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Missionary and feminist icon
A century ago Mildred Cable arrived in China with a burning desire the share the gospel. Jane Hepburn tells the story of her amazing life and writings. Her diaries are still in print, thanks to a major feminist publishing house.
Imagine. Your mission mentor is beaten to death, hacked into small pieces, and dumped in a pit, before you have a chance to open your mouth or land on the foreign shore she inspired you to go to. Not the most auspicious start for a mission career. But that’s how it all began for Mildred Cable, missionary extraordinaire, 100 years ago as she set sail for China. Undeterred by the slaughter of hundreds of foreign missionaries and tens of thousands of Chinese Christians in the Boxer rebellion of 1900, the fearless 22-year-old couldn’t wait to get going. Despite a broken engagement, which devastated her, she remained true to a conviction she had received when she was 15. She was determined to devote the rest of her life to China.
The “respectable” but “vigorous rebel” was to become one of Britain’s most courageous and intrepid travellers. Her descriptions of life in the Gobi Desert, earned her acclaim and admiration, not only in missionary circles, but also in the hallowed, men-only halls of the elite Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Central Asian Society and even Buckingham Palace itself.
Captured by bandits, held to ransom and broken with fatigue, roasted and frozen by the desert extremes, hungry and desperately uncomfortable most of the time, Mildred spent the next 35 years with her beloved Chinese and urging others to do the same. She was convinced that only Jesus was able to liberate women, rescue abandoned babies, heal the deep wounds of inequality and right the wrongs of injustice that deeply permeated every strand of early 20th century Chinese life.
Born in genteel Victorian Guildford in 1878, she was one of the first fruits of a revolutionary style of school that was more interested in a girl’s brains than her culinary expertise. Inspired to strive for greatness by headmistress Miss Agnes Morton and her deputy Maria Angell, the self-confidence, ambition and educational aspirations they nurtured were to stand her in good stead in the coming years.
Tales of missionary heroes replaced fairy tales for the 12-year-old whose new-found faith spurred her on to look for the extraordinary in life. She was surrounded by creative women visionaries in the Guildford of the 1880’s, who had already begun to challenge poverty and injustice. But these women had yet to be entrusted with equality in church life. They became auxiliaries, unlike those who made it to the mission field who were independent, free thinkers, pioneers, teachers, church planters and builders.
She first encountered a live missionary at 15, whose “rapturous smile, contagious zeal and a way of talking about the Lord … conveyed the impression that He was her constant companion”. Her comment: “I think the Lord wants you in China,” to Mildred at the end of a mission rally, at first repelled, but later propelled her on a course from which there was no turning back.
Attracted by the China Inland Mission (now OMF Intenational), whose express purpose was to live as the Chinese and to die with them if necessary, she trained in pharmacy, anatomy, midwifery and surgery. Her grief stricken parents, unable to dissuade their daughter from this suicidal course eventually resigned themselves to her decision. Her successful high street draper father escorted her to New York where he confessed that on the day she was born, he had dedicated her to foreign missionary service. She left with his blessing.
The day she landed on those remote shores heralded the start of a unique 55 year partnership with Francesca French and her sister Eva who was to arrive later. They became known as the Trio. Starting in Hwochow in Shansi province, Central China, she finished 3,500 miles away in East Turkestan, part of the tumultuous Islamic North-West of the country. Battling illiteracy, lethargy, exploitation and superstition, she later wrote of the “tragedy and disappointment” inter-woven into a girl child’s life. Abject poverty, female seclusion, infanticide, arranged-marriage, concubinage and foot binding blighted the China of the day, but she was later to witness the “revolutionary power of Christianity in establishing a new social order. In the Christian community one sees a girl welcomed in baby-hood, cared for in childhood, and received in honour in her womanhood when she becomes a bride,” she wrote..
The church was reeling from the ravages of the Boxers. The Empress Dowager’s hatred of the “Foreign Devils” aggravated by a devastating drought turned the Chinese brutally and sadistically against missionaries and Chinese Christians. Thousands were torn to pieces by baying crowds and tortured mercilessly for their faith. Mildred’s first days and hours were spent listening to the paralysed and traumatised believers as their tragedies unfolded. The church desperately craved a new stimulus.
The need to educate hundreds of illiterate girls scattered in Christian families throughout the province was irrefutable. Mildred’s fiery initiation to missionary life was as headmistress whose initial job was to teach the first batch of teachers not to teach, but to read and write themselves – not in English of course, but in the language she was only beginning to get to grips with herself. She rose to the challenge and within seven years had the school running militarily. Highest standards were expected of all the girls, whether they were inmates of the church’s womens’ opium refuge, a recently rescued slave, battered orphan or former beggar. Very soon a girls’ Bible school was opened to meet the need for evangelists and teachers who were thoroughly grounded in the scriptures and Mildred’s life became a cacophony of competing demands to teach, to mediate in quarrels, to pray for sick converts or to deal with the all too frequent “horrors of demon possession.”
Twenty years of toil, however, never diminished the “unspeakable joy” experienced by Mildred and her companions when she saw those for whom she had toiled and prayed “decide for Christ”. This was an unprecedented period in the history of the Chinese Church of the day, when the 95,943 believers swelled to 366,524 and 337 mission stations were established.
