“Give Me Souls, or I Die”

“My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you—”

— Galatians 4:19, ASV

A Week at Murree

In the summer of 1907 a group of missionaries went up to Murree, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas on the road to Kashmir. They went to escape the heat of the plains, which in June can make work nearly impossible. Several of them had been leaders in the Sialkot prayer room, and as the weeks passed they arranged to set aside a week or ten days for waiting on God together. Others heard of it and came. Pengwern Jones was among them. He called it “the most wonderful week of my life.”

They stayed with the Rev. and Mrs. McCheyne Paterson. Jones shared a tiny room with Hyde, and he recorded what he saw with the eye of an affectionate roommate. Hyde, he says, was “very full of humour which was under perfect control.” In the company of people who shared his prayer life, “the sad burdened features relaxed … and his face was lit up with joy.” The conversation at meals was lively and uplifting. But Hyde’s place at the table was often empty. “We knew where he was,” Jones wrote. “No one enjoyed the company of men and women more than he did, but Jesus came first.” When Jones went to bed, Hyde was on his knees, wrapped in a heavy overcoat against the mountain cold. When Jones woke at dawn, Hyde was on his knees again. Sometimes he stayed there the whole day.

Then, at some point in that week, a particular burden came upon him. It was not for the Punjab villages but for the English visitors in the hill station, the officials, officers, and their families who crowded Murree in the hot season. For two or three days Hyde did not go to bed or come down to meals. The food sent up to his room came back untouched. Several times he came and knelt by Jones’s bed, asking him to help him carry the burden in prayer. On the Saturday night he was “in great agony,” and Paterson and Jones stayed up with him. Jones thought of Jacob wrestling at the ford of the Jabbok, saying, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me” (Genesis 32:26, ASV). Yet in Hyde’s determination, he said, “there was such deep humility, such loving pleading.”

At two o’clock in the morning there was a knock at the door. Paterson whispered to Jones that it was probably his wife, reminding them to go to bed. It was not. It was a servant with a letter from a woman staying at the largest hotel in Murree, asking whether the missionaries would hold a service for Europeans in the hotel drawing room. The servant had been sent miles in the wrong direction and had struggled to find anyone at night who could direct him. That was why he came at two in the morning. Hyde heard them reading the letter, jumped up from his knees, and said, “That is the answer to my prayers, I know now that the Lord has heard me.”

The service was held. It was not large, and “from a human standpoint” it was not a success. Hyde, who had stayed in his room to pray, or rather, Jones says, to praise, was not at all disappointed. “He said that it was all in the Lord’s Hand and He knew how to carry on His work.” At least one person from the hotel came to the evening service in the Scottish church, and Hyde was there, his face so full of joy “that it was contagious.”

The story has none of the grand numbers that later books love. A burden, a night of agony, a knock at two in the morning, a small and unimpressive service, one person who came back. But it shows the pattern of Hyde’s intercession in these years very clearly. It began with a burden he did not choose. It continued in prayer that was costly to his body. It ended in an assurance that God had heard, and in a joy that did not depend on visible results.

“Souls or I Die”

The cry for which Hyde is best known belongs to the following summer. McGaw’s account, from the friend who was Hyde’s host that summer (very probably Paterson, though McGaw does not name him), describes Hyde’s stay in the hills in 1908. He had a separate room on the hillside, a little apart from the house. He came, they said, “for a very real intercession with his Master.” It was evident to everyone that he was “bowed down with sore travail of soul.” He missed many meals. When Paterson went to his room he would find him “lying as in great agony, or walking up and down as if an inward fire were burning in his bones.”

When Paterson begged him to come and eat, Hyde would look at him, smile, and say, “I am not hungry.” Paterson understood: “there was a far greater hunger eating up his very soul, and prayer alone could satisfy that.” And in the room on the hill, day after day, his hosts heard him pleading for the people of his district, “with sobs — dry choking sobs, that showed how the depths of his soul were being stirred.” The burden of his prayers was always the same: “Father, give me these souls or I die!”

That is the form in which McGaw records it. Later writers have varied the words. “O God, give me souls or I die!” appears in McGaw’s own preface, and other versions have spread from book to book. The exact wording cannot be fixed. What matters is the shape of the cry, and that is not in doubt.

It is worth noticing where the shape comes from. The words echo, perhaps deliberately, an ancient cry of longing in Genesis. When Rachel saw that she had no children, “she said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30:1, ASV). Hyde’s village converts were his children in the faith. The fruitlessness of his early years had taught him what it meant to long for them. And the language of spiritual birth runs all through the New Testament. The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s cry to the churches of Galatia: “My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19, ASV). Isaiah had promised that “as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children” (Isaiah 66:8, ASV).

What Is Travail in Prayer?

The word “travail” means the labour of childbirth. Applied to prayer, it describes a kind of intercession that is not calm or detached. It involves the whole person, body included. The one who prays feels the need of others as though it were his own pain, and cannot rest until it is relieved.

