Slow of Speech and Hearing

“And Jehovah said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? is it not I, Jehovah? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt speak.”

— Exodus 4:11-12, ASV

Not a Remarkable Missionary

If the story of John Hyde were a legend, it would move straight from the ship and the open-air meeting to triumph. A young man is filled with the Spirit and set free from sin, and he goes out at once to win the Punjab. That is not what happened, and every early witness is honest about it.

“At the first,” McGaw writes, “John Hyde was not a remarkable missionary.” His colleague H. D. Griswold, writing the obituary in 1912, was blunter still. Hyde’s first ten years in India, he said, “were marked by steady, patient, but not especially fruitful service.” Ten years is a long time. It is the whole career of many missionaries, who go out young, serve a single term or two, and come home. If Hyde had been one of them, no one would ever have written a book about him.

The reasons for those slow years were partly outside his control. The work in the villages of the Punjab was hard and slow for everyone. But some of the reasons lay in Hyde himself, and his friends named them with affection and without pretending.

“He Seemed Not to Hear”

Hyde was slow of speech. McGaw’s informants remembered that “when a question or a remark was directed to him he seemed not to hear, or if he heard he seemed a long time in framing a reply.” Part of the reason was physical. “His hearing was slightly defective,” McGaw says, “and this it was feared would hinder him in acquiring the language.” Pengwern Jones, who knew him in his last years, says without qualification that “Mr. Hyde himself was deaf.” The deafness seems to have grown worse with time. In his final spring in Britain he told an elderly woman that he could rarely hear anything at all when he went to church.

He was also, by temperament, quiet and withdrawn. Paterson, his closest friend, wrote that Hyde “was not naturally a bright and happy man. On the contrary he was in himself inclined to be morose, retiring, shy and silent.” McGaw’s sources describe a disposition “gentle and quiet” that seemed “to be lacking in the enthusiasm and zeal which a young missionary should have.” Some colleagues, Jones heard, thought him “a morose, melancholy person.”

There was one thing about him that everyone noticed. “He had a wonderful pair of blue eyes,” McGaw writes. “They seemed to search into the very depth of your inmost being, and they seemed also to shine out of the soul of a prophet.” People who could not hear much from him found themselves being looked at, and remembered it.

It is a strange picture of a missionary: a young man who was hard of hearing and slow to answer, shy by nature, and sent to learn two languages in a hurry and preach in them to crowds. If a mission board today were selecting candidates by aptitude, it might well have turned him down.

“Who Hath Made Man’s Mouth?”

Moses made the same objection when God called him. “Oh, Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant; for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (Exodus 4:10, ASV). It was a reasonable complaint. Moses was being sent to argue with Pharaoh and to lead a nation, and his gifts did not seem to fit the task.

God’s reply, which stands at the head of this chapter, does not deny the problem. It goes behind it. “Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? is it not I, Jehovah?” The limitations Moses was worried about were not accidents that had escaped God’s notice. They were part of the man God had made and was now sending. And the promise that followed was not “I will make you eloquent” but “I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt speak.”

Paul, who had his own weakness to carry, learned the same lesson in a different form. When he pleaded for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed, the answer was, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness.” And Paul drew the conclusion: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:9, ASV). He reminded the Corinthians that he had come to them “not with excellency of speech or of wisdom,” but “in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling,” so that their faith “should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:1, 3, 5, ASV).

Hyde’s deafness and slowness of speech were never removed. He was deaf to the end. What changed was not the weakness but what God did through it.

“First Things First”

New missionaries in the Punjab were expected to give their first years mainly to language study, working with a munshi, a language teacher, and sitting examinations set by the mission. One later reference work says Hyde began his study at Dehra Dun, in the hills north of the plains. Wherever it began, it did not go as the mission expected.

McGaw tells the story with evident relish. Hyde started on the language work, “but later neglected it for Bible study. He was reprimanded by the committee, but he replied: ‘First things first.’ He argued that he had come to India to teach the Bible, and he needed to know it before he could teach it.”

It is easy to admire this story too quickly. From the committee’s point of view, a new missionary who was already hard of hearing and slow of speech, and who then neglected his language study, was a real worry. They were right to be concerned. A missionary who cannot speak the language of the people will never reach them, however well he knows his Bible in English. Hyde was not wholly right, and later in life he may well have admitted it.

But he was not wholly wrong either. He had grasped something the committee was in danger of forgetting. The purpose of learning Urdu and Punjabi was to speak about God’s word, and a man who knew the words of a language but not the Word of God would have nothing to say in it. “Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33, ASV). McGaw adds, and it is an important addition, that Hyde “did not neglect language study” altogether. He simply refused to let it crowd out the Scriptures. And “God by his Spirit wonderfully opened up the Scriptures to him.”

