Hudson Taylor Goes Inland

I remember the pew creaking under me before I remember anything the preacher said. It was a warm Sunday near the end of June, the light coming long and yellow through the tall windows of that Presbyterian church in Brighton, and I had come down from London to spend a few days at the seaside as a guest in George Pearse's house. Mr. Pearse had a lodger that weekend too, a lean, sunburnt man with something restless behind his eyes, who was introduced to me only as a doctor lately back from China. I did not think much of it. Half of England seemed to know someone lately back from somewhere.

I learned the rest of him the way you learn most things about a man you sit near for two days — in pieces, out of order, some of it from his own mouth and some of it from Mr. Pearse, who spoke of him with the particular hush people use for men they are a little afraid for. He had gone out to Shanghai in 1853, a gaunt, wild-eyed young missionary of twenty-one, on a little three-masted clipper that slipped out of Liverpool without much notice from anyone. China then held only a scattering of Protestant missionaries, most of them clustered in the five treaty ports the Opium War had prised open, translating for merchants and consuls when they were not preaching. He had done something in those early years that scandalized his own countrymen — put on Chinese dress, grown the plaited queue down his back, and gone inland along the Huangpu River handing out Bibles and tracts to villages that had never seen an Englishman's face, let alone heard the name of Christ.

The society that had sent him out, the Chinese Evangelization Society, ran out of money to pay its own missionaries by 1857, and rather than starve at the mercy of a committee three months' post away, he resigned and made himself, as he put it, dependent on God alone for his support. That same year he married Maria Dyer, daughter of missionary parents who had themselves given their lives to China. Together they built up a small congregation in Ningpo that grew, slowly and by hard labor, to twenty-one members — not a large number, but each one had cost something. Then his body failed him. By 1860 the fevers and the wasting sickness that would trouble him the rest of his life had grown severe enough that a London physician, examining him on his return, told him flatly that to go back to China would be to throw his life away.

He did not look, sitting three chairs down from me in Mr. Pearse's parlor, like a man who had taken that warning to heart. He looked like a man biding time.

In London he had not rested. He and Maria set to revising the New Testament in the Ningpo dialect and compiling a hymnbook, work that ate ten or twelve hours of most days, Sundays excepted. He finished his medical training properly this time, sitting for the Royal College of Surgeons and taking a further license in midwifery, as though determined that if he ever returned to the field he would go back better armed than before. And above his writing desk, where he did his translating hour after hour, hung a large map of the Chinese empire — the whole vast outline of it, provinces he had never set foot in, names he had only heard secondhand from merchants and other missionaries. He told me once, in that clipped, tired voice of his, that while he had lived in China the daily press of need immediately around him had crowded out the thought of the greater need farther inland. It was only here, an ocean away, staring at a flat sheet of paper on a study wall, that the whole country came into view at once — and with it, the eleven inland provinces where, by his own reckoning, two hundred million souls lived and died without a single Christian voice among them.

He had gone to the great missionary societies of England with that map folded under his arm, so to speak, and asked them to send workers inland. Every one of them told him the same thing: their funds could not meet the demands already on them, let alone new ones. He kept asking anyway, through the early months of 1865, and the answer never changed.

Something had begun to work on him that spring that no ordinary man could carry alone. He told me, in that unhurried way he had of confessing things as though they were simple facts of weather, that for two or three months he had scarcely slept more than an hour at a stretch, day or night, and had begun to fear for his own reason. The thought that pressed on him, the one he could not set down even to sleep, was that a million people a month were dying in inland China without ever once hearing the name of Christ. He would reason with himself against it — *suppose these workers are given, and go; suppose their faith fails under trial; will they not turn and reproach me for having led them into a place with no safety net beneath them?* — and the reasoning would hold him back for a week, and then the thought of the million a month would return and undo all of it again.

That Sunday in the Presbyterian church, the building was full — a thousand people, by my rough count from the balcony, comfortable people in their good coats, singing with real feeling. I remember thinking it was a fine service. Ordinary. The kind that leaves a man pleasantly tired by the walk home. I did not understand, until I saw his face during the closing hymn, what it cost him to sit through it. He told me afterward he could not bear the sight — a thousand Christians rejoicing over their own security in Christ while, across the world, multitudes went down into the ground having never once heard there was a Savior to be secure in.

He left the church ahead of the rest of us and did not come back to the house for the midday meal. I went down to the front later in the afternoon myself, meaning only to walk off the heaviness of the sermon and get some air off the water, and that is how I came to see him — pacing the shingle a good distance below the parade, hatless, his coat open, walking the way a man walks when he is arguing with someone who is not there.