Anything approaching a complete history of the Christian testimony in the nineteenth century would be impossible even in a work many times the size of this. The magnitude of the work of God in this century is really stupendous and the coming day will reveal how vast the multitude gathered into the gospel net in this hundred years.
It was a time of unparalleled world development, during which the population of the earth increased beyond all precedents. That of the British Isles rose from 10 million to 32.5 million, while that of America, which at the beginning of the century consisted mainly of the Colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, expanded from five million in 1800 to seventy-five million in 1900. Not only did the whole of North and South America become the home of millions of immigrants, but a new continent opened up at the Antipodes. The British Empire, with the possessions of the other European powers, brought almost the whole world under the domination of Europe.
But at the beginning of the century, all these movements were in their infancy. England was still mainly an agricultural country. The great areas now black with factories and dwellings were represented in 1811 by half a dozen large towns, besides London. Railroads had not been laid; the so-called industrial revolution had scarcely begun. Britain lay under the threat of invasion by Napoleon’s armies. After Waterloo, however, no major conflicts devastated the world until 1914, so that the nations enjoyed a century of comparative peace, during which trade and industry, science, wealth and education made tremendous strides.
At this epoch, and more particularly during the first half of the century, it pleased God to give a fresh and powerful impulse to the gospel, which, by the end of the century, had spread all over the world. Britain was the focus of this great activity, and it was largely from this favored land that the glad tidings spread among the peoples of the earth.
The gospel seed sown in the previous century continued to bear fruit. While it did not center around such outstanding figures as those of Whitefield and Wesley, the tide of revival had not ceased. In England it spread to those parts which had been less abundantly watered, the agricultural counties. Scotland was visited with showers of blessing. During the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century, America was blessed with successive waves of evangelical revival which left a lasting impression on thousands. On the Continent, the dying embers of faith were kindled anew. The opposition to lay preaching had been broken down, and many humble and unlettered men, with faith in their hearts and the Bible in their hands, spread the Word of life among the poorer classes. Men and women, who had themselves drunk the waters of life, were eager to carry it to their fellowmen, and there thus arose that great zeal for the salvation of others, which found its expression in missionary enterprise. While the war with France was raging, earnest Christian men in England, so far from being entirely absorbed with current events, were seeking means to carry the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. Several missionary societies had begun in the closing years of the eighteenth century. In 1799 the Religious Tract Society was founded, in 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society, and many similar societies, yet these were days when, to those living at the time, the fate of Britain seemed to be trembling in the balance.
It has been said that in the nineteenth century Christianity was a greater factor in influencing mankind as a whole than in any preceding age. There was, moreover, at this time a clearer distinction between true Christians and those who were purely nominal. The gospel permeated every stratum of society, and not a few among the upper classes were truly converted and became lights in the world. Many titled people were found at this period devoting their lives to the service of Christ. What is called “family worship” (daily prayer and Scripture reading) was common among the well-to-do. In those days, an unbeliever moving among the higher circles of society complained that “religion” was the topic everywhere.
One great factor lay in the open Bible. The influence of the Holy Scriptures on men and nations has been incalculable. The first half of the nineteenth century was a time when the Bible had a preeminent place. There was much poverty and suffering as a result of war and the growth of the factory system in the days of the industrial revolution, but it was Christians, men whose lives had been changed by the gospel, who devoted themselves to relieve the poor and oppressed and to give them the gospel and the rudiments of education. Indeed, it was the advantage which being able to read the Word of God afforded that led Christian men and women to take an interest in the education of the poor. The government did not take it in hand till the end of the century. Griffiths Jones, a godly clergyman in Wales in the previous century, finding how much his labors among the poor were hindered by their inability to read, began to open schools for the children of the poor. Hannah Moore made a similar effort among the poor children of Cheddar. Sunday schools had, at first, a similar object in view. There is the well-known story of the little Welsh girl who learned to read so that she might be able to study the Bible, and she saved her hard-earned pennies for several years in her eagerness to have one of her own and then trudged twenty-five miles to buy it. The account so moved those who heard it that it led directly to the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society. The circulation of the Scriptures in many languages all over the world has, in itself, produced a harvest, the extent of which is known only in heaven.
