C. T. Studd Biography

In the summer of 1882, a young Englishman walked out to bat for his country at The Oval in the Test match that would give cricket its most famous name. When England lost, a mock obituary announced the death of English cricket and declared that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia — and so “the Ashes” were born. Charles Thomas Studd was among the best all-rounders England had. Within three years he had walked away from all of it: the fame, the game, and a family fortune, to sail for China as a missionary. He spent the rest of his life spending it, and he died in the heart of Africa at seventy, still refusing every half-measure — a man his own colleagues found as difficult as he was heroic.

A gentleman’s son

He was born on 2 December 1860 at Spratton, in Northamptonshire, into money. His father, Edward Studd, was a retired planter who had made a fortune in India and lived the life of an English country gentleman — horses, comfort, and no particular religion. Charles went to Eton, where he captained the cricket eleven at nineteen, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1883 and became a star of the university game. By every measure his world used, he had arrived before he was old enough to have earned it.

The turn came through his father. In 1877 Edward Studd was converted during the great Moody and Sankey campaign that swept Britain, and the change in him was total. He began pressing the gospel on his sons with the same energy he had once given to sport. In 1878, at eighteen, Charles was converted too.

Then almost nothing happened. For roughly six years he was, by his own later account, a Christian in name and cold in fact — his faith a private matter that changed little and cost less. Cricket was still his life. It is an honest and useful stretch of the story: conversion had not yet become consecration, and he knew the difference only in hindsight.

The Cambridge Seven

What broke the coldness was, first, a death that did not come. In 1884 his brother George fell seriously ill, and standing at what might have been a deathbed Studd found the questions he had been avoiding: what was all his fame worth, if a man could be gone so quickly? Around the same time he heard D. L. Moody preach again, and the zeal of his conversion returned with force. This time it did not stay private. He offered himself as a missionary.

In 1885 he sailed for China with Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, and he did not go alone. Six other privileged young Cambridge men went with him — athletes, an officer, men with prospects — and the group became famous across Britain as the Cambridge Seven. Their departure was deliberately publicized to stir the nation’s conscience about missions, and it worked: that seven men who could have had anything England offered would instead give it up for China was a sensation.

Studd gave up more than a career. Coming into his inheritance, he gave nearly all of it away — a sum variously reported at £25,000–29,000, an immense fortune for the time. He directed large gifts to Moody’s work in Chicago, to George Müller’s orphanages, to George Holland’s mission in Whitechapel, to the Salvation Army’s work in India, and to other causes. He kept back a modest sum for his future wife; the account most often repeated says that she told him to give that away too, so that they might begin married life with nothing but God to depend on. Whether the words fell exactly so, the pattern of the marriage bore it out.

If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.

— C. T. Studd

That sentence is the key to everything he did and everything he got wrong. He believed it without qualification, and he never learned to let other people believe it at a different pace.

China, marriage, and India

He spent about ten years in China. There he married Priscilla Livingstone Stewart, a fellow missionary, in 1888; four daughters would survive. The Studds worked in the interior in the plain, hard conditions the China Inland Mission expected of its people, and by every sign they were happy in it. But his health, never robust under the strain he imposed on it, broke down, and in 1894 illness forced the family back to England.

He was not built for rest. After a period of deputation work he took a pastorate at Ootacamund, in the hills of southern India, serving there roughly from 1900 to 1906 among English-speaking residents and soldiers. It was quieter work than China, and it was not what his heart was set on. He had begun to think about the parts of the world where no missionary had gone at all.

The heart of Africa

What seized him was central Africa — vast regions he believed had never heard the gospel and had no one on the way to bring it. He was over fifty, his health was poor, and the doctors told him plainly that he must not go. He went anyway.

In 1913 he founded the Heart of Africa Mission and set out for the Belgian Congo. The work grew, and in time it became the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade — WEC — one of the notable interdenominational missions of the century, which long outlived him. He spent roughly eighteen years in the Congo, latterly based at Ibambi, preaching, planting churches, and driving himself and everyone near him without mercy. The fruit was real and it endured. So did the cost, and honesty requires that the cost be named.

Some wish to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.

— C. T. Studd

Heroic and divisive

The same absolutism that made Studd give away everything made him very hard to work with. His Congo years were plagued with conflict — with fellow missionaries, with his family, and painfully with his own son-in-law, Alfred Buxton, who had once been his closest partner in the field. Missionaries left or were dismissed; those who could not match his ferocity were made to feel they had failed. He has been described soberly, and not by enemies, as an obstinate and unreasonable leader. His late tract The Chocolate Soldier, a blast against soft, comfortable Christianity, captures the militant, no-half-measures spirit that both fuelled the mission and wounded the people inside it. In his last years the home committee moved to remove him from the leadership of the work he had founded.

There was a darker strand still. In his final years, worn by illness and pain, Studd kept an increasingly harsh personal asceticism, and he used morphine regularly for his suffering — a fact that was documented in his lifetime and caused controversy then. It should be neither hidden nor sensationalized. He was an old, sick man in a punishing climate, and the discipline that had once been a gift had hardened into something that hurt him and those around him. A saint is not a man without faults; he is a man whose faults God does not waste.

This is where the reverent thing to do is to tell the truth. Studd was heroic. He was also difficult, rigid, and, at the end, in some measure broken by his own severity. Both are true at once, and the second does not cancel the first. The gospel he preached does not require its heralds to be flawless — only to be forgiven, and to press on.

Only one life

He died at Ibambi on 16 July 1931, at seventy, of untreated gallstones — refusing, to the last, the care his body needed. Those who told the story afterward remembered his final word as “Hallelujah,” and it may well have been; but it belongs to the tradition around him rather than to the certain record, and it is enough to say that he died as he had lived, in the field, at his post.

Among the words most loved by him and long associated with his name is a couplet he sent to his grandchildren in a farewell letter in that last year:

Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.

— lines beloved by Studd (authorship debated)

The full poem’s authorship is genuinely uncertain, and it would be wrong to hand it to him without that caution. But he quoted those two lines to his own grandchildren as he neared the end, and no words could more exactly sum up the account of his years. They are his in the only sense that finally mattered to him: he had believed them all the way down.

What he leaves

C. T. Studd left no comfortable legacy and no tidy one. He left a worldwide mission, thousands who heard the gospel because he would not stay home, and a life so extreme that admirers and critics have never quite agreed on how to hold it. He gave away a fortune when he was young and his body when he was old, and he was, by turns, magnificent and impossible.

He would not have minded the mixed verdict. He had settled the only question that concerned him at eighteen, and again at twenty-four, and every day after: if Christ was God and had died for him, then nothing was too much to give back. He gave the cricket, the money, the health, and the years, and he counted none of it a sacrifice. Only one life — and he spent it all.