n find opportunities for helping others."
[Illustration: GIRLS OF ALL CASTES MEET ON COMMON GROUND IN THE
CHRISTIAN COLLEGE.]
Eminent among the student body for maturity of thought and depth of
Christian purpose is Shelomith Vincent. Many of these characteristics
may be accounted for by her splendid inheritance. Her father was of the
military caste, the son of a Zemindar, or petty rajah. At the time of
the Mutiny he, a boy of ten years, ran away in the crowd and followed
the mutineers on their long march from Lucknow to Agra, where he was
rescued by a missionary and brought up in his family. Later, longing to
know his past, the young man returned to Lucknow, found his relatives,
weighed in the balance the claims of Hinduism and Christianity, and of
his own accord decided for the latter. Later we see him a Sanskrit
student in Benares, where he married his wife, a fifteen-year-old
Brahman convert.
The Christian couple moved soon to the Central Provinces, where Mr.
Vincent entered upon his twenty-five years of service as a Christian
pastor, using his Sanskrit learning to interpret the message of
Christianity to his Hindu friends. Yet it was in lowlier ways that his
life was most telling. Settling in a peasant colony of a thousand
so-called converts, only half-Christianized, the story of his labors and
triumphs reads like that of Columba, or Boniface in early Europe.
Through perils of robbers and perils of famine he labored on, building
villages, digging wells, distributing American corn in famine days,
reproving, teaching, guiding. All this I am telling, because it
explains much of the daughter's quiet strength. One of ten children,
she has spent many years in earning money to educate the younger
brothers and sisters, and she is finishing her college course as a
mature woman. Miss Vincent hopes that the American fellowship may one
day be hers; and already her plans are developing as to the ways she
will contrive to pass on her opportunities to her fellow countrywomen.
Her heart is with those illiterate village women among whom her
childhood was passed; her longing is to share with them the truth, the
beauty, and the goodness with which Lal Bagh has filled her days.
Has Lal Bagh been a paying investment? One wishes that every one whose
dollars have found expression in its walls might come to feel the
indefinable spirit that pervades them, filling cold brick and mortar
with life energy. For centuries philosophers sea
|