1904-1905. AGE 17
Christ has no hands but our hands to do His work today;
He has no feet but our feet to lead men in His way;
He has no tongue but our tongue to tell men how He died;
He has no help but our help to bring them to His side.
—Selected
CHINA MAY NOT HAVE the charm of Japan, but to Borden it appealed immediately. “I think I am going to like it better,” he wrote, impressed with the strength and virility of the people.
SHANGHAI, Nov. 19, 1904
DEAR MOTHER―We are now in China and such a change! It is perfectly impossible to imagine how different it is.... This is the most cosmopolitan place I have ever seen, and yet we hear that Hongkong is even more so, but I can’t see how it could be.
At the Bund where we landed we were immediately introduced to several very Chinese things. Of course the rickshas were nothing new, but the wheelbarrows! They are the queerest affairs I have ever seen. One wheel about two feet in diameter and a frame on either side for the load. The coolie has a strap from the handles which goes under his arms and over his neck. Four grown people is the most they carry and that is a pretty heavy load. The load isn’t always balanced and of course that makes it harder yet. I think I would prefer to walk every time. The Chinese merchants go up and down the Bund in their carriages and practically every foreign resident has one, so that there is a continual stream of carriages, rickshaws and wheelbarrows. There are several varieties of policemen but the most impressive are the Indians with their large red turbans, heavy braided beards and immense stature. Most of them are over six feet and some nearly seven.
We are staying at the Astor House which is very nice and is the place where you meet everyone, that is everyone who is traveling. We went over to the China Inland Mission and consulted Mr. Stevenson on our plans for China.
The plan worked out in Mr. Stevenson’s study filled the time to be given to China in the most interesting way possible, and when the travelers left by river steamer for Hankow they were anticipating visits to Pekin and not a few other places. In his journal Borden noted:
November 20, 1904
Traveling all day up the mouth of the Yangtze, which is practically a sea, it is so wide. Immense reeds, fifteen or twenty feet high, grow along the banks.
November 21
Lots of fun to watch the steerage passengers all try to get in and out of the junks and up and down the narrow gangway of the steamer at the same time. The result was they got very excited, and all shouted and argued and pushed and shoved each other until I expected most of them would go overboard. But only one did, and he got out all right.
The river varies in width from one to six or seven miles. At times the current is very swift.
November 22
Arrived at Kiu-kiang about four in the afternoon. Two Chinese fell in and nearly got drowned, between the steamer and the dock. When they were hauled out, they went for each other and had a pigtail pulling contest which was rather unique and interesting.
And in a letter to his father:
It took us four days to cover the six hundred miles to Hankow. On Wednesday morning we came in sight of the city, and while we were still several miles off a number of men came out in sampans and jumped on board while the steamer was going full speed. This is rather a dangerous proceeding and requires some skill. They were the representatives of native inns, eager to secure business.
At Hankow there is a difference of fifty feet in the depth of the water in summer and winter. Also the tide is sometimes felt up there. This would be the tide they had had at Shanghai two or three days previously. So there must be two or three high tides on the river at the same time, with as many low ones in between.
Hankow has a large foreign concession and a fine Bund, better even than Shanghai. The foreign and native cities do not overlap much. You just step through a gate from the concession and are at once plunged into the narrow dirty streets of the crowded Chinese city. Across the Yangtze is Wu-chang, a purely native city which is larger than Hankow. On the opposite bank of the Han River, which flows into the Yangtze at this point, is another city. The combined population of all three is about a million and a half.
But it is the unexpected that happens, and instead of traveling extensively in China, Borden was soon confined to a sick bed in a hospital. They did, however, get in two weeks in the Yangtze Valley, including a delightful time at Nanking where they were guests of Dr. Stewart of the American Methodist College. They had crossed the Pacific with these friends, and were more than glad to see again one bright girl who had had much to do with their enjoyment of the voyage. Borden missed the society of people of his own age, and it is safe to say that the Ming tombs did not suffer in interest through the companionship they had at Nanking. In this connection he wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that young people of either sex never travel out here and in fact don’t exist! I almost feel as though we were breaking the rules. We have met scarcely any young people. There were two fellows and two or three girls on the Korea, no more. In Japan, none. However, we hope for better things as we reach more civilized regions.
