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

She used the word used in speaking to a servant and then, addressing the onlookers, went on, pointing to me in a very disdainful fashion. “Does she think I bore the contamination of her presence—she who eats flesh and mingles with low-caste people—for the sake of her soul-deluding Book medicine? Let her go. I have no use for her. I have no use for her Lord Jesus. Let them both go!”

Were the Scraps accomplishing anything? Amy wondered. “Do not say, ‘Oh, they interest us.’ I do not care about ‘interesting’ you. One’s being in India is costing too much to make it worthwhile to spend a day in a month, ten months in the year, in merely interesting you. . . . Nothing is worth doing at all, nothing is worth writing, which does not do something which will last.”

A few lines from On the Threshold of Central Africa, by M. Coillard, spoke for Amy: “If those friends who blame . . . could see what we see, and feel what we feel, they would be the first to wonder that those redeemed by Christ should be so backward in devotion, and know so little of the spirit of self-sacrifice. They would be ashamed of the hesitations that hinder us. But we must remember that it was not by interceding for the world in glory that Jesus saved it. He gave Himself. Our prayers for the evangelization of the world are but a bitter irony so long as we only give of our superfluity and draw back before the sacrifice of ourselves.”

1. Amy Carmichael, Things as They Are, p. 158.

Chapter 20

A Small and Desolate Mite

On March 7, 1901, something happened which “caused a new thing to begin and I was rooted for life.”

Amy and the Starry Cluster had been itinerating in Tinnevelly District for about a year. One of the villages where they camped was Dohnavur (“Rhyme Doh with No, na with Ah, vur with Poor”). Dohnavur had been established in 1827 by Charles Theophilus Ewart Rhenius, a man of powerful influence in the missionary history of Tinnevelly. Although a Prussian Lutheran with pietist leanings, Rhenius had been sent to India by the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society in 1811 when English volunteers were few and far between. He has been called one of the ablest, most clear-sighted, practical, and zealous missionaries India has ever seen. He was the first to promote the education of women, establish Christian societies for charitable purposes, assemble the people of every Christian village for morning and evening prayer.

Wary of encouraging a merely nominal Christianity, Rhenius saw to it that every individual was drilled in doctrine, memorized Scripture, and was examined before being baptized. He helped to found organizations such as the Native Bible and Tract Society and the Native Missionary Society which sent local people to villages where there were no Christians. Congregations developed independence and a thoroughly Tamil, as distinct from colonial or European, cultural idiom. Perhaps most significant of all, he saw the caste system, on which India’s entire culture and economy rested, as incompatible with Christianity and tried to influence believers to break it. Wherever the Gospel of Christ is preached, believed, and scrupulously obeyed, there is trouble. Rhenius’s stand caused trouble. Christians were (quite justly) accused of intolerance, and became themselves simply intolerable. Persecution reached such a pitch that Villages of Refuge were needed. Some of Rhenius’s friends in Europe sent funds to support such villages.

Suddenly, twelve years after his arrival, the CMS dismissed Rhenius and took over his work. The reasons for such a drastic step lay in his being a Lutheran who ordained Indians in violation of apostolic succession as defined by Anglicans. Not wanting to hinder in any way the work of God, he bowed out. Later, at his people’s urgent request, he returned and struggled on, attempting to complete his Tamil grammar and his Bible translation, but died six years later before he was fifty.

Dohnavur was one of the Villages of Refuge. Rhenius named it in honor of a certain Count Dohna who had sent money for the persecuted Christians.

When Amy and her Band came upon it, it was “a bare sunburnt spot out on the plains under the mountains to the west, a huddle of huts and small houses round a fairly big, whitewashed church with, beyond low mud walls, an old ramshackle bungalow built of mud bricks and visibly falling to pieces.” Many of the Christians there were nominal ones, descendants of those who had “gone over” during the sweeping Christian movements early in the previous century. This was not the sort of Christian Amy and her Band, any more than Rhenius, wanted to multiply. They were laying down their lives to see true faith born—in mere churchgoers as well as in Hindus, some of whom seemed to be earnest inquirers.

On March 4 the Band had left Dohnavur, traveling by night as usual, to return to their old “battlefield” in the east, the village of Pannaivilai. Not far from there, in Great Lake, was a Hindu temple. They had often tried to speak to the devadasis, women who served in the temples. Swami Harshananda, in All About Hindu Temples,1 describes their function: “This system was opposed by the brahmanas. However, due to the pressure of the kings and noblemen it came to stay. The girls chosen to become devadasis would be married to the deity in the temple in a ceremonial way. Their main duties consisted of cleaning the temple, fanning the image, carrying lights, singing and dancing before the deity and devotees and so on.

“The system might have started some time during the third century A.D. It soon degenerated into prostitution, thanks to the notorious human weaknesses.”

Sometimes the Band had seen little girls, bought as infants from their mothers and reared in the temple-women’s house where, by precept and example, they learned the “trade.” These children were “gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways, almost always more refined in