'Htatitllllliiuii;, HUBBARD ETHEL ^Illlllllllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllltllllllllllllltlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllj^ 1 / TTHIS leaflet | 1 is one of a series of popular 1 sketches of mis¬ I sionary heroines § published in con¬ j nection with the 1 I Fiftieth Anni¬ 1 versary of our | . Woman’s Board i of Missions, November, 1917. ^iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS HE title reads like a conundrum; “the mother of a thousand daughters,” who is she? Who could she be save some big- hearted, faithful teacher in a girls’ school — in this instance the prin¬ cipal of the first school for girls in the whole continent of Asia. Her name is Eliza Agnew and for forty years she was at the head of the Uduvil Girls’ School in the province of Jaffna on the island of Ceylon. In all those forty years she never came to the United States and never left Jaffna but once, when she went to the Pulney Hills for a few weeks’ vacation. “I gave it all up when I left America,” she said, having resolved from the first never to return home. She was able to carry out this resolve because she had such phenomenal health of body and mind. The Uduvil Girls’ School came into being in the year 1814, ten years after the first missionaries from America landed in Asia, and sixteen years before Eliza Agnew began her record term of service. Samuel Newell, one of that group of pioneer missionaries, took refuge in Jaffna after his desolate voyage from the Isle of France, where Harriet, his young wife, had died and was buried. Jaffna had once been the scene of Roman Catholic and Dutch missionary work and was at that time occupied by a small English mission. The region seemed to Samuel Newell a favorable site for the mission he had failed to locate in India or upon the Isle of France. Acting upon his THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS suggestion, the American Board sent several missionaries to Ceylon, four of whom settled in Uduvil, a little village in the center of one of the larger islands of the Jaffna group. Mrs. Winslow, one of these early missionaries, was the founder of the Uduvil Girls’ School, the first school for girls in Asia. Soon after Mr. and Mrs. Winslow had made a home for themselves out of the tumble-down house once owned by a Franciscan friar, two little Tamil girls crept stealthily to the house and peeped in at door and windows. When Mrs. Winslow tried to speak to them, they ran away in terror, but only to return again and again until at last they sat upon the steps and allowed her to teach them to sew, beguiled by the promise of a jacket as soon as they could learn to make it. Six months later one of these little girls was caught in a sudden storm and invited inside the missionaries’ house to eat supper and spend the night. When she went home the next morning her father said, “You need not come here. You have eaten the mission¬ aries’ rice. Go back to them; be their child hereafter.” She went back to become Betsy Pomeroy, the first pupil in the girls’ boarding school, the first to acknowledge herself a Christian, and one of the first graduates to become a Christian wife and mother. In the other mission stations of Jaffna the missionaries had coaxed a few girls to come to them for lessons, and in 1824 all these girls were gathered into a central boarding school in Uduvil, numbering twenty-nine pupils at the start. A rude bungalow answered for schoolhouse, con¬ sisting merely of a thatched roof supported THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS by six or eight posts. The sand floor served for blackboard, palm leaves for slates and styles for pencils. Steadily the school grew in numbers until in 1838 there were one hundred pupils and a brick school¬ room and a dormitory were built for their accommodation. In the dormitory were set apart little rooms known as “prayer rooms,” and these little rooms contributed directly to the marked spiritual quality of the school. It was at this time that the missionaries in Uduvil sent to the American Board a request for “unmarried females” to assist in the work of the mission, particularly in the girls’ school. Some years before, a little Scotch girl at the age of ten, had heard Dr. Scudder speak in a New York church and had been stirred with the desire to become a missionary. Twenty years later the desire was answered and in 1839 Eliza Agnew sailed from Boston on the “Black Warrior,” a missionary under appointment for Uduvil, Ceylon. The record of this missionary’s life has no dramatic elements of human contacts, no stirring incidents of dilemma and escape, but it is, nevertheless, a life story of strange potency. Her character was cast away back in the hills of Scotland where the Agnew family was a dominating force in the neighborhood life. In this daughter, born and bred in New York, was developed the tenacity of purpose and the tremendous loyalty which belonged to her inheritance. In the heathen surroundings of Ceylon, this Scotch Christian lived out her family traditions and her personal convictions far more completely than she could have had opportunity to do in Scotland or America. THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS When Eliza Agnew took up her work in in XJduvil in 1840, there were about a hundred girls from the high-caste families of Jaffna under her care. These Tamil girls carried themselves with an inborn dignity which came from the superior position accorded them in Jaffna, because there girls and women are the property- owners. In northern Ceylon land is owned by the women, the property passing from mother to daughter rather than from father to son. By this custom a son can be dis¬ inherited, but a daughter never. Not¬ withstanding their high caste and native independence, the XJduvil girls were notably responsive to the spiritual appeal of the school, and readily yielded to the earnest¬ ness of Miss Agnew’s character and teach¬ ing. She exerted upon her pupils a pe¬ culiarly solid influence which stood the test of time and separation. There was no mistaking the set of her life, and no doubt of the loyalty of her heart to her hundreds of pupils. Very naturally she was called by the people of Jaffna, “the mother of a thousand daughters,” because approximately a thousand girls passed under her influence