A Son for China

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee. JEREMIAH 1:5

A praying father. James Hudson Taylor was born on the twenty-first of May, 1832, in Barnsley, a mining and linen town in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father, James Taylor, was a chemist and a Methodist lay preacher; his mother, Amelia, was a gentle and deeply devout woman. Some years before the boy was born his father had been stirred by reading about China, and knowing he could never go there himself, he prayed that if God gave him a son, that son might be called to labour in the vast empire that seemed then so closed to the gospel. Hudson did not learn of that prayer until he came home from China more than seven years after he first sailed. He was a delicate child.

The finished work. He grew up in the faith of his home without possessing it, and in his teens was glad of sceptical friends who seemed to offer a way out of a religion he could not make work. In June 1849, when he was seventeen, with his mother away from home, he picked up a gospel tract from a basket in his father’s library, meaning to read the story and skip the sermon. The phrase the finished work of Christ stopped him. If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what was there left for him to do? Nothing, he saw, but to fall on his knees and accept the Saviour. That same afternoon his mother, many miles away, had locked herself in her room to pray for him until she was assured that it was done. Within months, alone in his room, he gave himself to God for any service, and soon afterwards came the settled conviction that the service was to be in China.

Hull and London. He prepared with an almost fierce thoroughness. He studied Chinese from what books he could find, took up medicine, and in 1851 went to Hull as assistant to a doctor. There he tithed his whole income, moved into a single cheap room so that he could give more, lived largely on oatmeal and rice, and began what he called learning to move man, through God, by prayer alone. In 1852 he went to London to study at the London Hospital, living for a time on brown bread and apples and walking miles each day. He nearly died of a fever caught from a pricked finger in the dissecting room, and came through it convinced that he had work to do in China.

Shanghai in wartime. On the nineteenth of September, 1853, he sailed from Liverpool in the Dumfries under the Chinese Evangelisation Society, a small and poorly managed body, and reached Shanghai on the first of March, 1854. He landed in the middle of a civil war. Rebels held the Chinese city; an imperial army besieged it; the price of living was ruinous and his allowance inadequate. The first years were lonely, dangerous and hard. He travelled up the rivers and canals preaching and giving away Scriptures, and in 1855, on the advice of the veteran missionary Walter Medhurst, he put on Chinese dress, shaved his forehead and wore the queue. Many Europeans thought it absurd. He found that people listened.

William Burns. For some months in 1855 and 1856 he travelled in company with William Burns, a Scottish evangelist who had seen revival at home and had come to China to preach. Burns adopted Chinese dress after watching the difference it made to Taylor. Taylor learned from Burns a love of Scripture and a conviction that evangelism by ordinary men and women was the great work of the Church. Together they went south to Swatow, but a fire, a robbery and the outbreak of war kept Taylor from returning.

Ningbo and Maria. In the autumn of 1856 he settled in Ningbo. The following year, troubled that his society was repeatedly in debt, he resigned from it and depended on God alone. In January 1858 he married Maria Dyer, the orphaned daughter of a pioneer missionary to the Chinese, a woman of strong faith and sound judgement who had been living in Ningbo for some years. When the doctor who ran the mission hospital had to leave in 1859, Taylor took it over with no guaranteed funds, and it did not close. But by 1860 his health had broken, and the Taylors sailed for England.

The map on the wall. He was away for more than five years. He completed his medical qualifications, worked with F. F. Gough on a revision of the New Testament in the Ningbo dialect, and sat in his study facing a large map of China on which eleven inland provinces had no Protestant missionary at all. The burden became unbearable. On Sunday the twenty-fifth of June, 1865, at Brighton, unable to sit among a thousand comfortable Christians while millions perished, he walked out alone on the sands, surrendered himself to God for the work, and asked for twenty-four willing workers, two for each of the eleven provinces and two for Mongolia. That year, with the help of friends, above all William Berger, the China Inland Mission was formed. Its principles were plain: workers from any denomination, no guaranteed salaries, no debt, and no personal solicitation of funds.

The Lammermuir and after. On the twenty-sixth of May, 1866, Taylor, Maria, their four children and a party of sixteen missionaries sailed from London in the tea clipper Lammermuir, and after a voyage that twice nearly ended in shipwreck reached Shanghai that autumn. The years that followed were the hardest of his life. The party quarrelled, partly over Chinese dress. In 1867 their eldest daughter, Grace, died at the age of eight. In August 1868 a mob attacked the mission house at Yangzhou, and several of the party, Maria among them, were injured; British officials took the affair up in a way Taylor had not sought, and he was attacked in Parliament and the press. In 1869, worn out by his own spiritual failures, he read a letter from his colleague John McCarthy and came into the rest in Christ that changed the rest of his life. It came none too soon. In 1870 his son Samuel died, the older children were sent home to England, and in July, after the birth and death of a baby son, Maria died at Zhenjiang, aged thirty-three.

Jennie and the widening work. In 1871, in England, he married Jennie Faulding, who had sailed in the Lammermuir party, and who shared his work for more than thirty years. The mission grew beyond anything he had asked at Brighton. He prayed for eighteen workers in 1875, for seventy in 1881 and for a hundred in 1886, and they came. In 1885 seven well-known young men from Cambridge sailed to join it, and their going stirred the universities of Britain and beyond. Councils were formed in North America and Australia. He travelled constantly, and spoke against the opium trade that Britain had forced upon China.

The Boxer year and the end. In 1900 the Boxer uprising swept north China, and the mission lost fifty-eight missionaries and twenty-one children, along with many Chinese believers. Taylor, old and ill in Switzerland, was nearly broken by the news. The mission refused to claim compensation for its losses. He handed its leadership to Dixon Hoste, and in 1904 Jennie died. In the spring of 1905 he went back to China once more, and on the third of June, at Changsha, the capital of Hunan, a province that had once been fiercely closed to foreigners, he died quietly in the evening. He was buried at Zhenjiang, beside Maria and the children who had gone before him.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Taylor’s father prayed for a son for China before that son was born. Think of one person whose future you could begin praying for now.

2. His conversion came through a single phrase in a tract. Consider what small thing you could leave in someone’s hands this week.

3. He prepared for China years before he went. Ask what God may be preparing you for, and what preparation you are neglecting.

4. The hardest years of his life came after his greatest act of faith. If you are in such a season, do not conclude that God has left you.

5. Choose one of Taylor’s own writings in the Ochorus library and read its first chapter this week.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You heard a father’s prayer in a Yorkshire town and answered it in the life of his son. Teach me to pray for those who come after me.

You kept Your servant through danger, poverty, sickness, slander and bereavement, and You were faithful in them all.

Make me willing to be prepared for what I cannot yet see, and willing to go where You send.

And when my own losses come, let me find You as near in them as he did. Amen.