In 1814 a revival occurred in West Cornwall. It began in a prayer meeting, not through preaching. The emotional excesses that often accompany such movements were in evidence, but there were five or six thousand converts who continued to tread the Christian path to the end of their lives.
In 1815 William O’Bryan, a Cornwall Methodist preacher, felt called to go and preach in Devonshire, a county which the Evangelical Revival had not so far reached. He was dismissed from the Methodist society for engaging in such activities without authority—strange indeed, when one considers that Wesley himself sought no authority but the Lord’s for his life’s work. The Lord Himself appoints His evangelists and teachers, and it is quenching the Spirit to attempt to constrain His activities within the confines of a human system. The outcome of this attempt was the rise of the so-called Bible Christians, who multiplied rapidly in that part of the country. Among the number was the well-known Billy Bray, of whose life we must give a few details later.
O’Bryan was son of a wealthy farmer and tin miner. He was converted and became an evangelist, leaving the comforts of a home to spread the gospel. When he was expelled by the Wesleyans for these activities, he said, “I cannot abandon the work. It is my first duty to obey God, who has called me to it and who will be my judge in the last day.”
The Bible Christians were very evangelical and suffered not a little persecution. One of them wrote in 1830, “We have rotten eggs hurled at us, birds let loose in the midst, windows broken and I know not what else besides, but we have glory in the soul, and that makes up for the whole.”
They had, at first, no chapels or meeting rooms, and converts had to be left to find a place among other Churches. But by 1865 they had 750 chapels, 2,000 itinerant preachers and 26,000 members, besides 50,000 who had emigrated and by whom the gospel was carried to other lands.
Some time previously, in 1808, a man named Bourne was excluded by the Wesleyan body for open-air preaching in the Midlands, and in 1810 W. Clowes, a native of Hull, suffered the same fate. Their preaching, however, was blessed, and their converts became known as Primitive Methodists. There were thus two more sects formed, which, with the Methodist New Connection formed in 1796, made four Methodist Sects. Hugh Bourne was a rather timid man. His work began by conversational preaching and cottage prayer meetings. Later what were called “camp meetings” were held in the open air, attended by large numbers. He traveled forty to fifty miles a day, often on foot, and his diet often consisted of bread and hard-boiled eggs.
W. Clowes labored in much the same way. He and his wife had but 1/3 d. a week to live on, and when visitors had to be provided for, they had to be content themselves with bread and water to make ends meet. Such poverty was the lot of many in those days. God supported men who were prepared to make such sacrifices, and waves of blessing are recorded, continuing to the end of the first half of the century. Many of the converts became themselves preachers. Most of them were simple, unlettered men, with one aim before them: to spread the gospel. William Garner walked forty thousand miles in twenty years and preached six thousand times.
After the Napoleonic wars, there had been an appalling increase in poverty and vice in the rural districts. Persecution was often the preachers’ lot. Jeremiah Gilbert was arrested a dozen times in eighteen months. In East Anglia, the mob, after brutally treating a preacher named Key, changed its attitude. Suddenly the ringleader cried out, “You’re right and we are wrong,” and a circle of defense was made around him. These preachers were men of prayer. It is said of another, William Braithwaite, that a farmer, peering through the hedge, saw him on his knees, crying, “Thou must give me souls! I cannot preach without souls! Lord, give me souls, or I shall die!”
As we have already seen, the Baptists arose in England in Reformation days and formed an important element among the Puritans. They had divided into two main sections, the Particular Baptists, so named for their Calvinistic views, and the General Baptists. Both bodies had badly declined by the eighteenth century. The Particular Baptists, by carrying certain aspects of the truth to an extreme, seemed to lose sight of man’s responsibility. The outcome was that they were unable to offer a free salvation to all men, and the preaching of the gospel withered among them. This led to rapid decay. The Presbyterians and Congregationalists were similarly affected. They took the ground that Christ died, not for all, but only for the elect, and therefore it was not right to invite all to repent and believe in Him. Wesley felt so strongly about this attitude that he went to the opposite extreme of Arminianism. The General Baptists fell into another, even more serious error, that of Unitarianism, the denial of the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. They dwindled away or became Unitarian Churches.
