A MODERN PENTECOST
As the preachers went about on their fields toward the close of the famine, they saw that hundreds were ready for baptism. In villages where heretofore they had been received in a half-hearted kind of way they now found an open door. People to whom they had talked many a time about Jesus Christ in the years before the famine now told them that they believed in Him.
Those early Ongole preachers were a remarkable group of men. There were several among them who stood head and shoulders above their fellows, born leaders of men. Others, more retiring, were spiritually-minded to an eminent degree. People said of them, “They have faith; when they pray to their God He hears them.” Several had the gift of the evangelist; they went where others had not been, and left behind them, as they journeyed, many a village where it was said, “It would be well to join this new religion.” The majority of the preachers settled as pastors, making some central village their headquarters, and directing their efforts to all the region round about.
Some of his best men the Missionary placed at the outposts, where they had to hold their own far away from the mission station. Many a man developed ability under the stress of circumstances. The wave of enthusiasm that carried with it the strong did not leave behind the weak; they too pressed forward with a strength not their own. The esprit-de-corps of those years must have been of unusual intensity.
Four years before the famine began, a Theological Seminary was opened in Ramapatam. Of the early workers a number were together at school in Ongole for a year. They studied, but they knew that the days were precious. Messages came from far and near, sent by those who had heard only enough to make them eager to hear more. The day came when the Missionary told them that they must go; there were too many calls. He promised them another opportunity for study, but it never came. They went forth, and carried such burdens that never again could they lay them aside even for a season.
Their preaching was characterized neither by profound thinking nor by brilliant oratory. It was just the story of Christ and Him crucified told over and over again. Much as, in the days of primitive Christianity, simple but earnest men told the sublime story of the life and death of Christ to every one, so these men went about making Christ the centre of their thoughts and words. A spirit of tender allegiance to Christ was abroad among the early Ongole Christians that is seldom found among men. They could sit together and weep like children as they repeated to each other the story of the suffering of the Christ. “Such was our love for Him in those days,” they said to me.
And now these men came to the Missionary to talk with him about the hundreds, even thousands, who were ready for baptism. But he always said, “Wait till the famine is over.” Word had gone out some time ago that no more famine-money would be issued in Ongole; still he feared that the hope of further help might form a motive in the minds of some. During fifteen months there had not been a single baptism. But he knew his field; he had refused large companies who came and asked for baptism. He knew that when once the flood-gates were opened none would be able to stay the tide. A letter came from the Mission Secretary in Boston: “What is this that I hear of your refusing to baptize those who sincerely ask for the ordinance? Who has given you a right to do this?”
In June, 1878, the Missionary wrote to his assistants to come to Vellumpilly, ten miles north of Ongole, where there was a travellers’ rest-house by the side of the Gundlacumma River, and a grove of tamarind trees, that they might re-organize their work. As cholera and small-pox were still prevalent in the villages, the danger of bringing these diseases to Ongole was thus avoided. He asked them to bring with them only those Christians who had urgent matters to lay before him and to leave the converts behind. Contrary to orders, the converts followed the preachers, and when the Missionary came to Vellumpilly he was met by a multitude who asked for baptism.
He mounted a wall, where he could look into their faces, and told them he had no further help to give them, and they must return home. They cried: “We do not want help. By the blisters on our hands we can prove to you that we have worked and will continue to work. If the next crop fail we shall die. We want to die as Christians. Baptize us therefore!” He hesitated—again the same cry. Then he withdrew and talked with the preachers, who, as the spokesmen of the people, repeated their request. He dared not refuse longer those who begged to be received into the Church of Christ.
On the first day all gathered under a large banyan-tree, sitting close together on the sand. Many voices tried to join in the hymns that had become general favourites. The volume of sound was discordant, but it gave evidence that men were very much in earnest. And then the Missionary preached on those words that all had learned during the famine—“Come unto Me, all ye that labour.” For an hour and a half he talked, and none grew weary; he had borne their trouble with them, and now he could talk out of the fulness of an experience in which all had a part. This sermon struck the key-note of those days by the side of the Gundlacumma River.
Early next morning an enquiry meeting on a large scale began. The Missionary told the preachers to separate the people, each one taking those who belonged to his special field under one of the trees. There were many groups thus scattered; some counted hundreds, some only a few. Over each was the preacher, and to assist him he had the Madiga headmen of the villages represented, and the heads of households. The tribal character of the movement made itself felt, for each group was again subdivided into villages, and then into families. But this gregarious character of a tribal movement had its influence only to a certain extent. There was not a man or woman who was not called upon to give evidence that they had entered upon a new life. The individual had to stand for himself, and each one was made to feel that such was the case.
