THE OFFICIAL F W BOREHAM BLOG SITE

F W Boreham on Facebook

2009-08-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

A Public Page for fans of the life and writings of Dr F W Boreham has been established on the social media networking site Facebook.

Articles are being shared, book reviews linked, discussions encouraged and pictures posted about FWB, 50 years after his death.

This new site gives the opportunity to see and share with others who have an interest in Frank William Boreham.

Already over 80 people have become a part of this low key FWB Facebook community.

The F W Boreham Page is one of the good reasons to become part of Facebook.

If F W Boreham were living today would he be on Facebook? I discuss this question in one of the first articles on the new site.

Share this news with others interested in the life and ministry of FWB.

Link
Here is the link to the F W Boreham Facebook Page.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: F W Boreham Public Page on Facebook.

Listening to F W Boreham

2009-06-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

F W Boreham recorded some radio talks on Australia’s ABC station in the 1940s and 1950s.

I’m grateful to Andrew Corbett who has made them available and posted four talks (sound files) on his web site, Finding Truth Matters.

Andrew, who lives in FWB’s old Australian state of Tasmania, has written a fine article entitled, ‘F W Boreham: The Greatest Essayist of All Time.’ You will find the link on the left margin of Andrew’s site or you can click at this point.

The four devotional talks by F W Boreham are at the bottom of that article.

Other Recordings
A Missionary address given at a Baptist Union of Victoria Assembly is in the BUV Archives, as is a fairly indistinct recording that was taken off a record disc, on the topic of the Trinity.

Boreham’s Voice
FWB sounds rather old on these four devotional talks and he was probably more vigorous when younger and speaking to the Hobart Tabernacle congregation. On these four talks he adopts a more conversational style.

Local historian, Lindsay Newnham said to me that Boreham possessed an “orotund voice which was quite spellbinding.”

Boreham’s Accent
Boreham’s voice has a mixture of a Kentish accent that has been tempered by living in cosmopolitan London, a dozen years in NZ and the balance of his life based in Australia.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: FWB

Boreham on The Other Side of the Hill

2009-05-31T02:00:00.001-07:00

`But what is on the other side of the hill?'
That was the question. That is always the question. My friend and I had been spinning along in the car, the towering mountain and the shining harbour behind us, whilst each bend in the road presented us with a fresh unfolding of the ceaseless panorama of woodland, pasture, and stream. We were bound for nowhere, and so far as we could see the road led there. We were out for the pure sake of being out. All at once a sense of chilliness crept over us, and we were reminded that even the wealthiest days become bankrupt at last. Should we turn round and go home? There was only one objection. Right ahead of us lay a long range of hills. They had attracted our attention a few hours earlier as we sat under a big tree by the side of the road enjoying an al-fresco lunch. During the afternoon their massive forms had crept nearer and nearer, as the car had sped swiftly towards them. They captivated our fancy and lured us on. There was something taunting and challenging about them.
‘Shall we turn round and go home?'
‘But, what is on the other side of the hill?'
That, I say, is the question. It is the oldest question in the world and the greatest question in the world. All the pathos and the tragedy of the ages are crammed into it. It was the first question that man asked; it will be the last that he will try to answer. Wherever on this planet you find a man, you find him with eyes turned wistfully towards the distant ranges, repeating to himself again and yet again the old, old question, 'The hill! The other side of the hill! What is on the other side of the hill?'

That is how history and geography—and everything else—came to be. The first man, toiling amidst his weedy pastures, earned his bread in the sweat of his brow. But often, in the cool of the evening, he sat outside his primitive dwelling and pointed away to the hill tops that here and there broke the skyline. 'I wonder,' he said a hundred times to his companion, 'I wonder what is on the other side of the hill!' It never fell to his happy lot to sweep with delighted eye the valleys that stretched out beyond those ranges; but his sons and his grandsons conquered those tantalizing heights. They went out, north, south, east, and west; climbed one range and caught sight of another; were lured on and on—always by the old, old question; wandered beyond reach of each other; lost touch with the old home; settled here and settled there; and so your tribes, your races, your nations, and your empires came to be. It was the other side of the hill that did it.

