Similarly Mrs. Andrew told how she had received inspiration for this special work from reading Mr. Stead’s Life of Josephine Butler—when “the Spirit’s voice whispered to me, ‘You have not worked, you have not loved as she has worked and loved.’” The pamphlet proceeds to tell the story of these ladies’ investigations, and the wonderful way in which they touched the hearts and won the confidence of the poor Indian women. They found that all these women, “whether of high or of low caste, Hindoo or Mohammedan, and of whatever nationality, whether brought up in virtue and afterwards betrayed, or brought up from infancy in vicious surroundings,” felt a deep sense of the degradation of their position; and that “the fire of their hatred and indignation all centred upon the heart of the regulations, the examinations, and the violation of womanhood which these examinations were felt to be.” Mrs. Andrew and Dr. Kate Bushnell gave evidence before a Departmental Committee as to the action of the Cantonment officials, and the truth of their reports was amply substantiated by the further evidence which the Committee obtained in India. The Report of this Committee led to the passing, in 1895, of an Act which prohibited all examination or registration of women in the Indian Cantonments.
Josephine Butler in 1894 published The Lady of Shunem, a series of Biblical studies, “addressed to fathers and mothers, more especially to mothers.” We give three extracts from this volume.
Is it not a thought, a fact which should wake up the whole Christian world to a truer and clearer view of life as it is around us, that the first record of a direct communication from Jehovah to a woman is this of His meeting with the rejected Hagar, alone in the wilderness? It was not with Sarah, the princess, or any other woman, but with Hagar, the ill-used slave, that the God of Heaven stooped to converse, and to whom He brought His supreme comfort and guidance. This fact has been to me a strength and consolation in confronting the most awful problem of earth, i.e. the setting apart for destruction, age after age, of a vast multitude of women—of those whom we dare to call lost—beyond all others lost—hopelessly lost. We ourselves, by our utmost efforts, have only so far been able to save a few, a mere handful among the multitude; and of the others, unreached by any divinely-inspired human help, we are apt to think with dark and dismal foreboding. We forget that though they may be quite beyond the reach of our helping hands, they are never beyond the reach of His hand—His, who “being put to death in the flesh” was “quickened by the Spirit, by which also He went and preached to the spirits in prison.”
Into the vilest prison-houses of earth (I believe) He descends alone many a time, to save those souls buried out of the sight and ken of His servants and ministers, even as He—He alone, unaccompanied by any chosen ministers—descended into Hades and “preached the Gospel also to those that are dead,” that they who have been “judged according to men in the flesh” may “live according to God in the Spirit.”
That God should permit evil seems to some minds as immoral as that He should Himself create and dispense it. This portion of the subject is surrounded with difficulty and mystery. It leads us back to the great unanswered question concerning the origin of evil. Nowhere would a dogmatic utterance of any kind be more out of place and presumptuous than here.
The glimpses of truth, the broken lights which we possess concerning the divine government of the world, come to us often as a succession of paradoxes, among which however the humble seeker finds at last the truth which satisfies the heart and fortifies the spirit, if it does not seem exactly to fit in with our poor logic. God certainly suffers His children, even His highest saints, to fall now and again under the power of some of those evil things which we recognise as having been introduced into the world as the attendants of sin and death. He allows sickness to visit them. In the prolonging of such visitations however He is, I believe, sometimes only patiently waiting for the sufferer to claim deliverance; and it is frequently a long time before His child recognises the fact that he may glorify God by giving Him the opportunity of rebuking his disease as much as he is doing by an unquestioning submission. “Wilt thou be made whole?” is often His question to a sufferer, as to the cripple at the Pool of Siloam, as if He would say, “I am ready to rebuke the oppressor and to heal thee, when thou art ready to take this blessing.”
Those who are tempted to be angry with God for allowing misfortunes and evils to fall upon us, or who meet these in a spirit only of a sullen acquiescence, have not yet fully realised that it is only through conflict and through trial of our integrity that we can become in the highest sense sons and daughters of God. Christ Himself was “made perfect through suffering.” There are persons who seem to think that God could, if He pleased, by a single act of His will, by a wave of His hand, cause all evil to cease out of the universe this very day, this very hour. Whether He can do so or not is beyond our power or province to know or to enquire. But it is evident to one who studies humbly His Word and His Providence in the light of His Spirit, that God has been pleased to submit Himself for a season to a certain limitation of His power; and we may be sure that this is for an end that will be much more excellent and glorious than we can now conceive of, when the work of grace in the salvation of the world is fully accomplished.
“He could not there do many mighty works, because of their unbelief.” Here we have a clearly confessed limitation of His power, while at the same time the words point to that blessed truth and marvel of the appointed working together of God’s will and man’s will, the union of the divine and the human for the fulfilment of His loving purposes, and the final triumph of good over evil. If the above words be true that “He could not,” is not the converse true also, that He could, and that He can, do many mighty works because of the faith He finds in man? It would seem that God needs the faith of man as an allied spiritual agency, for the constant generating of the force by which He will finally “subdue all things unto Himself,” when the rebel power, the opposing will, will exist no more.
It is a wonderful and solemn thought that we, who believe in Him, we fathers and mothers, who have the strongest of all human motives to exercise the faith which He loves and approves, can supply to our God the conditions which He has told us He needs, and which He claims of us, in order to save not only our own children, but whole generations to come, who shall be fellow-workers with Him in bringing in the reign of righteousness on the earth.