With that, Eric Liddell faded from consciousness.
Joyce stood on the other side of the curtain, sobbing until someone escorted her out of the room.
Later that night, twenty minutes after the clock struck nine, Scotland’s greatest athlete crossed the finish line of his earthly life and into his heavenly home.
He had completed the race.
[103] Norman Cliff, Courtyard of the Happy Way (Evesham Worsc., England: Arthur James Limited, 1977), chapter 11, as quoted in Weihsien Picture Gallery, accessed September 27, 2017, http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Books/Courtyard/txt_Chapter_11.htm.
[104] Ibid.
[105] Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women under Pressure (New York: HarperCollins, 1966), 113.
[106] Ibid.
[107] Russell W. Ramsey, God’s Joyful Runner (South Plainfield, NJ: Bridge, 1987), 166.
[108] “Stephen Metcalf Talks about Eric Liddell,” People’s Recollections, Eric Liddell Centre, accessed September 25, 2017, http://www.ericliddell.org/stephen-a-metcalf/.
[109] The Scotland Register, June 20th, 2014.
CHAPTER 26
ERIC IS OUT
I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?
John 11:25-26
ON FEBRUARY 22, 1945, silent snow descended from the heavens. Nature’s halfhearted attempt to blanket the internees with a pure facade brought no warming comfort. There was no coal to burn for a fire anyhow. Chilling news began to spread as internees fussed to seek warmth. “Eric Liddell died last night.” The bitter words were repeated over and over that day, seemingly growing more dominant each time. The Eric Is In / Eric Is Out sign, which hung on Eric’s dormitory door, proved to be too painful to any who came to seek solace from Eric’s peers regarding his absence. The sign soon came down.
Everyone struggled to process the grief or find words to make the emptiness subside. Young Beryl (Goodland) Welch, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Chefoo teacher, managed to scratch in her diary that day, “Dear (Old) Uncle Eric died last night. It was so sudden. He wrote a letter to his wife just that day. Everyone was greatly impressed. I feel so sorry for her. Most people thought he was the best man in the camp. What a loss!”[110]
So many of the youth close to Eric felt as though the light had left the camp. But they were not alone. Grown men who would otherwise never cry in public broke down unashamedly at the news.
An autopsy, in which Joe Cotterill aided, was performed on Eric’s body the following day. The doctors confirmed that an inoperable brain tumor had grown to the point that Eric’s surrender to that infuriating outcome was the sole remaining option. His death could not have been prevented medically. Even if Eric had been in the finest of facilities and under the best of care, it would have taken a miracle to guide Eric unscathed through that surgery to health again.
Funeral arrangements began to take shape. Rev. Arnold Bryson, senior missionary of the London Missionary Society, would conduct the service, though many others would voice their endearing thoughts. On Saturday, February 24, Eric’s fellow internees—who together represented twenty-one nationalities—poured into a Weihsien church built to hold 350 people. When all the seats had been taken, the remainder of the mourners gathered outside in the bitter cold and swirling snow, unaffected by dropping temperatures or their hunger, to pay their respects to a man who had been the “finest example of Christ”[111] many of them had ever known.
Rev. Bryson began the service with the same triune invocation Eric’s father had spoken over him in his baptism: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit . . .”
Rev. Bryson continued,
It is fitting that the predominant notes of this service should be praise and thanksgiving to God for all that Eric Liddell has done and all that so many of us owe to him. To most in the camp who heard on Thursday morning that he had suddenly passed away after a relapse on the previous night, the news came as a great shock, and to a large number, with a sense of personal loss. For he was an outstanding figure in our community, known to all and respected by everybody.
From his humble and modest demeanor, no one could have guessed that here was a man with an international reputation on the running track and football field.
The sudden removal of such a man in the prime of his life, and at the peak of his powers, inevitably raises questions in our hearts. Why did God take him from a world in which such men are so sorely needed today? But God makes no mistakes. His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are his ways our ways. Perhaps in God’s loving purpose, by Eric’s early promotion to higher service he was spared years of acute suffering, and we can only bow to God’s will.
Yesterday a man said to me, “Of all the men I have known, Eric Liddell was the one in whose character and life the spirit of Jesus Christ was preeminently manifested.” And all of us who were privileged to know him with any intimacy echo this judgment. What was the secret of his consecrated life and far-reaching influence? Absolute surrender to God’s will as revealed in Jesus Christ. His was a God-controlled life and he followed his Master and Lord with a devotion that never flagged and with an intensity of purpose that made men see both the reality and power of true religion. With St. Paul, Eric could say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” If anyone was ready for his Master’s call, it was our friend, whose happy, radiant face we shall see no more on earth, but his influence will surely live on in the hearts and lives of all who knew him.
Rev. Edwin Davies gave a final prayer. The congregation sang “For All the Saints