And if it was the other side of the hill that made them, it was also the other side of the hill that made them great. For the great peoples have been the exploring peoples; and what is exploration but an attempt to discover the land that lies on the other side of the hill? Here, in Australia, exploration began with the conquest of the Blue Mountains. Settlement was confined to a narrow strip of land on the far east of the continent. And there, to the west, were the hills. And every evening, as shepherds and squatters watched the sun set over those huge, rugged peaks, they itched to discover what lay beyond the ranges. Again and again they attempted to solve the eternal secret; again and again they were baulked and defeated. Then came that never-to-be-forgotten day, a hundred years ago, when Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth crossed the mountains. They found that a great continent with fertile valleys, spreading plains, and rolling prairies lay on the other side of the hill. And on that memorable day the history of Australia began. It has been so everywhere. What was the opening up of America but the constant desire to discover what was on the other side of the hill? Think of that great moment—only twenty-one years after the epoch-making voyage of Columbus—when Vasco Nunez de Balboa

With eagle eye
First stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a peak in Darien.

Why the 'wild surmise'? Simply because they had found an ocean without looking for it! They were not searching for the Pacific; they were simply trying to find out what was on the other side of the hill! That was all.

Yes, that was all; and yet, after all, it is a fine thing to know what is on the other side of the hill. Who can read the fiery theological controversies of days gone by without wishing that each of the angry disputants had been able to peep over the brow of the ridge? Think of the language with which Luther and Calvin assailed each other! Think even of the correspondence of Wesley and Toplady. Wesley, the greatest evangelical force that England has ever known, wrote of the author of `Rock of Ages,' `Mr. Augustus Toplady I know well; but I do not fight with chimney-sweeps. He is too dirty a writer for me to meddle with; I should only foul my fingers.' Toplady was quite capable of repaying the founder of Methodism in his own coin. Wesley, he declared, was a hatcher of blasphemies; his forehead was impervious to a blush; he had perpetrated upon the public a known, a wilful, and a palpable lie! But it is too bad of me to drag these amenities of eighteenth-century controversy from the dust that has so long covered them. Let me bury them again at once; and let us remember Wesley only as the greatest spiritual force in the making of modern England, and let us remember Toplady only as the author of our favourite hymn.

For, after all, what do these angry sentences prove? They only prove that, for a little season, neither Wesley nor Toplady were able to see what was on the other side of the hill. I never read a newspaper controversy, or listen to a heated debate, without feeling that. It is so obvious that each of the disputants is standing on his own side of the hill, shouting at his opponent over the ridge that separates them.
`The bush consists principally of wattle!' cries A., looking around him at the swaying tassels of gold.
`I tell you that the bush consists principally of gum!' replies B., as he hears the flapping of the great strips of bark on every side.
'It is wattle!' cries A.
`It is gum!' cries B.
`You're distorting the facts!' shrieks A.
`You are telling lies!' returns B. And so the quarrel goes on; both A. and B. getting hotter and angrier as it proceeds. But anybody who stands on the ridge, looking down into both valleys, can see that both are right. On A.'s side the soil and the general conditions favour the growth of the wattle, and the wattle undoubtedly predominates. Just over the hill, the eucalyptus is in its element, and, as a consequence, the blue-gum reigns without a rival there. If only A. and B. could each have taken a peep over the hilltop! If only Calvin could have seen things as they presented themselves to the eye of Luther; and if only Luther could have looked at the universe from Calvin's standpoint! If only Wesley could have taken Toplady by the arm, and they could have walked together—first to the one side of the hill and then to the other! If only all our controversialists could be convinced of the very obvious truth that a peak is the meeting-place of two separate valleys! But alas, alas; it is very difficult. So many people seem to suppose that a hilltop crowns one valley and one valley only. So few are willing to see what grows on the other side of the hill.

And yet, for the matter of that, every man knows what is on the other side of the hill. Immensity is on the other side of the hill. Infinity is on the other side of the hill. From my doorstep to the hilltop is a matter of a mile or two at the most; but who can measure in miles the land that lies on the other side of the hill? Between me and the hills lie a cluster of farms; but all the continents and oceans lie over the ranges—on the other side of the hill. Therein lies the consecration and the glory of the Church.

On a pinnacle in South America, at the very summit of a lofty range of mountains, an immense statue of Jesus was recently placed. There is a deeper significance in the incident than the sculptors themselves saw. For Christ is always on the hilltops pointing His Church to the immensities beyond. The Church has always inclined towards parochialism; she has contented herself with those few miles that lie between herself and the distant foothills. But the Master has stood ever on the sunlit summit pointing to the infinities beyond. It is the story of Kipling's `Explorer':

There's no sense in going further—it’s the edge of cultivation!
So they said, and I believed it—broke my land and sowed my
crop—
Built my barns and strung my fences on the little border station,
Tucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and
stop.
Till a voice, as bad as conscience, rang interminable changes,
On one everlasting whisper, day and night repeated—so:
'Something hidden! Go and find it! Go and look behind the
ranges!
Something lost behind the ranges! Lost, and waiting for
You—GO!'

