1937
Maybe Grace Livingston Hill doesn't rank up there with Steinbeck and Hemingway as a great American novelist, but few would deny that the ten million novels she sold during the cen-( 66 ] fury did not have an impact on American Christians. Few American writers have sold more books than she did, and more of her books have been reprinted than books by Dickens, Scott, or even Zane Grey.
Her first novel was written in 1903 when she was thirty-eight and she continued writing until her death in 1947. All told, she wrote about eighty novels. Between her sixty-fifth birthday and her eightieth birthday she wrote forty-three novels, about three per year. When she died at the age of eighty-two, a half-finished novel was on her desk.
"I am not writing just for the sake of writing," she said. "I have attempted to convey through my novels a message which God has given me." Her writing technique was hardly orthodox. In The Writer magazine, she explained, ״The truth is ... I have no method at all,... I just sit down at my typewriter and go ahead. Sometimes a sentence just pops into my head and that starts me off.. .. Until the book is finished, I have no idea how the story is going to be worked out myself."
Critics often blasted her novels. The Saturday Review of Literature said of one of them: "A singularly sentimental and pious tract, clumsily written, fatuous, and illogical. To be candid, the book is awful." But the scathing reviews did not hurt her sales.
Her philosophy was simple: ״I feel that there is enough sadness and sorrow in the world, so I try to end all my books as beautifully as possible."
But life wasn't always beautiful, even for Grace Livingston Hill. Her first marriage to Rev. Frank Hill lasted only seven years; he died from an infection after an appendectomy. Her second
marriage to a church organist, Flavius Lutz, was a disaster. His tirades, tantrums, and irrational behavior made life extremely difficult. Eventually he walked out. Grace never made much of
an effort to look for him but she never knew when he might return.
Grace didn't want to dwell on the hardships of life, nor did America in the dark days of World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Christians were also wearied by the modernist-fundamentalist controversies, and Grace provided a retreat from those.
But Grace didn't retreat personally. When she felt that the biblical instruction she was getting in her local church was inadequate, she rented a meeting hall and invited outstanding Bible teachers to come to her town to speak. Soon a community Bible ״ class was developed, and she sponsored it for at least fifteen ^ ^ ^ years. She also started a mission Sunday school among Italian immigrants outside of town, which developed into a solid Presbyterian church.
So it was not surprising, when she sat down at her typewriter in early 1937 and began to write The Witness, that the hero of the novel purchases and renovates an abandoned old church.
The novel's hero, Paul Courtland, is injured in a theater fire that takes the life of his best friend. In the hospital, he recognizes a Presence with him, the Christ that his best friend knew.
As he follows that Presence, his life takes on new meaning. His girlfriend, however, cannot understand the change in him, and he has to make a choice between her and Christ. He chooses to continue following the Presence. Near the end of the book he comes across that old church, in danger of being sold to an iron foundry. But, just like his author, Paul Courtland buys it and begins a ministry to the poor people of that community.
Known for her novels of romance and idealism, Grace Livingston Hill was always more interested in pointing her readers toward wholesome family relationships and solid Christian values than in producing fine works of literature. In the first half of the twentieth century, evangelical Christianity had no novelist to compare with her.
1938
When Amy Carmichael was twenty-six, she left her native Northern Ireland and ventured to Japan as a missionary. She lasted one year; poor health forced her to return.
{ 68 ] The following year she went overseas again, this lime to South
India, sponsored by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. This time she lasted fifty-six years, until her death in 1951 at the age of eighty-four.
In South India she was moved by the temple slavery of little girls; in the name of religion small children were forced into prostitution. She rescued one child after another from it, and in 1925 began the Dohnavur Fellowship, an independent work dedicated to saving children in moral danger, training them to serve others, helping the desolate and the suffering, doing anything that might make God's lo ve known, especially to the peo-pie of India. Eventually, Dohnavur sheltered some nine hundred endangered boys and girls.
When Amy was sixty-four, she fell, breaking a leg and twist-mg her spine. For the rest of her life, her world was the room she called the Room of Peace, her bedroom and study. Even as the apostle Paul had used his prison cell in Rome to be his siLe to write some of his great epistles, so Amy Carmichael began writing in her "prison cell."
Although she had written a number of books in earlier days, the first book she completed after her accident was Gold Cord, rhe story of Dohnavur Fellowship, with poems by the author beginning each chapter. After that, she wrote thirteen more books, many of them carrying some of her poetry or nugget sentences. Perhaps the best-seller of her works, and the book with the greatest impact, is the little book If.
She tells how the book came to be written: "A fellow worker brought me a trouble about a younger one who was missing
the way of Love. This led to a wakeful night. ... And then sentence by sentence the Ifs came, almost as if spoken aloud to the inward ear.״
She wrote the book that night, shared it with others the next day, and then printed it on a hand press and bound it in booklet form.
If has three sections. The introductory section leads readers to the verse that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge״ (Eph. 3:17-19). The second section,' the core of the book, contains sixty-five provocative ״if" statements, like these:
If I can write an unkind letter, speak an unkind word, think an unkind thought without grief and shame, then I
know nothing of Calvary love____
If I have not the patience of my Saviour with souls who grow slowly; if I know little of travail (a sharp and painful thing) till Christ be fully formed in them, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
A short third section closes with the author asking, ״Lord, what is love?״ and then receiving the response, ״Love is that which inspired My life, and led Me to My cross, and held Me on My cross. Love is that which will make it thy joy to lay down thy life for thy brethren."
Amy Carmichael told readers that the little book was not meant to be read one page after another, but rather slowly and pensively, a little at a time. Elisabeth Elliot, who wrote Carmichael's biography, A Chance to Die, says that this book showed her "the shape of godliness," adding, ״It was from the pages of this thin blue book that I, a teenager, began to understand the great message of the Cross, of what the author called 'Calvary love.׳"
For Elliott, as for so many others, If was a starting point.