letter that is painful to read today:

I know my place as negro, but I have ever paid my respects to Europeans, whether old or young, missionaries or those in secular occupations, as the race of our benefactors, to whom we owe our bodily freedom and the spiritual privileges of the glorious liberty of the Christian religion.

He went on to ask for more European missionaries, to be “the chief workers under the superintendence of the European secretary,” because “the Europeans are better managers, their actions and report will be better confided in both out here and in England. We shall be content to work under their direction as in former years.”

How should we read this? It would be too simple to say that Crowther had absorbed the racism of his age and believed Africans inferior. His whole life argued the opposite, and so did much of what he wrote. He insisted to the end that Africa would be evangelised chiefly by Africans. He had trained, ordained, and defended an African clergy, and he protested when they were suspended over his head. He told the Royal Geographical Society that European interests shared the blame for closing the Delta’s rivers, and in his journals he rebuked Englishmen whose conduct shamed the civilisation they claimed to bring.

But it would also be too simple to say that the letter meant nothing. It was written by a man under great pressure, trying to save his mission by conceding what he could. And it reflects something real in him: a deep and lasting gratitude. He had been taken off a slave ship by English sailors, taught his letters by an Englishwoman, and made a bishop by English churchmen. “I owe so much to their fathers,” he said, when asked why he was so respectful to Europeans of every kind. That gratitude was genuine and honourable. But it also made it hard for him to stand up to Europeans when they were wrong, and some of them took advantage of it. The man who knew his place was surrounded, at the end, by younger men who were quite sure of theirs.

Prayer

He prayed constantly, and in the manner of an Anglican of his day: morning and evening prayer from the Prayer Book, family prayers, the Psalms. On the last morning of his life he went through his devotions as usual, and sat at his table with his Prayer Book and hymn book beside him. But he also prayed in the moment, silently, in times of danger. Once, when he feared that the Nupe king was about to order the mission out of Lokoja, he prayed, again and again, the prayer that Nehemiah prayed before the king of Persia. Nehemiah, asked by the king what he wanted, “prayed to the God of heaven” before he answered (Nehemiah 2:4, ASV). “The silent ejaculation of Nehemiah before Artaxerxes,” Crowther wrote, quoting Nehemiah’s words, “‘Grant him mercy in the sight of this man,’ was most applicable in my case, and was frequently offered.” To his surprise, the king raised the matter himself, and told him that the mission should stay. Crowther wrote in his journal: “This is an instance of an answer to prayer: ‘Before they call I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.’”

He believed that prayer was the chief tool of a missionary. As he had told the Christians of Freetown in 1864, just after his consecration, “the habit of prayer for help from above” is the weapon that prevails most in the work of the ministry, and “we are better fitted when we feel our incompetency to change a sinner’s heart.” It was the conviction of a man who had tried for decades to change hearts and knew he could not.

Patience

His patience was remarkable, and some thought excessive. A young African clergyman, J. Boyle, remembered an occasion in 1874 when he and another new missionary, fresh from college, accompanied the bishop on a visit to a king. They had sent word ahead, but no one came to meet them. They were shown to a verandah and kept waiting for a long time. The young men were indignant at the insult to their bishop. Crowther was calm. “My young friends,” he said, “you have to bear and forbear with these people. … In dealing with them you have to be armed with a threefold coat of mail called Patience.”

He also said, in the same breath, that the people were at best “nothing better than children” in some of their actions. It is the language of his time, and he used it of the people he loved and served. But the heart of the remark was not contempt. It was patience, and patience was the virtue that his critics lacked. The young men of 1890 had many virtues, but patience was not among them.

Scripture and Humour

His Bible was the foundation of everything. He knew it so well that in Abokko’s village, with no book to read, he and Dandeson took comfort on the Sunday by repeating passages of it from memory. His letters and journals are full of it, not as decoration but as the natural language of his thought. When something good happened, he raised his Ebenezer, the stone that Samuel set up after a victory, saying “Hitherto hath Jehovah helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12, ASV). When something bad happened, he looked, as he wrote in 1868, “above to the Hand which has ever overruled similar affairs.”

He was also funny, in a quiet way. His children remembered the performance of the Blucher shoes. His answer at Bonny, when he was offered a haunted patch of bush for a mission, was a joke: “leave us and juju to settle the remaining palaver.” He knew when not to take himself seriously, which is rarer in bishops than it should be.

An Eli?

Stock, in his history, admitted that Crowther might have been “an Eli in exercising discipline too lightly.” Eli was the old priest of Shiloh whose sons behaved disgracefully and whom he failed to restrain. It was a pointed comparison. But Stock added at once: “he was an Eli, too, in simplicity and sincerity of character.” And he wrote that Crowther “lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and scandal, yet no tongue, however malicious, of white man or black man, ventured to whisper reproach against his personal reputation.”

There is another side of Eli worth remembering. When the boy Samuel came to him with a hard message from God, Eli did not argue. He said: “It is Jehovah: let him do what seemeth him good” (1 Samuel 3:18, ASV). According to his son, those were the words that Crowther used in 1864, when Venn pressed the bishopric on him. They were the words of a weaned child.