1.07.03. Book 7: 3. Shaken Out
3. SHAKEN OUT
SLOWLY across Ragland’s first spring as a minister of Christ crept the long shadow, as the news slowly travelling home became known all over England. The may in the green hedges must have withered for him as that shadow spread and deepened. But it never came as an influence that bore a compelling word-and he continued to walk up and down the college grass plot, laboriously concocting his poor little sermons as if battles and blood and tears and the immeasurable sins and woes of nations wrestling in the darkness were dreadful dreams-no more than that.
Small wonder, therefore, that those who looked with God upon the world, and heard voices in events that were dumb to others, could not be silent, but spoke, and so spoke that the pleasant men in their pleasant rooms dared not stay in them any longer, but rose and went forth with the Word of Life to the peoples of the East.
One such was Henry Venn, Hon. Secretary of the C.M.S. A page from Knight’s memoirs is like a snapshot photograph. One day a stranger called to see him, and as it happened, on the African mail-day, when every moment was precious. The Secretary was busy with his despatches when the visitor was announced. He came to complain of the ministrations provided for passing tourists in a favourite health-resort, and to propose that a church should be built. "How was this to be accomplished?" "Nothing is simpler. Put the church into the hands of some well-known persons as trustees and the money will be easily raised." But the visitor was not satisfied; he did not wish it to be a party matter. "I have given you my advice," was the reply. The other stammered and hesitated with all the marks of a weak man who had a weak cause. "They wanted a man that didn’t belong to a party-not a party man. Besides," he feebly added, "the clergyman [a German missionary] says, ’Let us bray.’’’ It was too trivial, and the slur on a good man too unkind. Henry Venn grasped the arms of his chair, drew it close to the table, shifted his letters to and fro, and, looking his interviewer straight in the face, said, "I know, Sir, of but two parties in the world, Timists and Eternists. I am an Eternist." The gentleman picked up his hat and left Mr. Venn to complete his despatches. To Cambridge now came Henry Venn, the Eternist, and Ragland received him in his rooms and gathered a few men to listen to him, little knowing what would come of it. For what came was a shaking of the soul such as he had never conceived could be. A power had him in its grasp, and mightily it dealt with him. It shook him free from the silken threads of his very respectable life, it shook him out of Cambridge and, what was even more amazing to himself, it shook him out of all his small pet habits and desires, his very flesh had to rise and get out into a most uncomfortable world. He hated foreign travel. He was elected to travel with very few sitting-down periods right on to the end. Verily, Venn was a wakener of men.
Once before, like a wild bird flying unbidden through his quiet rooms, the thought-the disturbing thought-of the Christless peoples of the earth had come to him; but he had refused it, and the light within him departed.
Eight months had passed so. He was almost as many a man since then has been, called, but deaf to the call which, once trifled with, rarely comes again. "I was not willing then; I missed my chance; and now, when I would go, it is too late." Who that knows anything of God’s dealings with men but has had to meet and mourn with and try to comfort such, stricken with the sorrow of a great chance lost?
Ragland went forward at God’s sign. He wrote to Henry Venn on June 2, 1845, definitely offering for work abroad. Seven months later he landed in India.
Madras received him with her usual welcome, a glory of white surf along a shore which seems endless. Through streets where his eager, observant eyes saw many a forehead with Vishnu’s sign or smeared with Siva’s ashes, he passed to a house in the heart of the city from whose flat roof one might look down into the courtyard of a Hindu temple. And with a great quietness and earnestness almost awful, the new life began.
It was then early in 1846, three years after the close of the Afghan war, and he was thirty years old.