The Letter on the Ship

“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”

— Luke 11:13, ASV

Hours Out of New York

A long sea voyage in the 1890s was a strange suspension of life. For weeks a traveller had nothing to do and nowhere to go. One home had been left and the other not yet reached. McGaw, who had perhaps made such voyages himself, says of it that “the feet lifted up from off the dear homeland and not yet planted on the new homeland” gave “suggestion and opportunity for thoughtful meditation.” For John Hyde, in the autumn of 1892, the voyage became something more than that. It was the first great crisis of his spiritual life, and it began with the post.

We have two accounts of what happened, both claiming to come from Hyde himself. They agree on the essentials and differ in the details, which is roughly what we should expect from two tellings of the same story many years apart. It is worth reading them side by side.

The First Telling

The first comes from Francis McGaw. He says that Hyde afterwards described the incident “in an Indian publication,” and he quotes Hyde’s words directly:

My father had a friend who greatly desired to be a foreign missionary, but was not permitted to go. This man wrote me a letter directed in care of the ship. I received it a few hours out of New York harbor. He urged me to seek for the baptism of the Holy Spirit as the great qualification for mission work. When I had read the letter I crumpled it up in anger and threw it on the deck. Did this friend think that I had not received the baptism of the Spirit, or that I would think of going to India without this equipment? I was angry. But by and by better judgment prevailed and I picked up the letter and read it again. Possibly I did need something which I had not yet received.

Hyde goes on to say that for the rest of the voyage he “gave himself much to prayer” that he might “indeed be filled with the Spirit.” He wanted to know “by an actual experience” what Jesus meant when he said, in the words he quoted from the Revised Version, “Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be my witnesses … unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). And he says, simply, that “these prayers on shipboard were finally answered in a marvelous way.”

The Second Telling

The second account comes from Pengwern Jones. Years later, when the two men had become close friends, Jones asked Hyde how he had come into his life of prayer. It was, Jones says, “very difficult to get him to speak about himself.” But Hyde understood that Jones was not merely curious, and he told him. Jones wrote the story down afterwards, and he was careful to say that he was giving it “as far as I can remember … in some such words.”

In Jones’s telling, Hyde began with his ambition, as we saw in the first chapter. He wanted to be a great missionary, and he was a little proud of his degree. Then he described the letter. When he went aboard the steamer at New York, he found in his cabin a letter in the handwriting of his father’s friend. “The words were not many,” he told Jones, “but the purport of them was this: ‘I shall not cease praying for you, dear John, until you are filled with the Holy Spirit.’”

“My pride was touched,” Hyde went on, “and I felt exceedingly angry and crushed the letter and threw it into a corner of the cabin and went up on deck in a very angry spirit. The idea of implying that I was not filled with the Spirit! I was going out as a missionary, and I was determined to be a good missionary, and yet this man implied that I was not fitted and equipped for the work!”

He paced the deck, he said, “a battle raging within.” He loved the writer and knew the holy life he led, “and down in my heart there was a conviction that he was right and that I was not fit to be a missionary.” After a while he went back to his cabin, got down on his knees to hunt for the crumpled letter, smoothed it out, and read it again, and then again. He was still annoyed, but “the conviction was gaining on me that my father’s friend was right and I was wrong.”

This went on, he said, for two or three days, “until I felt perfectly miserable.” At last, “in a kind of despair,” he asked the Lord to fill him with the Holy Spirit, “and the moment I did this the whole atmosphere seemed to clear up. I began to see myself, and what a selfish ambition I had.” It was “a struggle almost to the end of the voyage.” But long before the ship reached port he had made up his mind that, whatever the cost, he would be filled with the Spirit. Then came what he called the second climax. He was willing, he told the Lord, even to fail his language examinations in India. He was willing to be a missionary “working quietly out of sight.” He would do anything and be anything, “but the Holy Spirit I would have at any cost.”

Reading the Two Together

The differences between the accounts are small. In one the letter is handed to him a few hours out; in the other he finds it waiting in his cabin. In one he throws it on the deck; in the other he throws it into a corner of the cabin and then goes on deck. McGaw’s version is shorter, more restrained, and shaped for a public audience. Jones’s is longer and more intimate, the story as a man tells it to a friend in private conversation. Jones’s version also carries the most important detail. The letter did not only urge Hyde to seek the Spirit. It promised that the writer would keep praying until he did.

Both tellings agree on what matters. A letter from an older Christian implied that Hyde was not spiritually ready for the work he was going to do. Hyde’s first reaction was wounded pride. His second, after a struggle, was to admit that the letter was right. And the voyage became a time of seeking God that changed the direction of his life.

