Tears at a Train Window

“Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the space of three years I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears.”

— Acts 20:31, ASV

A Boy from the Mission School

Most of the people John Hyde led to Christ are nameless in the records. They appear only as numbers in a mission report, or as “souls” in a friend’s memoir. One of them is known by his initials, and his story, told by McCheyne Paterson, is the most human in all the accounts of Hyde’s life. It does not end neatly. That is one reason to trust it.

Paterson calls him “J. N.” He was a young Brahman, from the highest Hindu caste, who had attended the mission school in Paterson’s town. As he grew up the teaching of Christ drew him, and he also attended the Sunday school of one of the women missionaries. When he left school and began to earn his living, he publicly confessed Christ as his Saviour, in the face of what Paterson calls “the bitterest opposition” of his widowed mother and his relatives.

His family then changed tactics. Instead of opposing him, they began to please him. Their kindness won his heart, and he went back home. There he fell in with young men who led him into drink. Paterson thought the weakness might have run in the family. He fell, and he denied his Lord.

But he was miserable. He went to Mr. Hyde, “who received him as did the father his prodigal son.” The young man came to live with Hyde. Once again he was won from his old ways and confessed his faith. And once again the drink would take hold of him. More than once he stole Hyde’s clothes and sold them to buy liquor.

Paterson met Hyde around that time. With a smile Hyde told him, “I may not get up to you to the hills this summer, the Father evidently desires me to spend my hot weather in the plains, for I have no warm clothes left!” He took the loss, Paterson says, cheerfully, and thought his clothes “a small price to pay in exchange for an immortal soul.” The letter to the Hebrews commends believers who “took joyfully the spoiling of your possessions, knowing that ye have for yourselves a better possession and an abiding one” (Hebrews 10:34, ASV). Hyde would point out how the Lord had borne with Judas, and how he never sent away anyone who wanted to stay with him. So Hyde bore with the young man.

The Train to Lahore

Paterson heard the next part of the story from a stranger. He was travelling by train when a Christian woman who worked as a ticket collector at a station told him about a remarkable man she had just seen.

A missionary had been talking to a young man sitting in a train bound for Lahore. The young man was loud and almost abusive. “I am tired of this sort of thing,” he said. “I am going to my boon companions and shall have a good time.” The missionary leaned forward and, in a low voice, begged him not to go away from him. He got only a rude answer. The ticket collector, disgusted, walked away. When she came back, the missionary was leaning into the carriage window, still pleading. He was imploring the young man in Christ’s name, and she saw tears running down his cheeks as he reasoned with him. The young man would not listen. The train pulled out. The missionary, Paterson later learned, went on alone and sad to stay with friends at Gujrat.

The next day the ticket collector saw the same young man coming back from Lahore. “You have come back very soon again,” she said. He looked up at her with a pale face. “I am going back to him,” he said. “I have not been able to sleep all night — I could not forget his tears.”

The missionary was John Hyde, and the young man was J. N.

Years later J. N. told Paterson what happened when he got back. He went to the mission house where Hyde was staying and found him in his room, praying. Hyde opened his eyes, saw him, took him in his arms, and said, “I have just been praying that God would send you back to me, and see, He has answered me!”

“I Could Not Forget His Tears”

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Paul’s farewell to the elders of the church at Ephesus. Looking back on three years among them, Paul reminded them that “I ceased not to admonish every one night and day with tears” (Acts 20:31, ASV). Tears were not a sign of weakness in Paul’s ministry. They were one of its instruments. He told the Corinthians, “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Corinthians 12:15, ASV).

Paterson drew the obvious lesson. “I often feel that if souls could say the same of us, that we wept over them — our tears would bring them to a proper frame of mind.” He reminded his readers that Jesus himself wept at the grave of Lazarus, and that those who saw him said, “Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:36, ASV).

There is no technique in this. Tears cannot be produced to order, and tears produced to manipulate someone are a kind of lie. What moved J. N. was not the tears themselves but what they revealed: that this man really loved him, cared more for his soul than for his own dignity, and would lean out of a train window in front of strangers to plead with him. Many people have heard the gospel explained correctly. Fewer have seen someone weep for them.

