Benjamin Channing was born into a prominent New England family with a respectable fortune, an Ivy League pedigree, and stalwart Presbyterian values of rectitude and public service. Friendly, helpful, honest, and optimistic, Ben excelled at school and sports, unwittingly becoming just the kind of young man that recruiting mission agencies longed for in their wildest dreams. In 1918, his peers at Yale and Princeton were humming with idealism and a desire for challenge and adventure. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions absorbed this energy and redirected it. Ben soon found himself committed to the evangelization of the world and on his way to Egypt. But the ancient land of Egypt in the 1920s was balanced on the edge of enormous social and cultural change. Centuries of foreign domination were creating an indigenous rebellion against Ottoman and British imperialism. Forces were struggling against the heavy hand of Western economic and military assets, grappling with the decidedly mixed legacy of European and American Christian missionary work in Egypt, and engaging with a radically new concept of powerful political Islam. Tested in many ways, Benjamin Channing did his best ... and somehow both succeeded and failed.
