Hudson Taylor in Early Years Summary: The Growth of a Soul

Biography Missions Christian Life

Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul is the first volume of the standard life of Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission. It was written by his son, Dr. Howard Taylor, and his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Howard Taylor, and published in 1911, six years after his death. It follows him from his family's roots in Yorkshire to the end of his first term in China in 1860, drawing heavily on his own letters.

The subtitle tells you what kind of book it is. It is less about what Taylor achieved than about how God shaped the man. D. E. Hoste, who led the mission after Taylor, says so in the introduction:

It was impressed upon them, with growing force, that the experience and the career of Mr. Taylor furnished a notable illustration of the truth that when God raises up a man for special service He first works in that man the principles which later on are, through his labours and influence, to be the means of widespread blessing to the Church and to the world.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, Introduction

The book has an introduction and forty-two chapters. Here is what happens in them, in five parts. Every chapter title links to that chapter in the reader, so you can read the whole book free as you go. For the life in brief first, see Who was Hudson Taylor?

Part 1: Family and boyhood (chapters I to IV)

Chapter I: As for Me and My House. Taylor's great-grandfather, a young stonemason near Barnsley, comes to faith under Methodist preaching in John Wesley's day and opens his home to the gospel.
Chapter II: Unto Children's Children. The faith passes down to Taylor's father, James, a chemist and lay preacher, who becomes engaged to Amelia Hudson, a Methodist minister's daughter.
Chapter III: Set Apart unto the Lord. James and Amelia marry and, before their first child is born, give him to God. James Hudson Taylor is born in Barnsley on May 21, 1832.
Chapter IV: Nurture and Admonition. A frail, loving boy grows up in a disciplined, happy Christian home with a father who insisted on punctuality and obedience.

Part 2: Conversion and the call (chapters V to IX)

Chapter V: The Finished Work of Christ. After a time of doubt, he reads a gospel tract in his father's warehouse in June 1849 and trusts Christ, at the very time his mother, far away, is praying for him.
Chapter VI: Here Am I; Send Me. The joy of new life, then a struggle with sin, then a full surrender. Before the year is out he knows God is sending him to China.
Chapter VII: The New Starting-point. A shop assistant of seventeen starts to prepare. He studies Chinese from a copy of Luke's Gospel in Mandarin, gets up at five to study, learns what little he can about China, and is stirred by the work of Karl Gutzlaff.
Chapter VIII: No Good Thing Will He Withhold. He falls in love for the first time, with a young woman who does not share his call, and it becomes a hard test of whether he will hold to China. He also begins writing to the Chinese Evangelisation Society.
Chapter IX: That I May Win Christ. He moves to Hull as assistant to Dr. Robert Hardey, then to a bare room in the poor district of Drainside, so he can give more away.

Part 3: Learning to trust God in England (chapters X to XV)

This is the part most readers remember. Our article on Hudson Taylor's faith and money follows it closely.

Chapter X: From Faith to Faith. He sets out "to move man through God by prayer alone." The half-crown given to a starving family, the half-sovereign that came back the next morning, and the overdue salary paid late on a Saturday night.
Chapter XI: If It Be Thou, Bid Me Come. He thinks of working his passage to China as a sailor, waits for God's timing, and decides to go to London to study medicine.
Chapter XII: Nothing Certain, Except. He arrives in London in the fall of 1852, having turned down help from both his father and the Chinese Evangelisation Society, so that he would look to God alone.
Chapter XIII: The Lord Will Provide. Life at the London Hospital on brown bread and apples. A needle prick while dissecting brings a fever that nearly kills him, and God meets his needs step by step.
Chapter XIV: Light at Last. News of a rebellion in China stirs hopes in England. He leads a dying, bitter old man to Christ, and the society asks him to sail at once.
Chapter XV: I Will Never Leave Thee. His mother sees him off from Liverpool in September 1853. On the long voyage the ship nearly wrecks in a storm and later drifts toward a reef until the believers on board pray for wind.

