TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
A Mysore Brahmin
LAKSHMAN RAO, converted Brahmin, tells his own story: “I was born at Gudibanda, in the Province of Mysore, in 1860. The first time I ever heard the name ‘Christian’ was when I was a boy five years of age. One morning I was naughty, and my mother very seriously said that she would make me a Christian if I did not behave well. At my eighth year, according to the religious requirements of Brahminism, I was initiated, with the investiture of the sacred thread and learning of the sacred mantras, into the privileges of a true Brahmin.
“At my sixteenth year I became exceedingly religious, but when I was about nineteen, through the influence of a great student of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndal, I gave up all faith in ceremonial Brahminism, and boastingly and ignorantly called myself an Agnostic. In my eighteenth year I went to Kolar, and began to attend the English service on Sundays. It was all so strange to me—the singing of hymns containing what I thought good words, people kneeling down to pray to an invisible God, the reading of the Bible, and the preaching.
On the 10th February, 1881, I heard Amanda Smith, an Africo-American Christian, preach Christ as a Saviour for sinners, and the work of the Spirit of God in giving life to any who believe in Christ, which she called “regeneration.” I had never heard there was such a thing in the Christian system. The Brahmins believe in what is called ceremonial regeneration, or being “twice born,” taking place at the time of the investiture of the sacred thread. Hence this truth of “regeneration” arrested my attention, because of the challenge that it was said to be a fact of experience, to be known and realised by a believer in Christ now in this present life. I spent the whole night trying to solve the problem, and I said to myself, “Why should I not test the truth of what she said? If I believe in Jesus Christ, and receive Him as my Saviour, I shall know by personal experience the truth of the spiritual life. If it is not true, I shall be none the worse for testing.”
Just as I was thinking thus, God used the fifth proposition of the first book of geometry as a means to help me to decide. I argued with myself thus: “Now, to prove the truth of this theorem, an hypothesis is assumed, certain postulates granted, and construction for the proposition made before the demonstration takes place, and then the theorem is demonstrated. So, if my possessing spiritual life is to be demonstrated in my experience, I felt it was very reasonable and absolutely essential that I must fulfil the conditions laid down to realise the truth of it, namely, ‘Repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Acts 20. 21). On coming to this conclusion, for the first time in my life I lifted up my soul to God, in Christ’s Name, and definitely by putting forth my heart and volition, I received Christ as my Saviour. The whole night I had been miserable, but once I had yielded myself up to God, and received the Lord Jesus in humble faith as my Saviour, there came over me instantly such a perfect calm and peaceful joy that was all the more marked because of the previous contrast.
“Thanks be unto God that I, a poor, miserable sinner, was enabled to find mercy in His sight and to trust in Christ, Whom for 21 years I have found to be my gracious Saviour from sin and a ‘ Friend that sticketh closer than a brother.”