All the early part of December, William was suffering from fever, and when they reached Canton it was found to be typhoid. This added seriously to Mr. Erdman’s responsibilities, who was thankful to get him safely to the hospital on Victoria Peak overlooking the city and harbor of Hongkong. Happily the illness proved to be a mild attack and the patient was soon convalescent. On Christmas Day he was writing:
Although in bed, I manage to pass the time very well, reading a good deal, magazines, interesting books and my Bible.... We see a few American papers now and then, and I have learned most of the scores of the big games.
We stayed in Canton four days and saw a good deal and met some of the missionaries. Canton is a most interesting city, but I won’t weary you with any more accounts of temples and the like. We were conveyed through the narrow streets in chairs carried by three bearers. They are quite comfortable. The streets with their busy throngs and open shops are always interesting. They vary in width from about twenty feet, in residence portions, to six or seven in business quarters. Sometimes they were so narrow that the chairs almost scraped both sides at once. I saw dried rats in great quantities hung up in the food shops for sale, but no edible birds’ nests though we looked for them.
His love of yachting and boat life generally made him specially interested in the river population of Canton. He was accustomed on their own boat, the Tsatsawassa, to narrow quarters, but never had imagined that people could be born and married, live and die, rear their families and marry off their children, without ever having a home on shore. And so many of them!
HONG-KONG, December 27, 1904
DEAR FATHER―There are some three hundred and fifty thousand boat people in Canton I am told. They live in small sampans which line the riverbanks about ten deep, and simply choke all the small canals. A boat perhaps twenty feet long will hold a family of six or seven. I couldn’t see where they stow themselves away, but they do it somehow. A great many keep chickens as well, hung out over the stern in a basket which serves as a chicken yard. Some of the kids and women have empty cans tied to their backs to act as life preservers if they should fall overboard. For one Chinaman will seldom rescue another, because the rescuer has to keep the rescued for the rest of his life, if he happens to want to be kept. And sometimes they will bargain with a drowning man before pulling him out! But to return to the river people―they live and die on their boats, and are not allowed on shore by the land people, who do not want their business taken away from them.
The work of the Y.M.C.A. in Canton had greatly interested him, as he wrote in that same Christmas letter, and he had been trying to take part in it a little.
I got into conversation with a young businessman who said he was a Christian and made it a great point that he always went to church. The start of our argument was that he was railing at missions and saying they were no good, etc. Well I tried to defend them and we got deeper and he turned out to be practically an infidel not believing in anything the Bible said. I told him what I believed and he said I was young and didn’t know better, that in a few years I would think differently. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five himself. I managed to quote a few verses to which he could not say anything but I didn’t put up a very good argument as I got rather fussed and excited. I wished at the time that I knew my Bible better....
This is my first Christmas away from home and my first one spent in bed. It is rather different from what I suppose is going on at 89. But I am not kicking. As I lie here several thousand miles away, home seems pretty nice and I feel it would be fine to be there. But when I do get back, it will be nice to think that I’ve been out here. We may get home before the first of September by a good deal, but cannot tell just now.
That he was homesick was not to be disguised, but as he became stronger the desire to shorten their trip passed away. Java had to be given up and their plans for India curtailed, but what he and Mr. Erdman lost in this way was more than made up by the deepening friendship between them. Of those days Mr. Erdman wrote:
His Bible was always on his bed in the hospital, except when the fever was at its height. I remember finding him poring over the tenth chapter of Genesis one morning, with a new interest in its geographical and ethnological statements aroused by his first impressions of new races and men of other tongues. It was a little Bible with fine print, too fine indeed for practical use, but it must have become dear to him, for I have seen it since, open, on his study table at Princeton.
