17. R. W. Dale (1829–1895)
Whenever John Angell James stepped into the pulpit of the Carr’s Lane Congregational Church in Birmingham, England, he silently prayed that God would give him a successor who would carry on the great work of the church. Carr’s Lane was one of the most influential churches in Great Britain, and James had been its pastor for over fifty years. He had a right to be concerned about his successor! How God provided that man is a remarkable story.
James wrote a religious bestseller called The Anxious Inquirer After Salvation, which sold some 200,000 copies within the first five years of publication. A copy of this book fell into the hands of an assistant schoolteacher in the little village of Andover in Hampshire, and the reading of that book led to the young man’s conversion. Robert William Dale was fourteen years old at the time. Ten years later, in 1853, he was installed as co-pastor of the famous Carr’s Lane Church; in 1859, when James died, Dale became the sole pastor. He devoted thirty-six years to that one church. When Dale died in 1895, the church called the famous John Henry Jowett to succeed him, and he remained there until 1911. It was during Jowett’s ministry at Carr’s Lane that A. T. Pierson made the statement that “Carr’s Lane is the finest church in the world.”
The transition from James to Dale was not easy, either for the church or for the young successor. James was Calvinistic in his leanings, although he preached the Word of God and not a doctrinal system. “I do not seem to find much about Calvinism in the Bible!” he once told a friend who asked him why he was not preaching more Calvinistic sermons. When Dale began questioning unconditional election, total depravity, and limited atonement, some of the saints were horrified. Were it not for the fact that James privately intervened and told his unhappy leaders to be patient with their associate, Dale probably would have been dismissed. In fact, early in his ministry as co-pastor, Dale felt he was definitely out of place at Carr’s Lane. An opportunity opened in a church in Manchester, and some of Dale’s friends urged him to accept the call; loyal to his senior pastor, Dale laid the matter before James and asked him to make the decision. Without hesitation, James replied, “Stay!” And Dale stayed! Subsequent events would indicate that the decision was a wise one.
R. W. Dale was a perplexing combination of preacher, theologian, politician, and denominational leader. Most pastors are happy to encourage their members to get involved in matters of government while they themselves concentrate on spiritual matters. But Dale’s convictions drove him right into the middle of some of England’s most explosive political issues. Dale saw no difference between God’s working in the church and his working in government. To him there was no separation between the secular and the sacred. God was just as concerned about the government of Birmingham as he was the government of Carr’s Lane Church. For this reason, nearly one-third of the 750-page biography written by his son is devoted to matters of British politics. Those of us who have never been initiated into the mysteries of home rule, parliament, and the British educational system will probably read these pages dutifully but not very profitably.
It was as a theologian and a preacher of doctrine that Dale excelled. “I hear you are preaching doctrinal sermons to the congregation at Carr’s Lane,” an experienced preacher said to Dale one day when they met on the street. “They will not stand it.” Dale replied, “They will have to stand it.” And they did. From these doctrinal sermons came some of the books that helped make Dale a famous man: The Atonement, Christian Doctrine, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, and Christ and the Future Life. His books on the Ten Commandments, Ephesians, and James are familiar to most well-read pastors.
There is an interesting story in connection with his book The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. Dale was preparing an Easter sermon when the truth of Christ’s physical resurrection burst upon him with compelling power. “Christ is alive!” he said aloud; “He is alive—alive!” He began to walk about the room saying to himself, “Christ is living! Christ is living!” Not only that following Easter Sunday, but for months afterward he exulted in the theme of the resurrected Christ. He even began the practice of having a resurrection hymn sung each Sunday morning, just to remind the people that they were worshiping a living Christ.
Dale wore his hair cut short, but had a full beard and moustache. Some of the older people in his church were scandalized when the moustache appeared, and several even wrote letters to the newspapers in protest! They felt it gave him “an air of levity and worldliness.” There is no record that anybody was upset over his smoking. “Food and drink he could forego without a pang,” wrote his son, “but cut off from tobacco, he was little better than a lost soul.”
A dark thread of depression ran through Dale’s life, and often he spoke of “the strange, morbid gloominess” that he had to battle, sometimes for weeks at a time. These periods of depression may have had their physical causes, but it is likely that Dale’s own personal struggles with doctrine and duty were partly responsible. Once he wrote, “I do not envy those who walk through life with no questionings, no mental struggles.” These seasons of depression would come without warning and often leave as suddenly as they came.
One day Dale was in a depressed mood, walking down a Birmingham street, when a poor lady passed him and said, “God bless you, Dr. Dale!” He asked her name, but she refused to give it.
“Never mind my name,” she said, “but if you could only know how you have made me feel hundreds of times, and what a happy home you have given me—God bless you!”
As she hurried away she seemed to take the dark cloud with her. Dale said, “The mist broke, the sunlight came, I breathed the free air of the mountains of God.” (Church members take note: sincere appreciation is good medicine for faithful pastors.)
