1.07.18. Book 7: 18. Three Frogs and a Corn of Wheat

18. THREE FROGS AND A CORN OF WHEAT AND now, having met again, they were so joyful that they set others singing. All over the fields and in the villages a little song in Tamil ran, set to an adaptation of "Men of Harlech," and Ragland was as pleased as a boy over the small triumph of writing down the notes without an instrument, notes proved correct when at last he had the chance to try them on a decrepit piano. "I do not know when I have had so much enjoy­ment of life," he wrote in the freshness of his happiness. And this happiness, so evidently not caused by circumstances but by something invisible and abiding, affected the people among whom they camped; for it impinged upon an exist­ence bounded for the most part by fear pushed far into the background of consciousness, but always there, in spite of periods of gay excitement. And except the mysterious aloofness of asceticism, nothing is so attractive in India as supernaturally sustained happiness. So there were constantly people about the tent door during the hot hours of the day and again in the evening. Sometimes they really wanted help and got it; but sometimes they talked for talk’s sake. One morning to the tent soon after breakfast came a young man who seemed in no need of teaching. So Ragland said to him, "You know so much about Christ and the way of salvation, how is it you are not yourself a believer?"

"I am," said the young man. "But are you baptized?"

"No, a man is not a Christian and safe merely because he is baptized."

"Certainly not," Ragland agreed, and he instanced the thief on the Cross. "But, then, if a man when he might be baptized will not be, I cannot believe in the man’s salvation." And he turned to Matthew 10:1-42, ’"Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I confess before My Father which is in heaven.’ Is it not because you are afraid of confessing Christ?"

"No," said the other. "Read St. Mark 13:20. ‘Except the Lord had shortened those days-’ "

"But what has that to do with baptism?" asked Ragland, mystified.

"Read on."

Ragland did so. "And false Christs and false prophets shall rise."

"Yes," said the young man, sure he had made his point. "There is my reason for not being baptized. Christ says there shall be false prophets. How do I know when I go to a missionary to be baptized whether he is a false or a true one, and so whether his baptism will profit me or not?" To which Ragland, using the way of the East, replied, "There is a loaf, no doubt, that has poison in it. Must I therefore never eat bread?" And he explained that it is not the baptism or the character of the baptizer that is of so much importance, but the confessing of the Lord Jesus Christ. "Will you walk down the village street with me," he asked, "and confess yourself a believer?" And the young man said in effect, "No, thanks." Then Ragland, in his kind, straight way, looked his questioner in the eyes, "Your own soul’s salvation, that is the important matter; and it is my belief"-and he said this very gently, as well as very seriously-"that you are not baptized simply because you are ashamed of Christ."

Thus in poor, flimsy coverings do souls screen themselves to this day; for the latest question asked us by a would-be enquirer was this, "Of what wood was the Cross made? If you cannot tell me that, of what profit is all else that you can tell me?" And the curious thing was that he believed he had said something very wise.

Once Ragland found himself alone among a crowd of scoffers. Imagine him, the polished gentleman (his courtly manners are remem­bered still), standing earnest but rather help­less in the midst of a delighted rabble who mimicked him, catechized him about his pay and relations, and altogether made hay of him, he the while serving up to them that which he had so laboriously acquired in many an arduous hour over intricate print.

"Bring your du-bashi!" (two-language man, interpreter), they shouted at last, in full chorus, and as his servant did as a matter of fact help him out of difficulties in the kind way servants do, his biographer, thus innocently trapped, illuminates the page with a footnote, "i.e., to come attended by a servant if he would command respect." This stage was passed, of course; but, though the complicated niceties of the Tamil written language were mastered in a scholarly way, Tamil spoken never became easy; he had begun it too late and had been too much inter­rupted. His fellow-workers were younger and got on well. He toiled long. One year, in the rainy season, he got a rustic to come to him every morning and patiently extracted words from him. These he would look up later and learn, quoting the verse about the slothful man not roasting what he took in hunting. Some­times he made the most comical slips. Which of us has not? And these are remembered because of the humble way he used to be sorry when he got upset over the result. A slight change makes a towel into a frog, and one day he sent his servant in a hurry to get a towel. The boy looked blank, searched long, and at last appeared with a frog. Rag­land, amazed, repeated his order, and the boy vanished, to reappear after a still longer interval with a bigger frog.

Then Ragland-it was hot and he was very tired-got properly cross, "I told you FROG," he exclaimed, and a third was added to his collection. At last he knew what he had done, and as he said about his sermons, shame covered his face. He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and apologized. He was so sorry that the boy was embarrassed. "We did not know what to do," said the old man who told me the story, and the incident was never forgotten, not because of the mistake, but because of the humility. "In him is a great gentleness; he is fine gold," said the servants one to another, and in a land where gentleness counts for more than eloquence he was loved for it.

It was not a virtue that came of itself, like the bloom on the peach. "Do I well to be angry?" he wrote once in an hour of distress. "Oh no, 0 my God, I pray Thee to forgive me for Thy dear Son’s sake. And teach me what to do about the various matters all so little in themselves which disturb me." The difficulty about the language caused a trial of spirit which perhaps only a missionary can appreciate; especially he felt it when one whom he had been addressing in flawless Tamil turned from him with that vague look of in­comprehension which is usually followed by a gesture of complete bewilderment: "To me English is unknown!" And, as his wont is, he puts his trouble into plain words of pitiless honesty on one of those slips of paper which served to shield his privacy:

"Know how to be abased: Tamil: not distressed when I hear (Fenn) speak so well, so easily understood, and understanding so well; when persons turn away from me, not under­standing me; when I cannot get out what I have to say; or when (Meadows) speaks what is orderly, interesting, gets attention. Let me thank Thee from my heart for them, be content, acknowledge Thy goodness. Not too anxious to make excuse for myself; not too fond of speaking of my deficiency; not trying to show off; not holding back out of a sinful shame or sloth. Two talents gained ’Well done.’ What a little matter deficiency is if I am only poor in spirit."

Here is another of these heart entries, the very pith of prayer: "Not loving to have the pre-eminence, to be called h.d. (highly devoted, as a missionary magazine had called him); impatient of being contradicted; disliking to have my faults pointed out in conduct, in spirit, in Tamil.

"Not vexed because as a missionary I am perhaps despised; not anxious to be thought anything more; not angry with any persons who seem to despise me."

We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too, But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.

Imagination refuses such a remark from such lips; but fitted into tidier words, Ragland would certainly have set his seal to them. Here we have him most humanly tempted to fret about the silly little mosquito stings of life that do so persistently beset us. That particular mosquito, the temptation to resent the foolish judgments of man, seems too small to write about, and yet able men of our day have known what it is to feel its sharp, minute irritation, and in those days even the C.M.S. Committee could remark after a Cam­bridge graduate who had offered to them had left the room, "A man with so many accom­plishments should go out as a chaplain, not as a missionary," and as a chaplain he went out. So Venn, ashamed, told, and so the C.M.S. history reports. Its sting, then, must have been uncomfortably venomous at times. For Ragland found that it was one thing to be Fellow of his College (Senior Fellow he was soon to become, and had the option of being preferred to any living that fell vacant in the Society’s gift), and quite another to be "only a missionary," especially only an evangelist: ("Poor old Ragland! A back number, you know.") Among the ordinary he passed as ordinary. It was part of the dying of the corn of wheat:

Dead to the world and its applause, To all the customs, fashions, laws, Of those that hate the humbling Cross. So dead that no desire may rise To appear good, or great, or wise In any but my Saviour’s eyes.

Stern words, and "narrow." Perhaps so; but they show the man of this book.