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Sam Higginbottom (1874-1958) was an English-American Presbyterian who graduated from Princeton, and went on to serve as a missionary to India, where he founded the Allahabad Agricultural Institute (now known as the Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences in his honor). He writes about his friendship with Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography, while carefully distinguishing Gandhi’s Hindu beliefs from Christianity. Higginbottom was very concerned to present the gospel to Indians, particularly those of the lower caste, while also seeking to address the full scope of their needs, both temporal and spiritual.
Sam Higginbottom (photo colorized by Matthew Lankford).
In The Gospel and the Plow; or, The Old Gospel and Modern Farming in Ancient India (1921), pp. 30-32, he has this to say:
There was a day when the missionary felt that baptism was the end. To-day he knows it is only the beginning. When these people come they are still poor, still ignorant, their eyes not yet clear, so that they see men as trees, walking. They have in them the inheritance of centuries of oppression and degradation. If we only baptize them and leave them alone we do them infinite harm. Baptized they are babes in Christ and need the milk of the Word that they may grow up to the full measure of the stature of men in Christ Jesus. How can we help such a lowly, dependent folk, who have no traditions of independence or liberty to brace them? If we dole out charity to them we rob them of the very thing they need training in most of all. It is not doles of charity they need but help to help themselves. Teach them by their own efforts how to earn their own living, and such a living as will enable them not only to have enough to eat, and to be decently clothed, but a living which contemplates education for the children, contributions to schools and churches, to hospitals and libraries, a living which enables them to take full responsibility as citizens.
I believe the best and quickest way to do this is to train them in agriculture, train the best and brightest in a good central institution so that the ones so trained can go out to their own folk in the villages. The ones trained in modern farming can earn much more than the un-trained, so much more in fact that they can pay their own way and take their part as self-supporting members of the community. Some people who have seen this mass movement work criticize it. They say these people do not understand Christianity, that their motives are mixed and often unworthy, that they come to Christ for what they can get out of Him, that they are mercenary Christians, that they come for the loaves and fishes, that they are rice Christians. Having said so much they think the work is condemned and the case closed, but is it? Grant all they say, it means that these poor folk see in Christianity more than in their old faith. While adhering to their old faith material progress was impossible, under Christianity it is possible. Under their old faith they were denied common human rights, under their old faith they were denied the spiritual resources of that faith, under Christianity their only limit is their capacity to comprehend the length and breadth and depth and height of the love of God for the lost. It always seems to me that Jesus must have had the low-caste in mind when He stated His mission to be to seek and to save that which was lost. After all, it is not the motive with which men or women come to Christ that matters, but the motive with which they stay with Him, and many can bear witness that God is raising up to Himself out of these whom man despises, a body of believers that are the spiritual equals of any body of believers anywhere on earth. In faithfulness even to death, in the last great supreme sacrifice for His dear sake, they are abundant witnesses. The low caste converts educated in our mission schools and colleges often attain positions of distinction and high responsibility. They move freely among high-caste people, where, had they not been converted and trained, they never could have gone. As I see the progress of these masses to Jesus I come to see that the only cure for caste is Christ. That He effectually takes away any disability that caste causes. That in this life if any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creation.
HT: Matthew Lankford
Read more by this noted missionary and educator at his page here.
