HUDSON TAYLOR The man who believed God by Marshall Broomhall

UNTO THE LORD 229
completed the reading of the whole Bible from Genesis
to Revelation.
In 1903, the year in which he celebrated the jubilee
of his first sailing for China, Mrs. Taylor manifested
signs of that physical infirmity from which she died
about a year later. Her mother had died of cancer, and
she herself was stricken_ with the same dread disease,
though mercifully neither she nor Mr. Taylor knew the
real facts. It was a case in which surgical skill could do
nothing, and the loved patient learned, in the quiet of
her own room, "the lessons of the sweet power of helplessness
and dependence", to quote her own words. And
one of her joys, during those closing months, was to disburse,
to various good causes, a legacy received from an
uncle in Australia.
After a time of slowly ebbing strength, the end came
quietly, on July 30, 1904, without, thank God, a long
and painful period of suffering. And in the churchyard
of La Chiesaz, not far from the pension at Chavelleyres,,
where they had been living, on the hills above the Lake
of Geneva, she was laid to rest in the sure and certain
hope of the Resurrection.
And now, the last long lonely reach of road lay before
Hudson Taylor. The autumn was spent in the same
lovely spot on the mountain side above the lake, the
writer's sister-a trained nurse-being his companion.
But in the winter a longing seized him to see once more
the land of his adoption, and, as his health had substantially
improved, this did.not seem impossible. And
so, in the company of his son and daughter-in-law, Dr.
and Mrs. Howard Taylor, he set sail,'an February 15,,
1905, for what was to be his seventh visit to the United
States of America, and his eleventh arid last journey from
England to China.