Hudson Taylor Quotes: Faith, Prayer and China, with Sources
Hudson Taylor is one of the most quoted missionaries who ever lived, and a good many of the lines passed around under his name can't be traced to anything he wrote. The quotations below are different. Each one is copied word for word from a book you can read free in TheWay Library, and each comes with the chapter it's from, so you can read it in context.
Most come from Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul, the biography by his son Howard Taylor and Mrs. Howard Taylor, which prints many of his letters. Others come from A Retrospect, his own short account of his life. Where a line is the biographers' and not Taylor's own, we say so.
If you're new to his story, Who was Hudson Taylor? gives the outline first.
On prayer
Taylor's mother and sister prayed for his conversion, and he came to faith on the very afternoon his mother set herself to pray until God answered. He never forgot what that taught him.
Prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God, whether on one's own behalf or on the behalf of those for whom one sought His blessing.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter V
Before he left England, he set himself one goal above others: to learn to get what he needed by asking God and no one else.
When I get out to China … I shall have no claim on any one for anything. My only claim will be on God. How important to learn, before leaving England, to move man through God by prayer alone.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
On the voyage out, the ship drifted toward a reef with no wind. Taylor asked the three other believers on board to pray for a breeze, and it came within minutes. He wrote:
Thus God encouraged me, ere landing on China's shores, to bring every variety of need to Him in prayer, and to expect that He would honour the Name of the Lord Jesus, and give the help which each emergency required.
A Retrospect, chapter VIII
On trusting God for money
These lines belong with the stories behind them, told in full in Hudson Taylor's faith and money.
In Hull, down to his last coin, he was asked to pray with a starving family. He found he couldn't pray honestly with the half-crown still in his pocket.
I little dreamed that the truth of the matter simply was that I could trust God plus one-and-sixpence, but was not prepared to trust Him only, without any money at all in my pocket.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
He gave the coin away. The next morning a letter came with a half-sovereign inside, four times what he had given.
Four hundred per cent for twelve hours' investment — that is good interest! How glad the merchants of Hull would be if they could lend their money at such a rate.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
Years later in Ningpo he left his missionary society because it borrowed to pay its workers:
If the Word taught me anything, it taught me to have no connection with debt.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XXXIV
And from a letter written to his family just before he left China in 1860:
We have only the Lord to look to for means, for health, for encouragement — and we need no other. He gives us all, and He best knows what we need.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XLII
On sacrifice
The biographers record a saying of his from late in life. The words in quotation marks are Taylor's; the explanation is theirs.
"I never made a sacrifice," said Hudson Taylor in later years, looking back over a life in which to an unusual extent this element predominated. But what he said was true.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter X
Probably his best-known line, written to his sister Amelia and her husband, begging them to come and help:
Had I a thousand pounds China should have it. Had I a thousand lives China should claim every one. No, not China, but Christ! Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a Saviour?
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XLII
On God's faithfulness
On his last Sunday at sea, a young man about to land in a country where he knew no one, he copied out two promises: "Lo, I am with you alway," and "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." Then he wrote:
Sweet promises! I have nothing to fear, with Jesus on my side.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XVI
Looking back on the hunger, danger and loneliness of his first years in Shanghai:
What circumstances could have rendered the Word of God more sweet, the presence of God more real, the help of God more precious?
A Retrospect, chapter 5X
After he left his society and depended on God alone:
I could look right up into my Father's face with a satisfied heart, ready, by His grace, to do the next thing as He might teach me, and feeling very sure of His loving care.
A Retrospect, chapter 34
The biographers close that same chapter of the story with the name of God that Taylor learned to lean on:
He only, He alone; always El-Shaddai — "The God that is Enough."
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XXXIV
On God's Word
He had been a skeptic for a time as a boy, and he decided that if he ever believed the Bible he would put it to the test.
Certainly it has never failed me. I have never had reason to regret the confidence I have placed in its promises, or to deplore following the guidance I have found in its directions.
A Retrospect, chapter 5
The best evidence of Christianity is a Christ-like life, and the best evidence of the inspiration of the Word of GOD is found in the Word itself; when studied, loved, obeyed, and trusted, it never disappoints, never misleads, never fails.
Unfailing Springs
When a minister told the teenage Taylor he would grow out of his idea of going to China "without purse or scrip," Taylor answered, years later:
I have grown older since then, but not wiser. I am more than ever convinced that if we were to take the directions of our Master and the assurances He gave to His first disciples more fully as our guide, we should find them to be just as suited to our times as to those in which they were originally given.
A Retrospect, chapter 5I
On missions and the lost
When an early convert in Ningpo learned how long the gospel had been known in England, he asked a question Taylor never forgot:
What!" said he, amazed; "is it possible that for hundreds of years you have had the knowledge of these glad tidings in your possession, and yet have only now come to preach it to us?
A Retrospect, chapter 34
On how to raise up missionaries:
I saw that the Apostolic plan was not to raise ways and means, but to go and do the work, trusting in His sure Word who has said, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
A Retrospect, chapter 34III
And from the preface to China's Spiritual Need and Claims, the little book that sent many of the first workers out:
Above all, let us not forget that we all may serve China by prayer to God, without whose aid no other help would avail.
China's Spiritual Need and Claims, Prefatory Note
On love
Taylor waited a long time, and through much opposition, to marry Maria Dyer. Fifty years after their engagement, long after her death, he said:
It never cooled — my love for her. It has not cooled now.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter XXXVI
Read the quotes in context
Every chapter cited above is in Hudson Taylor in Early Years or A Retrospect, and both read best straight through. For a guide to the biography's forty-two chapters, see our Hudson Taylor in Early Years summary.