“Victory, Victory, Victory”

“but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

— 1 Corinthians 15:57, ASV

A Summer of Doctors

Hyde had hoped to stay in Britain through the summer of 1911 and attend the Keswick Convention in July. He had a plan for it. He and McCheyne Paterson, who was also in Britain, would join Pengwern Jones to form a trio and hold a prayer room at Keswick, praying day and night through the convention, as they had at Sialkot. It never happened. When Keswick week came, both Hyde and Paterson were ill. Jones went alone. He suggested a prayer room to the organisers, but nothing came of it. Years later he still wondered what might have happened if his two friends had been well enough to come.

Charles Alexander, Chapman’s song leader, had not forgotten the missionary who had prayed for Shrewsbury. He took Hyde to his own doctor in England, and a consultation with two other physicians followed. The doctors tried to make Hyde understand how serious his condition was. Alexander, listening, was sure Hyde understood that he was dying. Both Alexander and the doctor were amazed at his composure. He had long ago ceased to fear death, McGaw writes. For him, as for Paul, “to depart and be with Christ … is very far better” (Philippians 1:23, ASV).

Clifton Springs

Hyde sailed for America in the summer. The missionary magazine of his church recorded his arrival among the month’s missionary movements: “Rev. J. N. Hyde, from Lodiana, India,” landing at New York on 8 August 1911, with a forwarding address at Clifton Springs, New York. Clifton Springs, in western New York, was the site of a large sanitarium much used by returning missionaries, many of whom arrived home exhausted and ill. Hyde went there at once, McGaw says, hoping to find relief from “a severe headache from which he had suffered much before leaving India.”

The doctors found a tumour. It was operated on and proved malignant. McGaw calls it a sarcoma. Later accounts say it was in the brain. The records do not allow us to be more precise than that. Hyde rallied after the operation, and for some weeks he was able to sit up.

From Clifton Springs he sent a postcard to one of his sisters, dated 27 October 1911. McGaw quoted it. It is one of the very few pieces of Hyde’s own writing to survive from his last months, and it is characteristic:

Am still in bed or wheel chair getting a fine rest and doing a lot of the ministry of intercession, and having not a few opportunities of personal work. How the radiance of holiness shone out in Jesus’ every word and deed!

Even in a wheelchair in a sanitarium, he was praying for others and talking to the people around him about Christ. And his thoughts were not on his own suffering but on the holiness of Jesus.

Northampton

On 19 December 1911 Hyde left Clifton Springs to stay with his sister in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was married to a professor there, E. H. Mensel. Soon after the New Year he began to have pains in his back and side. He thought it was rheumatism. His doctor knew that the tumour had returned.

The weeks that followed were, as the missionary magazine of his church put it, “days of unutterable suffering.” But the same magazine recorded what his friends remembered most: “the remembrance of his heroic, uncomplaining endurance, his splendid Christian fortitude.” In the midst of his agony, it reported, he said: “Thank God for pain, thank God for everything!”

H. D. Griswold, writing the obituary for the Presbyterian mission magazine, added more. “After his worst paroxysms of pain he would say: ‘Praise the Lord,’ or ‘In every thing give thanks.’” And, Griswold wrote, “to his sister he said shortly before his death: ‘It’s just victory, victory, victory.’”

John Nelson Hyde died at his sister’s home in Northampton on 17 February 1912. He was forty-six years old. Griswold’s obituary says forty-seven, and so does McGaw, but he was born in November 1865 and had turned forty-six only three months before.

This correction is worth making plainly, because popular accounts of Hyde’s life have repeated a mistake about his death for a century. Many say he died at Clifton Springs. That is not true. The mission magazine of his church, the obituary in its foreign missions journal, and the catalogue of his seminary all agree: he died on 17 February 1912, at Northampton, Massachusetts, in his sister’s home. Clifton Springs was where he had gone for treatment, not where he died.

“Shout the Victory of Jesus Christ!”

Griswold wrote that Hyde’s “last words were uttered in the Punjabi tongue, thereby indicating that his heart was in the Punjab.” He added, in a phrase that echoes Paul, that Hyde “was led in triumph even unto the end.” Paul wrote, “thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:14, ASV).