But more challenges lay ahead.After 20 years in Shansi just as their Chinese pastor had allocated grave plots for his foreign ladies,thinking they would stay forever, they knew their time was up.They packed their bags with the certainty that God wanted them in the remote and wild North West where the “name of Christ was not even known.” Doom and gloom greeted their announcement both from Chinese and foreigner alike, but seized with an inexplicable urgency to get going, they left the familiarity of their beloved friends and plunged “with bleeding hearts into the unknown.”
With “toiling beasts and bulging baggage,” laden with hundreds of Bibles, books and tracts in local languages, nine months later at the edge of the vast expanse of nothingness that was the vast and perilous Gobi, Mildred was asked by the young city-gate keeper: “Must you go into the Gobi?” “Yes.”They quietly replied. “We must. For we seek the lost, and some of them are out there.” By the end of the decade,their decision to go had been vindicated. The country was ablaze with forest fires of revolt. Descent into anarchy, brutal civil war and feudal warlord-rule, closed all doors to the Gospel. But by that time, after 15 years of criss-crossing the most inhospitable desert known to man in a donkey cart, thousands had heard the gospel who would never again have a chance to hear it from human lips.
“Only a fool crosses the great Gobi without misgivings,” she was to write later. But with every painstaking step she took she was to see parables for life … a life that embraced the message she had come to bring. “In this trackless waste, where every restriction is removed and where you are beckoned and lured in all directions …. one narrow way is the only road for you. In the great and terrible wilderness, push on with eyes blinded to the deluding mirage, your ears deaf to the call of the seducer, and your mind un-diverted from the goal,” she urged the reader while writing of the Gobi Desert.
The vast network of trade routes criss-crossing the area to spread gossip and political intrigue, captured Mildred’s imagination. In her mind’s eye she saw trade routes “captured for Him”. From their first base in Suchow, the City of prodigals, she wanted to see the Good News catapulted out to every untouched crevice of this remote land. “With such a glamorous task ahead,” wrote Mildred later, what mattered torrid heat, revolting flies and the accumulations of stinking oasis filth? For them, the “terms of service” for the master included not only suffering, but deep joy. “For Christ’s sake it is worth it a thousand times over.”
Mildred and her companions were uniquely placed to reach Chinese women whose homes and heartaches had been barred to male missionaries. Travelling slowly they stayed in filthy inns and caves,frequented by opium addicts. They made a point of visiting the lonely, the rejected and the poorest of the poor, feeding orphans, healing the sick,and educating girls. Given haunted houses to live in,because no-one wanted to host the “foreign devils”, their children’s meetings attracted suspicious mothers, who wooed by the message of love found their prejudices melting as they “crept out at dusk to join the throng.” They were soon privy to family confidences and sharers of family sorrows. Countless women and girls were rescued by the Trio. Some had been male playthings, discarded in old age. Others were forced to give sexual favours in the Temple, and there were many driven by marital unfaithfulness or cruelty to opium overdoses. Others had narrowly escaped being sold to opium lords, one, so tortured and underfed looked more like a sick monkey than a child, and the most famous of all, a deaf and dumb beggar girl “Little Lonely”, was renamed Topsy and eventually adopted by the Trio. All were launched into new lives where they were valued and respected.
At the mercy of psychopathic bandits and generals at whose whims they could have been annihilated, prey to cholera and typhus, tormented often by questions and doubt, and with paralysing fear lurking in the crevices of every ravine and mountain pass, the strain often proved intolerable and the task hopeless. But their calling to open a window in the darkness, through which Jesus would shine as the Light, spurred them on, and the feeling that the “night when no-one could work,” would soon be upon them, gave them the urgency they needed to complete the task.
1936 saw the hated “foreign devils ” chased out of China and with them of course Mildred, Francesca and Eva with Topsy in tow. They laboured tirelessly until their dying day writing, spreading the needs of China’s millions around the world from their base, a little stone cottage in Devon where “baths, beds, good lighting and an easy chair” were theirs for the taking. Mildred Cable and her friends pushed back the frontiers for women pioneer missionaries of the day. Treading where no white woman had ever trod to bring the gospel to those who had never heard, they trampled the fears and suspicions that made male missionaries a threat to local people. Their impact on conditions for Chinese women and children was incalculable and the value of their educational work became a pivotal building block in the China of the day. They were often misunderstood by their own, and criticised for their decision to stride out into uncharted territory. Single and celibate, they embraced loneliness, sacrifice and hardship with a vigour and single-mindedness impossible for married men with families. They shattered every stereotype of dowdy spinster missionary-hood with their fun, their zest for life and love of the absurd.
When Mildred Cable died at the age of 74 in 1952, Francesca said at her funeral: “Was her death the end? No rather the beginning, for the hand of God can never lead those who follow to anything but life, growth, expansion and attainment beyond human imagining.” “We have been gloriously happy,” Mildred had written on returning to London.“We have proved the truth of Christ’s words “Lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world. We have known joy unspeakable as men and women came from darkness into light and from the power of Satan unto God.”
Jane Hepburn is a missionary working with OMF International.