Who Wrote the Letter?

Neither account names the letter-writer, but they give three clues. He was a friend of Hyde’s father. He had greatly wanted to be a foreign missionary himself but had been prevented. And, in a small aside in the middle of Jones’s reminiscences, Jones adds in brackets: “I understand that this friend is the one who is preparing a short account of Hyde and especially of his prayer-life.”

The short account of Hyde’s prayer life that was being prepared in America at the time Jones was writing was Francis McGaw’s Praying Hyde. McGaw had known Smith Hyde well. His own mother had prayed for labourers for the mission field, and one of his brothers served as a missionary in India. If Jones’s information was right, then the friend who wrote the letter, and then kept his promise to pray, was McGaw himself. That would explain why his own account says so little about the letter-writer and so much about what the letter did. A modest man telling a story in which he plays a part will often leave himself out.

We cannot be certain. Jones says only “I understand,” and McGaw never claims the letter as his own. But it is a moving possibility. The man who compiled the book that made Hyde famous may have been the man whose prayers, thirty years earlier, set Hyde on his way.

The Wound of a Friend

Whoever wrote it, the letter was a risk. It is not easy to tell a young man on his way to the mission field, a new graduate newly ordained and full of hope, that he is not yet ready. Most of us, if we had such a thought about someone we loved, would keep it to ourselves, or dress it up so heavily that it lost its point. The letter-writer said it plainly and then promised to pray.

The book of Proverbs has a word for this: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are profuse” (Proverbs 27:6, ASV). A true friend will sometimes say what hurts. A false friend, or a merely polite one, will say only what pleases. Hyde’s first response was the natural one: he felt insulted. What makes him remarkable is not that he was angry but that he went back on his knees and looked for the letter he had thrown away. He let himself be corrected by someone who loved him.

That willingness would mark his whole life. Two decades later he would be corrected in the middle of his own prayer, rebuked by God for criticising a fellow pastor. The capacity to receive correction without defending oneself is one of the least glamorous and most important parts of Christian character. It began, for John Hyde, with a crumpled letter on a ship.

What Was He Asking For?

The letter used language that would be familiar to many Christians in the 1890s and strange to many today. Hyde was urged to seek “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” as the great qualification for missionary work, and to be “filled with the Spirit.” Among evangelicals of that generation such language was common. The Keswick Convention in England, the preaching of D. L. Moody and his associates, and a wide stream of writing on the “higher Christian life” all urged believers to seek a deeper experience of the Spirit’s power for holiness and service. Christians then, as now, disagreed about exactly how to describe that experience, and how it related to conversion.

This book will not try to settle those debates. What is clear from Scripture is the thing Hyde longed for. The Christian is commanded, “be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18, ASV). Jesus promised his disciples power for witness when the Spirit came upon them. And the verse at the head of this chapter gives the simplest possible instruction for receiving him: ask. “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13, ASV).

Hyde asked. He asked in anger at first, then in misery, then “in a kind of despair,” and finally with the settled resolve of a man who would rather fail every examination in India than go on without the Spirit’s help. It is worth noticing what he did not do. He did not demand a particular sensation or sign. He did not decide in advance what the answer should look like. He asked to be filled, confessed the selfish ambition he now saw in himself, and offered to be anything God wanted, even an unnoticed worker “quietly out of sight.”

That last phrase is almost a prophecy. John Hyde spent much of the rest of his life out of sight, in prayer rooms, in village huts, and on his face on the floor while others preached. The young man who had wanted to shine was given, instead, the grace to be hidden. It was the answer to his prayer.

Not the End of the Story

It would be tidy to end the chapter here, with the ship coming into harbour and a transformed missionary stepping ashore. But Hyde himself did not tell it that way. In Jones’s account, the voyage was only the beginning. Within days of arriving in India, Hyde met a question at an open-air meeting that went deeper than the letter had. It showed him that there was still something in his own life that the gospel he had come to preach had not dealt with.

The letter had humbled his pride. The next test would search his conscience. That is the subject of the next chapter.

For Reflection

Two things in this story deserve attention. The first is the letter-writer’s courage: to say a hard thing to someone he loved, and then, most important of all, to commit himself to pray until it came true. We would all be the poorer if such friends were rare.

The second is Hyde’s response. Pride throws the letter away. Grace goes back on its knees to look for it. Most of us have had letters, conversations, sermons, or rebukes that we crumpled up in anger. Some of them were wrong, and deserved to be thrown away. But some of them were from God, and are still lying in the corner of the cabin, waiting to be smoothed out and read again.