After the Evangelical Revival, the General Baptists had a new beginning. It came about as follows. The preaching of David Taylor, one of Lady Huntingdon’s servants, has already been referred to. Several companies of believers were gathered as a result of his labors and formed an independent body. They had meeting rooms at Hinchley, Loughborough, Melbourne and elsewhere. They were mostly poor, laboring folk, and their preachers were untrained and unpaid. They became convinced, however, that the baptism of infants, as practiced in the Anglican Church, was without scriptural warrant and adopted believers’ baptism by immersion as one of their principles.
About the same time another Taylor, Dan Taylor, born in 1738, a native of Yorkshire, came under the influence of Wesley, Whitefield and Grimshaw. Although a miner, he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew in his spare time, later leaving the mine to become the minister of a small group who had left the Methodists and who met together at Wadsworth, near Hebden Bridge. Like his namesake in Leicestershire, this man, too, came to question the rightness of infant baptism. Some time after, he came in touch with some of the old General Baptists in Lincolnshire, but he soon discovered their doctrinal errors and the deadness already alluded to. He is credited with the epigrammatic verdict upon them: “They degraded Jesus Christ, and He degraded them.” Later he came in touch with the Leicestershire companies which had arisen spontaneously, as already recorded. The two groups joined and a new body of Baptists arose, marked by zeal for the gospel. During the latter part of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth century, this body of Christians prospered and multiplied. Their unworldliness and piety is shown by the fact that they declined to receive into fellowship a person who was engaged in secular business till 1:00 p.m. on the Lord’s Day. They discouraged marriages with unbelievers. Unconverted or immoral persons were not allowed to take a lead in their singing. They held it to be unscriptural and anti-Christian to join such associations as the “Orange Clubs,” “Ancient Druids” and “Odd Fellows.” Their members were forbidden to keep beer shops. They disapproved of sick-clubs, maintaining that it was the duty of the Church to provide for its sick members. They regarded the use of musical instruments as unlawful in congregational service and maintained that fox hunting was, for Christians, “a waste of precious time, expense ill applied and a gratification of carnal nature.” And these were not simply individual opinions, but decisions arrived at in their annual meetings between 1783 and 1837. These details will serve to show how the tide of revival spread and affected Christians irrespective of denomination.
The gospel indifference of the Particular Baptists was also overcome and more balanced views as to the truth acquired. It was from among them that William Carey went forth to preach the gospel in India.
In 1801 the Baptist Churches had 176,692 sittings. By 1851 the number had risen to 752,343. How many of those covered by these figures were truly converted persons we do not pretend to say. We may hope the majority were. They do, however, give some idea of the way the gospel was influencing men and women in the first half of the nineteenth century. The revival of faith was the great feature of those days, and this revival spread throughout Christendom. It introduced new life into every denomination, except those which denied the deity of Christ. It spread to the Continent, pervaded America, and led to a wave of evangelical activity which carried the gospel to every corner of the earth and disseminated the Holy Scriptures in most of the world’s languages. In no age since Pentecost had such a widespread diffusion of the gospel taken place. And if the physical miracles which accompanied the gospel preachers of the first century were not in evidence, spiritual miracles, equally wonderful, testified to the divine power which was working through human vessels — vessels frail, weak and failing in themselves but which held and conveyed a power that could not be other than the power of God.
Billy Bray
Among the so-called Bible Christians already referred to was Billy Bray, a simple, working man, whom God greatly used in the early part of the nineteenth century in Cornwall.
He was born in a little village near Truro in 1794. His parents were pious people, and his grandfather was one of Wesley’s early converts. Billy, however, grew up to be a helpless drunkard. One day Bunyan’s book, Visions of Heaven and Hell, came into his hands, and as he read, the arrow of conviction pierced his soul. In the middle of the night, he was driven to get out of bed and pray, and he spent the next morning in prayer. From that moment, the great change began. A little later he spent the whole day in prayer and in reading the Bible and Wesley’s hymnbook. Then he went to the little hall where the Bible Christians met. He spent days and nights in agony of soul, crying for mercy. One night, returning home from his work, he went to his bedroom without supper. There he said to the Lord, “Thou hast said, ‘They that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened,’ and I have faith to believe it.” At that instant, the clouds rolled away and peace and joy unspeakable filled his soul. He said, “I was like a man in a new world.” He could hardly find his workmates quickly enough, so eager was he to tell of his newfound joy.
