28. W. Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923)
28
W. Robertson Nicoll
1851–1923
He read an average of two books a day and edited a weekly journal, three monthly magazines, and a steady stream of scholarly books which included The Expositor’s Bible (fifty volumes) and The Expositor’s Greek New Testament. He was undoubtedly the most prolific and respected religious journalist in the English-speaking world from 1886 to his death in 1923. Not only was he the “unofficial literary agent” for such men as Marcus Dods, George Adam Smith, A. B. Bruce, and Alexander Maclaren (he persuaded Maclaren to publish his expositions), but he managed to write over forty books of his own, and compile, edit, or supervise the publication of over 250 more titles. Yet when he was knighted in 1909, William Robertson Nicoll wrote: “I had never contemplated a literary career. I had expected to go on as a minister, doing literary work in leisure times, but my fate was sealed for me.”
His fate was “sealed” by ill health. Born at Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, on October 10, 1851, a son of the manse, Nicoll never was a “sturdy laddie.” His father was a bookworm who preferred to pastor a small flock of about a hundred people and spend the rest of his time in his library. In spite of a meager income, the Reverend Harry Nicoll acquired a library of seventeen thousand volumes, probably the largest library belonging to any pastor in Scotland. In his charming little book My Father, Robertson Nicoll described this library and how his father used it.
Robertson’s mother died when he was only eight years old. They called it “consumption” in those days, and it usually lingered with the family. Nicoll’s weak lungs were to plague him for the rest of his life, ultimately (and providentially) taking him from behind the pulpit into the editor’s chair. He often preached, but he could never have preached full time.
He graduated from Aberdeen University in 1870 and from the Free Church Divinity Hall in 1874. He was licensed to preach in 1872. From 1874 to 1877 he ministered at the Free Church in Dufftown, and from 1877 to 1885 at the Free Church in Kelso. Those were interesting years in Scotland: D. L. Moody was ministering there with great power, the Free Church was being torn asunder by Robertson Smith and his higher critical views, and new theological ideas were drifting over from the Continent.
Nicoll began his literary career while a student at the Divinity Hall. There were three weekly newspapers in Aberdeen at that time, and Nicoll was on the staff of the Journal, contributing reviews and literary notes and writing a weekly column, “Things in General.” Reading and writing: these would be the hinges on which his long and influential life would turn. The long winter months in Scotland would make him a “prisoner” in his own house. “One had the absolution of the snow for any failure to discharge pastoral duties,” he said. “I always look back with pleasure to my three months each winter there, when I was a prisoner alone with my cat and my books.”
A year after he was inducted at Kelso, he married and settled down to the life of a pastor and a literary man. In 1884 he was made editor of The Expositor, a monthly theological journal published by Hodder and Stoughton and edited from its inception in 1875 by the famous Hebraist Samuel Cox (his volume An Expositor’s Note-Book is worth adding to your library). Life was smiling upon the gifted young pastor, and then seeming tragedy struck. In 1885 Nicoll’s younger brother died of tuberculosis, and while on a holiday in Norway, Nicoll himself was infected with typhoid and became dangerously ill. No sooner did he start to regain his health when pleurisy set in, and for a time it looked as though Nicoll would succumb to the same disease that had taken his mother, sister, and younger brother. The best doctors in Edinburgh agreed that he would have to resign the church, give up preaching for two or three years, and concentrate on regaining his health.
Nicoll and his wife went to the south of England, near Torquay. He continued his editing and admitted that he did not miss preaching— “I feel so unequal to it.” What did he miss? “I feel rather lonely and depressed here away from my books.” In 1886 the Nicolls moved to the Upper Norwood section of London and became neighbors to Charles Haddon Spurgeon. All his life, Nicoll admired and defended Spurgeon. This relationship began in 1874 when Nicoll was the “summer pastor” of a little church at Rayne, about twenty-five miles from Aberdeen. He discovered a complete set of Spurgeon’s sermons and read it through! Soon after Spurgeon’s death, Nicoll wrote a strong letter to Marcus Dods and reproached him for some unkind things he had written about the great preacher. “Your paragraph about Spurgeon really vexed me,” he wrote, “and it is the only thing you have ever said, or written, or done, that did vex me or that I thought not worthy of your magnanimity.” Then Nicoll confessed: “Every Sunday night I spend at least an hour reading him, and there is no devotional writing pleases me so well.”
