The Legacy of Praying Hyde

“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God bearing witness in respect of his gifts: and through it he being dead yet speaketh.”

— Hebrews 11:4, ASV

A Stone in a Pond

Near the end of his book, Francis McGaw recalled a scene from his boyhood. There was a pond near his father’s house. He would stand on the bank and throw a stone into the middle, then watch the ripples spread in widening circles, until every part of the surface was moving and the little waves lapped at the bank by his feet. “Sialkot started circles and waves of blessing,” he wrote, “that are even now beating in the secret recesses and inlets of many human hearts.”

It is a good image, and a modest one. A stone thrown into a pond disappears at once. Its effect is seen only in the ripples, and the farther they travel, the harder it is to say which ripple came from which stone. That is how it is with the influence of a life like John Hyde’s. He wrote no books, founded no great institution, held no office of importance, and died at forty-six. What he left was a disturbance in the water that is still spreading.

This last chapter asks what that legacy is. It asks what is truly his, and what is ours to take up.

What He Left in the Punjab

Hyde’s first legacy belongs to the church he served, and it is the one the devotional books say least about.

In the villages of the Moga district there were hundreds of Christian families who had been baptized in the years when Hyde was “burying the good seed,” as the missionary magazine put it. The Ferozepore training school, later moved to Moga, which Griswold says Hyde founded, went on training village preachers and teachers. The humble village evangelists with whom he had lived “as a brother” carried on his work, and something of his zeal went with them. Griswold closed his obituary with a sentence that was, in its way, a prophecy: “His memory will constitute a precious heritage for the Punjab Church.”

The Sialkot Convention continues to this day. It is now a gathering of the churches of Pakistan, long since led by Pakistani Christians. The descendants of the villagers who came to Christ in the mass movements of Hyde’s time make up much of the Christian community of Pakistan and the Indian Punjab. They are often poor, and they have often been persecuted. Their faith has been tested in ways that Hyde’s generation could not have imagined. W. B. Anderson wrote that the Punjabi cry of victory Hyde loved, “Bol, Yisu Masih, ki jai!”, had become “the great war cry of the Punjab Church.” Hyde would have wanted to be remembered, if at all, as one voice in that shout.

What He Left in His Friends

Hyde’s second legacy is in the people who knew him, and here the memoirs are eloquent.

Pengwern Jones wrote, ten years after Hyde’s death: “I owe to him more than I owe to any man, for showing me what a ‘prayer-life’ is, and what a real consecrated life is.” Jones said that after every visit with Hyde he vowed to pray more than ever before, “and Christ always seemed more real to me.” He believed that Hyde, in his last years, “created a new era of prayer in the Punjab,” and that he had been “given to India to teach men how to pray.”

Paterson went on praying and preaching at Sialkot, and others carried on the prayer rooms Hyde had helped to begin. The Calcutta friend who watched Hyde’s light go on through the night began asking God to wake him for prayer too, and found that he woke at two, then at four, “with striking regularity.” J. Wilbur Chapman, who knew Hyde for only a week, wrote years afterwards that he had learned from him “a never-to-be-forgotten lesson concerning intercession.” An old deaf woman in Llangollen learned to praise God for her deafness. A drunken Brahman boy could not forget his tears.

McGaw collected other testimonies. A pastor in Illinois wrote that Hyde’s example had moved at least one member of his congregation to go to China as a missionary. A woman missionary in India read an account of Hyde’s prayer life and was so convicted by it that she resolved to give the best hours of every day to prayer and Bible study. She found it very hard. She had always been busy, and “to hear others going around hard at work while I stayed quietly in my room, as it were inactive” was a constant struggle. But in her district, where years of work had produced little, fifteen people were baptized in the first months, then more than a hundred. Two years later she reported that the Christians there numbered six hundred, where before there had been a hundred. “The stress and the strain have gone out of my life,” she wrote. “I could not go back to the old life, and God grant that it may always be impossible.”

That is the kind of legacy Hyde would have wanted. It is not admiration for him, but people praying.

What He Left in Print

Hyde’s third legacy is the one that has travelled farthest, and it is a strange one for a man who wrote almost nothing. It is the story of his life.

The two small books of 1923 were printed and reprinted. Later biographers built on them, and later preachers built on the biographers. A century on, the name “Praying Hyde” is known to many who could not say what country he worked in or what church sent him. That fame has done real good. Countless Christians have been stirred to pray by it. It has also, as this book has tried to show, carried a good deal of legend along with it.

