A Minister’s Son from Carthage

“Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest.”

— Matthew 9:38, ASV

A Prayer Heard in a Parsonage

Long before anyone called John Hyde a man of prayer, he grew up listening to one.

His father, the Rev. Smith Harris Hyde, was a Presbyterian minister in western Illinois. For seventeen years he was pastor of the Presbyterian church in Carthage, the seat of Hancock County, a small prairie town with a courthouse, several churches, and a Lutheran college that had moved there in 1870. The picture of him that survives is warm. Herrick Johnson, a leading Presbyterian preacher and a professor at McCormick Seminary in Chicago, where John would one day study, knew the elder Hyde. Johnson described him as “of rare proportion and balance, a healthful soul, genial and virile, firm of conviction, of good scholarly attainment, of abundant cheer and bent on doing for God to the best of his ability.” Francis McGaw, then a young minister in the same presbytery, often ate at the family’s table. He remembered a courteous, loving husband and a father who was “firm yet sympathetic,” “commanding his household after him.”

McGaw remembered something else, and it is the thread from which this whole story hangs. Again and again he heard Dr. Hyde pray one particular prayer. He prayed it at the family altar, with his children around him, and he prayed it from the pulpit. It was the prayer Jesus told his disciples to pray when he looked at the crowds in Galilee: “The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38, ASV). McGaw’s older English has Dr. Hyde asking the Lord to “thrust out laborers” into his harvest. The phrase is vigorous, almost violent, as though workers had to be pushed out of comfortable places toward the fields.

It is an extraordinary prayer for a father to pray with his own children listening. Most parents, even devout ones, pray for their children’s safety, health, and happiness, and keep a little distance from the prayer that might send those children far away. McGaw once heard a minister say, with some satisfaction, that his son would never follow him into the ministry, because the boy “knows too well the treatment a minister receives at the hands of the people.” Smith Hyde was not that kind of father. McGaw says he “magnified his office and rejoiced to give his sons up to a life of hardship and trial.” He prayed for labourers without adding the quiet clause, but not mine.

God answered the prayer in the parsonage itself. Two of the Hyde sons went into the ministry, and one of the daughters, for a time, into full-time Christian work. The son this book is about went to the other side of the world.

A Household of Six

John Nelson Hyde was born on 9 November 1865 at Carrollton, in Greene County, Illinois. The Civil War had ended that spring. He was one of six children who grew up in that home, three boys and three girls. The eldest brother, Edmund, was two years older than John. There was a third brother, Will, and there were three sisters: Mary, Gratia, and a sister who married a college professor in Northampton, Massachusetts. Sisters appear again and again at the edges of John’s story. He wrote them letters. A card to one of them survives from his last illness. And in the end it was a sister’s home in which he died.

Of his mother we know less than we would like, but what we know is consistent. McGaw calls her “sweet-spirited, gentle, music-loving, Christ-like.” Years later, walking the hills of north Wales with his friend Pengwern Jones, John talked about her a great deal. He told Jones that she had been the best singer he had ever heard, and “such a holy woman.” He also told him she had trained him carefully in the faith. Jones had the impression that the tired missionary, then forty-five and seriously ill, “just longed to go home to her.” She had died some years before. She was buried in Moss Ridge Cemetery at Carthage, where he would one day be laid beside her.

It was, in short, an ordinary devout Presbyterian home of the late nineteenth century, with a family altar, a praying father, and a mother who sang. There is nothing unusual in such a home. That is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to imagine that a man like Hyde must have come from somewhere extraordinary. He did not. He came from the kind of home that thousands of readers of this book grew up in, or are trying, with many failures, to build.

Faith That Is Handed Down

When Paul wrote to his young colleague Timothy, he reminded him of the soil his faith had grown in: “having been reminded of the unfeigned faith that is in thee; which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and, I am persuaded, in thee also” (2 Timothy 1:5, ASV). McGaw reached for the same comparison when he wrote about the Hydes. The point is not that faith is inherited like a family likeness. Paul is careful to say that he is “persuaded” it dwells in Timothy also. Each generation must believe for itself. But faith can be modelled, taught, prayed over, and made to look desirable in a home, and that is what the Hydes did.

The Old Testament law pictured this kind of teaching as woven into the ordinary hours of family life: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, ASV). A father who prays for the harvest every evening teaches his children something before they can explain it. The world has fields in it. The fields are God’s. There are not enough workers. And the right response to that is not first to organise, or to worry, but to pray.

John Hyde would spend his life living out that lesson, and he would take it further than his father ever did. But he did not invent it. He learned it on his knees in a parsonage in Illinois, from a man who meant what he prayed.

