Wales, Shrewsbury, and a Hymn That Sang Him Down

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

— Galatians 6:2, ASV

A Guest on Good Friday

Pengwern Jones had gone home to Wales on furlough in December 1910. Before he left India he had seen Hyde, who told him he expected to take his own furlough early in 1911. Jones gave Hyde his address and begged him to visit on his way through Britain. Hyde answered, as he usually did, that he would come if the Lord opened the way. Then he lost the address.

Jones later pieced together how Hyde found him anyway, and he told the story as a small chain of providences. The day before Hyde’s steamer reached Liverpool, Hyde asked a missionary of the Church Missionary Society on board whether he had any idea what part of Wales Jones came from. Jones barely knew the man and had never met his wife. But the man said his wife had Jones’s address, went down to her cabin, and brought it up. Jones never discovered how she came to have it.

The ship docked on Good Friday, 14 April 1911. Hyde crossed the Mersey to Birkenhead to catch a train for Llangollen, in north Wales, where Jones’s family lived. At the station he was told that only one train ran on Good Friday, and it had gone. A bystander overheard and told him that a cheap excursion train was going direct to Llangollen. But excursion passengers could not take luggage, and Hyde had all his belongings in a large American trunk. He stood there, Jones was sure, and prayed. Then the guard came up and said, “Go and secure your seat and leave your trunk with me, I shall bring it in my van.”

Meanwhile, in Llangollen, Jones had been surprised to find himself free. A deputation tour he had been booked for had been cancelled at the last minute because the district was busy preparing for the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon. He wondered what the free fortnight was for. On Good Friday morning he walked round the little town as he had as a boy. When he got home his wife met him at the door, greatly excited. “Guess who has come,” she said. “Go to the bedroom and see who is there having a wash.” Jones rushed upstairs, and there was Hyde, “with his face beaming with joy.”

A Little Heaven in Llangollen

Jones called the following weeks “a little Heaven on earth.” A doctor and his wife who lived nearby begged to have Hyde to stay, and Jones, knowing Hyde needed medical care, gladly agreed. But Hyde came to Jones’s house for most of his meals. He and Mrs. Jones understood each other “from the very first hour.” Grace before meals often turned into a long prayer, and the food went cold.

They walked together on the hills around the town. They sat on the rustic benches set out for visitors, or lay in the shade of the trees, and prayed. On these walks, Jones says, Hyde gave him “some of his early history” and spoke often of his mother. It may have been on these walks, too, that he told Jones the stories of the letter on the ship and the open-air meeting recorded in the early chapters of this book.

One visit that spring became a small classic. Jones took Hyde to see an elderly Christian woman who was very deaf. She told them loudly that she missed the church services terribly, “for I cannot hear anything when I go.” To her astonishment, Hyde answered, “You ought to praise God for that.” She thought he had misheard, and repeated, “I cannot hear, I tell you.” “That is why I tell you that you should praise the Lord,” he said. Then he explained. He himself could rarely hear anything at services. But it was a wonderful opportunity to pray. He would look at the preacher and pray for him. Then he would look at the people one by one and pray for each of them as he looked, until he found himself praising God for his deafness because it gave him such an opportunity for prayer and worship. The old woman laughed heartily and said she would try it. Two or three years later she wrote to Jones that Hyde’s advice had made a wonderful difference to her life.

The deafness that had troubled him as a young missionary, and that he had carried for twenty years, had become a gift he could pass on to someone else.

Shrewsbury

Jones heard that the American evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman and his song leader Charles M. Alexander were about to hold a mission at Shrewsbury, just over the border in England. Chapman and Alexander were near the end of a long evangelistic tour around the world. Hyde had never met Chapman, but they were both Presbyterians, and he wanted to. So he and Jones took small rooms in a quiet hotel in Shrewsbury for three days. They were joined for the first afternoon by a couple who had been deeply blessed in the revival of 1904 and 1905.

The mission opened in the Music Hall on Thursday, 20 April 1911. Jones was disappointed to find the streets almost empty as they walked to the first service. Near the hall they met Chapman and his party, and Hyde introduced himself. Very few people came. The evening meeting was larger, but there was no enthusiasm. Chapman and his team were clearly discouraged. That night an elder of one of the local churches, an old friend of Jones’s, joined them for supper. He was surprised that they had come all the way to attend a mission. He had heard of it but had not bothered to go.

