19. J. Hudson Taylor (1832–1905)
A Presbyterian moderator in a Melbourne, Australia, church used all his eloquence to introduce the visiting missionary speaker, finally presenting him to the congregation as “our illustrious guest.” He was not prepared for James Hudson Taylor’s first sentence: “Dear friends, I am the little servant of an illustrious Master.”
Nearly twenty years before, Hudson Taylor had written in an editorial: “All God’s giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.” As he looked at himself, Hudson Taylor saw nothing but weakness; but as generations of Christians have studied Taylor’s life, they have become acquainted with a man who dared to believe the Word of God and, by faith, carried the gospel to inland China—and saw God work wonders! “Want of trust is at the root of almost all our sins and all our weaknesses,” he wrote in that same editorial, “and how shall we escape it but by looking to Him and observing His faithfulness. The man who holds God’s faithfulness will not be foolhardy or reckless, but he will be ready for every emergency.”
How Hudson Taylor became a man of faith is a story that every Christian—and every Christian worker in particular—ought to know well, because in that story is the kind of spiritual encouragement that we need in these difficult days.
Begin by reading Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, written by his son and daughter-in-law, Howard and Mary Taylor. It is available in several paperback editions, although a cloth edition may still be available from the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, formerly known as the China Inland Mission. You may want to read the book twice—it is not long or difficult—and then secure the one-volume biography of Taylor by the same authors. The China Inland Mission published a beautiful centennial edition in 1965, but it is difficult to secure now. Fortunately, Moody Press has reprinted it in paperback with the title God’s Man in China. This one-volume biography is a careful abridgement of a definitive two-volume work—Hudson Taylor in Early Years and Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission. If I were teaching a pastoral theology course in a seminary, I would require my students to read these two books to discover how God builds a man and then uses that man to build a work. It is unfortunate that this set is now out of print. The abridgement gives us all the important material we need, but the larger work includes sidelights and details that delight any reader interested in living history.
James Hudson Taylor was born on May 21, 1832, in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England. Taylor’s parents were godly people who had dedicated their firstborn to the Lord, for their heart’s desire was that their son serve Christ. Even while still a child of four or five, Hudson Taylor showed a concern for the “heathen” in foreign lands. “When I am a man,” he would tell visitors in the home, “I mean to be a missionary and go to China.” His father was a chemist (American translation: druggist) by trade and was very active as a Methodist preacher in his district. Often the local pastors would gather at the Taylor table to discuss their work, and young Hudson would listen with keen interest. “I used to love to hear them talk,” he recalled years later. “Theology, sermons, politics, the Lord’s work at home and abroad, all were discussed with so much earnestness and intelligence. It made a great impression upon us as children.”
He had just turned seventeen when he was converted, and a short time later he felt a call to Christian service. He had experienced most of the trials and temptations of youth, and the tugging of the Holy Spirit on his heart; but for some reason he had resisted the call of God. The story of his conversion has often been told, but it is one that gets more wonderful with each telling. His mother had left him home alone while she visited a friend nearly a hundred miles away. Impressed by the Spirit to pray for her son, she left the table, went to her room, locked the door, and prayed for hours until she sensed in her heart that young Hudson had trusted Christ. Back at home, Hudson had found a tract in his father’s library and was reading it primarily for the interesting stories that it might contain. While he was reading, he was struck by the phrase “the finished work of Christ.” Immediately the words of Scripture leaped into his mind: “It is finished!” He said to himself, “If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what is there left for me to do?” He fell to his knees and yielded himself to Christ; and when his mother returned home two weeks later, she told him she already knew!
Most people forget that Taylor was trained in medicine, and it was during his student days that he learned to trust God for every need. He realized that he could not leave England for some foreign land if he had not learned to prove God at home. How he trusted God for finances, not only for himself but also for others; how he was miraculously spared after being infected in the dissecting room; and how he grew in his exercise of faith are all told in the biographies, and what exciting chapters they are! You feel as if you are revisiting the book of Acts.