'Go,' said the Master. `Go ye into all the world.' In that tremendous 'Go,' the Church has caught a glimpse of the other side of the hill, and has herself been saved from narrowness by the discovery.

Yes, immensity and infinity are on the other side of the hill. Immensity and Infinity—and Eternity. That is why the pilgrims of the ages have been struggling with bleeding feet up those precipitous slopes. They hoped that, from the summit, they might catch one satisfying glimpse of the Beyond. Sages and savages alike have gazed with awe at the hilltops, wondering what lay on the other side. No tribe or people has ever been discovered but in some tent or wigwam or kraal there dwelt some priest or fakir or medicine-man who guessed and muttered of the things on the other side of the hill. Oh, the witchery and the mystery of the other side of the hill! Oh, the lure and the fascination of the other side of the hill! There is, I say, a deeper significance in that South American statue than its constructors imagined. For Jesus stands on the hilltop. He sees what is on our side of the hill, and He sees what is on the other. And, since He knows, I need no fakir, no guesser, no medicine-man. He has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. And there He stands! And so long as He commands that eminence, there is no terror for me on either side of the hill.

F W Boreham, ‘The Other Side of the Hill’, The Other Side of the Hill (London: Charles H Kelly, 1917), 39-47.

Dr Geoff Pound

Boreham on The Powder Magazine

2009-05-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

I
I have a special fondness for explosive people. I can never persuade myself that dynamite got into the world by accident. I intolerantly scout the theory that the devil built all the volcanoes, and that his minions feed their furious fires. I have admired an indescribable grandeur in the hurricane. I have felt the cyclone to be splendid, and the tornado to be next door to sublimity. Even the earthquake has a glory of its own. And how a thunderstorm clears the air! How deliciously sweet my garden smells when the riven clouds have passed, and the glittering drops are still clinging like pendant gems to the drooping petals and the bright green leaves! And, in the same way, I have discovered something terribly sublime in those stormy elements that sweep the realm within.

There was a time when my eyes were closed to this side of the glory of God's world. I used to think it a dreadful thing for Paul to be cross with Barnabas. I thought it shocking if Barnabas spoke sharply to Paul. For Barnabas was `a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.' And Paul was `a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.' And I thought that so lovely and tranquil a little world had no room for dynamite. Till, one day, a thing happened that made me feel as though a volcano had burst into eruption at my feet! I was thunderstruck! The circumstances are briefly told. Paul and Barnabas had just completed one adventurous, triumphant, and historic campaign together. Together they had crossed the tumbling seas in crazy little vessels that would scarcely now be permitted to cruise about a river. Together they had trudged, singing as they went, along the lonely forest trail through the lowlands of Pamphylia. Together they had climbed the great pass over the mountains of Pisidia. Together they had felt the exhilaration of the heights as they surveyed, shading their eyes with their hands, the lands that they had come to conquer. Together, at the risk of their lives, they had forded streams in full tumultuous flood; together they had known hunger and thirst; together they had shared unspeakable hardships; together they had faced the most terrible privations. Together they had been deified one day, and together they had been stoned the next. Together they had made known the love of Christ in the great capitals; together they had rejoiced over their converts; and then, together, they had made that never-to-be-forgotten return journey. I have often tried to imagine their emotions, as, on the homeward way, they came in sight of one city after another that they had visited in coming. In coming, those cities were heathen capitals and nothing more. In returning, there were churches there and fond familiar faces! And what meetings those must have been in each city when the members again welcomed Paul and Barnabas; when the two scarred heroes told the thrilling tale of their experiences elsewhere; and when, in each church, ministers and officers were appointed! And, leaving a chain of thoroughly organized churches behind them across the land, as a ship leaves her foaming wake across the waters, the two valiant and dauntless companions returned home. How all this had welded these two noble souls together! They are knit, each to each, like the souls of David and Jonathan.

