Basil Miller - Praying Hyde: Missionary to India

Praying Hyde

Missionary to India

2008 Ambassador International

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by David Siglin of A&E Media

ISBN: 978-1-932307-89-4

eISBN: 978-1-62020-661-4

Published by the Ambassador Group

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

DEEP-LAID ROOTS

THEY CALLED HIM THE MAN who never sleeps. Some termed him the apostle of prayer, but more familiarly he is known as Praying Hyde. John Hyde was all of these and more, for deep in India's Punjab he envisioned his Master, and face to face with the Eternal he learned lessons of prayer which to others were amazing. Walking on such anointed ground for days without leaving the throne of prayer, John held holy converse with his Lord.

When he returned to the field preaching from such season of tranquil repose, his sword was keen for he had sharpened it with prayer. He was thus possessed of a spiritual power which opened dark hearts of India to his message.

Seeing him pray for thirty days and nights, or ten days on end, or remain on his knees for thirty-six hours without moving, fellow workers beheld him first in awe, then disgust, finally to be filled with admiration for this apostle of intercession and to sit at his feet as disciples.

Hyde opened heaven's windows upon his own soul through faith and prayer, and while they were thrown back others looked through and glimpsed eternal glories. Said missionaries who thus sat with Hyde when those gates were afar, We could never be the same again. Mary Campbell, who for forty-five years walked India's dusty roads, traversing every province, told me, John Hyde taught us that prayer avails... that prayer still is the Christian's most powerful instrument in India, in America, in all the world.

That was Praying Hyde, the man of whom an Indian missionary affirmed, It is a good thing John Hyde was not buried in India, for the non-Christians would have made a shrine of his grave. After thirty years of rest from his labors the mark of the man is still deep in India's heart. For he not only won individuals for Christ, but with his spirit and emblem of prayer he sweetened the entire stream of missionary endeavor.

Though dead these three decades, Praying Hyde's soul lives on in the land of his love and labors. Although his earthly ministry has ceased, the power of his achievement in India and America is greater today than ever during his career.

John was a son of the manse, where his life was early cultured in an atmosphere of prayer. For many years his father, Smith Hyde, was a spiritually-minded Presbyterian minister in Illinois. As a man of rare balance and proportion, his soul was healthful, genial and virile, and his ministry was stamped with godliness. His attainments were humbled though scholarly, and for seventeen years he marshaled the Presbyterian forces in Carthage, Illinois, the seat of Carthage College. Smith was a loving husband, a courteous leader and a true father to his half dozen children, three boys and an equal number of girls.

Mothering the group was a sweet-spirited, music-loving, high-minded lady of gentle birth, whose influence was indirect like the pervading rays of sun which burst with joy and beauty the tenderest flowers.

Into this family John was born on November 9, 1865, at Carrollton in the state where the foundation of his father's ministerial service was to be laid. John lived the life characteristic of an Illinois preacher's son until the family moved to Carthage in 1882.

He learned to love the ring of his godly father's voice in the public pulpit as he declared the saving Gospel of power. He listened as that noble man of God lifted the vision of the ripened soul-fields into which the Lord of harvest was to send forth laborers. It was not in public concourse, however, that Father Hyde was to make the greatest impression upon his son.

Around the family altar Smith helped to shape the soul of young John, when the father raised his voice heavenward and called upon God to greet with divine dews his petition. And how that father could pray! He was a noble man of God, says Francis McGaw, a friend of the family who later dipped his pen in his own heart of love and told the simple story of Praying Hyde. I have frequently heard Dr. Hyde pray the Lord to thrust out laborers into His harvest. He would pray this prayer both at the family altar and from his pulpit.

It was around that family altar that God planted the roots from which Praying Hyde's marvelous life of intercession was to flourish. Had there been no life-molding family altar where young John's soul met the Master day by day under the thrill of his father's Spirit-charged voice, there would have been no Praying Hyde as we know him. God goes back in the producing of Johns and Timothies to Father Smith as well as Grandmother Lois and Mother Eunice.

Often I have knelt with them and have... been strangely moved when dear Mr. Hyde poured out his heart to God as he prayed at the family altar, says McGaw, then a young minister. No less was son John strangely moved by his father's words as they winged their way toward the glory world.

The year the family moved to Carthage, John, high in hope, entered the local college, from which he graduated with such high honors that he was elected to a teaching position on the college faculty. Professor John, however, had heard the Voice, and shortly laying aside the scholastic robes he had donned, he matriculated at the Presbyterian Seminary in Chicago, then known as McCormick.

John was wise enough to be a professor, but in God's plan for his life he needed the seasoning of the seminary, where his vision was to sweep from America to India as the scene of his labors. He had been preceded at McCormick by an older brother Edmund, with whom he was to spend two years of unbroken fellowship.

During his student days he planned to be a minister and in an unobtrusive manner he was conscientiously carrying out the design. His fellow students, affirms Burton Konkle, then also a seminarian, thought of him as one who would settle in a small and ordinary pastorate and do a grand but inconspicuous piece of work. It was not until his senior year that he was looked upon as traveling toward a different destiny. And doubtless he would have been one of the last men in the class of whom more would have been expected, affirms Konkle.

The class had been active in city and foreign missions from the very first. Hyde however took only a mild interest in these programs, for his soul until then had not been touched by the flame of overseas kingdom work. One evening early in the semester, the usual missionary meeting was held by the students in the chapel. The voice of Herrick Johnson had been most appealing.

Hyde left that service with a stirring within his heart. God had been speaking and John could not remain still. He went to see Konkle, who had participated in the program that night. Sitting down in Konkle's room, he remained silent for some time and then said, Give me all the arguments you have for the foreign field.