Harold St. John - Chapter 1 - The Child
NOT very much is known of Harold St. John’s childhood. His father was Treasurer of Sarawak during the time of Sir Rajah Brooke, so the six children, of whom Harold was the fourth, spent their early years out East. They returned later to Germany and Belgium, where Harold remembers frequently playing truant from school in order to haunt the Brussels picture galleries. One can well imagine him, a sensitive, rather scholarly little boy, with his inherent love of solitude, dreaming among the old masters and grave madonnas, and imbibing some of those strong, lasting impressions that he turned to such account later on. He often based deep lessons on some of those far distant, early impressions, and one to which he loved to refer, dates back to the markets of Sarawak when he was little more than a baby.
“I was a very small boy,” he told us once, “and I was coming down the winding passages of an eastern bazaar, a few hundred miles away from Singapore. I was very interested in the various striking things in this bazaar, and I can remember to this day coming to a point where two ways crossed, and there, seated at his work, was a Hindu potter. It’s more than fifty years ago, but I can remember him now with his white turban, his keen, piercing eyes and long tapering fingers; at his feet a great disc of stone worked by a treadle, and in his hand a smaller disc of metal revolving swiftly. By his side was a small table and on it lay a lump of damp clay, and ever and anon his long fingers would go into the water, and then they would transfer the clay to the discs spinning so swiftly, with one hand pressing it outside, and the other moulding it inside while there grew in beauty and exquisite shape a vessel to the potter’s glory. And I shall never forget the quiver that ran through my childish frame as suddenly a little shiver passed through the clay and the whole piece fell, a shapeless mass, in the potter’s hand. He gathered it up swiftly, but the whole thing was so distressing and poignant to me that I turned away, unwilling to look at a thing I did not like. I had no words to describe what I had seen, but I knew there was something I could never un-see. I had seen the whole philosophy of man’s earthly life. I had seen power, but, thank God, I dimly saw something other than power that day. I saw the purpose behind the power.”
No doubt time lent depth to his infant musings, but the gift of interpretation was certainly given at an early age. He had a vivid memory of being carried, as a very little boy, in a sedan chair up a high mountain in bright sunshine. On one side of the path was a precipice, and he would often tell how the bearer carried him to the edge and bade him look down. Far below over the valley a mighty storm was raging, and as the child gazed down into the grey abyss he realized that he had actually journeyed above the clouds. Below, the hurricane was raging, but he had reached a golden place of peace.
While he was quite small his mother, Blanche St. John had, during one of the family’s visits to England, come under the influence of an evangelical mission, believed, and become a new creature. She threw in her lot with the Brethren Movement, and the home was a truly Christian one, with the mother’s influence strong and abiding. All her six children grew up to be Christian men and women, and all look back with gratitude to the saintly woman, beautiful in face and character, who brought them up. And in that rather unusual atmosphere of constant travel and change, Harold grew from childhood to boyhood. He was not always happy. The boys in the school he attended in Germany were not always kind to the band of young foreigners in their midst, but they admired him for his physical courage and for his fighting powers, and his love of books made him more self-sufficient than most children. There was also the delight of his father’s occasional home-comings. Their father would take his children for prodigiously long walks, on one occasion walking them from London to Oxford—a taste which remained with Harold all his life.
His early dreams were of scholarship—school, college, and the endless delights of study. It all seemed possible, too. The eldest brother had entered a medical school, and the family was comfortably off; a world of learning stretched in front of the eager boy, and in the background of his dreams rose the spires and towers of Oxford. But the dream was short lived. The family was already threatened by severe financial losses when his father died suddenly, out in Mexico.
Very little was left to provide for the widow and the six children, and it must have been a dark time for the mother. But her faith in the heavenly Father’s care never wavered; she knew that He would provide, and help was given. The eldest boy was enabled to finish his medical studies, and the eldest girl took a post in the Civil Service. The two middle boys left school, and helpful relatives found work for them in a city office; and in that office those two inwardly rebellious lads turned their backs resolutely on their life’s ambitions. Arthur knew that he would never enter the diplomatic service; Harold knew that he would never go to Oxford.
Harold, at that time, had no personal, spiritual refuge, although he outwardly revered his mother’s faith; and the high hopes of his life seemed to have been blighted at the outset. But he determined to do what was in his power to become a self-educated man. He read everything he could get hold of and spent most of his spare time browsing in the second hand book shops. The rosy-faced young clerk, with his overcoat pockets bulging with books, became a well-known figure in Paternoster Row. His amazing secular knowledge and wealth of preaching illustrations from geographical, scientific, and historical sources, dated from those hungry years when he craved for learning, defied fate, and helped himself to what life seemed to have denied him.
He got on well; his salary was by no means high, and he helped support the home in Bayswater, London; but he was a clever mathematician, well versed in French and German, and a conscientious, trusted worker and there was plenty of opportunity for rising to a high position if he persevered.
And then, when he was eighteen years old, on the 20th October, 1894, something happened. The circumstances that led up to that night of wrestling and anguish are not known. It was a night so awful and holy that he never spoke of it in detail, and when questioned about it, his answers were evasive. But we know that there wrestled a Man with him till break of day, and that until morning he paced up and down in the dark, or lay on his face before God. But he came through with a vision of Christ which never for one moment grew dim and a faith that never for a moment deserted him for the rest of his life.
“I remember the day—I shall never forget it,” he said many years later, “when I saw my Saviour with the giant’s head in His hand, unchallengeable proof that the work of salvation was eternally finished, for He had destroyed him that had the power of death, and, through fear of death had imprisoned those who all their lifetime were subject to bondage. And since that day, when I knew my Saviour had destroyed the giant and broken his power for ever, and carried the witness of His victory up to the City of God—since that day, I have never known the slightest challenge or fear in my heart as to my eternal security in the Lord Jesus Christ. I stand before God tonight as having, by faith, seen my Saviour with the marks of His victory. He has triumphed, He has gone up to God, and by His mercy I am going there too.”
Like Paul on the Damascus road, he had undergone an experience that made of him a completely new creature. The eager young student with his unsatisfied intellect and restless, far-flung desires, was born again overnight. In his stead stood a young man with a single, undeviating purpose and passion, forced into one single channel of untiring love and action. He could have said in all truth and simplicity,
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.
And yet the dreams of youth die hard. In the Spring of 1908 he visited Oxford and sauntered round the colleges in the late afternoon, when the April sun lay long on the quadrangles and the borders flamed against the old grey stones. “I betray my restless heart,” he wrote in his diary, “by the fierce longing I have for learning. God never gave me the chance, so He does not mean me to have it. Jacob had a ladder to help him to rise up to God, but there is none in the first of John. Christ has taken Jacob’s place, and there is no distance between Christ and God in glory.”
So he passed the final verdict on his early aspirations—learning is a ladder not to be despised, and he never did despise it, and ensured a good education for all his children. But for him all ladders led but to one destination—“That I may know Him.” There, with the old universities weaving their familiar spell around him, he realized with an upward rush of joy that he had by-stepped the ladder. He was a man in Christ, and there is no distance between Christ and God.