The voyage to India completely brought back his strength and he was eager for all possible excursions among the foothills of the Himalayas, at Darjeeling and elsewhere, and for opportunities not open to the ordinary tourist of shooting the spiral-horned black-buck when we were visiting friends in an isolated mission station in the Central Provinces. His interest in the archaeological and architectural features of the Orient was rapidly increasing, quickened by visits to the wonderful temples in South India and by the fascination of the Taj Mahal, and his imagination was stirred by the monuments of Egypt. In the closing months of travel, his growing interest in the achievements of man was manifested in what was to his fellow-traveler at least an unexpected appreciation of the art treasures of the galleries of Europe. But all the time, though one did not realize it then, he was being specially impressed with the spiritual destitution of the people of the countries we were visiting.
Sunrise over the Himalayas was the sight of a lifetime! Borden and his companion had been two weeks in India. They had left Calcutta the night before and had come up from the teeming plains of the Ganges by a mountain railway with a gauge of only two feet, through a dense jungle which did not lose in interest because “everyone said it was full of tigers and leopards” ―a regular Mowgli jungle! It was misty when they reached Darjeeling and cold enough to make them realize that they were at an altitude of seven thousand feet. Few Hindus were to be seen, but in the crowded bazaar they found themselves surrounded by hardy mountain people, distinctly Mongol in appearance. There were Tibetans clad in sheepskins, from the land of mystery beyond the Himalayas; Nepalese and Bhutanese from the equally forbidden countries lying to the east and west, and enterprising merchants even from China.
It seemed a little strange, on leaving the railway, to have one’s things carried up the steep hill paths by women, and at the hotel to have men chambermaids as well as waiters. But the women of Bhutan are said to be the strongest in the world. Barefooted, with large triangular baskets on their backs and the help of a strap that goes over the head, they carry the heaviest loads, apparently with ease. Men and children share the labor, carrying stone, wood, grain and what not, up the steep hillsides―sturdy, healthy, cheerful creatures, a contrast in almost every way with the enervated people of the plains. But nowhere in Bhutan, Nepal or Tibet was there a voice raised to tell these mountain races sunk in immorality, living in fear of demons and in dread of death, of the one and only Saviour.
The next morning was still misty, and they were not called at four A.M. to take the expected ride to Tiger Hill. But about six they woke to their first view of the highest mountains in the world.
To his father William wrote:
We looked right from the hotel porch, out across deep ravines filled with mist, at the mighty range of the Himalayas. The ranges we could see from the hotel were about forty miles away, and consisted of about ten peaks of which Kinshinjunga, twenty-eight thousand feet, was the highest. They were a solid mass of snow and towered above us clearly outlined against the blue sky. Our first view was very good but we had a better one next morning.
We got started a little after four, while the stars and moon were still bright, for Tiger Hill. This “hill,” only nine thousand feel high, is about six miles from the hotel. I enjoyed the horseback ride very much although I nearly froze. We got to the top just as dawn began to break, and the effects of light and shade were wonderful. To our right was a perfect wall of snow-capped peaks about twenty thousand feet high, stretching away for a hundred miles. Directly west was the great range with Junga in it. Then more to the left was a line of foothills about eleven or twelve thousand feet high, wooded and without snow. Beyond these, when the sun got higher, we could plainly see the peak of Mt. Everest, a hundred and twenty miles away. With the glasses we could see very distinctly the sharp lines and great bare cliffs. We spent nearly two hours on the hill and enjoyed every minute.
Oh, the wonder of that mighty rampart beyond which lies Tibet! What words can paint the grandeur, purity and loveliness of its eternal snows, “shining in the dawn light like some celestial country high above this lower world of human life and pain”? All around them at Darjeeling were touching evidences of the unsatisfied longing of hearts that search in vain for comfort amid life’s mysteries. The faith of the mountain people is more simple and appealing than the heathenism of the plains.
It was at Madura, near the sandy, southern point of the Indian peninsula, that they had their introduction to the worship of Siva, whose mark―a horizontal smear―they had seen on so many foreheads. Imagine “a hot plain, a red road, shaded the foliage of great overhanging trees in which monkeys Were playing; the village folk coming home from the fields in the evening time; the village wells surrounded by women and girls with their water jars; bullocks and buffaloes resting after the toils of the day, and the smoke of little wood or weed fires filling the air.” In such surroundings they spent the night at a dak bungalow before visiting the great temple at Madura, one of the largest of the Dravidian temples of southern India. Covering a square twelve acres in extent, it dominated the surrounding country with its massive gopura, something between a pagoda and a pyramid, rising to a commanding height above each entrance. William’s description of this place shows his reaction to Hinduism seen for the first time.