A Waiting Shed at Moga

J. N. also told Paterson how he had first come to know Hyde, and his account shows Hyde’s way with people very clearly.

He had seen Hyde on the platform of the railway station at Moga. He went up to him, mentioned the name of another missionary, and said that he himself had been baptized but had fallen away. “Why did you deny Christ?” Hyde asked him. The young man began to make excuses. Hyde did not argue. He took him into the third-class waiting shed, and there, with two other Christians, knelt down and prayed with him. A crowd gathered to stare. The young man’s own relatives came and saw him kneeling with the Christians. Then the train came in. Hyde said goodbye and added, “We will meet again in a week’s time or so, God will arrange it.”

The encounter so affected the young man that he set out to find Hyde. He heard that Hyde was holding meetings in a Christian village some distance inland. With a Christian friend he walked for two days to get there, and arrived exhausted. He was told Hyde was in his room praying. Hyde looked up, saw the Brahman lad, and took him in his arms “in good Punjabi style.” Then, seeing how tired he was, he made him lie down and began to rub and press his swollen feet. The young man protested. A Brahman did not expect a European missionary to touch his feet. Hyde insisted on serving him with his own hands. Years later, J. N. told Paterson about it with tears in his eyes, and said, “I often see him in my dreams before me as of old.”

Jesus, having washed his disciples’ feet, told them: “If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14, ASV). Hyde had never needed to be told twice.

An Island in a Pool

In the same Christian village J. N. saw something he never forgot. One day he missed Hyde and went looking for him. He found him on a small island in a pool, surrounded by Christian children, all of them praying. The young man waded across to join them. Hyde was praying aloud, a phrase at a time, and the children were repeating what he said. They were praying that God’s Holy Spirit might fill all their hearts. Afterwards Hyde crossed back through the water with them all, and said to J. N. that God had told him from his Word to go into the valley and pray. He saw that this place was the valley, and as he went, the children had followed him.

That evening, while they were eating dinner, news came that the village’s Indian pastor had suddenly fallen ill and that his house was on fire. Everyone ran to help. While the others fought the flames, Hyde went to the pastor and found him crying out in pain and fear of death, with some unconfessed sin evidently weighing on his conscience. Hyde talked and prayed with him. Then he said, “I think it is God’s will that you confess your sin in church before your congregation.” The pastor agreed, and he was carried to the church on his bed. Lying on it, weeping, he confessed that he had committed a great sin against God in that very church, and prayed for forgiveness. According to the story, a great peace came over him and his pain left him. About twenty members of the congregation, conscience-stricken, confessed their own sins too. The firefighters joined them, and the service went on for an hour and a half. Then everyone went back to their half-eaten dinner.

From that village Hyde and his companions went on to a hill station where he had been urgently asked to hold meetings. They travelled third class in the heat, with only enough money for one pony and one porter between them, so they took turns riding. One night the Indian preacher, riding ahead, felt his pony freeze. A tiger had sprung from the roadside and landed just behind him. The terrified pony bolted and leapt a ditch, and the tiger was left on the road. When Hyde came up later there was no sign of it. He made them go back by moonlight to see the paw marks in the dust. They stayed a week in the hill station, and J. N., who was with them, was convicted of having denied his Lord, confessed, and was received back into fellowship. “So they went like beggars and returned like kings!” Paterson remarked, and the young man laughed and agreed. A missionary, he said, had lent him his own pony for the journey home.

An Unfinished Story

It would be pleasant to end J. N.’s story there. Paterson did not. When he wrote his reminiscences, about ten years after Hyde’s death, J. N. was still coming to see him. He was “much chastened,” but he had still not given up drink, and he admitted he had not kept his promise. He was working for a lawyer in a job Paterson disliked. His aged mother was still alive, and the old Brahman friend who came with him whispered that the young man would come back to the Christians “whenever his mother dies.” The young man smiled and did not deny it. He spoke of Hyde, pointing upward, as the one “Up there.” Paterson reminded him that Hyde was praying for him, and asked his readers to pray too. “It is not for nothing,” he wrote, “that God has sent the lad back to me and he is sitting by my side as I write.”

