1.07.15. Book 7: 15. Into These God Infused a Willingness
15. INTO THESE GOD INFUSED A WILLINGNESS BUT he was not dumb to his God. Dumb to those who might have misunderstood and thought ill of his good Master, but never dumb to Him.
I beseech Thee, 0 Lord, let me have understanding. For it was not in my mind to be curious of the high things, but of such as pass us daily, namely, wherefore. . . and for what cause? . . . and why? Of these things have I asked.
Once, and for all ages, the story of days such as these now set for Ragland has been written in full. Esdras the earnest, the sincere, found at first no rest in the answer given. "I gathered you together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings," the God who so expressed His love, who had called His children "as a father his sons, as a mother her daughters, as a nurse her young babes," He to allow them to be taken captive by the King of the Persians? "The thoughts of my heart were very grievous unto me, and I began to talk to the Most High again. And said, 0 Lord . . . why?" And the burden on Ragland’s heart was just this that presses on ours so often: why, when God’s will is the salvation of these for whom Christ died, should there be these perplexing reversals of an apparent purpose? Wherefore this? And for what cause that? And why this unexpected, this bewildering defeat?
Sitting on deck wrapped in rugs as his ship passed out of the warm tropic seas into the keen winds of early Spring, Ragland was to all seeming a man broken; but it was then he entered as never before into the private places of peace. He, Ragland, buffeted back at the very hour of achievement, was not to be bewildered, was not to give in. There were purposes of love laid up for these peoples: "in the end the love that I have promised." He was not out of his dear Lord’s will as he sought to renew his strength and return to them.
Thus he was loosed from all his fears, and in the multitude of the sorrows that he had in his heart, the comforts of God refreshed his soul and made him vigorous with spiritual purpose. But it was a very sick man who landed in England in the good month of roses, and made his way slowly with his family to the south of Hampshire. Egypt or Nice was ordered, but he wanted his own country, and the doctor consented on condition he went south at once if he got worse. The various splendours of the sea, those four months round by the Cape, had done much for him, but no one believed he would ever return to India.
Just as he arrived home the two young Cambridge men, R. R. Meadows and David Fenn, who had answered to his call, were about to sail for Madras. He saw them, and his heart went out to them, went out with them indeed as they sailed away, leaving him, as it seemed, wrecked on the shore.
"There shall be no Alps," Napoleon said, and the road across the Simplon was constructed through a district formerly almost inaccessible. "Impossible," Napoleon said, "is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools." Napoleon and Ragland-the two names do not fraternize. Who can hear Ragland talking in that crude fashion about fools? But he had no more idea of giving in than Napoleon had. He calmly kept the required exercises for his B.D. and settled down to Tamil study.
Some years later, while in camp, he made himself a plan by which he covered the Tamil Bible once a year, the New Testament three times, the Gospel of St. John four times and the Psalms twice. No one could say he had not the use of his Tamil sword; but it was long before he got the freedom of the language. Idiomatic colloquial is a matter of time and opportunity.
One gain was his at home. He got into touch with keen men and started a Prayer meeting at Cambridge: "Oh that they [meetings for prayer] were multiplied through the land! It is for want of roots such as these to suck in grace from Him that is full of grace, that the Church, and missions especially, languish."
It is not difficult to live through those months of waiting with Ragland while his people tried to show him that he could not go. It was useless:
He saw a hand they could not see That beckoned him away, He heard a voice they could not hear That would not let him stay.
"Break through, 0 Lord, and show Thyself. Oh, speak aloud that they may hear!" Have we not cried the words in the loneliest hour of our lives? And it seemed as if no answer came. We had to go on alone. But if by the grace of the Lord we were held on in obedience, did not the day come when they too saw and heard and were satisfied? In the autumn of ’53, knowing he was needed there and being able to meet his own charges, Ragland sailed for India. To be ill in India can never be easy. It is a land to live for, and (most joyfully) to die in, but it is not a land to be ill in, unless one can command seclusion and quiet, and few missionaries can do that. To return thus in weak health meant suffering. That mattered nothing to him. He believed that it should not be counted a strange thing but a natural to suffer in the service of the Lord.
It is not Christ only that must suffer, he said. The work of bringing souls to glory is one which Christ shares with us, and He calls us now to share with Him, and to be content to share with Him, some part at least of His self-denial and suffering, and not only content, but ready, forward-"I had almost said, be ambitious to suffer." The words did not break forth like froth upon the tumbling waters of speech. They occur in a sermon preached at Cambridge shortly before he sailed, and must have been weighed and measured and steeped in prayer before they were written down.
Continuing earnestly, he spoke of Ridley and Latimer and the less-known John Bradford, who wrote from prison facing painful death, " Oh what is honour here but baubles? What is glory in this world but shame? Why art thou afraid to carry Christ’s cross? Wilt thou come into His kingdom, and not drink of His cup?"; and again in the very fire turned to one who suffered with him saying, "Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a happy supper with the Lord this night." "Into these, three hundred years ago, God infused a willingness to become as corn of wheat," he said, and then, "If it had not been for a long chain of persecution and of shame and of humiliations and of labours and of self-denials and of prayers with strong crying and tears, we should not have the Gospel; and we cannot expect in any other way than by adding one link to that chain to have the glory of handing it down to others. If we refuse to be corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying; if we will neither sacrifice prospects, nor risk character and property and health; nor, when called, relinquish home and break family ties, for Christ’s sake and His Gospel,’ then even supposing that we do not thereby prove that we have not the root of the matter in us, that we have nothing at all to do with Christ, we shall abide alone." So he returned to India to live five glorious years and die a glorious death. I write in the speech of the angels, not in man’s. Granted he played dice with his life, was it not worth while? God forbid that we should be too careful of our lives, or of what means so immeasurably more, the lives of our beloved.