I asked the old preachers many questions about those days at Vellumpilly. One of them told me: “I was on one side with about one hundred people. The Dora came to me and said: ‘Do you know all these people?’ I said: ‘I do not know them all.’ He looked them over with me; he had been in their villages. He told me to send away all those whom I did not know, but they would not go, they stayed around the camp. But I wrote down the names of those only whom I knew.” This was evidently the general mode of proceeding.
They told me the story of one of the assistant preachers, who to this day likes to magnify his office, and showed the same characteristic then. He had brought a crowd of people with him, five hundred at least. The Missionary saw them, and called for the preacher who was responsible for that part of the field. “For how many of these people can you bear witness that they are really Christians?” He selected about ten; for the rest he hesitated to take any responsibility.
It was an evil day for the assistant preacher. Some plain words were said to him by the Dora and he and all his company were sent home. One of my oft-repeated questions was: “How could you tell that a man or woman was a Christian?” They said: “We had many ways of telling. When men and women prayed and sang hymns, we knew that Divine life was in them. But we knew, too, when they stopped drinking sarai, and fighting, and eating carrion, and working on Sundays, there was a change in them, and we could tell.” Most of those who were baptized at Vellumpilly were really believers before the famine, but for some reason they had held back. The preachers could tell by the attitude of responsiveness that a change had been wrought. They seem to have felt more care and anxiety about those who were refused the ordinance than those who received it. Hundreds must have been sent away. Even to the present time there are villages where the preachers are greeted with words like these: “We came to Vellumpilly to have our ‘juttus’ cut off, and to be baptized, but you refused. Now go away to those whom you then accepted. We do not want you.”
On the first day, July 2nd, 1878, a beginning was made—614 were baptized; on the next day 2,222 followed; on the third day there were 700 more,—making 3,536 in three days. The multitude gathered on the bank of the Gundlacumma River, where the water at this season of the year is fairly deep. The six ordained preachers took turns, two officiating at a time. The names of the candidates were read. Without delay and without confusion one followed the other. As one preacher pronounced the formula: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” the other preacher had a candidate before him, ready again to speak those words, sacred in the history of the Church, and to baptize him likewise. And thus it was possible to immerse 2,222 in one day.
The Missionary stood by, helping and directing; he did not baptize any one during those days. He represented the link between this event on the bank of an Indian river and the sentiment of the Christian world. There would be joy and gratitude in many hearts at home, he knew. But critics, too, would not be far away, who would charge him with undue haste in admitting into the Church of Christ a multitude who could not have been taught more than the most elementary outline of Christian teaching. Years of excessive toil were at hand, to be spent in the Christian training of this multitude. More were coming. Before the year was over 9,606 members had been added to the Church at Ongole, making a total membership of 13,000. And the years that followed were but a continuation of that year. Once again, in 1890, there was a similar event, when 1,671 were baptized in one day.
But what relation did the famine have to this mass-movement? The distress of those two years—the pangs of starvation and the ravages of pestilence—undoubtedly made many a soul turn to that great and merciful God, of whom the Missionary and his assistants preached not only in words but in deeds. God, in His mighty power, can make even a calamity like famine serve as a means to bring about His own Divine ends. But while the famine was one of the conditions which favoured a mass-movement toward Christianity among the Madigas, it was not a normal, healthful condition.
It seems to me that a far more prominent place has been given to the famine, as a condition favourable to this movement, than it deserves. It is true, first came the famine, with its relief-camp at the canal, and then came the baptism of thousands. There is here a temporal succession, which seems to indicate the relation of cause and effect. But I believe the movement toward Christianity would have taken place in the same proportion if there had not been a famine. The Pentecostal day on the bank of the Gundlacumma River would not have been but for the famine; but those same converts would in all probability have come, in smaller companies at a time, but as the outcome of a steady, normal growth.
The famine ushered in suddenly the second period in the history of the Ongole mission. Abruptness is inimical to the principle of growth in the moral and spiritual, as well as the natural world. During the ten years preceding the famine, the preachers did their pioneer work under favourable circumstances, and the Missionary could widen his borders and strengthen his work throughout. There was normal growth, and the converts came as fast as the mission could care for them. The famine and that which followed was an overwhelming experience. After the veteran preachers had told me much of the years before the famine, and I asked: “Now tell me about the years after the famine,” they asked in turn: “What is there to tell? Did not thousands come?” The events were of such huge proportion they could not single out incidents and remember detail.