and found in her the heart of a mother who lavishes her all upon children not her own. She came close to her pupils in their most vital experiences, both during their school days and after graduation. Once she said of herself that probably she had led more brides to the altar than any other person living. In 1844, when the school jubilee was held, Miss Agnew welcomed hundreds of “old girls” to XJduvil, and it was then discovered that practically every girl who had gone through the whole course had become a Christian. Three hundred and sixty-five THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS had married and established Christian homes such as has made the word “home” spell a new meaning in the community. Many were the wives of pastors, catechists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, government offi¬ cials, all occupying positions of honor and usefulness for which they had been fitted by the life lessons they had learned from their teacher, Miss Agnew. Not only during the school year did this indefatigable teacher link her life with her pupils, but all her vacations, save one, were given to her girls of former years. She would go from one mission station to another, always on the same quest, to discover and help her girls. Her eye was quick to discern evidences of thrift and efficiency, as well as carelessness in house¬ hold affairs. If a child’s garment had an unseemly rent, she would say: “Oh my Anarche, is this the way you learned to take care of your clothes! You have not lost your needles and thread down the well, have you? Now the next time I come you must have the clothes all as nice and neat as are the pretty little ones that wear them.” Even when her girls grew to be middle- aged women and their children’s children claimed her interest, she would still show as much concern for these older graduates as for the last year’s senior class. Is it any wonder that a heart of such motherly capacity should call forth the responsive affection of a thousand daughters? It is an enviable record, that of the modest but indomitable Scotch woman in the Uduvil School. From the inspiration of her leadership, more than six hundred girls professed allegiance to Christ. Equipped by her splendid Bible teaching, forty or THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS more Bible women went out into the villages of Ceylon, to try to make Jesus Christ more real and compelling than Siva, whom the Ceylonese worshipped. Because this one life was lived loyally and trium¬ phantly, hundreds of homes and scores of villages received a lasting blessing. It was living worthy the name to have laid the impress of one’s character upon so many and with such depth and permanence. The source of Eliza Angew’s influence lay not in any genius of brain or personality, but in simple fidelity. Herein lies the great lesson of her life. She was a simple, straightforward woman, with natural execu¬ tive ability and a large fund of information but with more than natural adherence to duty and vision of the scope of that duty. The genius of her life was her tremendous realization of the potency of prayer. Her pupils used to say that no rising bell was needed to waken them for at the same hour, before daylight each morning, they heard her rise in an adjoining room and pray for the school and the individual girls. If things went wrong, she might have been heard to give a little sigh and say, “I’ll tell the Master.” Morning, noon and night and often in the night, she spoke to Him with the utmost spontaneity and confidence. Her prayer life was so real and convincing that it had incalculable effect upon her associates. At one time a baby of four months was seriously sick in the home of some young missionaries in Uduvil. The parents of the child had been obliged to occupy a dilapidated house and one night, after the mother had fallen asleep from the exhaus¬ tion of long watching, a cold stream of rain water came through the leaky roof and THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS fell upon the chest of the sick baby. Natu¬ rally, the symptons became alarming and recovery seemed hopeless. Into this anxious home Miss Agnew came each day at eleven o’clock, went into the room where the child lay, closed the door and knelt by the bed¬ side to pray for the little girl’s life. When that mother looked, in after years, upon her sturdy young daughter and recalled the baby whose eyes were even set in death, it was easy to share Miss Agnew’s belief in the potency of prayer. In 1879, Eliza Agnew resigned her posi¬ tion as principal of the Uduvil Girls’ School, after forty years of uninterrupted service. Relatives in the United States urged her to make her home with them in her old age, but she replied: “I do not know what others may think, but, as for me, I have a strong feeling that my work in Jaffna is not yet done. ‘Guide me O Thou great Jehovah’ is my daily prayer.” In order to spend her remaining days among the native Christians she moved to Mane- pay and gave much of her time to her ‘‘old girls.” Especially did she keep a quiet watch over those of her flock who had slipped out of the fold and needed her love and prayers to draw them back into its safe shelter. In the summer of 1883, at the age of seventy-six, Miss Agnew had a stroke of paralysis and in a few days died the peaceful death for which her old pupils had prayed, knowing that she could not recover. The funeral service in the Uduvil church was a further demonstration of the power of her life. Missionaries, English government offi¬ cials and a throng of native Christians represented the extent and genuineness of her influence. The real measure of her THE MOTHER OF A THOUSAND DAUGHTERS life’s value was expressed in the faces and bearing of those Christian women, her pupils, who stood for the thousand daugh¬ ters she had mothered. In the little cemetery at Uduvil where Eliza Agnew and several other missionaries are buried, the four hundred girls of the Uduvil school gather each year at the anniversary of her death and hold a service of prayer at her grave. Thus the school of the present is linked with the school of the past, and the splendid traditions of the old days are made the ideals of the new. WOMAN’S BOARD OF MISSIONS 704 Congregational House Boston, Mass. VERMONT PRINTING COMPANY, URATTLEBORG