The key date in Nicoll’s life is November 5, 1886, for it was on this date that the first issue of the British Weekly appeared, published by Hodder and Stoughton. It was intended to be a “high-class weekly journal for the advocacy of social and religious progress,” and it lived up to its purpose. Nicoll was so sure the journal would succeed that he agreed to work for nothing until the profits started coming in; it was not long before the paper began to flourish and take its place as the leading Nonconformist journal in Britain. Nicoll also had the genius for discovering and developing new writers. The bylines in the British Weekly read like a Who’s Who of literature: Marcus Dods, a regular contributor from the very beginning; James M. Barrie; R. W. Dale; Joseph Parker; Henry Drummond; and a host of other “worthies.”
Not content with a weekly journal to edit (his deadlines must have been frightening!), on October 1, 1891, Nicoll launched a monthly literary magazine called The Bookman. The entire first edition of ten thousand copies sold within a few days, and it was followed by two additional printings! Two years later he started another monthly magazine, The Woman at Home. He was now editing the British Weekly and three monthly publications: The Expositor, The Bookman, and The Woman at Home.
However, it is not as a magazine editor that Robertson Nicoll touches the lives of Bible students and pastors today. It is as the author and editor of theological books, some of which are classics. It was the year after the British Weekly was born that Nicoll began to publish The Expositor’s Bible, a work that is now somewhat outdated but still valuable to the serious student. The series was released in fifty volumes between 1888 and 1905. I believe that Alexander Maclaren’s Colossians was the first volume released, and George Adam Smith’s commentary on the minor prophets the last.
Evidently Nicoll was as hard on his writers as he was on himself, and some of them protested. His good friend Marcus Dods wrote, “Pharaoh might have taken lessons from you!” And Maclaren wrote, “I hope that you are not having any holiday this autumn! It would be some alleviation to think of you as stewing in Paternoster Row.” But the editor had his problems too. When he received the manuscript for George Adam Smith’s Isaiah (for The Expositor’s Bible), Nicoll wrote Marcus Dods: “I am wresthng with George Adam Smith’s Isaiah: he has chopped up the prophet terribly.”
Oddly enough, Nicoll did much of his work while in bed! His close friend and biographer, T. H. Darlow, wrote: “It was weird to watch him as he lay there, amid a medley of newspapers and books and pipes and cigarette ashes, and to know that his brain was busy absorbing knowledge and incubating ideas all the time.” He kept a fire in his study almost all the year and claimed that fresh air was an invention of the devil! He had almost no interest in music or art and, unlike the traditional Scotsman, was not excited by sports. Why waste on games, time that could be invested profitably in books? His books and his cats and his publications were his life.
Like most extensive sets written by many writers, The Expositor’s Bible is quite uneven in quality. Kellogg on Leviticus is a classic, as are Maclaren’s three volumes on the Psalms and his exposition of Colossians. Unless you are wealthy and have a lot of empty shelves, do not purchase the fifty volumes separately. The entire set is available in a six-volume edition with large, double-column pages. I believe that this edition was originally published by Eerdmans. It may be out of print, but used sets are often available. The Expositor’s Greek New Testament (also reprinted by Eerdmans) is still in print and is still considered a standard work for the careful student of the Greek New Testament, although some students prefer Dean Henry Alford’s Greek Testament, published by Moody Press.
