Truth Once More Stranger than Fiction — Nov. 1898

Recently there have come to knowledge certain remarkable facts in a woman’s life worthy consideration by every earnest Christian. I will state them here briefly without comment. The case is not one in which any attempt at pathos or argument would be fitting.

In 1884 Mary—, a successful teacher in southern Ohio, felt that she was called to the work of foreign missions. She was sent by the Methodist Church to Cawnpore in India. She was a woman, I have been told, of great womanly charm, gentle, sincere, cheerful, noted for a certain peculiar purity and delicacy both in her thoughts and person.

After six years of work her health suddenly failed, and she came home for a year’s rest. Her mother was still living, and the old happy home of her childhood was ready to receive her. Her symptoms, however, puzzled the physicians. One day, while alone, she perceived on her skin a curious, small, white scale over a swelling.  Without a word to her family she went to Cincinnati and consulted eminent physicians there. They all agreed that she had contracted leprosy. She went to a specialist in New York who had had a large experience in the disease. He confirmed their decision.

The girl went home to make ready to depart forever. She kept her dread secret. She told her mother and sisters that she must return to India and take up her work at once. During the few remaining days she treated them with all-acted indifference, not suffering them to come near her or caress her, knowing how contagious was the disease. Even at parting, when her old mother would have kissed her, she turned away with a cold neglect which seemed brutal to the lookers-on.

“Why do you go?” he mother cried. “God does not call you to leave me! Indeed, Mary, you are not well.”

But Mary went without a word. Only she knew what she left behind forever and to what she was going.

There was one gleam of hope. The New York physician sent to her to an eminent doctor in London, a specialist in Eastern diseases. He examined her carefully and pronounced the disease to be Asiatic leprosy of the most malignant type. When she offered him his fee, he turned away with tears in his eyes, saying, “Madam, of what do you think I am made?” Knowing how contagious was this form of the disease, he hastened her on her way.

Let any woman try to understand what that long journey was to this girl. She was forever shut off from her kind. Human beings accursed as she was were bidden to cry out, “Unclean!” if any one approached them. To the end of her life she was set apart from friends or love. She had not even her mother’s kiss upon her lips. And at the end waited the death most brutal and horrible known to man. And she such a dainty, loving woman!

But she made the journey with her awful secret, quiet, even cheerful. A physician who saw her on her way, a man who believed in no religion, said, gravely, “that woman has something about which I know nothing.”

The sect in which she had worked has a station in the Himalayas at Pithaagarh and about two miles distant the Scotch Presbyterians have an asylum for lepers. She went to this house and began her work among them. There are sixty patients in the house and over 400 in the neighborhood.

Now here is the singular fact in the case. Mary – had many kinsfolk and friends among the class of Christians who believe that Christ hears prayer now just as he did when he walked the earth, and answers it according to our faith as he did then. According to her physicians the disease would make a brief course.

“But,” writes one of her friends, “in all of my life of sixty years I never have known such earnestness and unanimity in prayer as has gone up from her friends and fellow-workers here and in India for the healing of this woman.” She has been six years at work in the leper colony, and not only has her disease made no advance, but the symptoms have almost disappeared. Her health is good.

A distinguished surgeon of the British army recently made a close examination and said: “While the virus probably still exists in her system, and might manifest itself, she is practically now a well woman.”

Those who know her believe now that the day of miracles is not yet over.

Why, they ask, should he not heal as of old? Why should the prayer of faith now not save the sick?

One little story I must tell. She has always kept up her rigid isolation. But one day last winter a friend of her youth forced her way to her and talked with her for a long time. When she rose to go she suddenly caught her in her arms, crying, “Mary, I’m not a bit afraid of you and I’m going to carry a kiss to your mother!”

The poor exile at last broke down and cried on her neck.

Creator

Alicia Mischa Renfroe