The Seven

“And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.”

— Isaiah 6:8, ASV

An Unlikely Band

By the end of 1884 seven young men had offered themselves to the China Inland Mission, and the newspapers had noticed that they had something in common. Most of them were Cambridge men, and all of them came from the class that ran Britain.

Stanley Smith, born in 1861, had stroked the Cambridge boat. Montagu Beauchamp was the son of a baronet and a Cambridge oarsman. William Cassels, a Cambridge graduate who had been ordained, was a curate in south London. Arthur and Cecil Polhill-Turner were the sons of a wealthy family in Bedfordshire; Arthur had been at Cambridge and had meant to take orders, and Cecil was an officer in the Dragoon Guards. Dixon Hoste, the one who had not been at Cambridge, was a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, trained at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and the son of a general. And there was Charlie Studd, the England cricketer.

They were not a natural team. Some were Anglicans of the evangelical school, and others were drawn to the newer independent churches. Some were quiet and some exuberant. Hoste, the soldier, was so reserved that he was later described as the odd man out of the group. But they had one thing in common, which their contemporaries found almost incomprehensible. They were giving up careers, comfort and position in order to go to the interior of China, where they would wear Chinese clothes, live as Chinese people lived, and rely on God, not a salary, for their support. Somebody, in the excitement of the following weeks, called them “the Cambridge Seven,” and the name stuck.

Hudson Taylor’s Gamble

For the China Inland Mission, the Seven were a gift and a risk. The Mission was nineteen years old. It had grown fast, but it had been criticised for sending out workers of little education, and some in the established churches thought it extreme. Here were seven gentlemen of the most respectable kind, two of them famous sportsmen, choosing it above every other society. Hudson Taylor saw at once what their example might do among students, and he and the Mission’s secretary, Benjamin Broomhall, encouraged them to tell their story before they sailed.

Taylor was also cautious. He did not want the Seven to become heroes, and he did not want young men to offer for China out of excitement rather than conviction. The Mission did not change its rules for them. They would sail as ordinary probationary missionaries, learn Chinese like everyone else, and be posted where the Mission sent them.

The Tour

In January and the first days of February 1885, the Seven, singly and in groups, spoke at meetings in universities and cities in England and Scotland. The meetings were crowded. Studd and Stanley Smith, the two famous athletes, were the main attraction, and they went to the universities in particular. The meetings with the students of Edinburgh are remembered as among the most remarkable of all. Students who had never before thought of the mission field went away asking whether God was calling them too.

Contemporary reports give some sense of what they heard. The Seven did not talk much about China, of which they knew almost nothing yet. They talked about Christ, and about what it meant to give him everything. Stanley Smith was the orator. Studd was not a natural speaker, and the reports describe his testimony as quiet but intense, the words of a man who had found something better than everything he was leaving. He told them that he had loved cricket as much as anyone could, and that he had found in Christ something far better. He told them that cricket would not last, and honour would not last, and nothing in this world would last, but that it was worth living for the world to come. He told them, too, about his six years of backsliding, and warned them that it was possible to be a Christian and still keep Christ out of the centre of one’s life.

Exeter Hall

The farewell meeting was held on the evening of 4 February 1885 at Exeter Hall in the Strand, the great London meeting place of evangelical societies. The hall was packed, with a crowd reported at about three thousand, and The Times reported it. Each of the Seven spoke. The next morning, Thursday 5 February, they left London for China.

Broomhall’s account of their meetings and testimonies, A Missionary Band, appeared in 1886 and was enlarged in 1887 as The Evangelisation of the World. Copies went to every corner of the English-speaking evangelical world. It is not a subtle book. Its purpose was to stir up young people to offer themselves, and it succeeded. Its title would echo for decades in the student missionary movement.

Across the Atlantic

The influence of the Seven was felt far beyond Britain. In 1885 and 1886 Kynaston Studd toured colleges in the United States, telling the story of his brother and his friends. At Cornell University, in January 1886, a young student named John R. Mott heard him, and later described that meeting as a decisive hour of his life. Mott became the leading figure in the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which was formed in 1886 and in the following half-century sent many thousands of young Americans and Canadians overseas as missionaries. The Movement’s watchword, “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” was shaped in part by the story of the Seven.

No single event created the great missionary expansion of the late nineteenth century, and the Seven did not do it alone. But few people have ever done more simply by going.

The Ones Who Were Not Famous

The fame of the Seven had a shadow, and it is right to notice it. In the same years, and in the years that followed, the China Inland Mission sent out hundreds of other missionaries whose names no one remembers: shop assistants, clerks, nurses, farmers’ sons, teachers and domestic servants, many of them with very little education. Many of them were women. They went to the same provinces, wore the same Chinese clothes, learned the same difficult language, and in many cases died young of the same diseases. Nobody published books about them in 1886. Nobody packed Exeter Hall to hear them.

Hudson Taylor knew this, and it was part of the reason for his caution. He was glad of the Seven, and he used their fame for the sake of the Mission. But he did not want the Mission to believe that its work depended on the sons of baronets and England cricketers. It depended on God, and on ordinary men and women who would go where they were sent.

Some of the Seven seem to have understood this very well. Dixon Hoste, in particular, spent the rest of his long life deliberately avoiding the limelight, and became known for his humility and his deference to Chinese Christian leaders. Studd understood it in his own way. He never thought of himself as a hero, and he spent much of his life telling ordinary Christians that they could do as much as he had done, and more. But the publicity of 1885 also set a pattern in his life that was not entirely healthy. From the age of twenty-four, he was a public figure in the missionary world, whose decisions were reported, discussed and admired. It is not easy for anyone to live under that kind of attention without coming to believe that his own judgement is especially to be trusted.

Paul reminded the Corinthians of something that the publicity around the Seven tended to obscure: “For behold your calling, brethren, that not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise” (1 Corinthians 1:26-27, ASV). The Seven were exceptions, and they were celebrated because they were exceptions. Most of the work of the gospel in China, as everywhere, would be done by people who were not.

Here Am I

Isaiah’s call came in a vision of the Lord “high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1, ASV). It began with a sense of the holiness of God, and of his own uncleanness, and only after his lips had been touched with a coal from the altar did he hear the question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” The answer, “Here am I; send me,” was not the boast of a confident volunteer. It was the reply of a man who had been forgiven and had nothing left to protect.

The Seven are sometimes remembered as a band of heroes, and the publicity that surrounded them made it hard to see them any other way. Their lives in China would be very different from one another. Hoste would succeed Hudson Taylor as head of the Mission, and lead it from 1902 to 1935. Cassels would become the first Anglican bishop of Western China. Stanley Smith would serve in China until his death in 1931, the same year as Studd. Beauchamp would serve there for many years and become an army chaplain in the First World War. Cecil Polhill would leave China in poor health and become one of the founders of the Pentecostal movement in Britain. Studd would stay less than ten years. None of them knew any of that as they left London in February 1885. They knew only that they had been asked who would go, and that they had answered.