January, 1905
The Madura temple has five large gopura which are over two hundred feet high and four small ones. The outside of these structures is a solid mass of carved stone images of Hindu gods. Inside the wall is another enclosure with its gopura, and inside this is the sacred place which none but Hindus are allowed to enter. The rest of the space is taken up with bazaars, priests’ quarters., ect.... The interior of the temple contains many images and corridors with wonderful stone monoliths. In the center is the “Tank of the Golden Lilies,” I am sure I didn’t discover any appropriateness about the name. The water was covered with green slime, and yet pilgrims were washing themselves and their clothes in it as well as drinking from it. It is supposed to wash away their sins.... Of course we were not allowed to go into some of the inner chambers and I guess it was just as well, for the worship of Siva to which the temple is given over is the foulest thing imaginable.
The three principal Hindu gods are Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Siva the destroyer and reproducer. All the large temples we have seen and innumerable small shrines, are dedicated to the worship of Siva. You probably know something about this already―but if you don’t I can’t tell you, as it is too awful. The fact that this vile teaching is the most universal and popular thing in Hinduism is enough to offset everything that Hinduism may have done for the people, if it has done anything but degrade them.
It makes me tired to have a person who knows little or nothing about it say that these people are as well off with their religion as we are with ours, or rather that theirs is as good as ours. Five minutes’ explanation of facts in any one of a dozen temples I have visited would disillusion such a person.
He would not put in plainer language the things these temples stand for―the deification of lust, the actual worship of symbols of vice, and the slavery of tens of thousands of women and girls “married to the gods.” Around the temples in this part of India many monkeys gather and are looked upon as sacred. It was saying a good deal when one who knows the conditions wrote:
“Wealth and labor could not have been devoted to baser practices than the erection of the vast enclosures dedicated to Siva and Vishnu. Even the sacred monkeys are disgraced by association with indescribable vileness.”
Another aspect of idolatry and superstition was seen when they reached Madras just in time for the annual festival of juggernaut. It was impossible to describe it adequately, but Borden did the best he could under difficulties.
Feb. 1, 1905
Well I must hurry on to Madras. The city itself is nothing to see but we were fortunate in being able to witness the festival of the Juggernaut. This had always been a sort of unreal fairy tale to me until I saw it. We took a carriage about nine thirty p.m. and drove towards the native quarter of the city. On the way we passed groups of people all hurrying in the same direction, some on foot and some crowded into little bullock carts. The whole native population seemed to be centering on one point.
Immediately we entered the native city, it was all we could do to get the carriage through the crowds of people. Imagine the crowd at a parade at home, only dress them differently―men and women with red shawls about themselves, fakirs smeared from head to foot with ashes and dirt, making a ghastly combination, naked children and nearly everyone with some kind of a caste mark on his or her face. The street along which the procession was to pass was dimly lit up, adding to the weirdness of the scene.
Finally the approach of the car was heralded by the pushing of the crowds and a vanguard of men beating kettledrums and a number of men with torches. And then came the car itself, a truly wonderful sight, drawn by two long lines of men. It was a square shrine about thirty feet high on wheels. The whole thing was a solid mass of gilt and was brilliantly lit up by numerous torches. The men would raise a great shout and then pull the clumsy affair a short distance, stop and start again, and so on. Of course since the British Government came into power, the practice of people throwing themselves beneath the wheels of the car, to procure immediate transition to heaven, has been stopped. Nevertheless, I can easily see how a religiously fanatical people could, under the excitement of the moment, do such a ruing. I was very glad that I had seen it all, and am sure I won’t forget it for some time.
And now they were at Benares, the sacred city on the Ganges, which is much the same today as when Macaulay wrote, “It was commonly believed that half a million human beings were crowded into that labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels, to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds. The traveler could scarcely make his way through the press of holy mendicants and not less holy bulls. The broad and stately steps which descended from these swarming haunts to the bathing places were worn every day by the feet of an innumerable multitude of worshippers.”