Carthage College and a Teacher’s Desk

John graduated from Carthage College in 1887, at twenty-one. Carthage was a small Lutheran college, and it drew its students mostly from the farms and small towns around. Later accounts say he graduated with honours and was at once offered a teaching post at the college. The seminary catalogue confirms only the essential outline: a Carthage degree in 1887, and then a period of teaching before he went on to study for the ministry.

What the young graduate was like inwardly, we know from an unexpected source: John himself, many years later, describing his younger self to Pengwern Jones with rueful honesty. He had decided as a youth, he said, to be a missionary. But he wanted to be a “good missionary,” and by that he meant a great one. “I wanted to shine as a great missionary,” he told Jones. He was, he admitted, “a little proud of the ‘B.A.’ after my name,” and determined to master whatever languages he would need, so that nothing should stand in the way of his success. “I loved the Lord and I wanted to serve Him,” he said, “but ‘self’ was at the foundation of my ambition.”

It is a disarming confession, and it matters for everything that follows. The man who would one day be remembered as an almost otherworldly intercessor did not begin that way. He began as a gifted, earnest, somewhat awkward young man who wanted to be admired for his devotion. Most people who take up Christian service begin with some mixture of real love for God and a strong wish to be significant. The difference between them is not usually where they start. It is whether they let God deal with the mixture.

A Death in the Family

In the autumn of 1889 John entered McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, the principal seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the Midwest. His elder brother Edmund followed him there a year later. Edmund had graduated from Lake Forest University in 1888, and he too was preparing for the ministry. He had joined the Student Volunteer Movement, the great wave of college students who were signing a pledge to serve overseas if God permitted. The movement’s watchword, the evangelization of the world in this generation, was being repeated on campuses across the country.

During one summer vacation Edmund went west to do Sunday school mission work in Montana. There he caught what McGaw calls “mountain fever.” A doctor advised him to go home to Illinois at once. He was too ill to travel safely, so they pinned his railway ticket and instructions for each conductor to the lapel of his coat and put him on the train. He was delirious before he reached home, but he arrived. A few days later he died. The seminary catalogue records the date simply: August 1891. He was about twenty-eight. He was buried at Moss Ridge.

John was at that point between his second and final years at seminary. He was already planning to preach. He had long thought vaguely about foreign missions. Now his brother, who had actually pledged himself to go, was dead before he could sail. McGaw says John “was deeply impressed by his brother’s death. There would be a break in the ranks on the foreign field, and he wondered if it were not God’s will for him to step into the gap.”

It is an old pattern in the history of missions: one worker falls, and another steps forward to take the place. It can be a noble instinct, and it can also be a confused one. A grieving young man may try to finish his brother’s story instead of discovering his own. John seems to have sensed that danger, for he did not decide at once. He carried the question for most of a year. The next chapter tells how it was finally settled.

The Prayer Behind the Answer

Before we leave the parsonage at Carthage, it is worth standing back to see what had happened there. A father had prayed for years that God would send labourers into the harvest. One son had offered himself and died. Another was now wondering whether he should go in his place. Within a year and a half, that second son would be on a ship bound for India, sent by his church, as a direct answer, although no one could yet see it, to a prayer said over and over in a small-town manse.

McGaw draws the obvious lesson with a preacher’s vigour. The great need of the church, he says, is not first for more training schools or better organisation. Christ has provided one method for securing labourers, and it is prayer. He puts Jesus’ command into a single stark sentence: “Look on the fields … they are white … the laborers are few … PRAY!” McGaw was writing in the 1920s. He was troubled that thousands of American churches were without pastors and millions of people overseas had never heard the gospel. He believed the cause was simple: “prayer closets are deserted, family altars are broken down, and pulpit prayers are formal and dead.”

We may think that diagnosis too simple. The reasons why churches lack workers are many and tangled. But McGaw is surely right about the order of things. Jesus did not first tell his disciples to go. He told them to pray, and only in the next chapter did he send them (Matthew 10:5, ASV). Prayer for labourers comes before the sending of labourers. And very often, as the Hyde family found, those who pray the prayer find that God answers it through them, or through their children.

That is worth pondering before we go further. Many Christian parents quietly hope that God will call someone else’s children to hard and distant places. Many Christian young people pray for the world while privately assuming that the answer will not involve them. The prayer at the head of this chapter is a dangerous prayer to pray honestly, because the Lord of the harvest may say, as he did in Carthage, I have heard you, and I will send one of yours.

For Reflection

John Hyde’s story does not begin with John. It begins with a father’s faithfulness, a mother’s quiet holiness, and a brother’s unfinished life. The courage of the later chapters grew from roots that were planted by others, in a home that was not remarkable except for its seriousness about God.

That should encourage anyone who feels that their own faithfulness is small and unseen. A father who prays the same prayer for twenty years may never know what it achieves. Smith Harris Hyde did not live to hear his son called “the Apostle of Prayer.” He simply prayed, and believed that the Lord of the harvest was listening. He was right.