A Heart on the Wrong Side

“And he saith unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while. For there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.”

— Mark 6:31, ASV

The Last Convention

The Sialkot Convention of 1910 was John Hyde’s last. McGaw’s sources remember it as the climax of his ministry there. The burden he had carried for five years, they said, pressed heavier each year. Before the convention he spent long nights in prayer, and “the long sleepless nights and weary days of watching with prayer” were “written on every feature of his face.” Yet when he stood up to speak, “his figure was almost transformed,” and he spoke “with such fire and such force that many hardly recognized the changed man.”

That year, the memoirs say, Hyde was called to help at revival meetings and conferences far beyond the Punjab, in Calcutta, Bombay, and other large cities. In the same year, the same sources add, he “was never more misjudged and misunderstood.” They do not say by whom. It may have been fellow missionaries who thought his piety extreme, or churches that found his preaching on sin uncomfortable. Hyde was now forty-four, and he had been in India for eighteen years. He did not know it, but he had little more than a year of health left.

A Fortnight in Calcutta

After the convention Hyde went to Calcutta to hold meetings. He stayed nearly a fortnight with a friend there, and McGaw printed the friend’s account. The friend was probably the Mr. F. Kehl of Calcutta whom McGaw thanks in his acknowledgements.

Hyde had fever the whole time. “Yet he took the meetings regularly, and how God spoke to us, though he was bodily unfit to do any work!” The host was himself unwell with a pain in his chest that kept him awake at night. From his dark room he could see the flash of Hyde’s electric light across the passage whenever Hyde got up and switched it on. He watched it come on at twelve, at two, at four, and at five. From five it stayed on until sunrise.

Hyde grew worse, and the annual meeting of his mission was calling him back to the Punjab. The friend grew anxious and persuaded Hyde to see a doctor. The next morning, the friend wrote, the doctor gave his verdict:

The heart is in an awful condition. I have never come across such a bad case as this. It has been shifted out of its natural position on the left side to a place over on the right side. Through stress and strain it is in such a bad condition that it will require months and months of strictly quiet life to bring it back again to anything like its normal state. What have you been doing with yourself?

“Dear Hyde said nothing,” the friend wrote. “He only smiled. But we who knew him knew the cause; his life of incessant prayer day and night, praying exceedingly with many tears for his converts, for his fellow-laborers, for his friends, and for the church in India!”

What Was Wrong with His Heart?

This is the origin of one of the most famous claims about Praying Hyde: that prayer physically moved his heart from one side of his chest to the other. The story has been retold countless times, and it usually loses its source along the way. It deserves careful handling, because it is precisely the kind of story that devotion embroiders.

First, what we actually have is a friend’s report, written down years later, of what a Calcutta doctor said after one examination. We do not have the doctor’s name or his notes. We do not know what instruments he used or what he meant by “shifted.” The friend then added his own interpretation of the cause. The doctor, according to the friend’s own account, did not know the cause. He asked Hyde, “What have you been doing with yourself?”

Second, a heart found on the right side of the chest has well-known medical explanations. Some people are born with the heart on the right side, a condition called dextrocardia. It often causes no trouble and may go unnoticed for years until a doctor listens in the right place. In other cases a heart in the normal position is pushed or pulled to the right by disease in the chest, such as fluid around the lungs, a collapsed or scarred lung, or a growth. Doctors call that dextroposition. Either might explain what the Calcutta doctor found. A man who had lived for eighteen years in the Punjab, often in poor village conditions, and who was feverish at the time of the examination, could easily have had some such illness.

Third, Hyde’s final illness gives us another clue. Within a year and a half he would die of a malignant tumour. For years before that he had suffered from severe headaches. The memoirs mention them several times, and the headache that sent him to Clifton Springs was, McGaw says, one he had “suffered much before leaving India.” We cannot diagnose a man a century after his death. But it is at least possible that the illness that killed him had been at work in his body for some time. Serious illness can affect the heart and lungs in ways that a doctor of 1910 might describe as a heart “shifted” and “in an awful condition.”

None of this means that Hyde’s way of life did him no harm. It almost certainly did. A man who slept very little for years, often missed meals, and kept long vigils while carrying fever would wear his body down. But the notion that prayer itself moved a healthy heart across the chest is a devotional interpretation laid on top of a medical report we do not fully have. The honest course is to tell the story as Hyde’s friends told it, and to leave the miracle unclaimed.

“The Man Who Never Sleeps” Pays the Price

There is a harder question behind the medical one, and Hyde’s friends did not avoid it. Was it right for him to live as he did?

