The Cambridge Seven

D. L. Moody opened his mission to the University of Cambridge in the Corn Exchange on Sunday 5 November 1882, at the invitation of the Christian Union. W. H. Stone of its committee wrote seventeen years later that 1,700 men in cap and gown were counted in on the first night. Only about a hundred, he says, came on the second.

J. E. K. Studd wrote a letter reminding the university that the evangelists had come by invitation. Stone counted 1,800 at the last service, when 162 men gave in their names to receive a little book.

Smith held a mission at Clapham in February 1884, and Marshall Broomhall dates Cassels's interest in China from it. C. T. Studd named the farewell of Mr. McCarthy of the mission as the meeting that turned him to China.

In the last weeks before they left, Smith and C. T. Studd toured the northern towns with Reginald Radcliffe. The expenses were met outside the mission. At Edinburgh, Dr. Moxey wrote, “Professors and students together were seen in tears”.

The mission arranged three farewell meetings. They stood at Eccleston Street on 30 January, at the Guildhall in Cambridge on 2 February and at the Corn Exchange in Oxford on 3 February. It then put off the departure by a day for a last meeting at Exeter Hall.

The Record's correspondent estimated 1,200 at Cambridge, and Broomhall prints no count for Oxford or for Exeter Hall. Rain fell in sheets on the London night, and an overflow met in the Lower Hall.

They left Victoria Station at ten o'clock the next morning for Brindisi, and they reached Shanghai on 18 March. Each put on Chinese dress before leaving the city. Smith and C. T. Studd later called that dress a matter of taste and noted that the coast stations did not wear it.

Studd and the two Polhill-Turners went up the river for Hanchung on 4 April. Smith, Hoste and Cassels went north by sea a few days later. Hoste wrote later from Kuh-wu that he had been there “without any European companion for now over a month”.

On the Han River, Studd wrote, the party waited for the signs of Mark 16:17 to 18 as at Pentecost. They concluded after some time that they were meant to study. At Hanchung he thought the people took them for “idle fanatics”.

C. T. Studd's brother J. E. K. Studd told the story of “The Cambridge Band” at Northfield in the summer of 1885 at Moody's request. Luther Wishard arranged his visits to the college associations. At Cornell, C. K. Ober wrote, a sophomore named John R. Mott “was led by Studd” into a Christian experience.

Ober, a colleague of Wishard, lists the story as the third of three lines that met at the Mount Hermon Conference. Norman Grubb, C. T. Studd's son-in-law, gave it more weight in 1933. He wrote that students in the United States caught the fire and “two of their number began the Student Volunteer Movement”.

Smith's own title page of 1901 calls him formerly of the mission. An article in the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (1998) says he held that not all who had never heard were lost, against the mission's statement. It says that he was asked to resign. In 1915 Marshall Broomhall still wrote of the seven that “the Band is still unbroken”.

Studd came into his money at twenty-five, and Grubb lists gifts of five thousand pounds each to Moody and to George Muller among others. He sailed for Africa on 15 December 1910, and Venn's register dates his Heart of Africa Mission to 1913.

Jonathan Bonk wrote in 1998 that “he proved to be an obstinate and unreasonable leader and colleague, provoking bitter conflict with family, fellow missionaries, and Africans until his death”. Bonk also records that his wife stayed in England, apart from one visit, until she died.

Grubb, who defends him, prints that he dismissed two workers, that others resigned and that some of the home committee did not agree with him. J. Murray writes in the same dictionary that he dismissed his son-in-law Alfred Buxton.