Starvation implies an experience that is not an elevating process to members of even a strong and noble race. The degraded Madiga was rendered more degraded by the greed with which he sought for a morsel of food. If he had had any possessions, a buffalo, a goat, he had lost them. Emaciated, sick, poor beyond expression, he had to try to regain his footing when the famine was over. Any element of sturdy manhood in him had suffered a shock; he was ready to lean upon any one for support. In this condition the mission took him and sought to make a man of him. It is safe to say that some of the most difficult problems which have confronted the mission since that time were born of the famine.
As men of the early days of the mission told me their individual experience, I could mark the steps essential in leading to conversion; steps conscious to the Western mind, conscious also to these Madiga men and women. In their own way they had come to a conviction of sin—there was repentance, and there were faith and justification. When the mass-movement began, these steps were taken unconsciously; the individual was carried along to some extent by the multitude. The Madiga community was shaken to the foundation; individual experience was merged in the whole. But pervading all there was the element of that deep spiritual life of the ten years preceding the famine. It was as the leaven that leavened the whole lump.
But the Madigas forsook their Gurus of the Rajayogi sect. They brought to the Missionary the idols that were theirs in the Ramanuja sect. Whole bandy-loads of stone images of the serpent, of the phallus of the Siva cult, were carted into the compound at Ongole. The family of the Matangi consulted with those who had contributed toward the expense of her initiation, and with their permission the Christian preacher broke the stick of the Matangi into pieces and tore the basket into shreds. Pots, decorated with shells, sacred to Ellama, were smashed by the hundred. It was a religious upheaval that swept away the old cults of the Madigas with a powerful hand, and there was nothing left in their stead but Jesus alone.
Every degree of spiritual life and energy was represented in the years that followed. There were high courage, persecutions unflinchingly borne, and noble example set. But there was also spiritual apathy, mental and moral stagnation. Bangarapu Thatiah brought a woman to me, leading a little boy by the hand, five years after the famine. “This woman,” he said, “has been an honour to me and to my Master, Jesus Christ, all over my field. When she became a Christian, her husband said but little. Soon her eldest son died, a bright lad of sixteen. Her husband began to ill-treat her, and to say the boy had died because she refused to worship the old swamis. Then another child died. He insisted that she must forsake the new religion; he tied her to a tree and beat her; he dragged her about the ground by the hair, so that bunches of her hair remained in his hand. Through it all her faith in God and His mercy has not failed. Her husband has left her and gone away with another woman. Take her into school.”
This instance is one of the bright lights that illumine the scene. Does any one care to enquire about the shadows, the spurious characters that have entered in, the crass ignorance and the deep degradation? I was out on tour among the villages with my husband some years ago. In the shade of a tamarind grove he was preaching to a crowd of Madigas sitting before him. Twenty Christians from a village where nearly all had reverted to heathenism were before him. He had been in their village in the morning, had seen the swamis to which they were again making puja. The men had let their “juttus” grow. The women went about dirty and uncombed, quarrelling and using evil words to each other. Carrion had been brought into the village. There were filth and squalor beyond telling.
The Missionary described the condition in which he had found them, and then broke out into an appeal: “Oh, men! I am not ashamed to be the Guru of poor people, for Christ said He had come that the sick might be healed and the poor have the gospel preached to them. But when I sometimes see you in your villages, where you are weak Christians, then I have a pain in my mind, and I ask myself: ‘Why has God chosen me to be the Guru of such dirty people?’” The men looked at each other, and the women involuntarily stroked down their unkempt hair.
But I could see, as I watched the faces of these lowest specimens of an Indian Pariah tribe, that, blunt as they were to any kind of teaching, they were not without responsiveness. I could see the shame in their faces. They were willing to listen, and this responsiveness proved that the spark of Divine life was there, for the spiritually dead cannot hear. But alas for the steep road out of many centuries of almost brute existence!
While the Missionary comes to one village of this kind, he comes to many where he can be proud of his people. Clean and tidy in their appearance and in their houses, they come out to meet him, the heads of households coming forward to do the honours of the occasion. A school-house in the village, and children proudly holding slates under their arms, give evidence of the status of the village. The Munsiff and Karnam come over to say a respectful salaam to the Dora, because the conduct of the Christians has taught them to honour this Dora and his religion. Crowds come to hear him preach, and Sudras are among them, sitting attentively on one side, saying, “It is a good religion. Let us listen.”
There is an atmosphere of spiritual life and energy abroad in such a village. And the question comes: “Is there any power on earth, save Christianity, that could thus uplift a community within the short space of one generation?”