Oswald Chambers who Never Wrote a Book

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This is the day that … Oswald Chambers was born in 1874, in Scotland … the author of 30 best-sellers, who never wrote a book!

“Thirty-two volumes bear his name on the cover, including My Utmost for His Highest, (which has been a blessing to thousands in their daily quiet time), but he never knew about any of them!” (Christianity Today, Sherwood Wirt, June, 1974).

His parents had been baptised by Charles H. Spurgeon and his father was later ordained to a Baptist pastorate by that same ‘prince of preachers’.

Oswald’s conversion took place on the way home from hearing Spurgeon preach. Oswald remarked to his father, “had the opportunity been given, he would have given his life to Christ.” The wise parent told him that he could do that very thing then and there … so it was “standing under a gas lamp in a London street” Oswald Chambers began his Christian pilgrimage (Os. Chambers, by D. Lambert, page 12).

He studied art, entered Bible College, married Gertrude Hobbs, and founded a Bible College in Clapham, England.

After four years as principal of a Bible Training College in Dunoon (Scotland), from 1911-1915, Chambers sailed for Egypt to join the staff of the YMCA, as a chaplain among the troops during World War I. He arrived in Egypt on 9 October, 1915, and many of his Bible lectures, given to thousands of soldiers solidly over the next two years, were taken down in shorthand. He was rushed to hospital in Cairo, and on 15 November, 1917, God took his servant home … at the age of 43 years.

It was then his wife gathered his writings: scraps of paper with scrawled notes, never intended for publication. Friends who had sat at his feet and taken notes of his messages sent them to her.

So it was, Baffled to Fight Better, rolled from the press shortly after his death …

In Chambers’ biography by his wife, Dinsdale T. Young pens this tribute in the Foreword: “Whenever I met him he did me good. He had a richly endowed mind which he reinforced by ceaseless study and prayer. His utterances in public were charming in form, rich in suggestion and full of ‘power from on high’. In his delightful and spiritual writings his works do follow him” (page 9).

And so the name of Oswald Chambers lives on in the 32 books he never knew he wrote!

This post is based on the work of my late friend Donald Prout whose love for books and Christian history led him to collate a daily Christian calendar. I continue to work with Don’s wife, Barbara, to share his life work with the world. I have updated some of these historical posts and will hopefully draw from Don’s huge files of clippings to continue this series beyond Don’s original work. More of Don’s work can be found at www.donaldprout.com.

McNeill the Scottish Spurgeon

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This is the day that … John McNeill was born in Scotland, in 1854.

(Now this John McNeill is not to be confused with the Canadian John T. McNeill who became leading Presbyterian professor and author; or with John MacNeill who was also born in Scotland in 1854, but spent much of his life as a Presbyterian evangelist in Australia.)

This John McNeill is he who was sometimes called the “Scottish Spurgeon”.

Whilst working for the railways as a lad he had a narrow escape as he was “engaged in coupling the carriages together … the finger the buffer nipped is ever before him” (Christian Portrait Gallery, page 227).

At the age of 19 he came to know the Saviour as his own, “and at once stood up and testified to being on the Lord’s side”.

He threw himself into YMCA work, a strongly evangelical organisation at that time.

By 1886 he was pastoring a Free Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh. The small congregation soon grew to over 3000.

Warren Wiersbe points out that McNeill “had a wonderful sense of humour that helped to keep his hearers alert and his sermons alive”. For example, speaking of the fierce cannibals in the South Seas he commented, “I have some elders I would like to send out there. I can assure you that if the cannibals got a taste of these elders, they would never touch a missionary again!”

In 1889 he accepted a call to Regent Square Church, London (where Edward Irving’s controversial ministry had taken place), then he resigned to help in the Moody/Sankey meetings.

During this time he married Margaret Miller, his first wife having died about 10 years earlier, leaving him with four small children.

In 1908 he followed F.B. Meyer into the pastorate of Christ Church, London; but he was more an evangelist than a pastor and found himself unable to stay in one church for a long period. “He pastored 10 different churches in 25 years!” (Back to the Bible magazine, August, 1985).

Then there were 16 years as an itinerant evangelist – preaching over 300 times a year.

In 1933 – 19 April – he went to be with his Lord, and Dr Graham Scroggie conducted the funeral service.

This post is based on the work of my late friend Donald Prout whose love for books and Christian history led him to collate a daily Christian calendar. I continue to work with Don’s wife, Barbara, to share his life work with the world. I have updated some of these historical posts and will hopefully draw from Don’s huge files of clippings to continue this series beyond Don’s original work. More of Don’s work can be found at www.donaldprout.com.

Archbishop Robert Leighton in Turbulent Times

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This is the day that … Archbishop Robert Leighton died in London, in 1684.

He was born in 1611 … the exact date being unknown. Nor are we sure of the place. His father, Alexander Leighton, was an outspoken Puritan who incurred the wrath of the infamous Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. As a result, Laud had him branded on the forehead, fined 10,000 pounds Sterling, publicly whipped, one ear cut off and one nostril split. Oh, yes, and life imprisonment! (Fathers of the Kirk, page 85).

Son, Robert, attended Edinburgh University from whence he was nearly expelled for writing “witty verse” in which the red nose of one of the faculty figured!

He entered the Church of Scotland (which at the time had bishops), spending 10 years on the Continent. He returned in 1641 to a Church of Scotland that had rejected episcopacy in favour of Presbyterianism. For seven years he fitted in, but in 1648 he resigned and became principal of Edinburgh University.

The year 1660 saw Charles II on the throne and episcopacy was re-introduced into the Scottish church. Two-thirds of the ministers accepted the change – including Leighton, who was consecrated as a bishop. Three hundred ministers refused to accept the king as “supreme in all causes civil and ecclesiastical” and were ejected from their parishes. History knows these faithful pastors and their followers as ‘the Covenanters’.

