HUDSON TAYLOR The man who believed God by Marshall Broomhall

PIONEER AND BUILDER 221
That gathering was in January 1899,. and in September
of the same year, after having spent the summer in the
hills, he and Mrs. Taylor left China for a visit to Australia,
New Zealand, and America. Mrs. Taylor was never
to see China again, and Hudson Taylor only for a short
seven weeks, five and a half years later. It was the beginning
of the end in their lifelong journey. The years
so full of strenuous activity were to be exchanged for
years of quiet watching and waiting, and for the supreme
trial of standing aside-and that from a work they had
begotten, and for which they had travailed in labours
and prayers.
It was while he was in America in the spring of 1900,
after his last visit to Australasia, that the first serious
signs of a breakdown manifested themselves. Dr. A. T.
Pierson, with whom he was holding meetings in Boston,
has recorded how, "in an otherwise effective address, he
repeated one or two sentences a score of times or more".
These sentences were:
"You may trust the Lord too little, but you can never
trust Him too much.
" 'If we believe not, yet He abideth faithful; He cannot
deny himself.' "
"There was", continued Dr. Pierson, "something
pathetic and poetic in the very fact that this repetition
was the first visible sign of his breakdown, for was it not
this very sentiment and this very quotation, that he had
kept repeating to himself, and to all his fellow-workers
during all the years of his missionary work? a blessed
sentence to break down upon, which·had been the buttress
of his whole life of consecrated endeavour."
And we cannot perhaps do better than close this
chapter with a few quotations from his addresses given