What were those last Punjabi words? The answer comes from W. B. Anderson, the United Presbyterian missionary who had helped to found the Sialkot Convention. He wrote a tribute to Hyde in his church’s magazine, and McGaw closed his book with it. When the news of Hyde’s death reached India, Anderson wrote, it seemed to him that he could hear “something of an echo of the shout of victory as he entered into the King’s presence. Then the next word that came was that he had died with the words upon his lips: ‘Bol, Yisu Masih, ki jai!’ ”

The words mean, roughly, “Shout the victory of Jesus Christ!” or “Say, Victory to Jesus the Messiah!” Anderson explained why they mattered. After hours of agonising prayer for people in bondage to sin, Hyde would often rise with those around him and shout that cry. It had, Anderson said, “become the great war cry of the Punjab Church.” The spelling varies from source to source, and later writers have translated it in different ways. Griswold does not give the exact words, only that they were in Punjabi. But the two accounts fit together. And they fit with the words to his sister, “It’s just victory, victory, victory.” The man who had preached at a convention that Christ’s cry “It is finished” was a shout of triumph in the darkest hour died in the same spirit.

A Vision of the Whole Field

Anderson’s tribute preserved one more memory, and it helps explain that shout. About four years before Hyde’s death, Anderson said, Hyde had spoken to a few close friends about something that happened to him on a day of prayer for India:

On the day of prayer God gave me a new experience. I seemed to be away above our conflict here in the Punjab and I saw God’s great battle in all India, and then away out beyond in China, Japan, and Africa. I saw how we had been thinking in narrow circles of our own countries and in our own denominations, and how God was now rapidly joining force to force and line to line and all was beginning to be one great struggle. That, to me, means the great triumph of Christ.

And Hyde had drawn a practical conclusion: “We must exercise the greatest care to be utterly obedient to Him who sees all the battle field all the time. It is only He who can put each man in the place where his life can count for the most.”

That was how Hyde saw his own life, and his death. He was one soldier in a great campaign whose outcome was certain, placed by a Commander who could see the whole field. His own place had been a few hundred villages in the Punjab, a prayer room at Sialkot, a hotel room in Shrewsbury, and now a sickbed in Massachusetts. It was not for him to choose the place, only to be obedient in it. Anderson recalled Jesus’ words on the night before his death, as his enemies closed in: “In the world ye have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33, ASV).

Carthage, 20 February 1912

Hyde’s brother Will and his sister Mary brought his body home to Carthage, Illinois. The funeral was held on 20 February in the Presbyterian church where their father had been pastor for seventeen years. The minister was the Rev. J. F. Young, Hyde’s seminary classmate, now pastor of the church in Carthage, and he preached. Francis McGaw assisted.

McGaw stood on the platform and looked down into the coffin. The face was “greatly emaciated,” he wrote, “but it was the same sweet, peaceful, gentle yet strong, resolute face that I had known in 1901 — the last time I saw him alive.” The day was “cloudy and chill and gloomy.” In Moss Ridge Cemetery they laid him beside his father, his mother, and his brother Edmund.

McGaw ended his account of the burial with the Christian hope. The clouds and shadows would flee away, “the chill and gloom of the grave be dispelled, and that man of prayer and praise come forth in the likeness of the Risen Son of God!” At the front of his little book he printed Paul’s words from the end of his own life: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that day; and not to me only, but also to all them that have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:7-8, ASV).

For Reflection

Hyde’s death was not easy. The records do not soften that, and neither should we. It was weeks of “unutterable suffering,” far from the Punjab he loved, from an illness no one could cure. Yet everyone who was near him remembered the same things: thanksgiving in the middle of pain, a shout of victory in Punjabi, and the words “It’s just victory, victory, victory.”

That is the fruit of a whole life. A man does not learn to say “Thank God for pain” on his deathbed. He learns it through twenty years of headaches in village huts, thanks offered through shut teeth, and seeing the cross as a victory. John Hyde had been practising that shout of triumph for a long time. At the end it came naturally. “But thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57, ASV).