HUDSON TAYLOR The man who believed God by Marshall Broomhall

26 THE MAN WHO BELIEVED GOD
God should answer in the conversion of her brother. Exactly
one month later the Lord was pleased to turn me from
darkness to light."
It was not many months after the experiences recorded
above that, having a leisure afternoon, he repaired
to his own room to spend it alone with God. It
was then that he experienced that overwhelming sense
of God, and of God's claim upon him, which has been
already recorded in the earlier pages of this book. But
his path was not uncheckered. Between that June afternoon
in his father's library and the Sunday in early
December when the insistent call to China came,
young Hudson Taylor knew something of that spiritual
struggle of which the Apostle wrote so vividly when he
said: "I delight in the law of God after the inward man;
but I see a different law in my members, warring against
the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity
under the law of sin".
Yet, on the one hand, he and his sister Amelia had
begun definite work for God in some of the poorer parts
of the town. But, on the other hand, he had to confess
that "the first joys of conversion passed away after a
time, and were succeeded by a period of painful deadness
of soul, with much conflict". This condition of conflict
lasted through the autumn. What still remains of
his own writings at that time reveal his joy and his
participation in a work of grace at Pitt Street Chapel,
when about one hundred decisions for Christ were recorded,
and yet, on the other hand, they show his feeling,
to quote his own words, that "something was wrong, so
wrong that I feared I might fall away from grace and be
finally lost".
The crisis came on Sunday, December 2, 1849, when
he was seventeen years of age. Being kept at home with