Preface

“What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”

— Matthew 26:40, ASV

The first volume of this series told the story of Watchman Nee, a Chinese church leader whose books travelled the world while he spent his last twenty years in prison. Courage in his case had a public shape. It stood before interrogators and refused to recant, and it paid for faithfulness with freedom.

The man in this second volume was never arrested. He never faced a hostile government. He was not martyred, and he preached no famous sermon that anyone troubled to write down. For most of twenty years he lived in the villages of the Punjab, travelled by ox cart and third-class railway carriage, ate what his Indian fellow workers ate, and spent a quite unreasonable part of his life on his knees, or flat on his face on the floor of a prayer room. The people among whom he worked gave him a name that has outlasted almost everything else about him: “the man who never sleeps.” English-speaking Christians gave him another. They called him Praying Hyde.

Why put such a man in a series called Portraits of Courage?

Because there is a courage that is harder to see than the courage of the prison cell, and in some ways harder to sustain. It is the courage to keep doing the hidden thing when the visible thing would be praised. It is the courage of a missionary who, with few converts to report and colleagues who thought him odd, decided that the answer was not to work harder in front of people but to wait longer before God. It is the courage to be misunderstood without defending yourself, to be passed over without resentment, and to be corrected by God in the middle of your own prayers. John Hyde had that courage. He was not born with it. The story of how he came by it is the story of this book.

Why a Book About Prayer Must Be Honest

There is a difficulty at the heart of any life of John Hyde, and it is better to name it on the first page than to hide it in an appendix. Hyde wrote very little. He kept no journal that has come down to us and published no book. Almost everything vivid that Christians know about him comes from two small books printed in 1923, eleven years after his death. One was compiled in India from the memories of two of his closest friends. The other was compiled in Ohio by a minister who had known his family. Both were written by people who loved him, for readers who wanted to pray more. Neither was written to answer a historian’s questions.

Since 1923 the story has been retold many times, and each retelling has tended to be a little more certain than the one before. Numbers have hardened. Dates have drifted. A doctor’s puzzled remark has become a medical miracle. A great deal of what is now repeated about Hyde as fact is really devotional memory handed from book to book.

This volume does not treat that tradition with contempt. The friends who remembered Hyde were honest people, and many of their memories are precise, local, and entirely believable. But it does treat the tradition as a tradition. Where the historical record is firm, this book says so plainly. Where a story rests on one friend’s recollection, it says that too. The record includes the seminary catalogue, the missionary magazines of his church, his colleagues’ reports, and the obituary a fellow missionary wrote in the spring of 1912. Where the popular accounts have simply got things wrong, as they have with the place of his death, this book corrects them without fuss.

This is not only a matter of scholarly tidiness. A book about prayer that exaggerates its evidence teaches readers, without meaning to, that prayer needs exaggerating. It does not. Hyde himself was uneasy with admiration. His friends recalled that he dreaded anyone copying him. He would disappear to pray when he thought people were looking at him rather than at Christ. The most fitting tribute to such a man is to tell the truth about him, and then to look past him to the One he looked at.

Scripture in This Book

As in the first volume, all Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version of 1901. The ASV belongs to the public domain. Its formal, careful English suits extended reflection on the biblical text. And it was published in the middle of Hyde’s own years in India, so it is an English Bible of his own generation.

Each chapter opens with a single passage that carries the chapter’s theme, and further passages are woven through the narrative. This is not decoration. Hyde’s friends remembered him with a Bible almost always open in his hands. When he knelt, his hands rested on it. When he prayed in the prayer room at Sialkot, he would take one promise and repeat it, word by word, until it seemed to fill the room. He took a verse such as “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Psalm 81:10, ASV) and prayed it until the people around him could not forget it. A biography of such a man that did not keep returning to Scripture would miss the thing that shaped him most.

The verse at the head of this preface is the question Jesus asked in Gethsemane, when the three friends he had brought to pray with him had fallen asleep. Hyde’s friends believed he had heard that question addressed to himself, and had answered it with his life. Whether or not we are called to pray as he did, and this book will argue that most of us are not called to his particular form, the question is still addressed to us. It is asked gently, by a Lord who knows that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41, ASV). The purpose of this book is to let John Hyde’s life put that question to us again.