“It Is Settled”

“And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.”

— Isaiah 6:8, ASV

Chicago, 1889

McCormick Theological Seminary stood on the north side of Chicago, in a city that was growing faster than almost any other on earth. When John Hyde arrived in the autumn of 1889 to begin his training for the ministry, Chicago had risen from the ashes of the great fire and was pushing out across the prairie. It was also full of new immigrants and packed with churches. D. L. Moody had opened his Bible institute there that very year, and the city was restless with religious energy. For a serious young man from a small Illinois town, it was a larger world.

The seminary’s course ran for three years. Students read Hebrew and Greek, church history, and systematic theology, and they preached practice sermons before professors who did not always hide their opinions. They also talked a great deal among themselves about where they would go. Some would take quiet country pulpits like the one Smith Hyde had filled in Carthage. Some would go to the growing cities. And a surprising number, in those years, were talking about going abroad.

The Volunteers

To understand why, one has to know a little about the Student Volunteer Movement. In the summer of 1886, at a conference for college students called by D. L. Moody at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, one hundred young men had declared themselves willing, if God permitted, to become foreign missionaries. The idea spread from campus to campus with astonishing speed. Within a few years thousands of students had signed the volunteer declaration, and the movement’s watchword became famous: the evangelization of the world in this generation.

The watchword was bold, and later generations have criticised it for its confidence. But it did one thing very powerfully. It made the question of the mission field personal. A student could no longer think of foreign missions as something the church did through other people. The question pressed on each one: If God permits, am I willing to go? Edmund Hyde had faced that question and said yes. His death in the summer of 1891 left the same question lying on his brother’s desk.

John was not a stranger to the question. He later told Pengwern Jones that he had determined as a youth to be a missionary. But a youthful intention is not the same as a settled call, and it seems that in his seminary years the matter had become unsettled. Perhaps the pull of a comfortable American pastorate was stronger than he expected. Perhaps he doubted his own fitness, for he was slow of speech and a little hard of hearing, and knew it. Perhaps, having grown up in a minister’s home, he simply could not tell his own desires from other people’s expectations. Whatever the reason, Edmund’s death forced the issue, and John did not rush to settle it.

A Year of Wondering

McGaw says plainly that “the decision was not finally reached till the next year, his last in seminary.” That means John lived with the question for most of a year. He went back to classes in the autumn of 1891 grieving his brother and unsure of his road.

There is wisdom in that slowness. Grief can produce sudden vows, and sudden vows are not always from God. A young man who has just buried a brother may promise, in a rush of feeling, to take his brother’s place, and later find that he has built his life on an emotion rather than a call. John seems to have sensed this. He did not treat Edmund’s death as the answer. He treated it as the question.

Isaiah’s call, which stands at the head of this chapter, did not come out of nowhere either. It came “in the year that king Uzziah died” (Isaiah 6:1, ASV), after the death of a king who had reigned for over fifty years. Isaiah went into the temple in a time of loss and uncertainty, and there he saw the Lord “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1, ASV). What moved him to volunteer was not the empty throne in Jerusalem. It was the throne in heaven that was not empty. And before he said “Here am I,” he said something else: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5, ASV). The call to go came to a man who had first been shown his own unfitness, and then cleansed.

That order matters, and we shall see it again and again in Hyde’s life. The ones God sends are rarely the ones who feel best qualified. They are the ones who have seen enough of God to stop pretending about themselves.

“Stay There Till the Question Is Settled”

The moment of decision, when it came, was undramatic. McGaw tells it in a few lines, and they have the feel of a story that a classmate told many times afterwards.

Late one Saturday night in his final year, John went to a classmate’s room. He asked him for all the arguments he could furnish on the question of the foreign field. He wanted, it seems, a debate. He wanted someone to set out the case for going and the case for staying, so that he could weigh them and reach a sensible conclusion.

His classmate refused. He told John that it was not argument he needed. What he should do, the classmate said, was go to his own room, get on his knees before God, and stay there till the question was settled.

John went. We do not know how long he knelt, or what he prayed, or whether he slept that night at all. We know only what happened the next morning. At chapel he found his classmate and said to him, “It is settled.” McGaw adds that “his shining face was enough to show which way the decision had been made.”

