Introduction: One Man, Two Little Books, and a Legend

“prove all things; hold fast that which is good”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21, ASV

A Name Before a Life

Many Christians know the name “Praying Hyde” long before they know anything else about the man. They meet it in a sermon illustration, or a paragraph in a book on prayer, or a quotation shared on a card: O God, give me souls, or I die! The name arrives already shining. It belongs, it seems, to a figure half in heaven, a man who prayed all night, who asked God for a soul a day and got them, whose heart was said to have been physically moved by the strain of intercession, and whose prayer turned an English evangelistic campaign from failure to triumph in an afternoon.

Some of that is true. Some of it is probably true. Some of it rests on nothing firmer than a single friend’s memory, written down ten years later. A little of it is simply wrong. Before we follow John Nelson Hyde from Illinois to the Punjab and back, it is worth pausing to ask where the name and the stories came from, and how much weight each of them can bear.

Two Little Books

Hyde died in February 1912. His friends in India were slow to write about him, and the most important of them waited almost ten years. He was the Rev. J. Pengwern Jones of the Welsh Presbyterian Mission in Sylhet. He edited a small monthly prayer circular called The Remembrancer for the Bengal and Assam Prayer Union. Jones had often meant to set down what he remembered of Hyde, and had always put it off. He believed the church “was not ready for such a record.” Then, around 1921, news came of fresh revival on the east coast of England and in the north of Scotland, and he found he could write at last. Month by month he published in The Remembrancer his reminiscences of Hyde. He described their first meeting in a prayer room at Ludhiana, the week they shared a tiny room in the hill station of Murree, the conventions at Sialkot, and Hyde’s last spring in Wales. A second series came from the Rev. R. McCheyne Paterson of the Punjab, Hyde’s closest companion in prayer. The articles were read, passed from hand to hand, and prayed over. In 1923 they were gathered into a small book by Captain E. G. Carré and published in Madras as A Present-Day Challenge to Prayer. Carré insisted that he had done nothing but arrange them. The reminiscences, he said, were given “practically word for word as they originally appeared.”

In the same year, on the other side of the world, a Presbyterian minister in Akron, Ohio, named Francis McGaw published a shorter book called Praying Hyde. McGaw had known the family for years. As a young minister he had eaten at their table in Carthage, Illinois, been with the family when Hyde’s mother died, and helped to conduct John’s own funeral. He described himself not as the author of his sketch but as “the compiler of material that others have so generously furnished.” That material came from Paterson and Jones in India, from Hyde’s sisters, from mission secretaries, and from others. Much of McGaw’s account of the Sialkot years comes from a narrator he leaves unnamed, “a brother” or simply “I”. Several of those passages match Paterson’s own reminiscences almost word for word, so the narrator is almost certainly Paterson, and this book usually calls him that. But it is an inference, and the book marks it where it matters.

These two books are the source of nearly every well-known story about John Hyde. Later biographies drew on them. Later sermons drew on the biographies. Over the following century the stories were retold with growing confidence, and sometimes with growing detail that no one had actually witnessed.

What Kind of Sources Are They?

It would be easy either to trust these books completely or to dismiss them. Both would be mistakes.

They are memoirs by friends. That means they are close to their subject. Jones shared a room with Hyde. Paterson prayed beside him through whole nights. McGaw knew his father well. Many of their details are small and odd in exactly the way real memories are: the heavy overcoat Hyde knelt in at Murree, the teenage servant who cried because his master would not eat, the glass of water he asked for instead of tea. These are not the inventions of a legend-maker.

But memoirs by friends are also shaped by love and by purpose. These books were written to make readers pray, and they say so. They rarely give dates. They sometimes place the same story in different settings. In one telling of the letter Hyde received on his voyage, he throws it “on the deck”; in another, “into a corner of the cabin.” They report numbers of converts without saying where the numbers came from. And they were written a decade after the events by people who, by their own account, were deeply moved by what they had seen. That is not a reason to disbelieve them. It is a reason to read them as what they are.

The Other Record

There is, happily, another record. It is quieter and duller, and it is precious for that very reason. Hyde was a missionary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, and his church kept books.

The general catalogue of McCormick Theological Seminary records his birth, his college, his ordination, and his station. The women’s missionary magazine of his church, Woman’s Work for Woman, noted his sailings and his arrivals in its columns of missionary movements. The printed report of the Punjab Mission for 1907 describes the district he superintended and quotes his own summary of how village work should be done. And in April 1912 the church’s missionary magazine, The Assembly Herald, printed an obituary by his colleague H. D. Griswold. Griswold had shared a crowded convention dormitory with Hyde, and he wrote with an honesty that is a gift to any biographer. Hyde’s first ten years in India, Griswold said, were “steady, patient, but not especially fruitful.” He was “sometimes criticised by his brethren for the rigorous and ascetic nature of his piety.” He “had not the gifts of an organizer.” And yet, Griswold went on, “from few others have I ever heard such heart-searching and powerful messages.”

That record corrects the legend in places. Hyde did not die at the sanitarium in Clifton Springs, New York, as many books say. He died at his sister’s home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Sialkot, the town whose convention made him famous, was never his station. It belonged to a different Presbyterian mission, and he travelled there each year for the gathering. The celebrated figures of a soul a day and four hundred converts in 1908 appear in no mission report that has yet been found. The closest official figure is a note that 685 people were baptized in the Moga district, where Hyde had been “burying the good seed,” in 1910.

At other points the record quietly confirms the memoirs. The people really did call him “the man who never sleeps.” He really was slow of speech and for years was thought unlikely ever to speak the language really well. His last words really were spoken in Punjabi. And at Moga he really was, in Griswold’s phrase, “marvelously used of God … in bringing very many to decision and baptism.”

How This Book Will Proceed

The chapters that follow tell Hyde’s story in order, from his father’s pulpit in Illinois to his grave in the same town. Part One traces how an ambitious, awkward young man became an intercessor. Part Two looks closely at the school of prayer he entered in the Punjab: the prayer union, the conventions, the long nights, the hunger for souls, and the lessons in praise and humility that God taught him there. Part Three follows him through the breaking of his health to his death, and asks what his life leaves to the church.

Throughout, the book will try to let you hear which kind of source is speaking. When it says “Jones remembered,” or “in Paterson’s telling,” or “McGaw records,” it is not hedging for the sake of it. It is telling you how the story reached us. When it says that something is documented, it means that a record independent of the memoirs confirms it. When a story cannot be checked, it will usually still be told, because a friend’s careful memory is real evidence, but it will be told as a memory.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s instruction to a young church excited about spiritual gifts and prophetic words: “prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, ASV). Paul did not tell the Thessalonians to despise what they heard. In the verse before, he warned them, “despise not prophesyings” (1 Thessalonians 5:20, ASV). Nor did he tell them to swallow everything. He told them to test, and then to hold on hard to what survived the testing. That is the spirit in which this book approaches the life of John Hyde. What survives the testing is more than enough to humble and stir anyone who reads it.