The psalmist prayed, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Psalm 119:18, ASV). That was the prayer of Hyde’s early years in India. He could hardly hear the people around him, and he could not yet speak to them. So he gave himself to listening to God.

A Tongue Loosed

For years the outcome looked doubtful. Griswold remembered that during Hyde’s first decade “it was thought that his command of the vernacular of the Punjab would never be of the best.” Then something changed. “The baptism of the Spirit and the fire of love,” Griswold wrote, “loosed his tongue and gave him free utterance.”

By the end of his life Hyde was recognised as an effective speaker in three languages. The Indian Witness, a Methodist weekly, called him “an acceptable speaker in Urdu, Punjabi and in English,” and added that “it was always the man of holiness and power back of an address which made it indeed a message.” McGaw’s sources went further, saying that he became “a correct and easy speaker” and could hold audiences of hundreds of Indians spellbound. Jones, who did not know Urdu well himself, reported what Urdu speakers told him: that Hyde “spoke the language well, if anything a little highflown, using the book-language more than the colloquial.” That is a lovely detail. It is exactly what one would expect of a man who had learned his Urdu partly through long hours with an Urdu Bible.

Isaiah has a verse that could stand over this part of Hyde’s life: “The Lord Jehovah hath given me the tongue of them that are taught, that I may know how to sustain with words him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught” (Isaiah 50:4, ASV). The tongue of the taught comes from the ear of the taught. Hyde’s friends noticed that he rose very early, morning after morning, to pray and read. The words that later reached so many came out of those hours of listening.

Misunderstood

The slow years had another cost. Hyde’s way of life puzzled his colleagues, and for a long time many of them did not approve.

Jones first met him around 1906, at a conference of the Punjab Mission in Ludhiana. Afterwards Jones talked with several of the missionaries about him and found “that he had been misunderstood by them.” They had not approved of “the way he spent so much of his time in prayer.” Griswold confirms that Hyde “was sometimes criticised by his brethren for the rigorous and ascetic nature of his piety, for the way in which he seemed to deny to the flesh even its just claims.” Some thought him impractical. It did not help that, as Griswold also said, “he had not the gifts of an organizer.” In a mission that depended on schools, accounts, committees, and careful administration, a man who prayed all night and forgot his meals did not always look like an asset.

Years later Jones asked Hyde whether he had realised, in those early years, that his colleagues disapproved of him. Hyde smiled, Jones says, “that sweet smile which one can never forget,” and answered: “Oh, yes, I knew it, but they did not understand me, that was all, they never intended to be unkind.” Jones added: “There was not one atom of bitterness as far as I could see.”

It is a small exchange, and it tells us a great deal. Hyde knew he was criticised. He did not pretend otherwise. But he refused to interpret his colleagues’ disapproval as malice. He assumed the best about them: they did not understand, and they did not mean to hurt him. That habit of charitable interpretation would be tested far more severely before his life was over. Here it already shows its roots.

Home for a Season

In the spring of 1901 Hyde went home to America on his first furlough. The women’s missionary magazine of his church recorded his arrival at New York on 15 May 1901, “from Ferozepore,” with a forwarding address at Prairie City, Illinois. He had been in India eight and a half years. McGaw saw him that year and did not see him alive again.

The furlough seems to have been partly for his health. When he sailed back from New York on 17 September 1902, the magazine noted that he and another returning missionary had “been doing much visiting,” and added the hope that they were “in more vigorous health than when they came home.” During that year he had spoken at the annual meeting of the Presbyterian women’s board of the Northwest, held in Omaha, stepping in when another missionary could not come.

He sailed back to India in September 1902 as he had left it: a faithful, quiet, somewhat misunderstood missionary with modest results. He was a few weeks short of thirty-seven. Nothing in the mission records of that year would suggest that the next ten years would be any different from the first. Griswold, looking back, dated the change almost exactly to this point: “The last ten years were the time of fruit-bearing.”

For Reflection

Many Christians carry some limitation they wish God would remove: a slowness of speech, a weakness of body, a shy temperament, a lack of the gifts their work seems to need. John Hyde carried several of these at once. They were not removed. He remained deaf and never became an organizer. By nature he remained more inclined to silence than to talk.

What God did instead was to give him the tongue of the taught, a loosened tongue fed by a listening ear. And he gave him the grace to be misunderstood for ten years without bitterness. If your first ten years of faithful service have been “steady, patient, but not especially fruitful,” John Hyde’s story does not promise that the next ten will be different. But it does show that such years are not wasted. They may be the soil in which everything else is growing.