At this point Taylor’s life takes on special interest for the Christian worker, for it is easy to see that Taylor permitted God to prepare him for the work he was calling him to do. It is for this reason that his biographers have devoted an entire volume of over five hundred pages to these first twenty-eight years of his life, his years of preparation. They say in the introduction to Hudson Taylor in Early Years:
At first sight it might appear to some that to devote not less than half of the biography of one who did a great deal of public work, to a description of his preparation for that work, evidences some lack of the sense of due proportion. The authors were fully alive to this aspect of the subject; but as they studied and pondered over the materials at their disposal, it was impressed upon them, with growing force, that the experience and the career of Mr. Taylor furnished a notable illustration of the truth that when God raises up a man for special service He first works in that man the principles which later on are, through his labors and influence, to be the means of widespread blessing to the Church and to the world.1
We need this emphasis today. We have too many “celebrities” and not enough servants—“nine-day wonders” that may flash across the scene for a time and then disappear. Before God works through us, he works in us, because the work that we do is the outgrowth of the life that we live. Jesus spent thirty years preparing for three years of ministry! The statement may have become a cliché, but it is still true that “God prepares us for what he is preparing for us.”
On September 19, 1853, Hudson Taylor sailed for China as a representative of the Chinese Evangelization Society; even on the ship he had opportunity to witness for Christ and to trust God for miracles. At one stage of the voyage the ship lost its wind and began to drift toward a dangerous reef. Taylor and three other Christians on board prayed earnestly for God’s help, and after a brief time of prayer, Taylor was convinced in his heart that God had answered. He went on deck and suggested to the first officer (“a godless man”) that he let down the mainsail and make ready for the wind. The man cursed and refused to act. At that point the corner of the topmost sail began to tremble, and Taylor urged the man to move quickly. Before long, a strong wind began to blow and the ship was on its way!
From the very outset of his ministry in China, Hudson Taylor preferred to work independently. He had no particular denominational connections, yet was friendly with all who professed to know Christ. (His own convictions were Baptist.) He did medical work but was not a doctor; he did pastoral work but was not ordained. His life of discipline and sacrifice distinguished him among the missionaries. This does not mean that he rejected those who worked in the traditional ways. It was just that he preferred an independent ministry that left him free to follow God’s leading without consulting the plans of men. It was this kind of devotion to Christ that led him to resign from the Chinese Evangelization Society in June 1857. Eight years later, on June 27, 1865, he officially founded the China Inland Mission.
On January 20, 1858, Hudson Taylor married Maria J. Dyer in China, and their romance is a love story that no fiction writer could concoct! For a detailed account read Hudson Taylor and Maria by John Pollock. Pollock claimed that the official biography errs in the order of events relating to Hudson’s courting of Miss Dyer, suggesting that the missionary’s memory failed him when he told his daughter-in-law the story years later.2
But the real bombshell in the Pollock book is his claim that in 1869, during the darkest hours of the mission, Hudson Taylor was so discouraged that he was tempted to end his own life! “Maria stood between Hudson and suicide,” stated Pollock.3 I once asked a veteran CIM missionary about this, and he claimed it was probably a misunderstanding. Pollock’s source, he added, is “an unpublished note in the Taylor papers.” Even if Hudson Taylor did express this kind of despair, two things are true: greater men than he have done the same (Moses and Elijah, for example); and he expressed it only before he experienced “the exchanged life.” In fact, it was the valley experience of the Yanchow riots that prepared the way for his life-changing meeting with Christ.
There is no need for me to retell the story; you have it in Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret. On Saturday, September 4, 1869, Taylor read in a letter from missionary John McCarthy about the new freedom that had come into McCarthy’s life. “Not a striving to have faith,” McCarthy wrote, “but a looking off to the Faithful One seems all we need; a resting in the Loved One entirely, for time and for eternity.” “As I read,” said Taylor, “I saw it all. I looked to Jesus, and when I saw— oh, how joy flowed!” The “theology of the deeper life” is disturbing to some people, and for this reason they avoid it; but for Hudson Taylor “the exchanged life” was as simple and as real as salvation itself. His associates noticed the difference: he had a new power in ministry and a new poise in facing the problems of the mission. “He cast everything on God in a new way, and gave more time to prayer,” wrote one co-laborer. “Instead of working late at night, be began to go to bed earlier, rising at 5:00 to give time to Bible study and prayer.” I cannot urge you enough to read the whole story for yourself and then take it to heart.