The Calcutta friend put the question sharply: “We have heard of martyrs who were kept in prison, and in the end were put to death. But have we ever heard of one who was so given up to the ministry of prayer that the strain of a daily burden brought him to a premature grave?” Another missionary in India answered: “No, friend, not a premature grave; it was the grave of Jesus Christ. John Hyde laid down his life calmly and deliberately for the Church of God in India.”

That is a moving answer, and there is truth in it. Paul described his own ministry as one of “labor and travail, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness” (2 Corinthians 11:27, ASV). He did not treat his body’s decline as failure: “though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16, ASV). Christians are called to “present your bodies a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1, ASV). Some are called to spend themselves in ways that shorten their lives, and the church rightly honours them.

But other voices in the story should also be heard. Griswold, who admired Hyde, noted that he “was sometimes criticised by his brethren for the rigorous and ascetic nature of his piety, for the way in which he seemed to deny to the flesh even its just claims.” The phrase “its just claims” matters. The body has claims that are just. It needs food and sleep, and it has limits. The teenage servant who cried because his master would not eat or sleep at the conventions was not lacking in spirituality. He was seeing clearly. And the confident claim a friend made in 1907, that since Hyde had learned to draw on God’s strength he scarcely felt tired, and that “no man need ever break down through overstrain in this ministry of intercession”, did not survive the events of 1910 and 1911.

The Lord Who Said “Rest a While”

The verse at the head of this chapter is easy to overlook in a book about a man of prayer. The apostles had returned from a mission. They were so busy that “they had no leisure so much as to eat.” And Jesus did not tell them to pray harder or work longer. He told them to “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while” (Mark 6:31, ASV).

The Bible has a great deal to say about the body’s limits, and it says it without embarrassment. When Elijah collapsed in exhaustion and despair under a juniper tree, God did not rebuke him or send him to pray. An angel woke him and said, “Arise and eat.” He ate, and slept again. Then the angel came a second time: “Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:5-7, ASV). The psalmist says that rising early, staying up late, and eating the bread of anxious toil is vain, “For so he giveth unto his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2, ASV). Jesus himself, in the middle of a storm, was “asleep on the cushion” (Mark 4:38, ASV). And Paul, who fasted often, also warned against practices that have “a show of wisdom … and severity to the body” but are “not of any value against the indulgence of the flesh” (Colossians 2:23, ASV).

None of this condemns Hyde. His long nights were not a technique for earning God’s favour or displaying piety. By every account they were a response to burdens he believed God had laid on him. His friends say he regularly asked God whether he should eat or sleep, and obeyed when he was told to. The story of the lunch bell shows that. And a man should be judged by the light he had. Many devout Christians of Hyde’s era, formed by the holiness teaching of the time, saw the neglect of the body as a sign of devotion. Hyde’s Indian neighbours, many of whom revered their own ascetic holy men, may have been especially moved by it. Griswold noted that his “simple, mystical and ascetic type of piety powerfully impressed the Indian people.”

But it does mean that Hyde’s way of praying should not be copied as a pattern. His closest friends were clear about this. Jones remembered how Hyde himself dreaded that anyone should try to imitate him, and he urged readers to follow Hyde’s spirit of prayer, “but not necessarily in the ‘form’ that he manifested it.” Many Christians, Jones said, “cannot spend weeks in prayer and fasting as he did, they are physically unfit for it.” But everyone can make prayer “their very breath.” Hyde’s form of prayer was his calling, and it cost him his life. The spirit of that prayer is for everyone, and it need not cost anyone their health.

Leaving India

Hyde did not follow the Calcutta doctor’s advice to live quietly for months. The mission’s annual meeting was calling him back to the Punjab, and he seems to have gone. He had founded the Ferozepore training school for village preachers and teachers, and it was about to move to Moga. Moga itself was the district where the baptisms had been increasing for five years. There was much to hold him.

But his health was failing. In March 1911 he left India for the last time. McGaw wrote that he started home “as the physicians would say, a ‘dying man.’” He had arrived in India in the autumn of 1892, “less than twenty years before.” McGaw added: “But surely they were nineteen beautiful years!”

For Reflection

It is right to honour John Hyde’s sacrifice, and right to be moved by a man who loved the church in India so much that he would not spare himself. It is also right to say that God does not usually ask his servants to destroy their health in prayer, and that rest, food, and sleep are gifts from him, not concessions to weakness.

Hyde’s life does not settle that tension, and we should not pretend it does. But it gives us a question worth asking. Are we more at risk of sparing ourselves too much in God’s service, or too little? Most of us, if we are honest, know the answer to that. Those who are the exception, who are already spending themselves beyond their strength, should hear the Lord who said, “Come ye yourselves apart … and rest a while.”