And now a second campaign is suggested. Barnabas proposes that they should take with them Mark. Mark, who was the nephew of Barnabas had started with them on their former journey; but, at the first brush of persecution, he had hastily scampered home. Paul instantly vetoes the proposal. He will not hear of it. He will not have a coward at any price. His soul loathes a traitor. Barnabas insists, but Paul remains adamant. `And the contention was so sharp between them that they departed asunder the one from the other,' and, probably, never met again. If I had not been actually present and witnessed this amazing explosion with my own eyes, I fancy my faith would have staggered. As it is, the surprising spectacle only taught me that God has left room for dynamite in a world like this; and, much as I admired both Paul and Barnabas before the outburst, I loved them still more when the storm was overpast.

II
I have said that I saw this astonishing outburst with my own eyes. That is so, or at least so I fancied. For it seemed to me that I was honoured with a seat on a committee of which both Paul and Barnabas were valued and revered members. We all loved them, and treasured every gracious word that fell from their lips. For `Barnabas was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.' And 'Paul was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.' Now Mark had applied to the committee for engagement as a missionary. And Barnabas rose to move his appointment. I shall never forget the charm and grace with which he did it. I could see at a glance that the good man was speaking under deep feeling. His voice reflected his strong emotion. He reminded us that Mark was his relative, and he felt a certain heavy responsibility for his nephew's spiritual well-being. He trembled, he said, lest he should be condemned as one who risked his life for the heathen over the seas, but who displayed no serious solicitude concerning his own kith and kin. He had wept in secret over his young kinsman's former treachery. But it had made him the more eager to win his soul in spite of everything. He was alarmed lest the rejection of his relative should lead to his utter humiliation, total exclusion, and final loss. He admitted with shame and grief all that could be alleged against him. He had been weighed in the balances and found wanting. He had turned his back in the hour of peril. But what of that? Had we not all our faults and failures? I remember that, as he said this, Barnabas glanced round the council-table, and looked inquiringly into each face. There was moisture in his own bright eyes, and each man hung his head beneath that searching glance.

And then, he went on, surely there was something admirable in Mark's original venture. He had nothing to gain by going. It was his enthusiasm for the cause of Christ that prompted him to go. It proved that his heart was in the right place. And the very fact that he was anxious to set out again, with a full knowledge of the perils before him, proved indisputably that he had sincerely repented of his earlier unfaithfulness, and was eager for an opportunity of redeeming his name from contempt. How could we ourselves hope for forgiveness unless we were prepared to show mercy in a case like this? Once more those searchlights swept the faces round the table. And then, with wonderful tenderness, Barnabas reminded us of the bruised reed that must not be broken and of the smoking flax that must not be quenched. And, in the name of Him who, after His resurrection, found a special place for Peter, the disciple who had thrice denied his Lord, Barnabas implored us to favour his nephew's application. There was a hush in the room when the gracious speech was finished. We all felt that Barnabas was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.

III
Then Paul rose. One could see at a glance that his whole soul rebelled against having to oppose the partner of so many providential escapes, the comrade of so many gallant fights. The affection of these two for each other was very beautiful. Paul admitted frankly that he had been deeply touched by the gracious words that had fallen from the lips of Barnabas. His heart leaped up to greet every one of those appeals. Each argument met with its echo and response in every fibre of his being. For old friendship's sake he would dearly like to accede to the request of Barnabas. Was it not through the influence of Barnabas, and in face of strong opposition, that he himself was admitted to the sacred service? And because Mark was his old friend's nephew he would especially wish to entertain the proposal. But we were gathered together, he reminded us, in the sacred interests of the kingdom of Christ. And for the sake of the honour of that kingdom we must be prepared to set aside considerations of friendship, and even to ignore the tender claims of kinship. The friendship of Barnabas was one of earth's most precious treasures; but he could not allow even that to influence him in a matter in which he felt that the integrity of the cause of Christ was at stake. The relatives of Barnabas were as dear to him as his own kith and kin; but there were higher considerations than domestic considerations. Mark had once—perhaps twice—proved himself unequal to the claims of this perilous undertaking. He might render excellent and valuable service in some other capacity. But for this particular enterprise, which required, as well as a warm heart, a cool head and a steady nerve, Mark was clearly unfitted. He became terror-stricken in the hour of danger. They could not afford to run such risks. A defection in their own party gave the enemy cause to blaspheme. It exposed them to ridicule and contempt. The heathen cried out that these men were prepared to follow Christ so long as Christ never went near a cross. The Jews, who had themselves suffered for their faith, laughed at a new doctrine from which its very teachers might be scared and intimidated. And the young converts would find it immensely more difficult to endure persecution for the gospel's sake if they beheld one of the missionaries turn his back in the hour of peril. He had long ago forgiven Mark, he said, for his former failure. Indeed, he scarcely recognized any need for forgiveness. He felt sorry for his young friend at the time, and he felt sorry for him still. Mark was a gentle spirit, not made for riots and tumults; and, in the shock of opposition, he was easily frightened. His love for Christ, and his zeal for service, were very admirable; and they all loved him for his simplicity and sincerity and enthusiasm. But, knowing his peculiar frailty, they must not expose either him or the cause to needless risk. The welfare of Mark, and the reputation of the Cross, were very dear to him; and he would on no account whatever agree to submit the delicate soul of Mark to a strain that it had already proved itself unable to bear, or the gospel to an unnecessary risk of being brought into disfavour and contempt. He implored the committee to deal wisely and considerately with the subtle and delicate and complex character of his young friend, and to prize above everything else the honour of the gospel. Personally he was quite determined that it would be a wicked and unjust and unkind thing to expose the soul of Mark to such imminent peril, and the Cross of Christ to such grave risk of further scandal. He would on no account take Mark. The speech was so tempered with tenderness, as well as with firmness and wisdom, that it created a profound impression. We all felt that Paul was a good man and full of the Holy Ghost.

