A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

in their part of the great Mission Trust. Will they believe that this thought presses, and that the more conscious of it we are, the more grateful we shall be for their prayer? Please pray! Please ask that the Master may stoop to use a thing so simple and so small, to lift even one into the Love wherewith He loves.”

Rereading the book later she was, like most authors, not happy with it. Tolstoy is said to have lamented, when he read War and Peace years after it first appeared, “This must all be done over.” In Amy’s copy of From Sunrise Land she wrote, “Bad rhymes in parts, bad writing all through.”

The D.O.M. was overjoyed to have her at home again, believing at first that she had been “given back” to him. He recovered from the stroke, but soon knew that he would have to relinquish her once more since she had no intention of staying. The doctors’ verdict that the tropics were not to be considered again did not in the least deter her. If any mission anywhere would take her, she was going.

In the spring a letter came from a friend in Bangalore, India. The climate there, she wrote, was healthy and delightful. Good news for Amy’s friends. Bad news for Amy—“it sounded much too easy.” On second thought, her going there would “lighten things for those who found it hard to see that I should go anywhere,” so she applied to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and went to London in May for an interview. She was not an Anglican, but was warmly recommended by Keswick leaders who were Anglican clergymen. In an informal meeting on July 26 at Keswick she was accepted. The next day she spoke at a missionary meeting in the tent. “Who can forget,” wrote a clergyman, “Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael’s farewell address, ere she left for her life of sacrifice in India, as she unrolled a ‘ribband of blue’ with the golden words, ‘Nothing too precious for Jesus?’”

Amy was with her dear “Fatherie” on his seventieth birthday, but both had to face the imminent, wrenching, second parting. “Of the blistering days before I sailed and of the goodbye I will say nothing. We shall all be together soon in the Father’s Country.”

She sailed on October 11, “with many a backward look at Japan,” and a few wistful ones at China, the country to which she had felt drawn ever since hearing Hudson Taylor speak of its millions’ spiritual need.

The country whose shores she reached in November of 1895 had been under British rule since 1600. London merchants had had their eye on the riches of India’s spice trade, then under the control of Dutch privateers. Outraged when the price of a pound of pepper went up five shillings in 1599, a group of twenty-four merchants met to establish a small trading firm. The East India Company was chartered in December of that year by Queen Elizabeth I, giving them a monopoly of English trade with the “Indies,” which comprised China, India, and Indonesia. It was not only pepper they were after. Wondrous tales were told of gems the size of pigeons’ eggs, endless forests of pepper, indigo, cinnamon, and ginger, and potions guaranteeed to perpetuate youth and virility. In August of 1600 Captain William Hawkins anchored his galleon north of Bombay and set off inland to find the world’s most powerful monarch, the Great Mogul. The emperor granted him not only trading rights, but offered a beautiful girl (an Armenian Christian, it was claimed) from his harem.

Profits began to pour in, merchants flocked to other Indian ports, and, with Britain’s assurance that their object was “Trade, not territory, “they were welcomed. Predictably, conflicts arose with local authorities on whose territory the Company operated, and soon there were British forts in Bombay, Madras, Cuddalore, and Calcutta, to protect mercenary interests. England was “in over its head,” almost unwittingly committed to a policy of intervention in every aspect of Indian life. In 1757 General Robert Clive, with an army of two hundred English and three hundred Indian soldiers, defeated ten thousand Indian troops at Plassey, losing only twenty-three men.

For a hundred years conquest followed conquest, even though orders came from London to avoid “schemes of conquest and territorial expansion,” such schemes being “repugnant to the wish, honour, and policy of this nation.” Not all governors saw things in the same light. Social diseases such as gang robbery, slavery, infanticide, thuggee (the practice of murder and robbery by thugs) and suttee (the immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands) were taken by some of them as typical of the country’s life as a whole. Richard Wellesley, governor general from 1797 to 1805 and himself a campaigner against suttee, thought the natives “vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar, and stupid,” and therefore unworthy of any rights. “No greater blessing,” he held, “may be conferred on the native inhabitants of India than the extension of British authority, influence and power.” The modest trading company had become the sovereign.

While the Company regarded noninterference with Indian customs as most beneficial to its own interests, the Crown saw its responsibility to reform and civilize these “wily Asiatic intriguers,” men of “degrading superstitions,” as a divine assignment. Clash between Company and Crown was inevitable. If the British were going to “hew down the dense jungle of Hindooism” business might suffer, as the silver business suffered in Ephesus in New Testament times. Missionary work inhibited profiteering, so the Company forbade missionaries to evangelize. Yet the barbarous practices named above, together with the almost universal idolatry, offended the sensibilities of those Englishmen (among whom Radicals and Evangelicals were among the most influential) who had no immediate vested interests. These began to insist on reforms.

Certain benefits of British rule can hardly be denied—her legal, administrative, and educational institutions, her railways and, above all, her language, which became India’s common one. But like most of the “blessings” of civilization, they were mixed.