One of the byproducts of reading Taylor’s life is the introduction you receive to so many well-known Christians who, in one way or another, played a part in his life and ministry. For instance, D. L. Moody was on the platform when, in 1872, Taylor gave the opening address at the “Mildmay” conference for the deeper life.
The Student Volunteer Movement that grew out of Moody’s Northfield ministry attracted Taylor tremendously. When he came to America in 1888, Taylor spoke at Northfield and Moody had to arrange extra meetings to allow the students to get the most out of Taylor’s ministry. Of course the story of “the Cambridge seven” had reached North America, and it is possible that the dedication of these young men was one of the seeds that helped to bring the Student Volunteer Movement into fruition. There is little question that Moody’s ministry in England assisted the progress of foreign missions in a tremendous way, and the China Inland Mission profited from this.
Moody and Taylor, of course, would disagree on the matter of financing the Lord’s work. Both of them believed in prayer and trusting God, but Taylor refrained from asking anybody for support. “When our work becomes a begging work, it dies,” said Taylor. Moody, on the other hand, was bold in asking Christians for financial support and raised huge sums for Christian enterprises both in the United States and Great Britain. While he greatly admired men like Hudson Taylor and George Müller, Moody felt that his own ministries operated by faith just as much as did theirs. He also felt that, sincere as they were, their emphasis on “making no appeals” was in itself an appeal. Thank God for the variety of men He uses, and thank God for men who can disagree without being disagreeable!
You also will meet other evangelical notables as you read the life of Hudson Taylor: F. B. Meyer (who was deeply moved by the Cambridge seven); H. Grattan Guinness, the British evangelist and Bible teacher (his daughter Mary Geraldine married Hudson Taylor’s son, Howard, and helped him write the biography); Howard Kelly; W. J. Erdman; and many others. I was interested to discover that the founder of the Scandinavian Alliance Mission, Fredrik Franson, was greatly influenced by both Moody and Taylor. Taylor’s pamphlet To Every Creature stirred this Swedish evangelist to form the Swedish Alliance Mission.
Taylor’s principles of ministry may not be agreeable to everybody, but they are certainly worth considering. He is the originator, as far as I know, of the oft-quoted statement “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supplies.”4 “And what does going into debt really mean?” he asked. “It means that God has not supplied your need. . . . If we can only wait right up to the time, God cannot lie, God cannot forget: He is pledged to supply all our need.”5 It was also a principle of his to promote missions and not simply the work of his mission alone. “We do not need to say much about the CIM,” he wrote. “Let people see God working, let God be glorified, let believers be made holier, happier, brought nearer to Him and they will not need to be asked to help.”6 In this day when too many men and their ministries are glorified and when some Christian enterprises have been fiscally irresponsible, perhaps Hudson Taylor’s counsel is appropriate. His word about trials is also needed: “We might be lifted up, perhaps, or lose spiritual life and power, if success were unaccompanied by discipline.”7
After you have become acquainted with James Hudson Taylor through the books written about him, start reading the books written by him. The Moody Colportage series used to carry Union and Communion, Taylor’s devotional commentary on the Song of Solomon (written while he was courting Maria!) and A Retrospect, his personal recollections. In 1931, the China Inland Mission published Hudson Taylor’s Legacy, a series of devotional messages taken from Taylor’s various articles and editorials originally published in the mission’s magazine. This book was edited by Marshall Broomhall, whose ancestors were a part of the CIM ministry from the beginning. The book is especially valuable in that it presents, in his own words, Taylor’s basic philosophy of missions and ministry. These three books are worth adding to your library.
One of Taylor’s close associates, J. W. Stevenson, wrote of him, “Oh, his was a life that stood looking into!” I suggest you do more than “look into” his life. I suggest you get to know Hudson Taylor intimately; for when you do, if you are open at all to God’s truth, the Holy Spirit will do something fresh and lasting in your heart. For the Christian seeking faith in troubled times, for the servant thirsting for fresh power, for the worker longing to know how to build for God, the life of James Hudson Taylor can point the way to Christ—the final answer to every need.
Taylor died on June 3, 1905, during his last visit to China, and he was buried in that land whose people he loved so dearly. But thanks to the printed page, “he being dead yet speaketh.”