A Retrospect

It is Hudson Taylor's own account of the years that led to the founding of the China Inland Mission — his conversion and call, the long voyage to China, and the answered prayers and hard providences through which the work took shape. Written near the end of his life, it looks back over the path by which God led him into a mission that would reach inland China with the gospel.

James Hudson Taylor was a nineteenth-century English missionary and the founder of the China Inland Mission, one of the most influential missionary figures of his age. He gave his life to reaching the unevangelized interior of China, adopting Chinese dress and customs and trusting God for every need, and this book tells the early part of that story in his own words.

Out of the years Taylor recounts here — his growing burden for the millions of inland China untouched by the gospel, his experience of God's provision, and his conviction that a mission could be founded on faith and prayer alone. A Retrospect traces the preparation and the answered prayers that led to its beginning, showing the mission as the fruit of a life learning to trust God.

That God can be trusted for concrete needs, and that a work undertaken in obedience will be supplied. Taylor recounts specific answers to prayer and hard providences alike, showing how he learned, often through trial, to depend on God for guidance, money, and strength. The book is really a testimony that God provides for those who trust and obey him.

Because he wanted to reach the Chinese people on their own terms and remove needless barriers to the gospel — a controversial decision in his day. Taylor believed the missionary should identify with those he served rather than impose a foreign manner, and this conviction, recounted in his story, became a distinctive mark of the China Inland Mission.

It is the narrative counterpart to books like Union and Communion and Separation and Service. Those unfold the inner life of communion and consecration that sustained him; A Retrospect tells the outward story of how God led him into mission. Together they show both the private devotion and the public path of a life given wholly to God.

Anyone interested in missions, in the history of the China Inland Mission, or in the life of faith and prayer. Taylor's account has inspired generations of missionaries and ordinary believers to trust God more boldly, and it remains a moving and instructive record of how one man was led, step by step, into a great work for God.

At the beginning, with Taylor's conversion and early call, and on through the voyage and the founding of the work. It is a continuous, first-person retrospect meant to be read in order, so that the reader follows the path of God's leading as Taylor himself looked back on it near the end of his life.