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Throughout the summer of 1896 Hudson Taylor’s morale was low. Irritability was his “daily hourly failure”, and sometimes he even wondered whether someone so dogged by failure could be a Christian as all. Long periods of separation from his wife Maria added to his inner tension and a bout of severe illness in August, probably pneumonia, didn’t help.

With all this went a sense of need. He saw that both he himself and the CIM needed more holiness, life and power. He believed the personal need was greater: “I felt the ingratitude, the danger, the sin of not living nearer to God.”

He prayed, he agonized, he fasted, he tried to do better, he made resolutions. He read the Bible more carefully, he ordered his life to give more time for rest and meditation. But all this had little effect.

“Every day, almost every hour, the consciousness of sin oppressed me. I knew that if only I could abide in Christ all would well, but I could not. I began the day with prayer, determined not to take my mind off him for a moment; but pressure of duties, sometimes very trying, constant interruptions apt to be so wearying, often caused me to forget him. Then one’s nerves get so fretted in this climate that temptations to irritability, hard thoughts, and sometimes unkind words are all the more difficult to control. Each day brought its register of sin and failure, of lack of power. To will was indeed present with me, but how to perform I found not.”

He began to ask himself a series of questions:

• Is there no rescue?
• Must it be thus to the end—constant conflict and, instead of victory, too often defeat?
• How can I preach with sincerity that to those who receive Jesus, “to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (i.e. Godlike) when it is not in my own experience?

Instead of growing spiritually stronger, he seemed to be growing weaker and giving in more to sin. He hated himself, he hated his sin.

I felt I was a child of God: his Spirit in my heart would cry, in spite of all, ‘Abba, Father’: but to rise to my privileges as a child I was utterly powerless… I began to think that, perhaps to make heaven the sweeter God would not given it down here. I do not think I was striving to achieve it in my own strength, I know I was powerless. I told the Lord so, and asked him to give me help and strength; and some times I almost believed he would keep and uphold me. But on looking back in the evening, alas! there was but sin and failure to confess and mourn before God.

This wasn’t his state of mind and spirit every minute or even every day of those summer months. Rather, he said, it was a “too frequent state of soul; that toward which I was tending, and which almost ended in despair. And yet never did Christ seem more precious—a Saviour who could and would save such a sinner! … And sometimes there were seasons not only of peace but of joy in the Lord. But they were transitory, and at best there was a sad lack of power.”

J. Hudson Taylor—A Man in Christ by Roger Steer, (Wheaton: OMF, 1990) p232f.