On the Day August 1 1883

Schofield and the Cambridge Seven

Khen Lim




The Cambridge Seven, circa 1885 (Image source: internetmonk.com)

It was a Thursday and Schofield was not feeling his usual self. By Monday, July 23, he realised his initial suspicion of malaria was incorrect. In fact it was epidemic typhus and at that time, incurable and deadly. After developing a dangerously fatal 71^o C fever about a week later, he died the next morning on August 1 1883. Tragically he was only thirty-two years of age.

Just before he died, he said to his wife, to “tell Mr Taylor and the Council… that these three years in China have been by far the happiest in my life.” Then his face turned radiant with an unusual brightness. His last words were, “Heaven at last,” and then he gasped his last.

Schofield and his wife, Elizabeth, had been praying that “God would open the hearts of the students at our Universities and Colleges to the needs of the Mission Fields of the world.” In fact once he knew he was seriously ill, he intensified his prayers, pressing God for missionaries capable of sharing the Gospel among the Chinese, the kind that would come from England’s top tertiary institutions equipped with the finest mental capacities and physique.

Just thirty months before his death, in 1880, Robert Harold Ainsworth Schofield decided to head for China with the China Inland Mission following a prayer meeting. Quickly marrying Elizabeth Jackson, both then travelled on April 7 to America before they left for Japan two months thereafter. Shortly after, they reached Shanghai. 

On  July 9, they left for Chefoo and three months later, they headed for T’ai-yüen Fu in the northern province of Shan-si in Northern China where there, he was one of only eight evangelical missionaries and the first in Protestant colours to be allowed in the country’s hinterland.

Following his arrival, he met Dr Mackenzie and together, helped build a medical dispensary and a new hospital. Inspired by Dr Hudson Taylor, Schofield made sure that both were done in the authentic Chinese cultural style and funded using local money in support of the Chinese economy. 

With the new facilities in place. Schofield successfully treated 50 inpatients and 1,500 outpatients and performed three operations under chloroform. By the second year, he completed 292 surgeries with 47 anaesthetised. He was also the first to medically treat opium addicts and administered the first experiment with hypodermic morphine.

While his medical prowess was certainly God-given and his achievements were nothing short of astounding, Schofield was probably more renown in the Christian circle for his insistent prayers for men equipped to spread the Gospel in China. While he did not live to see the handiwork of his persistent prayers, China stood to benefit from them. 

Nineteen months after his death, in February 1885, seven university graduates would make their way to China. They were impressively educated, athletic in build and lived their lives testifying for God and as they set forth to leave on the very day, they would forever be remembered as The Cambridge Seven.

Comprising rower Stanley Peregrine Smith and cricketer Charles Thomas Studd as well as Montagu Proctor-Beauchamp, Dixon Edward Hoste, William Wharton Cassels and Arthur and Cecil Podhill-Turner, the Cambridge Seven distinguished themselves with distinction but in different ways.

Hoste together with Smith worked with Pastor Xi Sheng Mo, adopting Chinese standards in attire, dining and cultural observances in a hope to understand the Chinese mind. It was Hoste who cultivated the localised principles of self-government, self-support and self-propagation for Chinese churches, which later became the backbone of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

Smith left the Mission before the First World War following a doctrinal conflict in which he apparently adopted the universalism view. However he is to be credited for his bilingual preaching in China and also his own work he established in East Shanxi.

Born in Portugal, Cassels was already a priest by the time he joined the China Inland Mission. By 1895, he became the Bishop of Western China and through his profound understanding of the Chinese people and their unique culture, he was greatly venerated.

Spending fifteen years in China, Studd devoted the rest of his life spreading the Gospel in India and Africa, establishing the WorldWide Evangelisation Crusade (WEC International). He was also an early pioneer behind the UPCI (United Pentecostal International) movement.

After several successful preaching tours across China, Proctor-Beauchamp returned to England with his family where he was ordained before becoming a chaplain to the armed forces in Egypt and Greece during the First World War.

Upon his return from China in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, Cecil Podhill-Turner indulged in the missionary cause by helping to finance them. When he visited Los Angeles, USA in 1908, he had a Pentecostal experience that later led him to become England’s first President of the Pentecostal Missionary Union (PMU), which he ran in ways similar to the China Inland Mission.

While his elder brother returned to England, Arthur Podhill-Turner, who was moved by D.L. Moody while studying, remained behind and worked quietly through the Boxer Rebellion and later the Revolution that eventually followed. He retired at the age of 66.

These seven remarkable men from Cambridge were the incredibly powerful fruits of Schofield’s persistent prayers.