Hudson taylor, god’s venturer

Chapter 9

It was, to say the least of it, rather a cheerless place after a long and uncomfortable sea voyage, for the family with three small children to come to. Poor Hudson, when he saw what the rooms looked like piled up with boxes, baskets, and bundles, was overwhelmed with shame and confusion. He had not realized it would be as bad as that! But even if he had, it would have made little difference to the result. The fact was that after paying the first installment of rent, he had less than three dollars left. He devoutly hoped that Dr. Parker would be adequately supplied with funds, for otherwise he was not at all sure where next week’s food would come from. It was distinctly disconcerting, therefore, to learn that his new colleague only had a few dollars, and was expecting to find money awaiting him in Shanghai. The Chinese Evangelization Society had assured him they would send him some there.

No money was awaiting him however. Letters there were containing greetings and advice, but no mention of funds. As Hudson had already discovered, the financial arrangements of the Chinese Evangelization Society were extremely haphazard. There seemed to be an unexpressed conviction on the part of its leaders that when missionaries had run out of money, they could happily and healthily live without until such time as more money was sent to them!

This view was not shared by the firm of agents who transmitted the society’s funds. When they realized the predicament Hudson and his newly-arrived colleagues were in, they lent them money until they should receive funds from the proper quarter. Thankful indeed was Hudson for this timely help. He did not entirely agree with the few comments the agents made about the business arrangements of the society! Indeed he wrote the society a frank though respectful letter, containing a few stiff phrases about responsibilities to their missionaries. He then settled down as best he could, to accommodate himself to this new conditions. For the next few months he lived with the Parkers, and was heartily glad to have such earnest and self-sacrificing fellow workers. Living with a family of five in three rooms was not conducive to quiet concentration on studying one of the most difficult languages, however. Many times did he think wistfully of the ramshacle house near the North Gate of the Chinese city, where he had constant contact with the Chinese themselves. That was the way to come to know them, to learn to speak as they spoke; to live among them. He was, therefore, delighted when his friend Edkins made a suggestion to him one day.

“I’m going to take a trip down to Ka-shing,” he said. “I shall hire a native houseboat for about a week and travel slowly, stopping at the towns and cities we pass to give out tracts and do some preaching. Will you come along with me?”

Would he! Hudson required no persuation. To travel inland for a week, to live on a Chinese boat, to see Chinese life at first hand—this was the very thing he longed for! Forthwith he made his preparations, and quite considerable they needed to be—bedding, baskets of food, fuel, a cooking stove, saucepans, as well as his medicines and a large assortment of books and tracts. As he walked down to the crowded shore behind the coolies he had hired to carry his baggage to the boat, he marveled that so many things were required for so short a time! And what a bargaining and a shouting and a scrambling before everything was safely on boad, and the boat drew away at last, winding its way between the innumerable junks achored by the shores, into mid-stream! By this time, however, Hudson was getting used to the customs of coolies, and was not önduly perturbed when they yelled at each other, hurling epithets which he mercifully did not understand! They usually parted as affably was if they had merely been making inquiries about each other’s health. Evidently it was all in the day’s work!

And now the boat was sailing along the broad waterway. Hudson gazed at the low-lying shores with its muddy banks and squalid-looking shacks, until gradually the scene changed as they drew away from the city toward open country. Village after village passed, and great tracts of land where innumerable mounds in the ground marked the graves of generations past. How thickly populated this country was! Little groups of houses clustered together every mile or two, and everywhere the signs of human habitation. When they eventually arrived at the first city where they were to go ashore, they were immediately surrounded by swarms of the blue-clad sons of Han, starting with undisguised interest at the two foreigners. Grasping as many tracts and booklets as they could conveniently hold Hudson and Edkins made their way up the bank and into the city.

It was while they were there, in that first city, they saw something which lived long in Hudson’s memory. They had entered the courtyard of a temple, with its dragon ornamented roof and its gloomy halls where enormous, fearsome looking idols looked impassively on the worshippers who bowed before them. The crowd that gathered around them listened quietly enough as Edkins and Hudson preached in turn, and when they had finished they had no difficulty in disposing of all the booklets they had with them. They were just about to move on when two or three of the priests, clad in rather dingy yellow robes and with clean-shaven heads, approached them.

“Honorable gentlemen, please come inside and sit down for a while,” they invited politely, leading the way into their living quarters. The two missionaries, interested to see the inside of a Buddhist monastery, accompanied them. After a short conversation, the priests offered to show them around, and said,

“Would you like to come and see our holy man?”

