A Soul a Day, and “What About That One?”

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having lost one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”

— Luke 15:4, ASV

The Most Famous Claim

If people know one thing about Praying Hyde besides his name, it is usually this. In 1908 he asked God for one soul a day, and by the end of the year more than four hundred had been won. The next year he asked for two a day, and got them. The year after that he asked for four a day, and on any day when four did not come, he could neither eat nor sleep until he found out why.

It is a stirring story. It has been preached in countless sermons and printed in countless books. And because it is so famous, it is worth taking more care over it than over almost anything else in Hyde’s life: what exactly the sources say, where they got it, and what we can confirm.

What McGaw Records

The story comes from McGaw’s book, in a section from his unnamed informant, almost certainly Paterson. The key passage describes what followed the burden of the summer of 1908:

It was about this time that John Hyde laid hold of God in a very definite covenant. This was for one soul a day — not less, not enquirers simply but a soul saved — ready to confess Christ in public and be baptized in his name. Then the stress and strain was relieved. His heart was filled with the peace of full assurance.

Hyde returned to his district with this confidence, the account says. It meant long journeys, nights of prayer, and cold dews and exhausting heat, “yet victory always crowning this.” And then comes the figure: “By the end of that year more than four hundred were gathered in.” The account for 1909 says that he asked for two souls a day. The next section speaks of “the eight hundred souls gathered in since last year’s convention,” that is, between the conventions of 1909 and 1910. For 1910 it says that he “at length got the assurance of four souls a day.”

Notice two things about this account. First, the definition of a “soul” is strict: not an enquirer, not someone who had shown interest, but a person ready to confess Christ publicly and be baptized. Second, the numbers come without any source. The memoir does not say who counted, or whether the figures are Hyde’s own estimate, a mission return, or a friend’s impression.

What the Records Show

No mission report yet found gives Hyde’s personal baptisms for 1908, 1909, or 1910. That does not mean the figures are wrong. The Presbyterian mission reported by station and district, not by individual missionary. But it means that the famous numbers rest, as far as we know, on this one memoir.

What the records do show is that something remarkable was happening in Hyde’s district. The women’s missionary magazine of his church reported in October 1911 that the Ferozepore training school had moved to Moga, and added: “Moga is where Rev. J. N. Hyde has been burying the good seed, and baptisms have steadily increased for five years past. They numbered 685 in 1910.” Griswold’s obituary says that Hyde “was marvelously used of God during his last few years at Moga in bringing very many to decision and baptism,” and that “rarely a day passed without the winning of trophies of grace.”

Most valuable of all is a line from Hyde himself. McGaw quotes a letter Hyde wrote to his old seminary classmates near the end of his time in India:

For three full years now God has given us decisions and baptisms every day when we have been out in our district — over a thousand the past two years … never a day if we were right with God without souls.

This is the closest we come to Hyde’s own account of the soul-a-day years, and it is worth reading carefully. He says “us,” not “me.” The baptisms belonged to the whole team of missionary and Indian evangelists working the district together. He says “when we have been out in our district”, meaning on the days of touring, not every calendar day of the year. And he gives a round figure, over a thousand in two years, which fits well with the 685 baptisms the mission recorded at Moga in 1910. His emphasis falls not on the arithmetic but on the condition: “never a day if we were right with God without souls.”

Read this way, the story is both more modest and more believable than the legend. Hyde did not personally lead four people a day to Christ for a year. What happened was this. In the middle of a great movement toward Christ among the poorest people of the Punjab, Hyde and his Indian fellow workers prayed specifically and expectantly for daily fruit, and for three years they saw it. That is extraordinary enough.

A Covenant, Not a Quota

There is a danger in the soul-a-day story, and it is not only the danger of exaggeration. Numbers can take over. A missionary who has asked God for a certain number of converts every day may be tempted to count people rather than love them. He may baptize too quickly, or treat a day without results as a personal failure. The critics of the Punjab mass movements worried about exactly this: converts baptized with little teaching, and churches full of people whom no one had time to instruct.

Hyde was not immune to the pressure. Paterson remembered him saying that “if on any day four souls were not brought into the fold, at night there would be such a weight on his heart that it was positively painful, and he could not eat nor sleep.” There is something admirable in that, and something troubling.

But the sources also show what kept Hyde’s covenant from becoming a quota. First, its motive was love, not success. Paterson insists that no number satisfied him: “No matter if he won the one a day or two a day or four a day, he had an unsatisfied longing, an undying passion for lost souls.” He seemed always to be hearing the Good Shepherd’s words, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring” (John 10:16, ASV). Second, when a day passed without fruit, he looked first at himself, not at the people. As we will see in a later chapter, what he usually found was that he had lost the spirit of praise. Third, his definition of a convert was demanding. He was not counting hands raised or cards signed, but people willing to confess Christ publicly and be baptized. In the villages of the Punjab that often meant persecution from employers and family.

And the numbers did not make him hurry. The most famous story of those years is about a day when Hyde refused to leave a village because one person was missing.

“What About That One?”