The next day Chapman called the ministers and church leaders of the town together to discuss how to rouse the people. Hyde and Jones were invited. Chapman spoke with intensity. But some of the ministers treated the whole mission “as some little side-show,” and their remarks showed “a state of appalling indifference.” At last Chapman, with a sad face, said that if that was the spirit in which the town’s leaders faced the mission, he had nothing more to say, and he left the room. That sobered the most flippant, and the few earnest people carried the meeting.

Jones watched Hyde. “I noticed Hyde’s head getting lower and lower, and his face wore that burdened look he always had when the burden of prayer was coming on him.” Hyde said little to anyone that night. Both men had preaching engagements elsewhere on the Sunday, and they left the next afternoon. But Hyde asked Jones to book his hotel room for the following week, because he meant to come back early on Monday morning. “I cannot leave a brother minister to bear this burden alone,” he said.

The verse at the head of this chapter was the whole of Hyde’s reasoning. “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, ASV). Chapman was a stranger, and a famous one. Hyde owed him nothing and was himself seriously ill. But a brother was carrying a heavy load, and the law of Christ said to help carry it.

“Here Is a Minister Who Sorely Needs Thy Help”

Jones was worried about Hyde’s health. Without telling him, he wrote to Chapman asking whether someone could be found to help Hyde in his intercession. Chapman arranged for a Mr. Davis of the Pocket Testament League (probably George T. B. Davis), a man of like spirit, to be with him, and the two became friends. Hyde went back on Monday, 24 April, and stayed the rest of the week.

What happened next has been told in two quite different ways, and it is worth setting them side by side.

The famous version is a letter printed in both memoirs of 1923, without a date or an addressee. In Carré’s copy Chapman says he had received “a letter from a missionary”, which fits the note Jones had quietly sent him. In it Chapman describes a mission in England where the audience was extremely small, until he received a note saying that an American missionary known as “the Praying Hyde” was coming to pray. “Almost instantly the tide turned. The hall was packed, and my first invitation meant fifty men for Jesus Christ.” Then Chapman asked Hyde to pray for him. Hyde, in this version, came to Chapman’s room, “turned the key in the door, dropped on his knees, waited five minutes without a single syllable coming from his lips.” Chapman could hear both their hearts beating, and felt hot tears running down his face. Then Hyde said, “Oh God!”, was silent for at least five more minutes, and then prayed for men as Chapman had never heard anyone pray. “I rose from my knees,” Chapman says, “to know what real prayer was.”

But Chapman himself published an account of the same prayer in 1917, in a book of his own called When Home Is Heaven, and it reads differently. He names the town: “We were in Shrewsbury, England, and our work was not going well, when a message came to me that an American missionary had heard of our difficulties and was coming over to pray for us.” He was told not to provide for the missionary’s entertainment or give him any consideration at all. He was told that the missionary might not even attend the meetings, “but he would pray.” The missionary came, and “instantly the tide turned in our work, and the victory was remarkable.” Then, as Chapman was leaving Shrewsbury, he sent for Hyde and asked him to pray for him:

He knelt beside me, he was still for several moments, I was tempted to open my eyes, and I saw his face lighted up with the light of heaven, his lips trembling, and his tears starting, and then he said something like this: “My Father, here is a minister who sorely needs Thy help, do bless him, I beseech Thee, may his life be precious in Thy sight. May he be girded anew with strength for service; may Jesus Christ become more real to him,” and then he was still again for a little while, and when the closing words of the prayer were said we arose from our knees and I had learned a never-to-be-forgotten lesson concerning intercession.

Chapman’s authorised biographer, writing in 1920 with Chapman’s papers in front of him, printed the 1917 version and recorded that on the very day the missionary arrived “at least fifty people” responded to the invitation.