In Borden’s letter to his mother it is interesting to get the point of view of a healthy minded boy among such scenes.
February 6, 1905
DEAR MOTHER―I was rather disappointed in Benares as a sacred city, it is too dirty, and its temples are comparatively poor and small affairs. However, it has interesting features, of which the ghats are foremost.
These ghats are steps or landing places which lead down to the Ganges. They are very numerous and practically line the whole waterfront. Some, in fact the majority, are bathing ghats for all classes of people. I mean there is a separate ghat for nearly every caste. There is only one burning ghat worthy of mention, and there all the dead of Benares are cremated. Benares is so holy that death within its precincts practically insures eternal happiness for the Hindu. The result is pilgrims come there simply to die. The best way to see these ghats is to take a boat on the river, which we did twice. In this way you get a very good view of everything. People are bathing continually in the sacred stream. They wash themselves and their clothes in it, pray to it, drink it and throw their dead into it. It is quite a sight to see all this going on. The people bathe in their clothes, and many of them have no dry things to put on, and go away shivering in their wet garments. And it is cold here now in India. There is frost at night, and an overcoat is comfortable even during the day. It is really the strangest climate I ever met. I shivered all day, and then read in the paper that in the sun it had been 120° Fahrenheit!
But to return, we took a boat and went down stream for some distance, seeing people of all classes at their religious duties.... The burning ghat, though not a pleasant sight, was quite interesting. Several corpses were in the process of cremation when we saw it. The bodies are placed on piles of wood right in the open, and the ashes are thrown into the Ganges with people bathing not fifty feet off. The bodies are placed in certain positions according to the creed of the deceased, some with the head pointing east, others west, etc. All day long throughout the year the smoke of one or more pyres rises from this place. Another method of disposing of the dead is to weight the bodies with stones and drop them in midstream. We saw several disposed of in this way.
“Holy” men and priests die, if possible, looking out over the river. As was passed down we saw an old man, a living skeleton, seated on the bottom step near the water with a friend propping him up. When we came back he was dead. He was one of the “holy” men. I hope you won’t mind hearing about these things, but they are actual everyday occurrences and I couldn’t well help seeing them.
The city itself is a dirty hole, full of beggars, fakirs and temples, with narrow streets in which sacred cows, donkeys and goats run around loose, getting in everyone’s way. Right in the midst of this Hindu sanctum is the Mosque of Aurungzebe, the Mohammedan invader. He built this thing there just to insult the Hindus, and it is there yet, but his present followers have to enter by the side door as the Hindus have blocked up the main entrance. I have learned that, as a rule, any native with a beard is a Mohammedan, and those who have their whiskers dyed red have been to Mecca. Well this mosque has two tall minarets, one of which we climbed to get a view of the city.
The temples are disappointing. They are right in the crowded part of the city and are very dingy places indeed. We were only allowed to look in and not to enter, of which I was not sorry. Cows came and went with impunity in the Golden Temple, which was positively sickening even from the doorway. The “Well of Knowledge” was a foul-smelling hole into which everyone threw flowers and water. We didn’t approach very close, though the priest wanted us to make an offering of flowers.
And here the millions come and go, still seeking to wash away their sins. The “sacred” cow is still the emblem, more than the emblem, the embodiment of the Hindu’s highest hope, and if they cannot die by the Ganges, even scholarly men will send for a cow to be brought into the room and have the hairs of its tail spread over their faces, that they may breathe their souls away in the most sacred atmosphere they know.
And we know that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
From Benares the travelers passed on up the Ganges to Allahabad, at the junction of that river with the Jumna―another focus of idolatrous worship, though at one time and for centuries under the heel of Moslem power. They reached the city as the annual Mela was commencing, when thousands of pilgrims were pouring in from far and near. For Allahabad is the site of “the greatest Mela in India, when more than a million devout Hindus pour up from all over the land to bathe in the mingling of the waters of the two sacred rivers. There is probably no religious spectacle equal to it anywhere else in the world. Under no other religion and in no other land could hundreds of naked men with matted locks and grotesquely daubed bodies be regarded as the highest embodiment of holiness, nor could such rites pass for religion and as acceptable with God.”
