Sialkot: “Is the Holy Spirit First?”

“But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me: and ye also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.”

— John 15:26-27, ASV

A Convention for the Deepening of the Spiritual Life

In the late summer of 1904, a few months after the Punjab Prayer Union began, missionaries and Indian Christian workers gathered at Sialkot for a new kind of meeting. It was not a business conference, of which the missions had many. It was a “convention for the deepening of the spiritual life,” in the spirit of the great Keswick Convention in England. For several days the participants would study the Bible, pray, and seek a fresh experience of God for themselves. The host was the United Presbyterian mission, whose headquarters were in Sialkot. The organiser who made everything run, as Jones later recalled, was a Dr. Gordon, who fed and housed hundreds of people with such calm that the accounts “balanced to a pice.” For a time its chairman was the Rev. John Forman. The sources differ over who first proposed the gathering. McGaw names Hyde, R. McCheyne Paterson, and George Turner as the three on whose hearts God “laid a great burden of prayer” for it. The United Presbyterian missionary W. B. Anderson, according to McGaw, chaired the committee that established it. No independent record settles the matter. Griswold’s careful phrase is the safest: Hyde was “very closely associated with that great annual gathering” from its beginning in 1904.

The Sialkot Convention continues to this day, more than a century later, in Pakistan. It began as a small gathering, mostly of missionaries. Carré’s book remembers that the blessing came in stages. In 1904 it was the missionaries who were most deeply affected. In 1905 it reached “our Pastors and elders.” By 1906 it had spread “to Christians generally and reached outside congregations all over Northern India.”

1904: “I Must Not Lose This Vision”

Hyde came to the first convention to lead Bible studies. One missionary remembered that he spoke on “the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of God,” an echo of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:18. But the most remembered moment of that first convention was not one of Hyde’s Bible readings. It was an evening when he arrived late.

McGaw’s source, a fellow missionary, told the story. The night before, Hyde had come to his study at about half past nine and started a conversation about “the value of public testimony,” that is, about whether Christians should speak openly of what God had done for them. They argued until after one in the morning. The next evening Hyde was due to lead a meeting for men in the tent on the mission compound. The men gathered on the mats and began to sing. Hyde did not come. They sang several hymns more. At last he came in, very late, sat down on the mat in front of them, and was silent for a long time. Then he stood up and said quietly:

Brothers, I did not sleep any last night and I have not eaten anything to-day. I have been having a great controversy with God. I feel that he has wanted me to come here and testify to you concerning some things that he has done for me, and I have been arguing with him that I should not do this. Only this evening a little while ago have I got peace concerning the matter and have I agreed to obey him, and now I have come to tell you just some things that he has done for me.

He spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes, “very quietly and simply,” about “some of the desperate conflicts that he had had with sin and how God had given him victory.” Then he sat down, bowed his head, and said, “Let us have a season of prayer.” The men lay on their faces on the mats in the Indian manner of prayer. For a long time, the witness remembered, “man after man rose to his feet to pray,” and there was “such confession of sin as most of us had never heard before and such crying out to God for mercy and help.” Several lives, he said, were “wholly transformed through the influence of that meeting.”

It is worth noticing what the controversy with God had been about. It was not whether to preach, or what to preach. It was whether Hyde would be honest in public about his own struggles. He had argued against it all night, as many Christian leaders would, for reasons that sound very respectable: it might seem self-centred, or unseemly, or might damage his authority. God won the argument. And the confession of the leader opened the way for the confession of others.

Something also happened within Hyde himself at that convention. One of his dearest friends wrote that until then, although Hyde was a child of God, he had never been “compelled to tarry at his Jerusalem till he was endued with power from on high.” At Sialkot in 1904, while he was speaking to his fellow missionaries about the work of the Holy Spirit, “God spoke to his own soul.” Griswold, who was there, remembered what Hyde said at the close of the convention: “Oh, I must not lose this blessing.” McGaw’s source remembered it as, “I must not lose this vision.” Whichever words he used, Griswold adds the verdict of the next eight years: “he never did lose it, but went on from strength to strength, and from glory to glory.”

Carré’s book preserves one more remark from that first convention, spoken by a leader whom it does not name: “Either we missionaries receive Power from on high now, or let us all take the first steamer home, for we are otherwise unfit for this task.” It is the same logic as Hyde’s hour in his room in 1892, now spoken by a whole group. They would have the gospel’s power in their own lives, or they would stop pretending.

1905: The Second Convention

The convention of 1905 is the one that everyone remembered. We have an unusually full record of it, including an official report written by the United Presbyterian mission within a few years and published in its history in 1909. That report is precious, because it is independent of the devotional books about Hyde. It does not mention him by name at all. It gives all the glory to the Holy Spirit, which is exactly what Hyde would have wanted.

The convention ran from 25 August to 3 September 1905. Nearly three hundred people attended. Most were Indian workers, men and women, and there were missionaries from the United Presbyterian, Scottish, and American Presbyterian missions. It lasted ten days. “Many prayers had been going up for this convention,” the report says. “In the Home land some had been praying for it, while in India very definite prayer had been made.”

A programme had been carefully prepared, and it included a series of morning Bible readings about the Holy Spirit. According to the memoirs, Hyde was the one appointed to give them.

“Is the Holy Spirit First?”