IV
Neither would yield. How could they? Each had heard a voice that was higher and more imperative than the voice of sentiment or of friendship. It is ridiculous to say that they should have `made it up' for old sake's sake, or for the gospel's sake, or for any other sake. Barnabas believed, in the very soul of him, that it would be wrong to leave Mark behind. And Paul believed, in the very soul of him, that it would be wrong to take Mark with them. You cannot bridge a gulf like that. Each tried to convince the other. The contention became sharp but futile. And they parted. And I, for one, honour them. They could not, as `good men and full of the Holy Ghost,' have done anything else. I do not pretend to understand why God has made room in the world for earthquakes and volcanoes. I see them tear up the valleys and hurl down the mountains; and I stand bewildered and astonished. But there they are! I do not pretend to understand these other explosive forces. But there they are! And I, for one, love both Paul and Barnabas the more that they will neither of them sacrifice, even for friendship's sweet sake, the interests of the cause of Christ.

In my New Zealand days I knew two men, almost aged. I have told the story in detail in Mushrooms on the Moor. These two men had been bosom friends. Time after time, year after year, they had walked up to the house of God in company. In the days of grey hairs they came to differ on important religious questions, and could no longer conscientiously worship beneath the same roof. They met; they tried to discuss the debatable doctrine; but their hearts were too full. Side by side they walked for miles along lonely roads on a clear, frosty, moonlight night, in the hope that presently a discussion would be possible. I walked in reverent silence some distance ahead of them. But speech never came. Grief had completely paralysed the vocal powers, and the eyes were streaming with another eloquence. They wrung each other's hands at length, and parted without even a `Good-night.' They still differ; they still occasionally meet; they still love. They even admire each other for being willing to sacrifice old fellowship for conscience sake. There is something here with which the more flippant advocates of church union do not reckon. Paul and Barnabas are good men, both of them, and full of the Holy Ghost. But they cannot agree. Face to face, the contention becomes very sharp. They wisely part. As I say, I do not pretend to understand why God left so many explosive forces lying about His world; but there they are!

V
It all turned out wonderfully well, as it was bound to do. Barnabas, whatever became of him, made a hero of Mark. He became perfectly lion-hearted. `Bring Mark with thee,' wrote Paul to Timothy, when he himself was awaiting his martyr-death at Rome. 'Bring Mark with thee, for he is profitable to me for my ministry.' And I like to think that when Peter felt that the time had come to put on permanent record the holy memories of earlier Galilean days, he employed Mark to pen the precious pamphlet for him. Peter and Mark understood each other. And as they worked together on that second `gospel,' they had many a tearful talk of the way in which, long before, they had each played the coward's part, and had each been greatly forgiven and graciously restored. To those of us who look up to Paul and Barnabas as to a terrific height above us, it is splendid to know that there is room for Peter and for Mark in the heart that loves and in the service that ennobles.

F W Boreham, ‘The Powder Magazine’, The Other Side of the Hill (London: Charles H Kelly, 1917), 253-264.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “I can never persuade myself that dynamite got into the world by accident.”