“Our holyman?” Who and what was he, the missionaries wondered? They would indeed like to see the “holy man.”

They were led to a remote part of the monastery, and up to a wall. In the wall was a small opening, just large enough for a man’s hand to pass through.

“He is in there,” said the priests. Hudson looked for a door but saw none. “There is no door,” he was told. Almost incredulously Hudson realized that whoever was in there was bricked in! Peering through the opening he could discern but dimly the figure of a man, huddled against the wall. There was no window, so the only light that entered was that which made its way in from the gloomy hall. There he was, a human being like himself, alone in that tiny room which was his coffin. He still breathed, and ate and drank the food passed to him through the hole in the wall, but apart from that, he might have been dead. In the dimness and the silence he passed his days and nights alone. By so doing, by cutting himself off from the fellowship of his fellow creatures, would he not crush his sins, would he not achieve holiness and accumulate much merit, as every natural desire was stifled? Certainly his religion taught him so, and he was already an object of great veneration in the city. Quite voluntarily he had entered upon the living death, believing that thereby he would attain nirvana, the “heaven” of the Buddhists.

Edkins and Hudson exchanged significant glances. They had heard of these holy men, poor devotees of a strange religion but had never before seen one. Moved by a feeling of deep compassion, Edkins drew near to the hole, that he might the better speak to the man inside. He had come to him with a message from the one true God, he explained, and very earnestly he told the “holy man” that his sins could be freely forgiven, for Christ’s sake. As clearly as he could, Edkins spoke of Jesus on the cross, and of His rising again from the dead, to be the Savior of those who trusted in Him. But it was all strange and new to the man in that bricked-in place, and to the yellow-clad priests standing around. Never had they heard this “foreign religion” before, and they gazed at the two missionaries with dark, impassive eyes, and politely disbelieving faces. They had their god—Buddha. The Westerners evidently had their god—Jesus. Good, good. It was all good. It mattered not what religion it was, all led to the way, they said. They accompanied their two visitors to the gate of the temple courtyard, bowed affably, and returned to the dark building with its fitfully flickering oil lamps, its incense sticks and fearsome idols, and its “holy man” in his dark stillness.

Hudson and Edkins emerged into the street, and almost immediately became the center of attraction. They had to return to their boat two or three times to obtain further supplies of tracts. On one occasion they narrowly escaped being trapped on the water’s edge by the crowds that swarmed around them. It was not until evening was drawing on that they had an opportunity to be quiet, and review the happenings of the day. Climbing up the winding stairs inside a pagoda, they stood together looking down silently on the scene below. The city looked like a lake of rooftops from their high vantage point, and they could see across them to the stout, solid walls encircling it and the flat countryside beyond. The paddy fields, profusely springled with clumps of trees that betokened the presence of villages, stretched away to the horizon. Here and there pagodas and temples with curved roofs standing out against the sky told of other cities and towns not far away. Hundreds of thousands of human beings were living within the range of their vision, they realized, as they stood watching the evening shadows lenghthen over innumerable dark little homes with their idols and their paper gods, their incense sticks and their ancestral tablets. This was only on the very fringe of the great empire that stretched away for hundreds of miles into the unexplored interior.

The interior, Inland China. As Hudson stood in the pagoda that evening, the immensity of China’s population began to have a new meaning for him. Shanghai with its narrow native streets and teeming markets had more or less bounded his vision hitherto, although he and Dr. Parker had walked many times miles out into the country to preach and distribute tracts in the villages around. Now, however, looking over the great silent plain, he became dimly aware of regions away toward the west, great tracts of land where cities, towns, markets, and villages lay in a profusion that defied the imagination. And in them all, the only way the people know was the dark way of death. He remembered that silent, walled-up man in the monastery...The temple gongs, the worship of ancestor spirits, the fear of demons—they seemed to hang like a pall over this great eastern civilisation. It seemed to be lying hopelessly in the arms of some immense, evil monster. The boy who had heard a voice saying, “Go for Me to China” began to comprehend as never before the greatness of the task before him. Perhaps, as never before, his very soul steeled itself for the battle. Here was a conflict that was going to demand every ounce of his strength, that required courage and determination above anything he had imagined. It was in a solemn frame of mind that he returned to the boat that everning. Whatever it cost, however rough the way, the people of this land must be told of the only One who could save them from death.