1.07.07. Book 7: 7. Secretary

7. SECRETARY IN those days Secretaryship included the care of a congregation in a quarter of the city then called Black Town. The people to whom he ministered he loved with such affection that, as we shall see later, he proposed giving himself entirely to them. The sermon-making-and he had three to make a week-he did not love. Nor did he love those stiff little semi-social functions held "with a view to promote Christian unity and intercourse among the religious portions of the residents of Madras," which week by week, with ruthless punctuality, looked to him as their natural prey. It was then June 1847, a period politically not unlike the present. Have we ever caught ourselves, as we looked at some old print, wondering if people so quaint felt exactly as we do? The wood-cut in Perowne’s Memoir, with its respectable Mission house, and top-hatted gentlemen, exceedingly prim ladies, and stiff clerics walking soberly in the background, feels millenniums remote from us and our ways. Did these decorously buttoned-up hearts beat hot as ours do? Were those so immaculate people really and truly up against life, with the tumble and toss of it, the laughter of it and the tears, its thousand secret shynesses, the tyrannies of temperament, and ignorings of the same? But as history repeats itself, so does the fashion of the soul of man, never twice identical, yet always one. We leave the pictures with their disguising exteriors and, looking in, we understand each other.

See Ragland then and, to take him at his lowest ebb, see him in the soaking heat with a sermon in view. Now he bends over his paper, pen in hand, writes nothing; now sits back in his chair in a kind of despair, mopping his forehead, which drips, being, as the nice would put it, bedewed, and his hand, also plentifully "bedewed," drips too and sticks to the paper. At last he begins again, but writes, in his deep desire, prayer instead:

"Oh, help me to complete the preparation of my sermon: let it be suitable, wisely arranged; let it forcibly set before my people the important truths connected with my subject. Oh, let it not be as it were an essay, the performance of a task, the filling up of the half-hour." Then, for we have anticipated a little, "Let me not regard improvement in Tamil, or other matters of this inferior kind. The souls of my hearers, their real sound profiting, that they may be instructed, excited, comforted, led to Thee indeed through Christ-let me regard this." And afterwards, "Shame covers my face almost every time I leave the pulpit, for my hesitations and poor, meagre, incorrect state­ments; and such a hubbub does wounded pride stir up in my heart, that I feel I never prize so highly as then the precious blood of sprinkling." Yet again: "Yesterday was the day of the ordination. I preached on the occasion at the cathedral. It was a very, very heavy trial, preparing. I could not divest my mind of the unusual auditors I should have, although con­vinced of the folly and wickedness of caring for anyone but Him who walks in the midst of the golden candlesticks." But he tells of one good day when, just before he had to speak, the hymn "There is a fountain" acted upon him like David’s music upon Saul, and words came forward joyfully, and he ended refreshed. And he tells too, with a kind of grateful wonder, of an experience of help when, owing to the heavy pressure of his official duties, he had not time to prepare his sermon at all, and yet had to face his expectant congregation early on Sunday morning. On his knees he waited, the book of Joshua open before him: "Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage." He had met the word before as a comfortable word, a cushion not a trumpet-call; now he met it as a command. "And I said to the Lord, with this thought on my mind, ’I will obey Thee, and be strong and of a good courage,’ and from that moment I could almost fancy that I felt I had got strength." With his Bible open at Joshua 1, he began to speak to his people. "Whenever faintness of heart returned I put down my head and drank in those words ’Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage.’ And they proved each time a powerful cordial. I felt no fear. And now, blessed be the Lord my strength, who teacheth my hands to war, and who hath once graciously opened my mouth, and so given me the hope that He will continue to do so." Preaching, however, was the lesser part of his work.