That is where the record ends. We do not know what became of J. N. His story is a reminder that even the most loving intercession does not guarantee a tidy result, and that Hyde’s tears did not end his friend’s struggle. They kept him coming back. Love, Paul says, “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7, ASV). Sometimes that is all it can do, and it is not nothing.

Blankets and a Stick

J. N. was not the only one who took advantage of Hyde. Jones heard repeatedly that people stole Hyde’s belongings. He saw men wearing clothes they had taken from him, and would not call them to account “lest the men should be driven further away from Christ.” Some of his fellow missionaries blamed him for it.

One of Hyde’s Indian evangelists, who shared a village mud house with him for a time, told Paterson a story against himself. One cold winter night Hyde knocked at his door, late. The evangelist did not want to open it. Hyde called his name and asked, “Can you lend me a sheet for the night?” “Where are your own blankets?” the evangelist snapped through the closed door. Then he answered his own question: “Oh yes! that drunken sot that was with you has gone off with them. He will sell them, get drink and make a beast of himself. Do you know that you put us all about by doing things like this and then shivering yourself in the cold?”

The evangelist asked Paterson, with tears, whether he could imagine Hyde’s answer. Hyde called him by name and said: “If the prodigal had come back to you, you would have taken a stick to him!”

It is the gentlest possible rebuke, and it goes to the heart of the parable. In Jesus’ story, the father sees his son “while he was yet afar off” and “was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20, ASV). It is the elder brother who stands outside, angry, counting the cost. Hyde knew which character he wanted to be.

“He Has No Fault”

Jones heard another story from an Indian doctor in the Punjab shortly after Hyde’s death. The Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement that was working hard against Christian conversions, had been troubled by Hyde’s influence and by the number of people baptized under his preaching. Its members decided to send a man to live near Hyde, watch for his faults, and publish them, so as to break his influence.

Their man went to Hyde pretending to be an enquirer who wanted to know all about Christianity. Hyde welcomed him kindly and invited him to stay. He stayed for three or four days, watching Hyde day and night. Then he ran away, went back to the men who had sent him, and said: “He has no fault, the man has no fault, he is a God and not man.”

McGaw records a similar remark by a young Hindu: “Mr. Hyde seems to me like God.” Hyde would have been appalled by such words. He was painfully aware of his own sins, and he hid when he thought people were admiring him rather than Christ. We should read these stories as the tribute of people who had never seen anything like the Christ-like love they saw in him, and who reached for the only word they had. But the stories point to something real. Jesus told his disciples, “Give to every one that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again” (Luke 6:30, ASV). Very few Christians take that literally. Hyde seems to have done so, and it made even his enemies wonder.

Given Altogether

One more fact about Hyde belongs here. He never married. Jones once asked him why, pointing out that a wife could look after his comforts. Hyde smiled, paused, and then answered “just as if he were betraying a secret”:

Years ago I felt that I wanted to give something to Jesus Christ who loved me so, and I gave myself to Him absolutely and promised Him that no one should come into my life and share my affection for Him. I told the Lord that I would not marry but be His altogether.

Scripture honours such a choice without requiring it. Jesus spoke of some who make themselves celibate “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and added, “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:12, ASV). Paul wrote that “he that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:32, ASV), while insisting that marriage is good and that each person has “his own gift from God” (1 Corinthians 7:7, ASV). Hyde’s vow was his own gift and calling, not a pattern for others. But it explains a good deal. He had no household to protect, no family to worry about on a dark road, and no children to feed. He could give away his blankets and wait in a village until dark for one more soul. His angry evangelist, on the dark road, had thought that the Sahib had no wife or family to think of. He meant it as a complaint. Hyde would have heard it as a description of what he had freely given.

For Reflection

Hyde’s love for people was not sentimental. It cost him his clothes, his blankets, his sleep, his dignity at a railway window, and, as we will see, his health. And it did not always succeed. J. N. was still struggling ten years after Hyde’s death.

But it made the gospel visible. A drunken Brahman could not forget his tears. An enemy sent to spy on him could find no fault. An evangelist who slammed the door on him remembered his answer for the rest of his life. Most of us will never be asked to love as extravagantly as Hyde did. But each of us can ask whether anyone has ever been unable to forget our love for them, and whether there is someone we should be leaning out of a window to plead with today.