Scripture gives many examples. Moses pleaded for Israel after the golden calf and offered to be blotted out of God’s book in their place. Jeremiah wished his head were waters and his eyes a fountain of tears, so that he could weep day and night for his people. Paul wrote to the Romans, “I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake” (Romans 9:2-3, ASV). That passage was on Hyde’s mind throughout these summers. McGaw’s informant, apparently Hyde’s host in the hills in 1907, remembered that Hyde’s last message before he left was on those very verses. When he finished, “how we all broke down!”

Above all there is Gethsemane. Jesus said to his three friends, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: abide ye here, and watch with me” (Matthew 26:38, ASV). Paterson believed that in those summers Hyde had heard the Lord say to him, “Abide ye here and watch with Me,” and had stayed.

The Fellowship of His Sufferings

Paterson and Hyde spoke often, in these years, of “the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings,” a phrase from Paul: “that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10, ASV). Hyde would quote another verse that puzzles many readers: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24, ASV). And Paterson remembered his preoccupation with the thought “that our Lord still agonizes for souls,” that the risen Christ, who “ever liveth to make intercession” for his people (Hebrews 7:25, ASV), still bears their burdens with them.

This theme needs careful handling, and Hyde’s friends did not always handle it carefully. Scripture is clear that Christ’s sacrifice for sin was once for all, complete, and unrepeatable. He cried, “It is finished” (John 19:30, ASV). No intercessor adds anything to the atonement, and nothing is “lacking” in Christ’s work of redemption. When Paul speaks of filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions, he is not talking about the cross as payment for sin. He means the sufferings that Christ’s body, the church, must still undergo as it carries the gospel to the world. Those sufferings Christ counts as his own: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” (Acts 9:4, ASV). The intercessor is invited to share, in a small way, in the Lord’s grief over the world and his longing for its salvation. He is not invited to share in the Lord’s work of paying for it.

Some of the language in the memoirs goes further than this. It speaks of Hyde being given “the privilege of drinking of the Master’s cup,” and of a friend of his who seemed to tread “the winepress of the wrath of God against sin all alone.” Such phrases are the overflow of devotion and should not be pressed into theology. But at its heart the idea is sound and deeply biblical. When we pray for others, we are not persuading a reluctant God to care about them. We are being drawn into a care he already has. The Spirit himself, Paul says, “maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26, ASV). Hyde’s groans in the room on the hillside were, in his friends’ understanding, a small echo of those.

“It Is Not Our Broken Heart”

There is a danger here, and Paterson saw it. If intercession is measured by how much the intercessor suffers, then prayer becomes a kind of spiritual athletics. Those who can stay up longest and weep most will be counted the best at it, and ordinary Christians will despair.

McGaw preserves a conversation from the end of one of the conventions that addresses this directly. A Christian was praying aloud, asking God for “Thy heart of love for sinners, Thy broken heart for their sins, Thy tears with which to admonish night and day.” Then he went on, “But, O Lord, I feel so cold. My heart is so hard and dead. I am so lukewarm!” A friend interrupted him. “Why are you looking down at your poor self, brother? Of course your heart is cold and dead. But you have asked for the broken heart of Jesus, his love, his burden for sin, his tears. Is he a liar? Has he not given what you asked for? Then why look away from his heart to your own?”

Paterson drew the lesson clearly: “It is not our broken heart, it is God’s we need. It is not our sufferings, it is Christ’s we are partakers of. It is not our tears with which we should admonish night and day — it is all Christ’s. The fellowship of his sufferings is his free gift — free for the taking in simple faith, never minding our feelings.”

This is an important corrective. The burden that Hyde carried was not something he manufactured. It was given. And the secret of his prayer life, Paterson insisted, was not his own effort but Christ’s intercession: “I confess my ever failing prayers … and plead his never failing intercession.”

Not a Hermit

One more detail from the summer of 1908 deserves to be remembered. For all the intensity of those weeks, Hyde did not become a recluse. His host’s children loved “Uncle John,” who had often played with them, and they greeted him with smiles. They seemed to understand that this was “no time for play,” and were hushed and gentle in his presence. Yet “there was nothing of the hermit about him,” Paterson wrote. “People were more than ever attracted to him, and freely asked for his prayers. He always had leisure to speak to them of spiritual things, and entered even more patiently than ever into their trials and disappointments.”

That is the test of genuine intercession. Prayer that makes a person impatient with the people he prays for, or too spiritual to be interrupted, has gone wrong somewhere. Hyde’s prayer made him more available, not less.

For Reflection

Few of us will pray as Hyde prayed in the hills in 1907 and 1908, and later chapters will ask honestly whether he himself should have prayed quite so hard. But all of us can ask whether we have ever longed for the salvation of others as Rachel longed for children, or as Paul longed for his people. We can ask whether we have ever prayed for them until it cost us something.

And if our hearts feel cold, Paterson’s word is for us. We are not asked to produce a broken heart. We are invited to ask for Christ’s, and to trust that he gives it, “never minding our feelings.”