Hallelujah

“For I am already being offered, and the time of my departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith”

— 2 Timothy 4:6-7, ASV

The Last Work

In the last two years of his life, while the quarrel with the committee in London was coming to its climax, Studd was at Ibambi, ill, often in pain, and working. One of the tasks to which he gave his remaining strength was the translation of Scripture into Kingwana, the form of Swahili spoken across much of the north-eastern Congo. With two colleagues, Stapleton and Lowder, he had begun a version of the New Testament, and in 1930 the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were published in it.

Kingwana was not the language of a single people. It was a common tongue, used in markets, on the roads and in the posts of the administration across a wide region, and understood by people of many different mother tongues. A Scripture in Kingwana could travel far beyond the stations of one mission, carried by traders, workers and evangelists. Studd, who had always thought in terms of the whole unevangelised world, would have understood the value of that.

It is fitting that the last substantial work of his life was translation. He had never been a linguist, and he had depended on others for much of his life in Africa to speak for him. But he had come to believe that the Congolese church needed the Scriptures in its own hands more than it needed anything a missionary could give. The work was taken further by others after his death. In the Swahili of eastern Congo a New Testament and Psalms appeared in 1955 and a complete Bible in 1960, the year of Congolese independence; how much of Studd’s own draft survived into those later versions is not clear. Studd did not see it. He had helped to begin it.

A Letter to His Grandchildren

In his last year Studd wrote a farewell letter to his grandchildren. It has not been published in full in any source available to this book, and it is not quoted here, except for two lines that he is recorded as including in it:

Only one life, ’twill soon be past,

Only what’s done for Christ will last.

As the introduction explained, there is no good evidence that Studd wrote those lines. The longer poem that is often printed under his name begins by saying that its author had first heard the couplet from someone else, and the couplet itself may be older than any printing of the poem. But he loved them, and he wanted his grandchildren to have them. They sum up the conviction of his whole life better than anything he wrote himself. He had believed for more than fifty years that the only things that would last were the things done for Christ, and he had tried to live as if that were true. He had not always lived it wisely. He had lived it wholeheartedly.

The Last Illness

In the summer of 1931 his health collapsed. The cause of death recorded in the reference works is gallstones, for which he had not had surgical treatment. There seems to have been no hospital within reach of Ibambi that could have operated on him, and it is doubtful whether, at seventy and in his condition, he could have survived the journey to one. Some later writers say that he refused the care his body needed; it is fairer to say that the care his body needed was not available where he had chosen to live and die, and that he had chosen long before not to leave.

He died at Ibambi on 16 July 1931. One genealogical record gives the date as 15 July, but 16 July is the date given by most sources. He was seventy years old.

Those who were with him in his last days, or who heard from those who were, said that his last word was “Hallelujah.” Some accounts say that he repeated it several times. There is no reason to doubt it. It would have been a natural word for him to say at the end. But the reader should know that it comes from the testimony of his family and colleagues, and that nothing else records it. “Hallelujah” means “praise the Lord.” If it was his last word, it was a good one. The book of Revelation imagines the voice of a great multitude, “as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunders, saying, Hallelujah: for the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigneth” (Revelation 19:6, ASV). Studd had spent his life trying to bring more voices into that multitude.

The Funeral

He was buried at Ibambi. Accounts of the funeral agree that a great crowd of Congolese Christians came, many of them from a distance. The numbers given vary: one account says more than a thousand, another two thousand. One account says that four chiefs stood among the mourners. None of these figures comes from a record that can now be checked, but all the accounts agree that the funeral was very large, and that the people who mourned him were above all the Congolese Christians of the forest.

That is the most important fact about the end of his life, and it should not be passed over. Studd had quarrelled with his committee, with many of his missionaries and with members of his own family. He had been a difficult and sometimes harsh leader. But the people for whom he had come to Africa came in their hundreds, perhaps their thousands, to bury him. Whatever they had suffered from his severity, they had also known his love, and they honoured him. Their grief is part of the evidence, and it should weigh as much as the judgements of those who found him impossible.

Studd’s grave is at Ibambi, in what is now Wamba territory in the province of Haut-Uélé. He was never brought home to England, and he lies among the people he had come to serve. In 2013, when the Congolese church that grew out of his mission celebrated a hundred years since his arrival at Niangara, he was remembered there as one of the founders of a church that had long since become entirely Congolese.

The psalm says, “Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15, ASV). The word “saints” in the Bible does not mean people without faults. It means people set apart for God, and the Old Testament uses it of the whole people of Israel, with all their failings. Studd was a saint in that sense, set apart for God from his youth and given to him to the end. His death, at Ibambi in the forest, far from the cricket grounds and drawing rooms of his youth, was precious in God’s sight. It did not need to be anything more.

The Seven at the End

By 1931 the Cambridge Seven were old men, or dead. William Cassels, who had become the first Anglican bishop of Western China, had died there in 1925. Stanley Smith, the orator of 1885, died in China in January 1931, six months before Studd. Dixon Hoste, the quiet soldier, was still General Director of the China Inland Mission, which he had led since 1902, and would lead it until 1935. The others had gone their different ways, some still in China, some at home.

Of the seven, Studd had stayed in China the shortest time, and ended furthest from it. But in a sense he had remained more faithful than any of them to the original excitement of 1885: the conviction that the best thing a person could do with life was to give it away for the sake of people who had never heard of Christ. The others had settled, in different ways, into long and patient work in one country. Studd had never settled anywhere. He had gone to China, America, India and Africa, and he had died still looking beyond the horizon.

Neither way is simply better. The Church needs the patient builders and the restless pioneers. Studd was a pioneer to the end, with the gifts and the faults of one.

Finished the Course

Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy from prison, knowing he would soon die. “I am already being offered,” he wrote, “and the time of my departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” He did not claim to have been perfect, or to have won every battle. He claimed to have finished, and to have kept faith.

Studd could have said the same. He had begun the course at Tedworth in 1878 and lost his way for a while. He had found it again at George’s bedside and run it, from then on, with all his strength: through China, America and India, into the heart of Africa, and to the end. He had stumbled often. He had hurt people. He had been, at times, more like a general than a shepherd. But he had not turned back, and he had not stopped trusting the Christ who had died for him. The crown Paul spoke of was not, he said, for him alone, “but also to all them that have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:8, ASV). Studd had loved it. Whatever else is said about him, that must be said too.