Later accounts have sometimes named the classmate. One modern reference work credits a fellow student, Burton Alva Konkle, with a decisive influence on Hyde’s call. Konkle was indeed in Hyde’s class at McCormick. But the early sources do not name the man in the story, and it is better to leave him as McGaw left him: a friend with the sense to refuse a request for arguments, and to send John to his knees instead.

What the Classmate Understood

The classmate’s advice is worth pausing over, because it holds in miniature the whole shape of John Hyde’s later life.

There is a proper place for arguments in Christian decisions. Scripture tells us to count the cost before we build a tower or go to war (Luke 14:28-31, ASV). It commends the counsel of many advisers. Hyde’s friend did not despise thinking. But he saw that John had reached the point where more arguments would not help. He had heard them all. He knew the needs of the world, the claims of his own country, the risks of India, and his own limitations. What he lacked was not information. He lacked a settled word from God, and a willingness to obey it whatever it turned out to be.

There is a kind of decision that can only be made alone before God. Jesus himself, before choosing the twelve apostles, “went out into the mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12, ASV). The psalmist heard God say, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10, ASV). Arguments keep a person busy, and they keep the final decision at arm’s length. Kneeling until something is settled means risking an answer one did not want.

That Saturday night in Chicago was, as far as we know, the first time John Hyde prayed his way through to a decision in that way. It would not be the last. Twenty years later his friends would watch him stay on his knees, sometimes for a whole day, sometimes for many nights, until some burden was lifted or some assurance given. The habit that made him famous began with a classmate who would not argue with him.

Mixed Motives, Real Call

It would be pleasant to report that John went to India with a pure heart, having laid aside all ambition on that Saturday night. He did not, and he said so himself. He told Pengwern Jones years later that when he boarded the ship he still wanted to be a “great missionary,” still counted on his abilities, and still had “self” at the foundation of his plans. The call was real, and it would be tested within days of his sailing. But he was not yet the man he would become.

This is a comfort, not a scandal. Very few people answer God’s call with entirely clean motives. Paul could even rejoice when some in Rome preached Christ “of envy and strife” rather than of goodwill, because “in every way … Christ is proclaimed” (Philippians 1:15, 18, ASV). God does not wait for our motives to be perfect before he sends us. He sends us, and then, very often, he purifies our motives on the way. A young man can say “Here am I; send me” with sincerity and a good deal of pride mixed together. What matters is that he means it enough to let God deal with the pride.

Ordination and Sailing

The records from here on are clear and precise. John Hyde graduated from McCormick Theological Seminary in the spring of 1892, having completed the full three-year course. On 26 April 1892 the Presbytery of Schuyler, in western Illinois, ordained him to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America appointed him to its mission in the Punjab, in the far north-west of British India. It was then still called the Lodiana Mission, after the town of Ludhiana where American Presbyterians had begun their work in 1834.

On his way east that autumn he called at the Chicago rooms of the women’s missionary board, which noted in its magazine that he had visited them “on his way to Lodiana.” The same issue listed him among the month’s departures in a single line: “Rev. John N. Hyde, to North India.” He had sailed from New York on 15 October 1892. He was twenty-six.

Behind him were a father who had prayed for labourers, a mother who had sung the faith into him, and a brother buried in Moss Ridge Cemetery. Ahead lay a language he would struggle to learn, a climate that would test his health, a people he would come to love more than his own life, and colleagues who would not understand him for years. Between the two, a few hours out of New York harbour, a letter was waiting for him. He did not know it yet, but it was the most important letter he would ever receive.

For Reflection

Many Christians carry an unsettled question for years: a call they half-believe in, a step they neither take nor abandon, a decision they keep reopening with fresh arguments. John Hyde’s classmate would give them the same advice he gave John: not more arguments, but time on their knees until the matter is settled.

This is not a promise that the answer will always be dramatic, or that the face will always shine the next morning. It is simply the recognition that some questions belong to God. They will not be answered until we are willing to hear his answer, and are willing to say, whatever it is, “Here am I.”