"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).
There is a tendency in the masses always to think--not what is true, but--what is respectable, correct, orthodox: we ask is that authorized? It comes partly from cowardice, partly from indolence: from habit: from imitation: from the uncertainty and darkness of all moral truths, and the dread of timid minds to plunge into the investigation of them. Now, truth known and believed respecting God and man, frees from this, by warning of individual responsibility. But responsibility is personal. It cannot be delegated to another, and thrown off upon a church. Before God, face to face, each soul must stand, to give account.
Do not, however, confound mental independence with mental pride. It may, it ought to co-exist with the deepest humility. For that mind alone is free which, conscious ever of its own feebleness, feeling hourly its own liability to err, turning thankfully to fight from whatever side it may come, does yet refuse to give up that right, with which God has invested it of judging, or to abrogate its own responsibility, and so humbly, and even awfully, resolves to have an opinion, a judgment, a decision of its own.
Fear enslaves, courage liberates--and that always. Whatever a man intensely dreads, that brings him into bondage, if it be above the fear of God, and the reverence of duty. The apprehension of pain, the fear of death, the dread of the world's laugh, of poverty, or the loss of reputation, enslave alike.
From such fear Christ frees, and through the power of the truths I have spoken of. He who lives in the habitual contemplation of immortality cannot be in bondage to time, or enslaved by transitory temptations. I do not say he will not, "he cannot sin," saith the Scripture, while that faith is living. He who feels his soul's dignity, knowing what he is and who, redeemed by God the Son, and freed by God the Spirit, cannot cringe, nor pollute himself, nor be mean. He who aspires to gaze undazzled on the intolerable brightness of that One before whom Israel veiled their faces, will scarcely quail before any earthly fear.
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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.