Shortly after he became the sole pastor of Carr’s Lane, Dale began to have sincere doubts about the traditional Christian doctrines of man’s immortality and eternal punishment. When he attempted to preach on judgment, he found the experience “costly.” Fifteen years later, in 1874, he publicly committed himself to the doctrine of annihilation—the idea that only those possessing eternal life in Christ would live forever.
When Moody and Sankey came to Birmingham in 1875 for their first revival meeting, Dale threw himself into the effort with enthusiasm. Years later, Dale told G. Campbell Morgan that D. L. Moody was the only preacher whom he felt had a right to preach about hell. “I never heard Moody refer to hell without tears in his voice.” Many of the clergy in Birmingham were opposed to the Moody meetings, some because of his simple gospel message and others because of his “American methods.” More than one preacher published rather severe criticisms, including Archibald Campbell Tait, the archbishop of Canterbury. Dale rose to Moody’s defense and published a pamphlet called The Day of Salvation: A Reply to the Letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury on Mr. Moody and Mr. Sankey. No doubt Dale and Moody had their own disagreements, but this did not keep them from being friends and laboring together to win souls. Dale reported that he received about two hundred new members from the meetings, and he concluded years later that about seventy-five percent of them “stood well.”
Now for an interesting sequel to these events: nine years later Moody returned to Birmingham, and again Dale cooperated with the meetings. But Dale thought he detected a change in the evangelist and in the converts. Moody’s emphasis in 1875 had been the free grace of God, but now his emphasis seemed to be repentance “as though it were a doing of penance.” Dale wrote that Moody was “just as earnest, as vigorous, as impressive as before. People were deeply moved. Hundreds went into the inquiry room every night. But the results, as far as I can learn, have been inconsiderable. . . . I have seen none of the shining faces that used to come to me after his former visit.” Dale did the Christian thing and wrote to Moody, sharing his convictions; the evangelist replied that Dale’s letter had “set him a-thinking.” Whether it was Moody’s preaching or Dale’s doctrinal vantage-point that had changed, we do not know.
Whether or not Dale’s theology is agreeable, it must be admitted that it was a living reality to him and not a dead abstraction. What he believed, he sought to live—no matter the cost. If his beliefs led him to the lecture platform to oppose the state church, or into the political arena to fight for better education, he willingly obeyed.
In 1877 Dale was invited to give the Yale lectures on preaching, and there is every indication that he was quite a success. His series is published under the prosaic title Nine Lectures on Preaching. It is not an exciting book, but it is a helpful one. When he returned home, Dale tried to persuade Charles H. Spurgeon and Alexander Maclaren to accept the invitation to lecture at Yale, but both refused. Spurgeon’s reply to the invitation was “I sit on my own gate and whistle my own tunes and am quite content.”
Dale was a man who loved the city, and the city of Birmingham in his day was hardly the Garden of Eden. Dale could have pastored a comfortable church in a quiet town, but he chose to minister in the city. This, he felt, was God’s calling. While on a European holiday in 1863 he wrote to his wife: “The Lake of Lucerne . . . is before me—the noblest scenery, as some think, in all Europe; but I declare that there is nothing in this magnificent view which makes me feel half the thrill I have sometimes felt when I have looked down on the smoky streets of Birmingham from the railway, as I have returned to my work among you after a holiday. The thought of having to do, more or less directly, with all that mass of human thought and action, which is covered with the ceaseless smoke which hangs over us—the thought that you and I together may, with God’s help, save multitudes—sends the blood through one’s veins with the exultation and glow which the most magnificent aspects of the material universe cannot create.” In this day when our great cities desperately need a steady evangelical witness, this kind of excitement is heartening. May his tribe increase!
In June 1893, G. Campbell Morgan began his ministry at the Westminster Road Congregational Church in Birmingham, England; a month later he visited Dr. and Mrs. Dale in their home. Since he was not a graduate of a recognized college or seminary, Morgan was concerned about his “inadequate qualifications” as a pastor in the great city of Birmingham. He shared his concern with Dale, and Dale solved the problem immediately. “Never say that you are untrained! God has many ways of training men. I pray that you will have much joy in His service.”
Two years later on March 13, 1895, Dr. R. W. Dale died, bringing to a close thirty-six years of ministry at Carr’s Lane. An unfinished sermon lay on his study desk. The last sentence read: “—that, after our mortal years are spent, there is a larger, fuller, richer life in—.” The sentence was broken, but the life was completed.
The biography of Dale written by his son, Sir A. W. W. Dale, was published in 1898 by Hodder and Stoughton in London. Be prepared to wade through 750 pages of material, some of which—particularly the sections dealing with British politics—is painfully dull. But Principal A. M. Fairbairn’s appendix on “Dale as a Theologian” is probably the best analysis of Dale’s doctrinal position you will find anywhere. I especially like the sentence, “He ceased to be a Calvinist without becoming an Arminian.”
Regardless of his theological classification, R. W. Dale is a man worth knowing, especially in this day when there is a tendency for us to divorce theology from ethics and from the practical ministries of the church. As Fairbairn put it, “It is not simply the heart, it is the whole man that makes the theologian.”1 Perhaps we need this kind of wholeness today.