One of my favorite sets, edited by Nicoll, is one that is usually forgotten or is dismissed as unimportant. It is The Sermon Bible, originally published in twelve volumes and containing nearly five thousand outhnes and précis of sermons actually delivered by famous preachers in the last half of the nineteenth century. It was republished by Baker Books as The Sermon-Outhne Bible and comprises the first six volumes of a fourteen-volume series called The Preacher’s Homiletic Library. I highly recommend this set, particularly to the pastor who is not too tired (or lazy) to dig again the homiletical wells of the past. (The other eight volumes of the set are Homiletic Studies in the Gospels by Harold F. J. Ellingsen, a rich mine of sermonic suggestion, and Proclaiming the New Testament, a book-by-book, chapter-by-chapter homiletic survey of the New Testament, edited by Ralph Turnbull.) This set gives the student the best of the old and the best of the new.
It may be that you have no interest in old sermons. If so, then The Sermon-Outhne Bible will bore you. But before you consign it to the antique shop, let me suggest that you consider some of the men represented in these volumes: Joseph Parker, Henry Alford, Alexander Maclaren, Marcus Dods, Phillips Brooks, Adolph Saphir, R. W. Dale, Henry Ward Beecher, John Henry Newman, William Taylor, James Stalker, and J. J. Stuart Perowne, to name a few. Many of these men have written learned commentaries that are still available, but their sermons are difficult to come by. I do not know of any one set that offers so much historic material in such a convenient form.
But better still, the set also contains sermons by relatively unknown preachers whose works are even less accessible today. For example, there are a number of sermons from Henry Melville, whom Spurgeon called “the Demosthenes of London.” Coming from Spurgeon, that is quite a tribute! Henry Scott Holland is also represented in these pages. In his day (1847–1918) he was recognized as one of the leaders in applying Christian faith to the needs of the common man. I was amazed to also find dozens of sermons from Samuel Martin, who pastored Westminster Chapel, London, from 1841 to 1878. Under his leadership the present church building was erected. (Interestingly enough, Samuel Martin was an architect before entering the ministry; yet the design of the Westminster Chapel does not seem to reflect it. When Jowett pastored there, he said he felt as if he were preaching in the Charing Cross railway station. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has stated that the building helped to hasten the death of more than one pastor who preached there week after week.) Martin’s sermons are probably available nowhere else today. Also represented in The Sermon-Outhne Bible are Samuel Cox, Nicoll’s predecessor at The Expositor; John Ker, who was George Morrison’s favorite preacher; Horatius Bonar; Handley C. G. Moule; J. Oswald Dykes; and F. D. Maurice, who greatly influenced Phillips Brooks. These are not sermons that you will preach—their style and approach are not contemporary— but they are sermons you should read and study.
One of my favorite Nicoll books is Princes of the Church, a collection of thirty-four biographical essays on “notable figures in the Christian world.” Spurgeon is here (“He has fallen like a tower, and his removal means for many a change in the whole landscape of life”), but so are Henry Drummond, Robertson Smith, R. W. Dale, the great Roman Catholic preacher Cardinal Vaughan, George Matheson, Silvester Horne, Andrew Bonar, and Bishop Westcott. His essay on “The Centenary of Frederick Robertson” is one of the most perceptive I have ever read on this fascinating preacher from Brighton.
Nicoll’s library contained twenty-five thousand volumes, including five thousand biographies! “I have for years read every biography I could lay my hands on, and not one has failed to teach me something,” he wrote. His own biography, William Robertson Nicoll: Life and Letters, was written by T. H. Darlow and published in this country by the George H. Doran Company in 1925. Nicoll’s long-time associate at the British Weekly, Jane T. Stoddart, wrote a brief biography, W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D., Editor and Preacher. In a very real sense, Nicoll was the father of modern religious journalism, but he was also a strong churchman and preacher. He died on May 4, 1923, and among his last words were “I believe everything that I have written about immortality!”
If you are a lover of good books and good men—and every pastor should be—then get acquainted with W. Robertson Nicoll and the rich literary heritage he has left us.