As Different As Chalk Is from Cheese: They Knew Their God Vol. 5

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As Different As Chalk Is from Cheese: They Knew Their God Vol. 5

Continuing our study into the variety of characters cited in the series, They Knew Their God, here is Volume 5, noting, as with Volume One, the nationality, denomination, vocation, and the century in which they were born as relating to each character.

 

Volume 5:12 characters described in 12 sketches.  

Nationality: 1 Welsh, 1 Spanish,  6  English, 1 Scots, 1 Canadian,  1 Swiss, 1 French,

Century: 1 from 16th century; 2 from 17th, 3 from 18th century; 6 from 19th century.

Denomination:  1 RC, 4 Anglican, 1 Lutheran, 1 CIM (China Inland Mission), 3 Presbyterian, 1 Baptist, 1 Salvation Army.

Vocation—original and final.  

Nobleman/public orator—Anglican vicar/poet

Nobleman/R.C. priest

Tutor/chaplain/Anglican curate/author

Tutor—Anglican vicar/author

Philanthropist/deaconess

Scholar—missionary/minister/philanthropist

Bank clerk—missionary

Minister/poet

Missionary pioneer

Housewife/missionary/author

Salvation Army officer/soul-winner

Minister/author

 

Sex: 3 women, 9 men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humility, Brokenness, Lowliness

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“Is it wrong, the wish to be great?” asks young Willie of his father in George MacDonald’s poem “Willie’s Question. ” The following two stanzas are taken from the end of the poem and summarize the father’s response:
“The Man Who was Lord of fate,
Born in an ox’s stall,
Was great because He was much too great
To care about greatness at all. . . .


“You long to be great; you try;
You feel yourself smaller still;
In the name of God let ambition die;
Let Him make you what He will.”
These stanzas are quoted in the book Royal Insignia, compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, In the same reading, entitled “Disdaining Praise,” the authors have included a quotation by John Elliot, an early settler who became a missionary to the Indians:
“I am come to a conclusion to look for no great matters in the world, but to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I make best way in a low gale. A high spirit and a high sail together will be dangerous, and therefore I prepare to live low. I desire not much; I pray against it. My study is my calling, so much as to attend that without distraction. . . . By my secluded retirement I have advantages to observe how every day’s occasions insensibly wear off the heart from God and bury it in itself, which they that ever live in the noise and lumber of the world cannot be sensible of.”
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their online Christian Bookstore.

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Hast Thou No Scar?

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Most Christians have heard of Amy Carmichael. As well as being a devoted missionary in India for many years, Amy was also a writer and poet. She writes out of her wealth of experience. In Royal Purposes, a small devotional of thirty-one readings and compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, one of her many poems is included in the reading, “Scarred in Battle.”
Hast thou no scar?


No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star;
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound:
Yet was I wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned me against a tree to die, and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed me, I swooned;
Hast thou no wound?

No wound: No scar”
Yet, as the Master, shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me;
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who has not wound or scar?

Royal Purposes is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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Eva Von Winkler—Sister Eva

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Eva Von Winkler, often known as “Sister Eva,” or “Mother Eva,” is among the women included in the They Knew Their God Series. In Volume One, Edwin and Lillian Harvey tell how this remarkable woman, brought up in an ancestral castle in South Eastern Germany, eventually established a sisterhood in Friedenshort. Here, Sister Eva and her fellow sisters, ministered to anyone in need—the elderly no longer cared for by their own family, children without a home, and the sick in need of loving attention.

In the ” The Call Back Series” written and compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, there is a chapter in Loneliness, the first volume of the series, entitled “Eva Von Winkler Calls Back.” When nervous exhaustion overtook Sister Eva in the midst of her work, she was set aside for seven long years. This “detour” she later remarked, “was necessary to prepare me for His service.” She had realized that she was “sinking into the rut of duties in a so-called Christian work, and missing the highest.” (Illness, p. 26.)
“Side-tracked, my Lord, amid some pain and loss,
Unfit to strive amid the lab’ring throng,
Weakened and spent—yet whatso’er the cross,
Resting in Thee, Who art forever strong.”
—Fred Brooks. (ibid)

You may read more about this remarkable woman in They Knew Their God Volume One and Illness. Both these books are published by Harvey Christian Publishers and are available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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