Some readers may feel that the careful sorting in these chapters, between the documented, the remembered, and the legendary, takes something away from Hyde. It does not. The man who comes through the testing is more believable than the legend, and more helpful. The legendary Hyde, with his heart moved by prayer and his four converts every day, is a figure few of us can relate to. The real Hyde was a shy, deaf, slow-speaking, ambitious young man. He threw away a letter in anger, struggled with a besetting sin, and spent ten years in unfruitful work. His colleagues thought him odd, and God had to correct him in the middle of a prayer. He is a man we can recognise. And what God did through him is therefore something God might do through us.

What Is Not Ours to Take

Before we ask what to take from Hyde’s life, it is worth saying clearly what we should leave.

We should not copy his neglect of his body. His closest friends said so, and he said so himself. His form of prayer, the sleepless nights, the missed meals, the weeks of fasting, was his particular calling, and it cost him his life. Most of us are not called to it, and we would be wrong to make it a standard.

We should not turn his story into a formula. The soul-a-day covenant, the long repetitions of a single word in prayer, the dancing in the prayer room: these belonged to a particular man, time, and place. They are not techniques that produce revival if they are used correctly.

And we should not make him a hero to be admired from a distance. He hated that. When he thought people were looking at him rather than at Christ, Jones said, “he would run away and remain away in some hiding place praying for them.”

What Is Ours

What remains, when all that is set aside, is still a great deal. Each of the chapters of this book has drawn out one lesson. Together they make a short summary of what John Hyde has to teach.

Faithfulness in small and hidden things matters, because God answers a father’s prayers for labourers. Honesty before God matters more than reputation, and a settled call comes from time on one’s knees, not from more arguments. A wounding letter from a friend may be the voice of God. A besetting sin is not something to live with. Slow years are not wasted years. The despised are those God chooses. The messenger needs preparing as much as the message. A small daily discipline of prayer, kept “till the awakening comes,” can prepare the way for revival. The Holy Spirit must be first. A prayer room behind a meeting is as important as a pulpit in front of it. Travail in prayer is Christ’s burden shared, not a burden we manufacture. The one who is missing matters as much as the ninety-nine. Accusing a brother, even in prayer, is the work of the accuser, and thanksgiving is its cure. Praise is a garment we can put on before we feel it. Love may cost us our blankets. The cross is victory even in the darkness. Rest is a gift, not a failure. Other people’s burdens are ours to bear. And death, for a Christian, is not defeat but a shout of triumph.

None of these lessons is new. Every one is in Scripture. What Hyde’s life adds is a picture of them being lived, imperfectly, by a real man.

He Being Dead Yet Speaketh

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of Abel, the first person in the Bible to die. The writer to the Hebrews says of him that “through it he being dead yet speaketh” (Hebrews 11:4, ASV). Abel left no words at all. What speaks is his faith, and the sacrifice it offered.

Carré applied the phrase to Hyde in the foreword of his book in 1923. Jones used it again: “‘He being dead yet speaketh’ is true of him. It is now ten years since he was called Home, but he is not forgotten, he is speaking to us to-day, and throwing light on the Prayer-Life of Christ.”

That last phrase is the key. Hyde’s friends did not think that his life pointed to himself. They thought it threw light on Christ, and in particular on the prayer life of Christ, who “ever liveth to make intercession” for his people (Hebrews 7:25, ASV). The deepest thing Hyde’s life teaches is not about Hyde at all. It is that the risen Lord is still praying. He still longs for the lost, still carries his people’s burdens, and still invites his friends to watch with him. In the Punjab, one of those friends said yes.

The writer to the Hebrews, having listed the faithful who had died, turns to his readers: “Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2, ASV). John Hyde is one of that cloud now. He is not watching us to be admired, but cheering us on toward the One he looked at all his life.

For Reflection

The man the Punjab called “the man who never sleeps” has been at rest for more than a century. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; for their works follow with them” (Revelation 14:13, ASV).

The question his life puts to us is the one Jesus asked his sleeping friends in Gethsemane, the question at the head of this book’s preface: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” It is not asked in anger. It is asked by a Lord who knows our weakness, who is still praying for us, and who still, in his kindness, wants our company. Hyde answered it with his life. We are invited to answer it in ours, not in his form, but in his spirit. Perhaps that means half an hour at noon. Perhaps it means a thanksgiving instead of an accusation, or a person no one has thought to ask about. But in some way it means watching with Christ, and praying “till the awakening comes.”