They each had a little room at Newington Green, a cell almost, and ate communally at a long, heavily-scrubbed, wooden table in the area onto which their rooms opened. They drank tea that was very milky, and when I was a teenage Saturday-helper to Harry the Express Dairy milkman, we would be expected to sit for a while after having delivered the crate of milk, and to take a cup of tea with the ex-missionaries, quite a number had elephantiasis of the legs, and this tea was extremely milky. Whether they were good caring Christians, simply trying to be appropriate as they saw it to the milkman, with all this milk, or whether they always drank tea like that I cannot say, but I didn’t like it much.
The China Inland Mission was formed by JAMES HUDSON TAYLOR. James was a man with a mission. In 1850, he had made up his mind that it was his desire to spread the Christian message to China, and was moved to write:
Think of it – 360 million souls, without God or hope in the world! Think of more than twelve million of our fellow creatures dying every year without any of the consolations of the Gospel. Barnsley including the Common has only 15,000 inhabitants. Imagine what it would be if all these were to die in twelve months! Yet in China every year hundreds are dying, for every man, woman and child in Barnsley. Poor, neglected China! Scarcely anyone cares about it.
So strong was James Hudson Taylor’s concern about his observed imbalance in the world between Barnsley, including the Common, and China, that he prayed many times a day that the Lord would give him the power to do something to redress this. And the Lord did come up trumps, in a way. By the end of his life Hudson Taylor led an organisation of over six hundred missionaries working in China with headquarters in Newington Green and Shanghai comprising what would now be considered highly valuable real estate. He never asked for donations to his cause, yet the entire organisation was supported by donations. He prayed, he lectured, he gave speeches and presentations, and the money was given.
Not that his was an easy passage, in fact it was a constant battle with hardship for both him and his missionaries. His early years in China were so arduous that they effectively killed his wife. He prayed hard to the Lord, though, and received the advice that it would be the right thing to do to marry one of his secretaries pretty quick.
The trials of James and of the missionaries in China ranged from being beaten with sticks by chauvinistic Chinese in remote inland regions to more psychologically taxing dilemmas. For example, the first time Hudson Taylor visited the USA on a lecture tour, money came pouring in faster than he could spend it. This gave him cause for great deliberations. It is all very well asking the Lord to provide and having one’s wishes granted, but what are you to make of it when the Lord provides before you have even asked? Do you just say, ‘Trust those bloody Americans to wreck the system?’ Not James Hudson Taylor. He prayed to the Lord for guidance and received the reply that he should use this money to broaden the international make-up of his missionary force which up to that time had been almost exclusively British and Chinese. The problem then arose, that the American volunteers kept getting subsidised by their local church and families, so the donations would still not diminish. It is enough to give you a headache, and James Hudson Taylor appears to have had more than his share of pains in the head and various other parts of his body as a result of all this loot coming in when he hadn’t asked the Lord for it.
To us now, it may seem a strange Lord to believe in, who selects Barnsley, including the Common, for special privilege and leaves the great majority of the world’s population out of the equation, but the Victorian evangelisers had no such doubts. They had faith. They had a mission. And it produced results. That the substance of the mission was not one resilient to logical argument, and actually not a sustainable one over the long term, are not the point, a mission believed in strongly enough can succeed, however essentially bonkers.
The China Inland Mission had blossomed, boomed, and then begun to fade within a period of about 100 years. Not many poor unfortunates to evangelise to, in Newington Green, not many who would listen, anyway.
James Hudson Taylor’s organisation was in the right place at the right time. The language of the time spoke of, ‘devoting yourself to God’. Hudson Taylor’s biographers described how his parents made love:
Long and earnest was the talk that followed in view of the happiness to which they were looking forward. Then together they knelt to fulfil as literally as possible an obligation they could not relegate to Hebrew parents of old. Just as definitely the Lord responded, giving them faith to realise that He had accepted their gift: that henceforth the life so dear to them must be held at the disposal of a higher claim, a deeper love, than theirs.
Had James Hudson Taylor been a young man in 1950, instead of 1850, the language of his biographer would have been blunter, less elitist, more understandable by those used to scanning the lines rather than reading between them, more understandable to more people overall, and with a greater sense of personal responsibility – his parents would have been more likely to make love because they felt it was a good thing to do, rather than devising some justification for it not being their fault really, since the Hebrew rulers were no longer of much practical benefit. And did they really do it kneeling?
It is also most unlikely in the latter half of the 20th century that James’ crazy life-plan would have worked. He would have had to follow a different crazy life-plan instead. Perhaps, he would have felt moved, with or without all his fervent prayer, to start a restaurant business.
But whatever he might have done, he would no doubt find the need to be in considerable depths of prayer these days, for his grandiose centre at Newington Green is now accommodation for students at one of the London universities, though the facade is still there. That’s something to be thankful for.
Dave
Extracts are from Biography of James Hudson Taylor by Dr and Mrs Howard Taylor, which is out of print I believe.
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