12. F. W. Robertson (1816–1853)
It is August 3, 1841. A young British preacher is visiting Geneva, hoping to restore both his faith and his broken health. He visits the celebrated Henri Caesar Malan, the Swiss evangelical leader whose fearless ministry has aroused the resentment of the established church. The young preacher opens his heart to the man for he too finds his position in the established church an uncomfortable one. As the two pastors discuss matters both theological and ministerial, the godly Malan looks at his visitor, shakes his head, and announces: “You will have a sad life and a sad ministry!”
The prophecy was fulfilled. The young man died at the age of thirty-seven, after only thirteen years of ministry; when he died, he considered himself a failure. Nevertheless, within a few years of his death, his printed sermons were making an impact on thinking Christians (and even unbelievers) that has not diminished to this day. He lived a sad, almost tragic life, and his ministry was filled with both physical and emotional pain, yet Frederick W. Robertson is known as “the preacher’s preacher,” and his failure has turned into success.
Robertson was born on February 3, 1816, in London. His father was a captain in the Royal Artillery, and Robertson spent his first five years at Leith Fort near Edinburgh. In 1821, Captain Robertson retired and moved the family to Yorkshire, where young Frederick grew up enjoying the outdoors and dreaming of a soldier’s life. Both his father and grandfather had served gallantly in the army; his three younger brothers were to follow in their steps. But not Frederick. Though he prepared himself and applied for his commission, two years passed before he heard from the Crown. But before that, something interfered.
In March 1837, a neighbor introduced him to Mr. Davies, a devoted clergyman who asked Robertson what he planned to do with his life. When told that the young man planned to enter the army and was even then waiting for his commission, Davies asked, “Have you ever considered the church?” Robertson replied, “No, never! Not that! I am not fit for that!” After further conversation, Robertson asked Davies what he should do; the wise pastor said, “Do as your father likes, and pray to God to direct your father aright.” In true military fashion, Robertson followed his counsel, and Captain Robertson decided that the place for his son was the church. On May 4, 1837, Robertson entered Oxford. Five days later his army commission arrived.
Robertson was disappointed in Oxford. The students, having little sense of duty or devotion, jested about sacred things; the Anglican church was seething with division and debate. John Henry Newman was preaching at Oxford at that time, and the famous Tractarian movement that ultimately led Newman back to Rome was getting underway. Robertson’s studies were not too systematic, nor did he strive to win prizes. He did focus attention on the Bible, and each morning while shaving he tried to memorize certain portions. His biographer claimed that Robertson memorized all of the New Testament in English and much of it in Greek!
On leaving college he plunged into his ministerial career and on July 12, 1840, was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester. Interestingly enough, the text of the ordination sermon was “Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” That was exactly what Robertson would have to do for the next thirteen years, and at times he would be tempted to quit. His first sermon, given a week later, was on Isaiah 55:1: “Ho, every one that thirsteth!”
Apparently he and Mr. Nicholson, the rector, got along beautifully, for the young man had a mind to work. Nicholson was in poor health, and many of the pastoral responsibilities fell to his young assistant, who performed them with sympathy and success. Unfortunately Robertson developed the bad habit of “unwise self-dissection” during that year, and the constant examination of his spiritual condition did not make for spiritual health. He became overly sensitive to his faults and gradually overcritical of the faults of others. He lived too under a self-induced conviction that he was going to die soon, and this outlook tended to make him melancholy.
His morbid attitude only made his symptoms worse. The doctors recommended that he tour the Continent, and in July 1841 he set off for Geneva. It was there he met the Swiss preacher César Malan. It was also there that he met Helen Denys, daughter of a British nobleman; they were married after a brief acquaintance.
The Robertsons returned to England, and in 1842 he began his ministry at Christchurch, Cheltenham, working with Archibald Boyd, the rector. Boyd was what was known in those days as “a pulpit giant,” and Robertson learned much about preaching and studying during his five years at Christchurch. Up to this point Robertson had been somewhat careless about sermon preparation, sometimes leaving it until Saturday! Now he saw that real preaching was born of painstaking work and agonizing prayer and study.
But he had his problems in Cheltenham. To begin with, Robertson was ministering to the wealthy, and his heart was with the poor. The city was “a resort for the lame and lazy and rich,” and Robertson had no desire to be a popular preacher to a pleasure-seeking society. But his most difficult problem was with the evangelicals in Cheltenham. Robertson himself had been brought up in the evangelical tradition, but he was pained by the bitterness, narrowness, and downright meanness that seemed to characterize some of their leaders. Their publications seemed to thrive on name-calling, tests of orthodoxy, and the reaffirming of traditional truths in the same traditional language. When Robertson’s preaching did not completely conform to their standards, they began to shoot at him. “I stand nearly alone,” he wrote, “a theological Ishmael!” He was too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives.
