HUDSON TAYLOR The man who believed God by Marshall Broomhall

LOVE TRIUMPHANT 81
Maria Dyer was a bright and winsome girl, not yet
of age, the daughter of Samuel Dyer of the London
Missionary Society. This Mr. Dyer, though educated at
Cambridge for the Bar, had, as early as 1827, dedicated
himself to God for work among the Chinese, amongst
whom he laboured for sixteen years until his death.
Gifted and devoted beyond many, he was consumed with
a passion for the salvation of the Chinese. "If I thought
anything could prevent my dying for China, the thought ,,
would crush me", he had once written. Such words, and
others like them, reveal the man he was, and his daughter
was possessed of a like spirit. It was no wonder Hudson
Taylor loved her.
Orphaned in early life, Maria Dyer, with her elder
sister, Burella, who married the Rev. J. S. Burden (later
the Bishop of Victoria, Hongkong), joined Miss Aldersey
at Ningpo in the first girls' school opened by missionaries
in China. Fluent in the language from birth, Maria Dyer
was well adapted for this work, and in Miss Aldersey
she had as chief a remarkable and pommanding personality.
Miss Aldersey had been a student of Chinese
under Dr. Robert Morrison during his first and only furlough,
and was the first single woman to go to China as
a missionary. So profound an impression did she make
upon the Chinese that they believed the British Consul .
took his commands from her, a belief encouraged by the
fact that the reigning British soverign-Queen Victoria
-was a woman. Hudson Taylor and Maria Dyer were
to find in her a formidable opponent to their love affairs.
For some reason Miss Aldersey had taken a violent
prejudice against Hudson Taylor. She dfaliked his adoption
of the Chinese dress; she disapproved of his methods
of work. Another resident in Ningpo, Dr. W. A. P.
Martin, who afterwards learned his worth, regarded
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