The two versions agree on the essentials. The mission was struggling. Word came that Hyde was coming to pray. The tide turned, and fifty people responded. And when Hyde prayed for Chapman personally, Chapman learned something about intercession that he never forgot. They differ in the drama. The locked door, the five-minute silences, and the single cry of “Oh God!” are found only in the undated letter. The printed account, which Chapman himself put his name to, has a stillness of “several moments” and a simple, tender prayer. Perhaps Chapman told the story differently on different occasions, as preachers do. Perhaps the letter was embellished by someone who copied it. We cannot know. But the version Chapman published is quieter, and it may be the more moving of the two. What struck him was not a spectacular silence but a man who knelt beside him, with trembling lips, and asked God to make Jesus Christ more real to a tired evangelist.

“My Dear Saviour’s Burden”

Jones heard afterwards that the mission had been a great success, that the churches were revived and many were converted. The elder who had not bothered to go to the first meetings attended later, was “gloriously blessed,” and a few weeks afterwards stirred his whole presbytery with an account of what he had seen.

But the week had cost Hyde dearly. He returned to Jones’s home, as Jones put it, “crawled back to us.” The next day he was so weak he could hardly speak. As Jones bent over him, Hyde smiled and whispered: “The burden was very heavy, but my dear Saviour’s burden for me took Him down to the grave.”

Jones was struck most by what Hyde did not say. “Not one word of criticism did I hear.” Hyde did not blame the indifferent ministers or mention his own part. He spoke only of “the glory of Christ manifested,” of Chapman’s and Alexander’s powerful messages, and of the gift of intercession his companion Davis had received. “Instead of criticizing and blaming the men,” Jones wrote, “he took their burden and carried it to the Lord.”

A Hymn That Sang Him Down

Two more episodes from that spring show the same spirit, and Jones found them harder to bear than Hyde did.

Hyde and Jones were invited to a two-day prayer meeting at the home of the Rev. Evan Hopkins, one of the founders of the Keswick Convention, held about a month before Keswick each year for its speakers and friends. About forty people were there. Toward the middle of the second day a discussion began about whether Keswick should have a prayer room like Sialkot’s, and the two Indian missionaries were asked to describe their experience. Jones spoke briefly, wanting to leave Hyde as much time as possible. Hyde began to speak, slowly and quietly, and Jones could tell that he was carrying a heavy message. After three or four minutes one of the women present began to sing a popular hymn. Others joined in. The message was never delivered.

Hyde closed his eyes and prayed. Jones was afraid he would be hurt, “but there was not a word of resentment or even displeasure.” The burden of the undelivered message was so great that Hyde was prostrated with a violent headache and could not leave with the others that evening. He stayed on as Hopkins’s guest, and told Jones afterwards what blessed fellowship they had had. He never mentioned being sung down.

On another occasion that spring Hyde went to a meeting of a presbytery in north Wales. He had spoken with great power in many of its churches, and people there had urged him to come. He made a long journey early in the morning, suffering from headache and from the illness that would kill him within a year. The presbytery was unusually large because word had got round that he would be there. Messages were sent up to the moderator more than once. But the meeting closed without anyone welcoming him. It was conducted in Welsh, which he did not understand. He was too deaf to have heard it anyway, so he sat through it with his eyes closed, praying for everyone there. Afterwards many people crowded round to say how sorry they were that he had not been asked to speak. He smiled on them all. When Jones, alone with him, expressed his indignation, Hyde gently rebuked him. The Lord knew everything, he said, and “it was not our place to criticize the Lord’s people.”

Jones remembered him saying something similar when urged to defend himself against a bitter and unjust attack: “They do not understand. I know they do not want to be unkind.” When a friend offered to write and explain the situation for him, Hyde answered, “This is my cross which He wants me to take up and carry for Him.” Peter wrote of Christ, “who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23, ASV). Hyde had been learning that for twenty years. In the spring of 1911, in the land of his friend’s birth, it was very visible.

For Reflection

Hyde’s last season in Britain gathered up all the lessons of his life. The deafness he had carried was turned to praise. A struggling evangelist he did not know was carried in prayer, at great cost. And an interrupted message, a slight from a presbytery, and an unjust attack were all met without resentment.

Burden-bearing is not only for people who can pray all week in a hotel room. It is the ordinary law of Christ, and it is open to anyone who notices that someone else is struggling and says, as Hyde did, “I cannot leave a brother to bear this burden alone.” And the meekness that refuses to criticise the Lord’s people, even when they have been thoughtless or unkind, is within reach of anyone who has looked long enough at the cross.