He came upon one from John McCarthy, written a day or two
after Hudson had left. It was a long letter. He read on and on, attention riveted.
‘I seem,’ McCarthy wrote, ‘as if the first glimmer of the dawn of a glorious
day has risen upon me…I seem to have sipped only of that which can fully satisfy.’
McCarthy had found the secret they sought. Hudson looked at the letter again. ‘To
let my loving Saviour work in me His will…Abiding, not striving or
struggling…’
Hudson came to the last paragraph. ‘Not a striving to have
faith, or to increase our faith but a looking at the faithful one seems all we
need. A resting in the loved one entirely, for time, for eternity. It does not
appear to me as anything new, only formerly misunderstood.’
Hudson was amazed at his own blindness. His eyes opened
wide. As in Barnsley twenty years before, as at Brighton four years before, a
long inward struggle resolved in a split second. ‘As I read I saw it all. “If
we believe not, He abideth faithful.”
And I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how joy flowed) that He had
said, “I will never leave you”.’ In
shorter time than it took to describe afterwards, Hudson grasped that he must
not struggle to have strength or peace but rest in the strength and peace of
Christ. ‘I have striven in vain to abide in Him. I’ll strive no more. For has
not He promised to abide with me—never to leave me, never to fail me?’ The
effort to ‘get it out’ was a mistake.
‘I am one with
Christ,’ he cried as he explained the glorious discovery to the whole Chinkiang
household, hastily gathering them together and reading McCarthy’s letter. ‘It
was all a mistake to try and get the fullness out of Him, I am part of
Him. Each of us is a limb of His body, a branch of the vine. Oh, think what a
wonderful thing it is to be really one with a risen Saviour.’ And in some such
words as he wrote a few weeks later to his sister Amelia in England, he
expounded the truth he had missed so long: ‘Think what it involves! Can Christ
be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? Or your
head well fed while your body starves?’
A few evening slater Hudson went up the canal to Yangchow.
Judd came in to the sitting-room to welcome him, and was astonished: ‘He was so
full of joy that he scarcely knew how to speak to me. He did not even say, “How
do you do,” but walking up and down the room with his hands behind him,
exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Judd, God has made me a new man! God has made me a new man!’
“
Judd, and every man and woman who came in close contact with
Taylor noticed the difference. A magnetism of love and happiness radiated from
him. The years rolled away, and instead of premature middle age he was again a
man in his late thirties.
…
‘As to work,’ Hudson wrote to Amelia in October, ‘mine was
never so plentiful or responsible or difficult but the weight and strain of it
is gone. The last month or more has
been perhaps the happiest of my life.’
Hudson
Taylor and Maria
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