At this point, “the sudden ruin of a friendship . . . accelerated the inward crisis,” and Robertson was plunged into a spiritual conflict that shook him to his very foundations. “It is an awful moment,” he wrote, “when the soul begins to find that the props on which it has blindly rested so long are, many of them, rotten, and begins to suspect them all.” It was his “dark night of the soul.”1
He left his wife and children in England, took a leave of absence from the church, and headed once again to the Continent, to struggle alone with himself and his God. Even his dreams afflicted him. He dreamed that members of the church were gossiping about him and tearing down his work. He would awaken, go back to sleep, and then dream he was being reproached for work left undone. Neither change of scenery nor strenuous exercise up and down the mountains could cure his deep melancholy and the painful conviction that his ministry was a failure. He returned home, resigned from the church, served as interim at another church for two months, and then moved to Trinity Chapel, Brighton, where he was to carry on a brave and noble ministry for six brief years.
Brighton was a fashionable seaside resort of about seventy thousand people, one-fourth of them holiday vacationers. There were thirteen Anglican churches in the city, as well as nineteen independent churches, a Quaker meeting, a Jewish synagogue, and a Roman Catholic church. But the churches seemed to make little difference in the lives of the people, who were interested primarily in pleasure and money. Every weekend a new army of pleasure-seekers invaded the city from London, and the worldliness of Brighton became a burden on Robertson’s heart.
He turned to the poor and to the workingmen of the city, and this upset the rich of the congregation. He refused to be labeled, and as a result he was libeled. His sermons were too pointed, and he dared to name the sins of the rich right in the presence of their servants! Anonymous letters attacked him; some of these even found their way into the local newspapers. Because he dared to search into the truth of the Bible and let the Bible open up its own message, he was condemned by those who rested on a secondhand faith and never knew the “dark night of the soul” through which he had won his own convictions.
One of the main organs of criticism was The Record, published by the evangelical party of the church. When one of his London pastor friends wrote to The Record to defend him, Robertson wrote to thank him and said: “The Record has done me the honor to abuse me for some time past, for which I thank them gratefully. God forbid they should ever praise me! One number alone contained four unscrupulous lies about me, on no better evidence than that someone had told them, who had been told by somebody else.” But Robertson was human, and these barbs often penetrated deeply into his heart. A tinge of bitterness crept into his personality, though he was always kind to people—including those who differed with him.
In 1852 the young men of the congregation presented a public testimonial to their pastor, which he gratefully accepted. However, he confessed in a letter to a friend, “In the midst of the homage of a crowd, I felt alone, and as if friendless.”
He sensed that the end was near; the physical demands of his ministry were too much for him, let alone the strenuous demands he made on himself in sermon preparation. He suffered from splitting headaches. Often he would sit alone for hours, gritting his teeth and silently waging war against indescribable pain. At night he slept with his head against the rung of a chair. There was an abscess in his brain, and nobody could do anything about it. A group of his friends raised the money to provide an assistant for the church, but the vicar of Brighton rejected the man they chose because of a long-standing grudge between them!
Robertson’s last sermon at Trinity concluded a series on 2 Corinthians; the text was, “Finally, brethren, farewell!” It proved to be prophetic. On August 12, 1853, he wrote his last letter; his closing words were: “His will be done! I write in torture.” When his physician and his wife tried to move him to a more comfortable position, he said, “I cannot bear it; let me rest. I must die. Let God do His work.” On August 15, 1853, he finished his course. Two thousand people attended his funeral, and all of Brighton was draped in mourning. Even some who had bitterly attacked him realized that he had taught them something important and, even more, that he had lived before them the message that he preached.
One is tempted to ask, “Why was such an effective preacher so constantly discouraged and overshadowed by a dark cloud of failure?” No doubt there were physical reasons: Robertson was not a robust man and the seeds of death were working in his body years before his friends knew they were there. A pastor’s health may not be as important as his doctrine, but Paul does not separate the two in 1 Timothy 4:6–8. “I am impressed,” said Phillips Brooks in his Lectures on Preaching, “with what seems to me the frivolous and insufficient way in which the health of the preacher is often treated.” Bodily weakness need not be an obstacle to a successful ministry (witness McCheyne and Brainerd, for example), but certainly it is no advantage. It was when Elijah was weary and hungry that he entered the valley of despair and sat under the juniper tree.
