Quote by Frederick W. Robertson

Frederick W. Robertson
1816-1853

Young Frederick W. Robertson wanted to join the army. But his evangelical father urged him to enter the ministry and circumstances pushed the young man in that direction. He threw himself heart and soul into training. Frederick was ordained in the Church of England by the Bishop of Winchester who gave him this motto: "Endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ." Filled with determination, Frederick became one of the greatest preachers of the nineteenth century England.

His evangelical upbringing and his personal concern for soul-winning, made him seem a natural ally of the Low Church. Indeed, he loved the common people and preached his best sermons to groups of working men. But it was in the Broad Church that his independence of thought, love of the natural sciences and sympathy with social concerns placed him.

The careful search for truth and the exhausting work of caring for his parish at Brighton wore him out. He took unpopular political stands and this brought him much criticism. A lonely man, the strain broke his health. He preached only thirteen years, dying at the young age of 37. His printed sermons came to be widely admired after his death.

      Frederick William Robertson (known as Robertson of Brighton) was an English divine, born in London. The first five years of his life were passed at Leith Fort, where his father, a captain in the Royal Artillery, was then resident. The military spirit entered into his blood, and throughout life he was characterized by the qualities of the ideal soldier. In 1821 Captain Robertson retired to Beverley, where the boy was educated. At the age of fourteen he spent a year at Tours, from which he returned to Scotland, and continued his education at the Edinburgh Academy and university.

      He read hard, and made a careful study of the Bible, committing to memory the entire New Testament both in English and in Greek. He was at this time a moderate Calvinist in doctrine, and enthusiastically evangelical. Ordained in July 1840 by the bishop of Winchester, he at once entered on ministerial work in that city, and during his ministry there and under the influence of the missionaries Henry Martyn and David Brainerd, whose lives he studied, he carried devotional asceticism to an injurious length.

      After doing duty for two months at St Ebbe's,Oxford, he entered in August 1847 on his famous ministry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. Here he stepped at once into the foremost rank as a preacher, and his church was thronged with thoughtful men of all classes in society and of all shades of religious belief.

      He was however, crippled by incipient disease of the brain, which at first inflicted unconquerable lassitude and depression, and latterly agonizing pain. On 5 June 1853 he preached for the last time, and on 15 August he died.