It was these fakirs who specially interested Borden, though the vast concourse of people, their absorption in their devotions and the sadness and weariness of many faces made also a deep impression. All the questions he wanted to ask at Allahabad found ready answers, for they were privileged to have as their escort a missionary who had been long in India. “You can learn more from a missionary in half an hour,” he wrote with appreciation, “than you can pick up yourself in a couple of months of travel.”
February 12, 1905
Dr. Lucas came in on Friday from his camp. He goes to the country and visits villages through the week. He has been out thirty-four years and knows a thing or two. He told us that the Tessul Dhar, a native official, had promised him an elephant to use at the Mela. So Saturday morning we started off for the Mela grounds.
On the way we passed groups of pilgrims, some in bullock carts but most walking. Many of the men carried baskets in which Dr. Lucas told us they would carry back bottles of the sacred water to their friends far away, after getting a priest to seal it and mark it as the original article. Groups of women passed along the road chanting mournfully. All the pilgrims had the same sad expression on their faces― no trace of hope or happiness. They had been coming there and their ancestors before them, and yet were just as badly off as ever. But they keep on coming.
After some delay the elephant appeared and four of us clung to his back while he got on his feet, somewhat in the fashion of the camels at the World’s Fair. From the back of this creature we had a splendid view of the sea of turbaned heads. The road leading up to the levee was lined with shops containing all sorts of things. Bottle for holy water, powder for caste marks, flowers for offerings, jewelry, shawls, etc. This levee, called a “bund” out here, was a good place to watch the approach of the pilgrims. They would come up the slope until they saw the river and then prostrate themselves in the dust and hurry on. I noticed that the women were much more painstaking than the men, who often did not stop at all. We rode with our elephant through the throng to the riverbank, where we saw the crowds in bathing. It was cold and some of the poor beggars nearly shook to pieces in their wet clothes.
When we had gone as far as practicable, on account of the crowd, Walt and I got down and walked with Dr. Lucas to see the shrines, fakirs, etc. At the roadsides were crowds of beggars with all sorts of deformities. Dr. Lucas explained that they consider any deformity a mark of divine power and consequently a holy thing. There were so many of these that a poor pilgrim could hardly be expected to offer something to all. But they would walk down the line with a bag of rice and drop a few grains at each place. In this way small heaps of rice and other food stuffs would collect in front of each one.
But the fakirs were the most interesting sight of all. I don’t believe I have attempted to describe a fakir. He wears nothing but a loin cloth; his body is smeared or painted with ash dust in such a way that it never comes off, but remains a dull gray color; his hair is long, and from sprinklings of ashes and more sprinkling of water, it hangs like pieces of half-inch rope. There were about two dozen of these men, but not all of them were self-torturists. However, there were about ten, either sitting or lying on boards full of spikes. To be sure the spikes were somewhat blunted, but it must have been very uncomfortable until they got hardened to it. There was one man sitting in a swing with one leg on the ground and his hands above his head. I noticed that his arms were very small and shrunken, and on inquiring we learned that he had held them up that way for seven years. The pain at first must have been frightful, but now he couldn’t get them down if he wanted to and can only move his hands a very little. I had never expected to see anything like this. Dr. Lucas says that the British Government has put a stop to the worst of their self-torturing practices, and he told us some that he had seen which I won’t repeat.
It is difficult for Westerners to enter with any understanding into the state of mind that produces such results. To see a man kneel or lie on his back in the blazing sun with his head completely buried in the ground, for a whole day at a time, would not impress us with a sense of his holiness or with any desire to worship him. But it is very different with those whose one hope for the next life is the accumulation of merit in this.
At that very time there was in Bengal a woman who had been a fakir like the worst of those Borden saw at Allahabad. Having means of her own, she had visited all the most important temples in India, north, south, east and west, to try to escape the burden of sin. Her awful guilt was that her husband had died young, when she was only a child of thirteen, and of course it was attributed to some wickedness on her part in a previous life. To atone for this unknown sin and to obtain relief for heart and conscience she spent seven long years traveling on foot from shrine to shrine, facing untold hardship and danger; but the burden grew only heavier as time went on. Then she determined to become a fakir. She had not suffered enough. She would give three years to self-inflicted torture, in the ways enjoined by the sacred books as pleasing to the gods. And this plan she carried out, though the sufferings she endured seem incredible.
