F W Boreham felt it was important to often recall his own faith journey and the time when he sensed Christ put his hand on him. He commended this practice to young ministers as a way of re-warming their spiritual passion.While Frank had been brought up in the church ‑ the St John’s Anglican Church in Tunbridge Wells and then the Immanuel (revivalist) church ‑ he marked his conversion experience to a phase in London. He later wrote several times about being dreadfully lonely when he moved to the big smoke at the age of sixteen.[1] In one of his earliest books (and now one of the most expensive to buy!), he describes his experience.[2]
In a sermon, The Ultimate Centre of Gravitation, he pictures the judge of all the earth … surrounded by the countless throng...reading the secrets of each heart as though He and the judge were there alone:
"The very magnitude of that drama of the ages shall only make each heart feel more fearfully lonely. I shall never forget the day when, at the age of sixteen, I left home and found my way up to the roar and din of London. I had never seen such crowds anywhere else, jostling and shoving for every inch of pavement. And yet I remember standing that day in the heart of the world's metropolis, under the very shadow of St. Paul's, and shivering in the thick of the crowd at my utter loneliness. Amid the hops and the clover and the orchards of my Kentish home one could often shout to his heart's content, and never a soul would hear him. Yet that was a delicious and tranquil loneliness that one loved and revelled in, but the loneliness of that awful surging crowd seemed an intolerable thing. That will be the loneliness of the Judgement day, the indescribable loneliness of standing in the midst of myriad millions, all in the regal presence of the King of kings, and each most dreadfully alone before him."
Geoff Pound
Image: St Paul’s Cathedral
[1] F W Boreham, Mountains in the Mist, 221; F W Boreham, A Reel of Rainbow, 20
[2] F W Boreham, The Whisper of God, 137.
