Union and Communion

It is Hudson Taylor's brief, searching meditation on the Song of Solomon, read as a picture of the believer's love-relationship with Christ. Taylor traces the soul's progress from first communion with the Lord into deep and unbroken union with him, drawing from the bride's words a portrait of growing intimacy, occasional coldness, restoration, and settled fellowship with Christ the Bridegroom.

James Hudson Taylor was the founder of the China Inland Mission and one of the most influential missionaries of the nineteenth century, who gave his life to reaching inland China with the gospel. Alongside his missionary labours he was a man of deep devotion, and Union and Communion opens a window onto the inner life that sustained his extraordinary work.

As a portrait of the love between Christ and the believing soul. Following a long Christian tradition, he takes the bride's longing, the seasons of nearness and distance, and the final settled union as figures of the Christian's own experience of Christ — the awakening of love, the pain of coldness and separation, the joy of restoration, and the deepening of fellowship into unbroken communion.

Union is the settled, unbreakable joining of the believer to Christ — a fact established by grace. Communion is the felt, enjoyed fellowship that flows from that union, which can be interrupted by coldness or sin and then restored. Taylor's concern is to lead the reader from merely being united to Christ into the warm, conscious, daily communion with him that the Song describes.

Taylor does not hide the seasons when love grows cool and the sense of Christ's presence is lost — he sees them in the bride's own story. But he reads them as occasions for return and deeper fellowship, showing how the Lord seeks out the wandering heart and restores communion. The book is honest about spiritual ups and downs and hopeful about their remedy.

Not in subject, but it comes from the heart of a missionary. It is a devotional work about intimacy with Christ, and it reveals the source of Taylor's own strength — a personal communion with the Lord that underlay his life of faith and sacrifice. Readers often value it as a glimpse of the inner spring behind the outward mission.

Any Christian who longs for a warmer, closer walk with Christ, and who is drawn to the language of love and intimacy in the Song of Solomon. It is a book for the heart more than the head — brief, tender, and searching — and it speaks especially to those who sense the difference between knowing they belong to Christ and actually enjoying him.

At the beginning, following Taylor's path through the Song from first love to settled union. Because it traces a progress of communion, it rewards being read in order and slowly, as a devotional guide to deeper intimacy with Christ rather than a study to be finished quickly.