For one period of six months she sat without shelter in the sun all day with five fires burning around her, the perspiration streaming from every pore. Even wealthy men would bring wood and keep the fires burning as an act of merit. With no clothing but a loincloth, her body smeared with ashes and her long hair with cow dung, she was an object of veneration to the pilgrims, many of whom worshiped her as they fed the fires. At night she took her place in the temple, standing before the idol―actually standing on one foot with the other drawn up against it, from midnight until daylight―her hands pressed together in the attitude of prayer, imploring the god to reveal himself to her.
And then, to increase her sufferings, when the cold season came with frosty nights, she went down at dark to the sacred pond and sat with the water up to her neck, counting her beads hour after hour, till dawn appeared. Thus she called upon Ram day and night, with no response.
“If thou art God,” she used to plead, “reveal thyself to me. Reach forth and take the offering I bring. Let me see, hear or feel something by which I may know that I have pleased thee, and that my sin is pardoned” ―but there was no sign, no rest, no peace.
When the years of her long endurance were ended, she went to Calcutta, cut off her once-beautiful hair and threw it into the Ganges as an offering, exclaiming:
“There―I have done and suffered all that can be required of mortal man, yet without avail!”
She had lost faith in the idols and had ceased to worship them.
“There is nothing in Hinduism,” was the conclusion forced upon her, “or I would have found it.”
Think of the privilege of bringing to such a soul the message of the love of God in Christ! Think of the joy on earth as well as in Heaven when the seeking sinner and the seeking Saviour met at last! That, indeed, is something worth living for, worth dying for, the glorious compensation of the missionary’s life! And when the poor, tortured fakir becomes the Spirit-filled preacher, telling by lip and life the riches of redeeming grace, think of the wonder of that transformation. Chundra Lela, Pandita Ramabai, Sadhu Sundra Singh―what witnesses these and many another to the power of the living Christ!
This was the brighter side to our travelers’ experiences in India, for they did see and hear much of the transformation that is coming, slowly but surely, over the mingled peoples of that great land.
That Borden was thinking over these things is evident from iris last letter from India. He had been writing to his sister at Vassar College about the native state of Rajputana―of Jeypore, the capital, with its wide streets, pink houses and fascinating medley of color, its magnificent horses, trains of camels, and the “Barbaric splendor” of its Maharajah, who kept elephants and tigers to fight in his arena. But it was Sunday, and he turned to other things.
RAJPUTANA HOTEL, ABU
February 26, 1905
DEAR MOTHER―I have just been reading over some of your letters and enjoying them so much. I do not expect to get any more until we reach Cairo.
Walt and I have Bible study together every day when possible, and I enjoy it very much. He is able to point out many things that are new to me, and I am beginning to see what a wonderful storehouse of good things the Bible is. I pray every day for all my dear family. I also pray that God will take my life into His hands and use it for the furtherance of His Kingdom as He sees best. I feel sure that He will answer my prayer. It strengthens me to know that you are also praying for this.
I have so much of everything in this life, and there are so many millions who have nothing and live in darkness! I don’t think it is possible to realize it until one sees the East. I know it is no easy thing to serve the Lord, but others have been enabled to do so, and there is no reason why I should not. Mark 10:2727And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. (Mark 10:27).
Among the letters he had been re-reading was a sheet of paper he had carried with him all the way from Japan—not a letter, only a few verses in his mother’s writing, sent to him for the birthday he had spent so far from home. All through college and seminary years he kept it. It was among his special papers to the last.
Just as I am, Thine own to be,
Friend of the young, who lovest me,
To consecrate myself to Thee―
O Jesus Christ, I come.
In the glad morning of my day,
My life to give, my vows to pay,
With no reserve and no delay―
With all my heart, I come.
I would live ever in the light,
I would work ever for the right,
I would serve Thee with all my might―
Therefore to Thee I come.
Just as I am, young, strong and free,
To be the best that I can be
For truth and righteousness and Thee―
Lord of my life, I come.