Robert Leighton met with some of these “non-conformists and sought to heal the breach, to no avail.”

Robert was also a writer of great influence. He was devotional in style and his works impacted many, including Coleridge.

Some quotes from Leighton. Faith is an humble, self-denying grace; it makes the Christian nothing in himself, and all in God. God’s sweet dews and showers of grace slide off the mountains of pride, and fall on the low valleys of humble hearts, and make them pleasant and fertile. Were the visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous and abominable.

In 1674 he resigned his archbishopric and passed his final decade “in quiet study and meditation!”

On his tombstone is the inscription: “In an age of utmost strife, he adorned the doctrine of God his Saviour by a holy life and the meek and loving spirit which breathes through his writings.”

This post is based on the work of my late friend Donald Prout whose love for books and Christian history led him to collate a daily Christian calendar. I continue to work with Don’s wife, Barbara, to share his life work with the world. I have updated some of these historical posts and will hopefully draw from Don’s huge files of clippings to continue this series beyond Don’s original work. More of Don’s work can be found at www.donaldprout.com.

Ebenezer Erskine, Contending for Truth

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This is the day that … Ebenezer Erskine was born in Berwickshire, Scotland, in 1680.

His father was a Church of Scotland minister. Ebenezer, and his young brother Ralph, followed suit. But their respective ministries encountered stormy days.

The republishing of a volume that had first appeared 73 years earlier – The Marrow of Modern Divinity – was condemned as heretical by the General Assembly of the Scottish Church. Ebenezer Erskine, by this time a well-known preacher who oft-times resorted to open air meetings because his church could not accommodate the crowds, defended the Marrow volume. As a result he, and three other ministers, were suspended (August, 1733) and eventually deposed from the State Church.

Ebenezer Erskine became the leader of the Associate Presbytery, later known as the Secession Church, founded on 5 December, 1733 (The Cambaslung Revival, A. Fawcett, page 26). And he invited fellow open-air preacher, George Whitefield, to visit Scotland … on the condition that Whitefield would not align himself with the State Church. This Whitefield declined to do… “If the Pope himself were to lend me his pulpit,” he replied, “I would gladly proclaim the righteousness of Jesus Christ therein” (George Whitefield, by A. Belden, page 124). Thus the Secession Church began to denounce Whitefield – “and even called him an agent of the devil” (ibid, page 125).

Ralph and Ebenezer are counted among the great Puritan preachers and their published sermons display their engagement of the souls of men to command faith-filled holy living, such as in Ebenezer’s “The Wind of the Holy Ghost Blowing upon the Dry Bones in the Valley of Vision”. “What is the reason why many professors of religion have lost their wonted vigour in the way of the Lord, and are in such a languishing condition as to their soul-matters? The plain reason of it is this, they are glutting themselves with the pleasures of sense.”

Ebenezer Erskine died on 2 June, 1754, and within about 200 years “most of the ‘seceders’ had found their way back into the national church” (Who’s Who in Christian History? page 237).

This post is based on the work of my late friend Donald Prout whose love for books and Christian history led him to collate a daily Christian calendar. I continue to work with Don’s wife, Barbara, to share his life work with the world. I have updated some of these historical posts and will hopefully draw from Don’s huge files of clippings to continue this series beyond Don’s original work. More of Don’s work can be found at www.donaldprout.com.

The Sunbeam, Elizabeth Cecilia Douglas Clephane

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This is the day that … Elizabeth Cecilia Douglas Clephane was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1830. She was the delicate, retiring one of three sisters whose example impacted their community.

“Gentle and retiring in disposition, and generous to a degree, she was known as ‘The Sunbeam’ among the poor and suffering in Melrose”, the village in which she lived, and made famous in Walter Scott’s novels (including The Abbot and the Monastery).

Elizabeth and her sisters belonged to the Free Church of Scotland where Rev. James Irwin later ministered. “There still remains,” he wrote, “a treasured memory of their wholehearted devotion to the church … their generosity was a constant joy to my predecessor and the church treasurer!” (The Romance of Sacred Song, by D. Beattie, page 55).

The sisters gave away everything they did not require for their daily needs, so they might meet the needs of the poor. Elizabeth gave herself to Bible Study and poetry writing. Many of her poems were published anonymously.

Her poem … “There were ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold” …was found in a newspaper by Ira Sankey and spontaneously set to music as he sang and played the organ with only the words before him! (My Life Story, by Ira Sankey, page 307). It was 1874, in Glasgow, Scotland. “A short time afterwards I received, at Dundee, a letter from a lady who had been present at the meeting thanking me for having sung her deceased sister’s words” wrote Sankey (ibid.).

Elizabeth Clephane’s other well-known poem was also published posthumously, and set to music three years later …
Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand!

The hymn is testimony to her ardent Bible study, as it is replete with Biblical references and allusions. The reference to “the mighty Rock” is taken from Isaiah 32:2. The reference to “the weary land” is taken from Psalm 63:1. The reference to “home within the wilderness” is taken from Jeremiah 9:2. The reference to “rest upon the way” is taken from Isaiah 28:12. The reference to “noontide heat” is taken from Isaiah 4:6. The reference to “burden of the day” is taken from Matthew 11:30.

Miss Clephane died at the age of 38.

This post is based on the work of my late friend Donald Prout whose love for books and Christian history led him to collate a daily Christian calendar. I continue to work with Don’s wife, Barbara, to share his life work with the world. I have updated some of these historical posts and will hopefully draw from Don’s huge files of clippings to continue this series beyond Don’s original work. More of Don’s work can be found at www.donaldprout.com.