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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century

Helen L. Taylor

1850–1929English evangelical

Retold Pilgrim's Progress in words small children could follow, and generations met Christian there first.

Pictured: the era he stood in — Stanley meets Livingstone at Ujiji — Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0

Summary

Helen L. Taylor lived 1850–1929. This wing places Helen L. Taylor in The Missionary Century, 1790–1910.
  • Lived 1850–1929.
  • Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
  • Hangs on The Awakeners.
  • Read first: Little Pilgrim's Progress (1889).
  • Tradition: English evangelical / Children's-Christian-literature / Bunyan adaptation.

The life

Helen Louisa Taylor (1850–1929) was an English evangelical author best known for her child-accessible adaptations of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The daughter of a silk manufacturer in Derby, England, she excelled in her studies as the only girl in an all-boys school. She authored Little Christian's Pilgrimage: The Story of the Pilgrim's Progress Simply Told (1889) and Christiana, The Story of the Pilgrim's Progress Second Part (1902).

Moody Publishers purchased the rights and combined the two into Little Pilgrim's Progress, which has sold 600,000+ copies and remains in continuous print. Modern illustrated editions feature artwork by Joe Sutphin (woodland-animal characters in Brian Jacques Redwall style) that have substantially extended the book's reach. Pastor Marc named Helen Taylor specifically in the original Tier 2 list as the standard child-accessible Bunyan entry-point.

What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1790–1910
  1. 1854Hudson Taylor lands at ShanghaiHe was twenty-one, under-funded, and arrived in the middle of a civil war. Within a few years he had done what no missionary did, put on Chinese dress and gone inland, away from the treaty ports and the protection of gunboats.
  2. 1859The '59 Revival, and Spurgeon's foundation stoneAwakening ran through Ulster and Wales after a season of prayer meetings begun in New York two years earlier; contemporaries counted converts in the tens of thousands, though the figures were estimates made in the moment. In August the foundation stone was laid for Charles Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, which opened in 1861 and seated around five thousand.
  3. 1865The China Inland Mission and the Salvation ArmyIn June, walking the beach at Brighton in anguish over inland China, Taylor wrote in his Bible that he was asking God for twenty-four workers, a mission that would ask no one but God for money. The same summer William and Catherine Booth opened a mission in London's East End; it took the name Salvation Army in 1878.
  4. 1873Livingstone dies on his kneesHe was found on the morning of May 1 at Chitambo's village, kneeling by his bed. His African companions Chuma and Susi buried his heart under a tree, dried his body, and carried it roughly a thousand miles to the coast so England could bury him in Westminster Abbey.
  5. 1885The Cambridge SevenSeven young men from Britain's most privileged circles, including the cricketer C. T. Studd, gave up sport, money, and careers and sailed for China with the Inland Mission. Their farewell tour of the universities sent a wave of students into missions on both sides of the Atlantic.
  6. 1904Clouds gathering over WalesIn the autumn a young miner named Evan Roberts began meetings at Loughor, and within months chapels across Wales were full night after night. Reports of about a hundred thousand converts in a year are the era's own estimate, not a count, but the world was watching, and the next era was already breaking.
  7. 1910EdinburghIn June, some 1,200 delegates met in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference under the chairmanship of John R. Mott. For the first time since the apostles the church could look at a map and say it was genuinely worldwide, and the delegates from the younger churches asked, politely and firmly, when they would be treated as equals.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Helen L. Taylor at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Hangs on The Awakeners: The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes.

Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall

Portrait of William Carey
William Carey1761–1834

A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.

Portrait of Adoniram Judson
Adoniram Judson1788–1850

Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.

Portrait of George Müller
George Müller1805–1898

Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.

Portrait of David Livingstone
David Livingstone1813–1873

Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.

Portrait of Horatio Spafford
Horatio Spafford1828–1888

Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.

Portrait of William Booth
William Booth1829–1912

Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.