Missionary to China

“We’re drifting to that island and will surely be eaten by cannibals!” Said an officer on board the ship Dumfries.
“I don’t think so,” said Missionary James Hudson Taylor. “We have prayed, and God has assured me we’ll arrive safely in Shanghai.”

The officer looked at Taylor as though he thought he was crazy. “How can you say that when there isn’t a cloud in the sky? How can we sail a ship without any wind?” he asked. “We will be floating here for days, and we are floating right towards the island with the cannibals.”

But Hudson Taylor had learned to trust God. “Never mind,” he said. “God’s going to send a wind that will carry us away from that island, regardless of the way the current is flowing. Let down the corners of the main sail.”
“What good will that do?” argued the officer.

“Just please do it,” said the missionary. “Look! The wind is already here.” A breeze was moving a corner of the topmost sail.
“It’s only a small breeze and it won’t last.”
“A small breeze or not, let down the main sail,” insisted Taylor.

The officer swore loudly and said it would not do any good, but grudgingly he had the main sail lowered. Immediately the wind rose, bearing the ship, against the current at the rate of about eight miles an hour, away from the island of cannibals.

On March 1, 1854, the Dumfries docked safely at a port in Shanghai. Hudson Taylor, at age twenty-one, had achieved a dream that had been his since he was a child. He was in China as a Christian missionary. “My heart felt as though it had not room and must burst its bonds, while tears of gratitude and thankfulness fell from my eyes,” he said.

When young Taylor arrived in Shanghai he found a civil war in progress. An army of rebels, the “Red Turbans,” fighting with the Imperial forces. Even noncombatants in the community were in danger. On one occasion the missionary had just moved away from a wall when a cannonball crashed through the wall where he had been standing. At another time a bullet tore off the arm of a chair in the room he occupied. He had several close calls, yet God was protecting him for the work ahead in China.

Often Hudson thought of an unusual experience he had had when he worked as a medical intern in London. During an operation he cut his arm slightly with a surgeon’s knife. Thinking the wound a minor one, he gave it little attention. But a violent fever developed. And the surgeon who examined him said, “Go home and get your affairs in order, for you are a dead man.”

But Hudson Taylor answered calmly, “I don’t think so. For unless I am greatly mistaken I have work to do in China, and shall not die now.” He probably came as near death as a man could have and yet live.
Upon arriving in China the missionary immediately began preaching and witnessing for God. His first convert was Kuei-Hua. And this experience brought both of them unusual joy.

Anyone who would listen was a likely prospect for personal evangelism. On another boat trip, for instance, Hudson Taylor talked at length to a man about his soul’s salvation, and the man was interested. Then the missionary went to his cabin to get some tracts, but while he was gone the man with whom he had talked fell overboard. No one made any attempt to rescue the man as the ship moved away.

When Taylor discovered what had happened he immediately leaped overboard to try to save the man, but he could not find him. In desperation the missionary called to some fishermen who were in an open boat nearby. These men had a dragnet with hooks which might be used to grapple the drowning man.

“Come over here and drag directly over this spot!” Taylor shouted. “A man is drowning here!”
“Veh bin,” was the reply. In English this meant, “It is not convenient.”
“Don’t talk of convenience. Don’t you understand? A man is drowning!” said the missionary.
“We’re busy fishing and can’t come.”

“Never mind the fishing! I’ll give you more money than many a day’s fishing will bring. Only come – come at once!”
“How much money will you give us?” was the heartless response.
“We can’t discuss that now! Come, or it will be too late. I’ll give you five dollars.”
“We won’t do it for that,” said the spokesman. “Give us twenty dollars and we’ll drag.” What an unusual time to bargain.
“I don’t have that much, but please come quickly, and I’ll give you what I have,” promised Hudson Taylor.
“How much do you have?”
“I don’t know exactly. About fourteen dollars I believe.”

That offer brought the fishermen, slowly. They used the net and almost immediately found the man who had fallen overboard. But he could not be revived, probably because the fishermen thought more of a few dollars than of a human life.
J. Hudson Taylor valued human life, but of course he put a much greater value on a soul. Saving souls was his great mission in life. And his daily living was Christlike. One time he was beaten and robbed, and left hungry by the wayside. But he refused to “get even” with the servant who had done that. He followed his Master’s command to resist evil with good. When another missionary, George Mueller, heard of this incident he was deeply and favorably impressed with Taylor’s Christlike spirit.

In 1856 when Missionary Taylor visited Dr. Parker’s hospital in Shanghai he met Maria Dyer, a teacher in Miss Aldersby’s school. He fell in love with the pretty teacher, who was a daughter of a missionary and his wife who had died several years earlier. And she loved him, although Miss Aldersby objected to their marriage. “Hudson Taylor has no connection with any mission board, is without money, and shabbily dressed,” said the woman principal.

“Furthermore, he is only a mystic, absorbed in religious dreams, waiting to have his work revealed. He is not idle, but aimless.”
Hudson Taylor did not depend upon earnest prayer to support his missionary work, but he was not aimless. His entire purpose in life was to do the complete will of God.

Maria’s guardian, who lived in England, did not share Miss Aldersby’s negative opinion of the missionary, and the couple were married on January 20, 1858. Concerning this marriage he wrote home to his Christian parents, “When you have such a treasure as mine, it makes you happier, more humbly thankful to the Giver of all good, for the best of earthly gifts.”

For about three years J. Hudson Taylor worked earnestly as a missionary in China. Then his health failed. It was discovered that he had tuberculosis. His doctors said he must leave China if he expected to live very long.

He could not understand the turn of events in his life, yet after praying much, he believed that God wanted him to return to England. But he still had China’s interest at heart, and within five years was influential in sending five other Christian missionaries to the Orient. His book, China’s Spiritual Needs and Claims, influenced several people to help missionary work in China financially. During this rest period in England he also revised the New Testament of Ningpo. In the meantime he had never abandoned his purpose of returning to China in person. By May 1866, he had regained his health sufficiently to make the venture, and on the twenty-fourth day of that month, he, his wife, and four children, with twenty-four other missionaries, sailed for China!

Of the ship’s thirty-four crew members, twenty were converted to Christianity before they reached the port in China.
With new zest and spirit Hudson and Maria worked faithfully for their Saviour, but on July 23, 1870, she died from cholera. Although it seemed as if part of his heart were gone, Taylor considered it to be another “blessed adversity,” because he had learned to trust God implicitly, regardless of what happened.

About five years earlier, Hudson Taylor had organized the China Inland Mission, which had an influence over a large area of China. Referring to this organization, Taylor wrote in a book titled A Retrospect: “Three hundred and ninety-four stations and out-stations have been opened and occupied either by missionaries or native workers. Since 1865, 12,964 converts have been baptized; and there are now (in 1900) 8,557 communicants in fellowship.”

J. Hudson Taylor, generally regarded as one of God’s most valuable servants, served his Saviour consistently until his death in June 1905. His last counsel to other missionaries was “Pray and put all your problems into the hands of God. There is nothing small, and there is nothing great. Only God is great, and we should trust Him fully.”

He rests now at Chinkiang, in China, the harvest field to which God called him in childhood.
God has a purpose for each one of you in your lives. Ask God what it is and then be willing to go anywhere He wants you to go and do anything He wants you to do. He promises to be with you wherever you are.
AMEN.