Hyde’s subject for those morning readings was the passage at the head of this chapter: “when the Comforter is come … he shall bear witness of me: and ye also bear witness” (John 15:26-27, ASV). The memoirs preserve the heart of what he said. The Holy Spirit, he insisted, is the true witness to Christ. He alone was present at every event of Jesus’ life: his birth, his baptism, his preaching, his miracles, his death, and his resurrection. So he alone can testify to them with full authority. Human witnesses are secondary. Our part is to bear witness in his strength and behind him, never in his place.

Then Hyde turned the point on his hearers. McGaw’s source preserved the questions he asked:

Is the Holy Spirit first in your pulpits, pastors? Do you consciously put him in front and keep yourselves behind him, when preaching? Teachers, when you are asked hard questions do you ask his aid as a witness of all Christ’s life? He alone was a witness of the incarnation, the miracles, the death and the resurrection of Christ. So he is the only witness!

Carré’s account adds that when Hyde asked the pastors “who was first and foremost in their pulpits, they themselves, or the Divine Teacher and Guide into all the truth,” there was not, in the writer’s judgement, “a single preacher who was not convicted of this sin.”

The teaching was not new with Hyde. Carré says that on this point he was following one of his own teachers, the Rev. D. Lytle of the United Presbyterian mission. Lytle had insisted that Indian churches would become self-supporting and self-propagating in the apostolic way only when “the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and then the constant infilling of the Holy Spirit, received its true place in the heart and life of the Christian community.” The apostolic churches, Lytle used to say, “put first things first.” Hyde had said the same thing to his mission committee a decade earlier, when they scolded him for studying his Bible instead of his grammar.

“He Has Given Me No Message”

What happened next is told in three sources, and they agree in substance, though McGaw’s order of events differs slightly from the mission report’s.

The official mission report says simply: “A series of morning addresses were to have been given about the Holy Ghost. Only one was delivered. After that, He came Himself in great power, and all learned from Him.” It continues: “When the one who had been appointed to give the addresses came in, the second morning, and said quietly, ‘I thank God, He has given me no message for you to-day,’ surprise was written on some faces. The chairman moved aside and said, ‘The Holy Ghost is leader of this meeting.’ Each morning meeting was left in this way and the liberty was not abused.”

McGaw’s account, from his unnamed informant (almost certainly Paterson), tells the same scene from Hyde’s side: “The next morning Mr. Hyde was not allowed to give any further teaching. The chairman came down from his seat and declared the meeting to be in the hands of God’s Spirit.” The next morning again, Hyde said that he had no fresh message from God. And Carré’s book adds: “when John Hyde intimated that he had no other message to give, the Chairman was led to leave each meeting to the guidance of the Holy Spirit — surely that was the direct result of this teaching!”

The unnamed speaker in the official report was, all but certainly, John Hyde. And the story fits his teaching with an almost uncomfortable neatness. He had spent one morning urging the pastors to put the Holy Spirit first in their pulpits and themselves behind. The next morning he did it himself. He had nothing to say, and he said so, and he sat down. A man who needed to be seen as a great speaker could not have done that. The young missionary who had wanted to shine could not have done it. The man who had prayed on the ship to be willing to work “quietly out of sight” now did it gladly, in front of three hundred people.

The Days That Followed

The official report describes what came next. The morning meetings “usually continued two and three hours.” There was deep conviction of sin from the start: “It was a time of intense mental agony.” One day was remembered as “the day of great confession,” when people “with trembling in every limb, stood obedient to His voice, confessing openly as He bade.” After that, the report says, “the cloud seemed to lift and the sunshine came and flooded the place, and joy was depicted on many countenances.” A room was set aside for prayer, and “after the first or second day this place was not empty, day or night.” An aged Indian minister, bitterly opposed to the public confessions, fell on his face in the prayer room and cried, “Oh, how I have sinned! O God, have mercy on me!” On the last Sunday there was no sermon and no leader. Someone announced the thirtieth Psalm, and it was sung three times over, the old minister himself calling for it again. The 148th Psalm, “Praise ye Jehovah,” became the song of the convention, sung day and night.

McGaw’s sources add scenes from inside the prayer room. They remember Hyde there day and night. At one point he was told by God to do something, and he went and obeyed, but he came back weeping and confessed that he had obeyed unwillingly: “Pray for me, brethren, that I may do this joyfully.” When he returned from obeying a second time, he entered the hall and repeated three words in Urdu and three in English, three times over: “Ai Asmani Bap,” “O Heavenly Father.” The writer struggled for a way to describe what followed. It was, he said, “as if a great ocean came sweeping into that assembly.”

One of the most moving memories comes from a missionary who went to comfort a Punjabi Christian sobbing in the prayer room. The man had seen, he said, a vision of “thousands of souls in this land of India being carried away by the dark river of sin.” The missionary put his arms around him and said, “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” The man’s face lit up: “Thank God, Sahib.” The words the missionary quoted are from John: “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7, ASV). The grief of that convention was real, but it was never allowed to end in grief.

For Reflection

The heart of the 1905 convention was not a great sermon. It was a speaker who stepped back. The official report and the devotional memoirs, written for different purposes, agree that the turning point came when the appointed teacher had nothing to say, and the chairman gave the meeting to the Holy Spirit.

Most Christian gatherings today are carefully planned, and there is nothing wrong with planning. The 1905 programme was carefully prepared too. But Hyde’s question still presses: Is the Holy Spirit first? Do we consciously put him in front and keep ourselves behind him? It is easy to agree with that in theory. It is quite another thing to stand before a waiting crowd and say, “I thank God, He has given me no message for you to-day.”