Paterson heard this story from one of Hyde’s Indian evangelists, who told it “with shame.” It is the most vivid scene in all the memoirs, and it has the ring of a true story partly because it makes the storyteller look bad.

One morning, after prayer, Hyde and two Indian evangelists felt assured that God would give them ten souls that day. They set out in a country cart to a distant village. The road ran along a river bank and was dangerous after dark. They reached the village. They sang, and preached, and sang again, and preached again. The day wore on. Not one person showed the slightest interest. The evangelists grew hungry and thirsty. As Paterson put it, echoing the parable of the prodigal son, “No man gave unto them.” They began to want to go home. Hyde would not move. He was waiting for the ten.

At last, near a humble cottage, they asked for a drink. The man offered them milk as well as water, and invited them in. As they talked, he showed a surprising knowledge of Jesus Christ. Yes, he said, the family had been thinking about following him. Then why not now? He called his wife and children. They understood what they were doing, and they decided together, there and then, to take their stand on the Lord’s side. Hyde baptized them all, nine people in all.

By now it was getting dark. The short winter day was ending, and the dangerous road lay ahead. Surely now they could go. The father of the family urged it too. Hyde left the house reluctantly. One of the evangelists went for the cart. The other took Hyde by the arm and hurried him toward it. When it came, they tried to lift him in. He would not get in. He looked pleadingly at the evangelist and asked, “What about that one?”

The evangelist lost his temper. It was all very well for the Sahib, he thought, if he broke his neck on the road in the dark. He had no wife or family to think of. It was a different matter for them. He said something sharp about their wives and children waiting anxiously at home. The two of them almost used force to get Hyde into the cart. And each time, “the same cry” came from him: “What about that one?”

After a while the father of the family came up, wondering why the Padri Sahib was still standing in the road. Hyde told him that one soul was still missing. “Why, there he is!” said the man. “My nephew, whom I have adopted. He has been living with the rest of us, but has been out playing.” He brought the boy forward, a bright and intelligent lad. Hyde asked him about his faith, and the boy answered clearly. There could be no doubt about him, and he too was baptized.

“That is the ten,” said Hyde, with what the evangelist called “a weary sigh of heart’s ease,” and climbed into the cart. They reached home safely in the dark, tired but content.

The Shepherd’s Arithmetic

It is possible to read this story as a lesson in stubborn faith: Hyde asked for ten, and would not settle for nine. That is part of it. But the heart of the story is not the number. It is the one.

The verse at the head of this chapter describes a shepherd who has ninety-nine sheep safe and goes after the one that is lost, “until he find it” (Luke 15:4, ASV). By any sensible reckoning, ninety-nine is a good day’s result. But the shepherd does not reckon sensibly. He reckons by love, and love counts differently. Jesus concludes, “I say unto you, that even so there shall be joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine righteous persons, who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7, ASV).

Paterson saw the same thing. Hyde, he wrote, “knew that the good Shepherd was Himself searching for that one still outside the Fold.” Hyde’s stubbornness in the road was not the obstinacy of a man chasing a target. It was the stubbornness of a man who believed he was standing beside the Good Shepherd, who had not stopped searching.

And the story ends with rest. Paterson wrote that the “rest of soul” the Lord gives his faithful under-shepherds is also the rest they give him, “for in their passion and longing for the lost He sees of the travail of His soul and is satisfied.” The phrase is from Isaiah’s great prophecy of the suffering servant: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11, ASV). The joy of the village road in the dark was not finally Hyde’s. It belonged to Christ.

Preach and Baptize on the Spot

One more feature of these years deserves notice, because it troubles some readers today. Hyde baptized quickly. He told his mission in 1907 that the ideal was to “preach and baptize on the spot.” McGaw’s sources remember him baptizing people “in the village, by the roadside, or anywhere.”

This can look reckless. But it was not unbiblical. When Philip explained the gospel to the Ethiopian official on the road to Gaza, the man said, “Behold, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?” Philip baptized him at once (Acts 8:36, 38, ASV). On the day of Pentecost about three thousand were baptized (Acts 2:41, ASV). The New Testament knows nothing of years-long waiting periods for people who have confessed Christ.

What made quick baptism responsible in the Punjab was what came after it. Hyde’s own method insisted on following up converts in their places of work, and trying “every time we visit a convert … to leave some lesson or some influence on his life.” He founded the Ferozepore training school, later moved to Moga, to prepare village preachers and teachers. Baptism was the beginning of discipleship, not the end of evangelism. Whether the mission always managed that follow-up well is another question. It was stretched very thin by the sheer size of the movement. But Hyde did not treat baptism as a finishing line.

For Reflection

The soul-a-day story is often told to make Christians feel that they pray too little and expect too little. It may do that. But its real challenge lies in the question Hyde asked in the dark: “What about that one?”

Most churches are content with the ninety-nine. Most of us, if we have seen nine people come to faith, would call it a remarkable day and head home before dark. Hyde’s question will not let us settle so easily. Somewhere near us, playing in the lane or sitting at the back or living in the next house, there is probably one person no one has yet thought to ask about. The Good Shepherd has not stopped searching for them. We might pray, like Hyde, to be standing where he is searching.