A second factor in Robertson’s attitude was, I believe, disappointment. He had always wanted to be a soldier, and when he was made a minister instead, he continued to live like a soldier. He read the “war news” of his day eagerly and often imagined himself leading a battalion to victory. He confessed to a friend that he could not witness military maneuvers without experiencing a choking sensation. He often wore a dragoon cloak, and the emphasis on duty in his preaching is obvious. He would have fled from Brighton the first year of his ministry, had not a soldier’s sense of duty kept him there. I am not suggesting that he was not dedicated to the ministry, or that he ministered in a half-hearted way, but rather that his concept of the ministry was primarily militant, and in war you either win or lose. In ministry the victories are not always that definite; Robertson was never really able to evaluate honestly the good he was doing through his preaching.
Perhaps a chief cause of depression was his tendency to be a loner. He had few close friends or confidants, probably because he did not want to be crushed by another broken friendship as he had been in Cheltenham. Even his wife does not seem to have entered into his ministry the way a pastor’s wife normally would. There are suggestions in his letters that he and his wife did not agree on church matters—and that on more than one occasion she was right!
Because he could not find a group that agreed with him and because he had too much humility to start one of his own, he identified himself with no group and ultimately ended up criticizing all of them! His ministerial loneliness robbed him of the balance he needed, both emotionally and spiritually. “I would rather live solitary on the most desolate crag,” he wrote, “shivering, with all the warm wraps of falsehood stripped off . . . than sit comfortably on more inhabited spots, where others were warm in a faith which is true to them, but which is false to me.” It seems to me that his alternatives are not honest: a man can have convictions and still have companions. Again, this is the soldier in Robertson: he was on the defensive, always protecting his citadel of truth and never suspecting that others were trying to defend it too. The pastor is a lonely enough man without making the situation worse!
What is Robertson’s contribution to our preaching today? Perhaps his “six principles” still have something to say to us: (1) establish positive truth instead of only destroying error; (2) since truth is made up of two opposite propositions, look for a doctrine large enough to include both; (3) preach suggestively, not exhaustively; (4) start with Christ’s humanity, then move to his deity (Brooks would say, “Find the place where truth touches life”); (5) truth works from the inward to the outward; and (6) try to find the basis of truth even in error. We may not totally agree with all these propositions, but we must confess they give us a great deal to think about.
Robertson’s weakness was in the area of systematic theology. His Oxford training was definitely inadequate here, and even during his own personal studies he never did arrive at concrete statements of the great doctrines of the faith. Principal A. M. Fairbairn wrote: “The very incompleteness of his work was the secret of his power. He said what many had been feeling, but he did not help the many to translate their feelings into a rational substitute for what he so vigorously swept away.”2 It is his vagueness that attracts people of different schools, but we must confess that this vagueness leaves the soul a bit dissatisfied.
Robertson was not, as is often claimed, the “father of the two-point sermon.” He learned it from his beloved rector at Christchurch, Archibald Boyd. But it was Robertson who perfected the approach and made it popular. I feel I would tire of it week after week, as would my congregation, but it is worth studying and incorporating into our own kits of homiletical tools.
Before you rush out and purchase everything by and about F. W. Robertson, acquaint yourself with the man. I suggest you start with The Preaching of F. W. Robertson edited by Gilbert E. Doan Jr., a volume in the excellent Preacher’s Paperback Library published by Fortress Press. Along with a brief biography and a fine study of his preaching are ten of Robertson’s best sermons. Do not read these sermons quickly! Read them carefully, slowly, meditatively, beginning with “The Loneliness of Christ,” which is perhaps Robertson’s most autobiographical sermon.
If you find yourself excited by what you read, then secure The Soul of Frederick W. Robertson by James R. Blackwood. This is the best study of Robertson you will find; it is based on careful scholarship and a fine sympathy for the man. (The author is a son of the eminent Princeton professor of homiletics, Andrew W. Blackwood.) You may also want to read Lewis O. Brastow’s study of Robertson in his Representative Modern Preachers.
If at this point you are still interested, then purchase Stopford A. Brooke’s definitive Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson, available in several different editions. Brooke spent eight years writing this book. At times it is tedious, but for the most part it permits the preacher to speak for himself. The author’s most subjective chapter is chapter 7 in the first volume, where some of his views need to be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, you will then want to add all of Robertson’s sermons and addresses to your library, index them, and refer to them as you study. You will also want to read a sermon now and then just for your own edification.
In his monumental A History of Preaching, Edwin C. Dargan called Robertson “one of the most pathetic and powerful figures in all the history of English preaching.”3 Perhaps so, but could we not use in the church today a bit more of the “soldier spirit” that gives a man the courage to keep ministering in spite of the odds? Robertson once suggested that all clergy be “forced to serve in the army for five years previous to ordination, to make them men.” We may not agree with this suggestion, but we do agree with Paul’s admonition—and Robertson’s ordination charge—to “endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.”