Introduction: The Cricketer, the Crusader, and the Record

“He that pleadeth his cause first seemeth just; But his neighbor cometh and searcheth him out.”

— Proverbs 18:17, ASV

A Life Told Many Times

Few missionary lives have been retold as often as C. T. Studd’s, and few have been retold with so many exclamation marks. He is the Eton and Cambridge cricketer who gave up the game for China, the young man who gave away a fortune, the old man who went to the heart of Africa when the doctors said he would die, the man traditionally credited with the rhyme about running “a rescue shop within a yard of hell,” and the man whose last word, it is said, was “Hallelujah.” Popular books for adults and children have told the story in nearly every decade since his death. A good deal of it is true.

A legend is a kind of compliment, but it also flattens a life. Retellings of Studd’s story tend to fall into two kinds. In the first he is a hero of total surrender, and the conflicts of his last years are either left out or explained away as the price of greatness. In the second, which is less common but has grown in recent decades, he is a warning: a rich man’s son who made an idol of sacrifice, drove his colleagues and family hard, and ended addicted to morphine and at war with his own committee. Neither picture is simply false. Both are too tidy. The verse at the head of this chapter is a proverb about lawsuits. The first person to tell a story always sounds right, until the neighbour comes and asks questions. This introduction explains which stories this book trusts, and why.

Grubb’s Biography

Nearly everything vivid that is known about Studd’s inner life comes from one book, C. T. Studd: Cricketer and Pioneer, written by Norman Grubb and published in 1933, two years after Studd’s death. Grubb had married Studd’s youngest daughter, Pauline, in 1919. He had worked beside Studd in Congo through most of the 1920s, and after Studd died he led the mission for more than thirty years. He had access to the family’s letters and to Studd’s own papers, and he wrote with love, energy and a good deal of candour.

Grubb was not a neutral witness. He was a son-in-law, a disciple and a successor, and in the crisis of Studd’s last year he had taken Studd’s side against the mission’s committee in London. His book is a defence as well as a biography. Yet it is also more honest than many later retellings. Grubb did not hide that Studd quarrelled with colleagues, that he wrote and spoke in language that shocked people, or that he used morphine in his last years. Later writers who depend on Grubb sometimes forget how much of the evidence against Studd comes from his own admirer.

Grubb’s book is still in copyright. This volume uses it only for facts, never for wording, and where an important fact rests on Grubb alone it says so.

What Can Be Checked

Some parts of Studd’s life can be checked against records made at the time, and where they can, this book checks them.

His cricket is the best documented part of his life. Scores, averages and the reports of the season were printed in his own day and are now gathered in the standard cricket databases. They show a player of real distinction: one of the leading amateur all-rounders in England in 1882 and 1883, a member of the England side at the Oval in August 1882, and a member of the team that went to Australia that winter to win the Ashes back. They also correct some of the popular stories. Studd did not score heavily in his five Test matches, and in the famous Oval match he made no runs in either innings, though in the second he was left stranded, not out, when the last wicket fell.

The story of the Cambridge Seven was published within a year of their sailing by Benjamin Broomhall, secretary of the China Inland Mission, in A Missionary Band (1886), enlarged the next year as The Evangelisation of the World. That book prints reports of their meetings and testimonies from the seven themselves. It was written to stir up missionary zeal, and it reads like it, but it is a record made at the time, and it is in the public domain.

Studd’s own publications survive too. The best known is The Chocolate Soldier, a short and furious tract on the lack of heroism in Christian life, which is in the public domain and freely available. There are also his Quaint Rhymes for the Battlefield, published in London in 1914 under the pen-name of a Quondam Cricketer, the pamphlet Christ’s Etceteras (1915), from which the constitution of his mission later developed, and a booklet of 1928 with a deliberately shocking title, discussed later in this book.

Some independent witnesses have also survived. The most valuable for the Congo years is the diary of Hayes Perkins, an American who worked at Studd’s first station at Niangara in 1914 and recorded his impressions, which were not all flattering. Later historians, notably the contributors to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, have assessed Studd and his colleagues more coolly than his first biographer did. The Dictionary judges, in substance, that in Congo he proved an obstinate and unreasonable leader and colleague, whose conflicts reached his family, his fellow missionaries and Africans alike. That judgement has to be weighed alongside the fruit of his work, but it cannot be ignored.

Sayings and Their Sources

Studd is one of the most quoted missionaries in the English language, and several of the sayings most often given as his need care.

The best known, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him,” is everywhere attributed to him, and it sums up his life so well that it is hard to imagine anyone else saying it. But this book has not been able to trace it to anything Studd published in his lifetime, and the wording varies from one printing to another. It is quoted here as the saying traditionally associated with him, not as a sentence whose source is known.

The lines about the “rescue shop” are similar. They are always attributed to Studd, usually in rhyming form, and they sound like his rhymes. Their original printing has not been traced for this book.

The couplet most often linked with his name, “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last,” is the hardest of all. A longer poem built around it is often printed under his name, but the poem itself says that its author first heard the couplet from someone else. Studd certainly loved the couplet and is recorded as quoting it to his grandchildren in a farewell letter in the last year of his life. Whether he wrote any of the longer poem is not known. This book treats the couplet as words he loved and lived by, not as his composition.

Finally, the story that his last word on earth was “Hallelujah” comes from those who were with him or heard from them. It may well be true. It belongs to the testimony of his family and colleagues rather than to any record that can be checked.

His World and Ours

Studd lived at the high noon of the British Empire. He was born into wealth made in British India. He went to China under the protection of treaties forced on the Chinese government by war, and to Congo under Belgian rule only five years after the end of King Leopold’s Congo Free State, whose methods of extracting rubber had become an international scandal. He did not create any of those arrangements, and in his own way he despised the love of money that drove them. But he depended on them, and he sometimes spoke of the people among whom he worked in the language of his class and time. This book quotes such language only where it is needed to understand him, and it does not adopt it.

He was also, in some ways, ahead of his world. He wore Chinese clothes and ate Chinese food when many Europeans thought that degrading. In Congo he lived in African-built houses, on very little, and insisted that the Congolese church should support its own evangelists. Congolese Christians, not European missionaries, did most of the preaching that spread the church through the forest, and the church that came out of his mission is now led by Congolese men and women and counts its members in the hundreds of thousands.

What This Book Is For

The purpose of telling Studd’s story truthfully is not to cut him down to size. It is to let a real man be seen, so that what was good in him can be learned from without copying what was not. Jesus said, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32, ASV). A legend of total surrender can shame its readers for a while, but it cannot teach them much. A real life, with its fire and its failures, can show how God works through people whose zeal outruns their wisdom, and how much he is able to bring out of a life given away, even when the giver gets many things wrong. Studd would not have minded. He had no patience with polite Christianity, and he would have preferred the truth told plainly to a monument.