Name: Union and Communion
Author: J. Hudson Taylor

“The real secret of an unsatisfied life lies too often in an unsurrendered will.” — J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion

J. Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) spent fifty-one years in China as the founder of the China Inland Mission and one of the nineteenth century’s most influential missionaries. Yet this small book has nothing to do with missionary strategy. It first appeared in the Mission’s journal China’s Millions, was later issued as a book, and by its ninth impression had sold nineteen thousand copies. Thirty-five pages long, titled Union and Communion; or, Thoughts on the Song of Solomon, it has endured not because it is systematic but because it is honest — it names something many believers feel but cannot articulate: why does communion with the Lord keep breaking?

Taylor’s position is clear: the Song of Songs is “a poem describing the life of a believer on earth.” The love story between bride and Bridegroom is the progressive journey of the soul’s union and communion with Christ. The book’s purpose is “to deepen this union, to make more constant this abiding” — not a theological project but a matter of life itself. Spiritual dissatisfaction is not God’s design, nor the believer’s fate. It has a cause. That cause is a will not yet fully surrendered.

Major Themes

I. Surrender of the will is where everything begins

Section I (Song 1:2–2:7) portrays the bride’s longing for the Lord — a longing that yields only occasional, intermittent communion. Taylor does not blame God, nor her circumstances. He points directly at the contradiction in the bride’s heart: she wants to fully possess the Bridegroom while withholding herself from him. The analogy is uncomfortably accurate — we crave the Lord’s presence but will not release our grip on our own sovereignty. Taylor compares this to a bride-to-be who fears that marriage will bring demands beyond her capacity; and that very fear, he says, is the deepest insult to her beloved’s love.

When the bride finally cries out “Draw me: we will run after Thee!” — she expects Calvary. She meets a King instead. “When the heart submits, then JESUS reigns. And when JESUS reigns, there is rest.” Surrender is never a loss. It is a discovery.

II. Two different kinds of broken communion

This is the book’s sharpest insight, and the one most summaries miss. The Song describes two distinct failures of communion — different in character, different in cause.

The first (Section II, Song 2:8–3:5) breaks through worldliness. The bride drifts back into the world, assuming she can keep the Bridegroom’s favor while retaining the world’s comforts. Taylor does not dramatize this; he simply observes: “We have to take our choice: we cannot enjoy both the world and CHRIST.” The Bridegroom comes, knocks; she delays; by the time she opens the door, he is gone. The long dark night of searching alone begins.

The second failure (Section IV, Song 5:2–6:10) is more hidden and therefore more dangerous. This time it is not indulgence but spiritual self-satisfaction and ease. The bride has just come through a high season of working alongside the Lord — and then settles into being satisfied with the experience of blessing rather than with the One who blessed. The Lord goes out into the night, his head wet with dew, seeking the lost; she rests in her comfort. Taylor writes that she was “self-occupied and self-contented, she scarcely noticed His absence.”

If the first failure is stolen by the world, the second is stolen by spiritual achievement. For believers who consider themselves practiced in spiritual discipline, this is not a comfortable mirror.

III. From “He is mine” to “I am His”

A subtle but important internal trajectory runs through the whole book: the bride’s declaration of love shifts, chapter by chapter, in whose name comes first. In Section II she says “My beloved is mine, and I am his” — her claim comes first. In Section IV: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” — his claim comes first. By Section V: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me” — self has entirely disappeared.

Taylor calls this “a still further development of grace.” Not theological refinement but a real and traceable movement of attention from self toward Christ. In Section III — the unbroken communion section — he notes that the bride has little to say and “appears as the hearer.” The less self, the more of him. Not a slogan: a trajectory verifiable from the Song’s own narrative.

IV. Union is the power of service

The second half of the book dismantles a common false opposition — as though inner life and outward service were two competing goods. Taylor’s position is plain: when the bride is fully united with the Lord, he calls her to come and labor with him. Service is not done “for Jesus” but “with JESUS” — “service with JESUS as well as for JESUS.”

“What we are is more important than what we do; and…all fruit borne when not abiding in CHRIST must be fruit of the flesh, and not of the SPIRIT.” — J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion

For believers who have spent years laboring in a high-demand church environment, this sentence has weight. If service grows out of union, then when union is severed, all the effort yields only the shell of flesh. Taylor adds:

“The intense activity of our times may lead to zeal in service, to the neglect of personal communion; but such neglect will not only lessen the value of the service, but tend to incapacitate us for the highest service.” — J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion

He wrote this book more than twenty years after his 1869 spiritual breakthrough in Zhenjiang — when a letter from fellow missionary John McCarthy removed “the scales from his eyes.” He saw that the Christian life is not the effort to abide in Christ but the rest of discovering you are already in him. This is what he called the “exchanged life”: exchanging your striving for Christ’s fullness, your anxiety for his rest. Union and Communion is the crystallization of that discovery after two decades of living it.

Brother Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life, used Taylor’s experience to illustrate what it means to abide in Christ — citing Taylor’s struggle, “I knew that if only I could abide in Christ, all would be well, but I could not,” and his subsequent breakthrough. Brother Witness Lee, in the Life-Study of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, wrote directly: “To use Hudson Taylor’s expression, this is a book of union and communion with Christ.” The phrase has since become standard vocabulary in the life of the church.

Honest Assessment

The book has several genuine strengths. Its distinction between two types of broken communion — worldliness versus spiritual pride — is rarely found in devotional literature, precisely because this distinction grows from the Song’s own narrative rather than being imposed from outside. The repeated insistence that the Bridegroom’s desire for communion exceeds the bride’s is a countercultural tenderness:

“Wonderful thought! that GOD should desire fellowship with us; and that He whose love once made Him the Man of Sorrows may now be made the Man of Joys by the loving devotion of human hearts.” — J. Hudson Taylor, Union and Communion

For someone who has spent years “working for the Lord” in a high-demand church while growing hollow inside, this sentence may be the most necessary thing in the book.

One element of the appendix deserves a caution. Taylor argues that “the daughters of Jerusalem” represent “half-saved Christians” who will miss a special resurrection and rapture at the end of the age. This reading reflects a strand of nineteenth-century Keswick dispensationalism that has been widely contested. Readers need not be bound by it.

The book is very short and makes no scholarly argument — it meditates rather than demonstrates. If you want serious engagement with the Hebrew poetry of the Song, this is not that book; it barely addresses the literary or textual dimensions at all. Its value lies elsewhere: in the voice of someone who has walked this road, putting a hand on your shoulder and saying — your struggle has a name, and there is a way through.

When to Read This

If you feel a spiritual dryness — not unbelief, but communion with the Lord that has become routine rather than real, obligation rather than encounter — this book was written for you. Also for those who have spent years busy with church responsibilities and find their inner life growing empty; and for those who once knew a season of rich communion and cannot understand why they have returned to the ordinary.

This is not the book to reach for in the midst of deep theological crisis or crisis of faith — it speaks at the level of experience, not doctrinal argument. Sit with it for an afternoon and read it through quietly. That is enough.

The final image of the bride is of one “leaning upon her beloved, coming up from the wilderness” (Song 8:5). Taylor wrote this book knowing what wilderness means — fifty-one years of missionary work, the death of a wife, misunderstanding from colleagues, chronic illness. He does not pretend these were not real. He only says: when you lean on him, the wilderness is no longer only wilderness.