His wife, who had been a backsliding Christian herself, was soon recovered. A number of fellow-workers and neighbors got blessed through his testimony. About a year after his conversion, towards the end of 1824, he became a local preacher and there was such power and attractiveness in his preaching that people flocked to hear him. On Sundays, crowds of strangers were seen making for the little whitewashed chapel where he was wont to preach, and when crowds of well-dressed people were to be found in the neighboring town, the explanation was that Billy Bray was going to preach. It is said that the secret of his successful preaching was much prayer. His disposition was naturally exuberant, and the joy that filled his soul, continually, expressed itself in keeping with his character, both in his actions and in his words. He said once, “I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot and it seems to say ‘Glory,’ and I lift up the other foot and it seems to say ‘Amen,’ and so they keep on like that all the time I am walking.”
Poor as he was and without any money in sight, he began to build a little chapel near his home with his own hands. In spite of much opposition, he got the materials together and built the chapel. The place was a center of blessing. He said he had seen fifty at one time asking for mercy, “and mercy they had.” A little while after, he felt the Lord had told him to build another chapel, a mile away at Kerley Downs. Still a poor miner, working daily in the mine, with a wife and five small children, working sometimes on the morning shift, sometimes on the afternoon shift, and sometimes at night, he spent the free part of the day building. Beside this, he preached every Sunday, sometimes three times a day and sometimes had to walk twenty miles. After this he built another chapel at Gwennap. In answer to his faith, God provided the means in remarkable ways.
So he went on for forty years, praying and praising, working and preaching, and God was with him. His labors were abundantly blessed, and the record of his life has been an encouragement, a cheer and an inspiration to thousands more. His earthly course came to its completion in his seventy-fourth year on May 25, 1868. The last word he uttered on earth was “Glory.”
There were in the Church of England at this time many truly evangelical clergymen who preached the gospel and contended “for the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 33Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. (Jude 3) JND), as far as their light went. A brief account of two such men follows.
Legh Richmond
Well-known as the author of The Dairyman’s Daughter, a little book much admired and widely circulated in Victorian days, Legh Richmond became, as a young man, curate of Brading in the Isle of Wight. Good living and conscientious, he carried out his formal duties correctly, but he was a stranger to vital Christianity. Through reading William Wilberforce’s Practical View of Christianity, he was brought to see that he was a guilty sinner needing pardon and peace, and he was thus led to trust the Saviour. A new motive now entered his life; his conversation, his habits and his service were transformed. By study of the Scriptures, he became versed in the truth and preached a sound and effective gospel. He visited the homes in his parish with a view to their spiritual welfare and thus came into touch with the fervent, young Christian woman whose closing days he portrays in his book. The book was translated into nearly every European language and circulated also widely in America. Later Richmond became rector of Turvey in Bedfordshire, where he served with the same devotion till the end of his life in 1827.
The young woman who was the subject of his book recalls another devoted clergyman, Samuel Marsden, who, going as chaplain to the penal settlement in Australia, was the first to take the gospel to the Maoris of New Zealand. It was through his preaching in the Isle of Wight on the eve of his departure that this young person was converted.
A copy of this book translated into the native tongue was left in a town in what was once called Bithynia. Years later a group of Christians were found gathered together as the result of its message.
William Haslam
This High Church clergyman who went to Cornwall for his health was then a zealous sacerdotalist entirely without evangelical light. One of his congregation, his own gardener, had been converted on his deathbed through the word of a Dissenting preacher. Haslam was both alarmed and grieved by this. His concern was deepened by a brother clergyman who told him he would do no good in his parish until he was converted himself. The next Sunday, while preaching on the words, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:11Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: (Romans 5:1)), the light broke into his soul. The change was so obvious that Billy Bray, who was among the congregation that day, rose up and cried, “Hallelujah, the passon’s converted.” With a heart as full of joy as it had been of misery, he now proclaimed Christ alone as the means of salvation. The effect on his congregation was immediate. Many cried for mercy and were saved. His labors from that time were accompanied by great blessing. A revival such as he had never dreamed of resulted. He wrote an account of it in an interesting and widely read book entitled From Death Unto Life. It was through Haslam that Lord A. P. Cecil, who became well-known among the “Brethren,” was converted.