01 Early Life

Chapter 1

EARLY LIFE The subject of this brief biography was born at Lowell, Washington County, in the State of Ohio, and was the first girl in a family of four brothers and four sisters. Already blessed with a son, we may be sure the hearts of the parents accorded a warm welcome to their first little daughter. Happily, their joy was clouded by no prevision of the special lot of suffering awaiting her. In this quiet home, watched over by her parents, and surrounded by an atmosphere of love and happiness, the years of Mary Reed’s childhood glided rapidly away. When about sixteen, an age critical to the moral character, her nature was first awakened to the reality of the things that are not seen, but are eternal. As the young and supple seedling is bent to the shape that the sturdy oak bears in after years, so by the sweet constrainings of the Divine Spirit, the fresh young life was gladly yielded to her Saviour, and thus early was commenced the service which is now being consummated among her afflicted fellow-sufferers in India. From the time of her first surrender to the claims of Christ, she appears to have realized that she had been saved to serve, and that if she received, it was in order to bestow. An intense longing that others should share her newly-found joy induced her to engage earnestly in every form of Christian effort open to her. She was led to adopt the profession of a public schoolteacher, and for some ten years she pursued this calling with success, availing herself of the many opportunities her position afforded to impart to her pupils the knowledge of heavenly, as well as earthly, things. May we not see in this experience a providential preparation for the work in after years, of the organization and supervision of a large institution, peopled by those who, although men and women in years, she loves to speak of as her "little ones," or still more frequently as " Christ’s little ones ! " But the Master had need of her for more difficult service than teaching work in America. She became conscious, dimly at first, of an inner voice pleading on behalf of her sisters in the Zenanas of India, still sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death. With the true humility which still characterizes her, she hesitated to believe that it was really a Divine call to leave all and follow whithersoever the Spirit led. But she was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In spite of conscious weakness and a deep distrust of her fitness for such high and holy work, she cried at length, like Isaiah of old, "Here am I, send me," and also, like him, she heard the Divine command, "Go, and tell this people." In connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church of America, there is an old-established and well-organized Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, and to the Directors of this Miss Reed offered her services. They were gladly accepted, and her name was added to the roll of her sisters, then numbering forty or fifty, but since increased to 200, who are being supported by this earnest and energetic body. To the Cincinnati Branch fell the privilege of being represented by Mary Reed, and the loving but sad farewells having been said, she reached India in November, 1884. This surrender, on the part of the dear home circle, though it cost them many a pang, was endured for the Gospel’s sake, and must, in some measure, have prepared them for the greater renunciation, then hidden in the darkness of the future. At the Society’s North India Conference in January, 1885, Miss Reed was allocated to Cawnpore, for work in the Zenanas of the city where the white marble angel marks the site of the well into which the treacherous Nana Sahib flung the bodies, dead and dying, of 125 English women and children. It is surely a Christlike recompense that into a city stained within living memory with so foul a crime as this, Christian women should carry with prayer and patient labor the glad tidings of redeeming love. But not immediately was this herald of the Cross to proclaim her Evangel to the women of Cawnpore. At this juncture her health gave way, and a period of rest and change became imperative. In unconscious pursuance of the divinely ordered plan of her life, Pithoragarh, in the bracing climate of the Himalayas, was selected for the purpose. Here she spent a few weeks of earnest preparation for the work then awaiting her. In addition to study of the language, and observation of missionary work being carried on in the neighborhood, she had an opportunity of seeing the very spot in which was to be erected (two years later), the Asylum over which she is to-day presiding with marked ability and success. Her pity was powerfully awakened on learning that within a comparatively small radius of this lovely spot, some five hundred lepers were to be found in a condition of utter misery and hopelessness. With restored health, she gladly returned to Cawnpore to enter upon the work to which she had been appointed, and which for four years she was permitted to prosecute with zeal and energy, and not without tokens of success. No doubt this may be regarded as a further stage of training and preparation for the work, so peculiarly difficult from a merely human point of view, which the providence of God had assigned to her. From Cawnpore she was transferred to Gonda, where for twelve months she taught in the Girls’ Boarding School. By this time her health was seriously undermined, and in January, 1890, she returned to America in search of renewed strength for further service.