Eric's Beijing Diary

Zhenjiang. It was in a nice, quiet cemetary where he was laid to rest. His first wife had died years earlier. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards vandalized the cemetary. It is now covered over with industrial buildings. A few years ago, Hudson Taylor's tombstone was discovered in an old museum. It is now in a display room at the old Methodist Church in Zhenjiang.

How do we evaluate someone like Hudson Taylor? By training he was a missionary doctor, but he never really distinguished himself as a physician. I guess he did write a few books, but nothing really earthshaking. He was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a man with off-beat ideas. Those early CIM missionaries were a little strange, you know, walking around with their pigtails and gowns. To the Brits in Shanghai, their behavior was downright scandalous.

He was not a man of great talent or genious. But Hudson Taylor was blessed with an extraordinary gift of faith. He just would not stop believing in God and in God's provision. Taylor was a clear thinker, and built his life on principles well thought out and held to with tenacity, such as:

"God's work done God's way will never lack God's supply."

Hudson Taylor baptized something in the neighborhood of 50,000 Chinese believers. But he was also noted for bringing many missionaries to China. By the end of his life, the CIM had about a thousand missionaries on the field. He expressed his concern for China with deep passion:

"Oh, for eloquence to plead the cause of China, for a pencil dipped in fire to paint the condition of this people."

The list of great missionaries who were developed by Hudson Taylor is long and impressive. Fraser, who developed a Lisu alphabet, and wrote a Lisu hymnbook, Isobel Kuhn, who also went to the Lisu Tribesmen, Jonathan and Rosalind Goforth--all of them were with the China Inland Mission. C.T. Studd, who started the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade is known as a missionary to Africa, but he got his start with the CIM in China.

Hudson Taylor was deeply affected by the death of his first wife Maria Jane, an orphaned MK, who succumbed to cholera in Zhenjiang. After his second wife had died in Switzerland, Taylor returned to China. A few short months later, he died and was laid beside Maria.

This is the home of Pearl Buck, also in Zhenjiang. The contrast between Pearl Buck and Hudson Taylor could not be more profound. Pearl Buck was a gifted writer, whose literary genius won her the Nobel prize for literature in 1938 mainly, I think, for "The Good Earth." Her talent and creativity were overwhelming and indisputable. She published over a hundred works of literature during her long and prolific life. But although the daughter of missioanries, she seemed to be hopelessly tone deaf when it came to the things of God. Ironically, her spiritual blindness seems to have affected her cultural insight. Her work does show a knowledge of the factual details of how people lived, but is sometimes lacking in genuine understanding of the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western culture. "The fear of God," as Proverbs says, "is the beginning of wisdom."

Labels: China Inland Mission, China Missions