Hudson Taylor & Missions to China Issue 52 | 1996 Purchase this issue

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There are probably more books on Hudson Taylor, and his China Inland Mission, than on any other missionary since the apostle Paul and perhaps Francis Xavier, the 16th-century Jesuit missionary to Japan. Just in the Princeton Seminary library, which I regularly use, I counted some 54 titles. In the case of books out-of- print or republished many times, only the date of the original edition is given.

The single most indispensable and easily available work is A. J. Broomhall’s seven-volume paperback Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century (Hodder & Stoughton and OMF, 1981—89). For those not quite ready for seven volumes, read the older standard 2-volume work, Hudson Taylor in Early Years and Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission (in many editions), both by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor. Also see the fine short history of the mission by Leslie T Lyall, A Passion for the Impossible: the China Inland Mission 1865-1965 (Moody, 1965).

For young people, there are two fine works: Marshall Broomhall’s Hudson Taylor: The Man Who Dared (1920) and Hudson Taylor: God’s Man for China by Betty Macindoe (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979).

Hudson Taylor is known for his unwavering faith and his devotional life. On this, see Marshall Broomhall’s stirring Hudson Taylor: The Man Who Believed God (1929), Virgil Robinson’s Hudson Taylor: Man of Faith (1966), and Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret (1932) by Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor. His human, Christian compassion is sometimes overlooked but not so in Marshall Broomhall’s By Love Compelled (1936), which traces the motivation of both the man and the mission to the “overwhelming sense of God’s love” as much as to God’s faithfulness.

Anyone concerned that mission history neglects the ...