Part 4: Shanghai and the inland trips (chapters XVI to XXXII)

Chapter XVI: Arrival and First Experiences. He lands in Shanghai in the spring of 1854 to find the city under siege, prices sky-high, and the friends he expected gone.
Chapter XVII: Make It a Place of Springs. War, poverty, loneliness and language study. The authors see in it the Valley of Weeping that God turns into a place of springs.
Chapters XVIII to XX. He rents a house near the North Gate, has to leave it as the fighting comes close, and makes his first trips into the country with older missionaries.
Chapters XXI to XXIII. He and Dr. Parker plan their work. W. T. Berger, who will become his great supporter, enters the story. Trips to places where Christ had never been named give him the vision of his life's work: the unreached interior.
Chapter XXIV: Emptied from Vessel to Vessel. A hard, crowded summer ends with a step few missionaries then dared: he puts on Chinese dress for good.
Chapters XXV and XXVI. In Chinese clothes he is welcomed in a way he never was before, and he settles on the island of Tsung-ming, until the authorities force him out.
Chapters XXVII to XXX. Months of preaching beside the Scottish evangelist William Burns, whom Taylor called the best spiritual father he ever had, ending in the southern port of Swatow.
Chapters XXXI and XXXII. He goes back to Shanghai for his medicines and finds them burned. On the way to fetch more, his servant runs off with everything he owns, and he forgives him. Burns is arrested, and the way back to Swatow closes.

Part 5: Ningpo, marriage and the hospital (chapters XXXIII to XLII)

Chapter XXXIII: By a Way That They Knew Not. He settles in Ningpo in a little house that later becomes the first home of the China Inland Mission, and falls in love with Maria Dyer, a young teacher there.
Chapter XXXIV: The God That Is Enough. He resigns from his society because it borrows money, and depends on God alone. Opposition to his love for Maria grows.
Chapter XXXV: Ebenezer and Jehovah Jireh. The first converts in Ningpo, among them Mr. Nyi, a seeker from a Buddhist sect, and the two scrolls on the wall: "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us" and "The Lord will provide."
Chapters XXXVI and XXXVII. After nursing a friend through smallpox, he is engaged to Maria, and they marry in January 1858.
Chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX. Their home on Bridge Street becomes a church. The converts become soul-winners, among them a painter named Wang Lae-djun.
Chapter XL: What Hath God Wrought. Maria nearly dies and is raised up in answer to prayer.
Chapter XLI: A Wealthy Place. Dr. Parker loses his wife and goes home, and Taylor takes on the Ningpo hospital with no funds. The last bag of rice is opened the week a fifty-pound gift arrives.
Chapter XLII: Above All That Ye Ask or Think. Patients are saved, the church grows, and Taylor's health breaks. In 1860 he sails for England, praying for five helpers.

The book closes on that voyage home, and the authors look ahead to what the Taylors could not yet see: an inland mission working in China's most distant provinces, and many hundreds of missionaries where they had prayed for five.

All that Hudson Taylor saw was the great need and the unutterable privilege of giving oneself, one's all, to meet it, in fellowship with Christ.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XLII

What the book teaches

Three threads run through all forty-two chapters.

Godly homes matter. The opening chapters dwell on his parents and grandparents because the authors believe his life began with their prayers.
Faith is learned by testing. Taylor deliberately put himself where he had to trust God for money, health and guidance, first in small things in England and then in large ones in China.
Suffering prepares for fruit. Loneliness, war, loss and illness come again and again, and each time the authors show what God was building through them.

How to read it

This is a long book, about 190,000 words. If you want the core of it, read chapters V, X, XIII, XXIV, XXXIV and XLI first. Taylor's own short account, A Retrospect, covers the same years in a fraction of the length and carries the story on to the founding of the mission in 1865.

For the best lines from both books, see our Hudson Taylor quotes. When you're ready, open Hudson Taylor in Early Years and start with chapter I.