Boreham on The Signal Box

2009-05-27T02:22:00.000-07:00

When I was a small boy in my Kentish home, I was occasionally missing—even at meal-times. As the years wore on, the alarm created by these mysterious disappearances of mine gradually subsided, not by reason of any dwindling value or importance attached to my person, but simply because a very shrewd conjecture could be formed as to my whereabouts. For at the foot of our garden, separated from it by a high bank, which was itself a romantic wilderness of blackberries, ran the railway. And just beside the railway line, not more than a hundred yards from the bottom of the garden, was the signal-box. Few things delighted me more than to spend an hour in that old signal-box. It was close to the mouth of the tunnel. I loved to hear the bell go ring-a-ting-ting when the train entered the tunnel on the far side, and to watch for its emergence on our side. It seemed to me positively uncanny that the signalman could tell by all these clanging tokens just where all the trains were. I liked to see him swing the great levers backwards and forwards, pulling the signals up and down, and at night-time causing the green and red lights to shine from the tall signal-posts. As I sat beside his great, roaring fire on winter evenings, and saw him stop the trains or let them pass, just as he pleased, I thought he must surely be one of the most important men in the country. I could scarcely imagine that the Prime Minister had greater authority or responsibility. And I remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, that I used to sit on the stool beside that fire—face in hands and elbows on knees—wondering if I might hope, one great day, to attain to the glory of being a signalman. And, surely enough, I have.

For I have come to see, as the days have gone by, that we humans are expert and inveterate signalmen. We have a perfect genius for concocting mysterious codes; we revel in flashing out cryptic heliograms; we glory in receiving occult messages. We even communicate in this abstruse and recondite fashion with our own selves. A man will twist a piece of string round his finger, or tie a knot in the corner of his pocket-handkerchief, or stick a scrap of stamp-paper on the face of his watch, to remind him of something that has nothing whatever to do with string or handkerchief or stamp-paper. It is his secret code, and in the terms of that code this inveterate signalman is signalling to himself, that is all!

Moreover, we not only signal to ourselves, but we are fascinated by the spectacle of other people signalling to themselves. A novel becomes invested with a new interest when its plot suddenly turns upon the weird phenomena of a witch's cavern or the mysterious ritual of a gipsy camp. By means of her viper, her owl, her toad, her cauldron, her tripod, her herbs, and all the rest of it, the withered crone in the dimly lighted cave is signaling to herself from morning to night; by means of the crossed sticks where the roads fork the gipsies leave tokens for themselves and each other. Many a man will wear a charm hanging round his neck, or suspended to his watch-chain, of which nobody knows the significance but himself. Luther went down to his grave without revealing even to his wife the meaning of the five mystic initials that he had carved over the portal of his house. They are, he explained, the initials of five German words; but what those words were he alone knew. The signals stand to this day over the portal; the code was locked up in the great reformer's breast, and, deposited there, it descended with him to his tomb.

Henrik Ibsen, too, the great Norwegian dramatist, kept on his writing-table a small ivory tray containing a number of grotesque figures, a wooden bear, a tiny devil, two or three cats—one of them playing a fiddle—and some rabbits. `I never write a single line of any of any dramas,' Ibsen used to say, `without having that tray and its occupants before me on my table. I could not write without them. But why I use them and how, this is my own secret.' Here was a great and brilliant thinker happy in being able to flash covert messages to himself by a code which no one but himself ever knew! I instance these—the witch's cavern, the gipsy's ritual, the reformer's portal, and the dramatist's tray—to show that our passion for signalling is so ingrained and deep-seated that, if we cannot satisfy it in cryptic communication with others, we atone for the deficiency by signalling to ourselves.

After all, there is but one really universal language. It was spoken in the world's first morning, and people will still be speaking it when they are startled by the shocks of doom. It was the language of the Stone Age, and it will be the language of the golden Age. It is spoken all the world over by people of all kinds, classes, colours, and conditions; and if either Mars or the moon is really inhabited, it is spoken there too. The little child speaks it before he is able to lisp one single word of our clumsier dictionary speech; and the aged spear it long after the palsied lip has lost its utterance. It is equally intelligible to the English merchant on the London market, to the Indian trapper in the Western forests, to the Chinese mandarin in the far interior of Asia, to the South Sea Islander basking in the rays of an equatorial sun, and to the Eskimo in his frozen hut amidst the blinding whiteness of the icy North. It is known even to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; they understand it, and sometimes even speak it. The universal language is the language of gesture. The shrug of the shoulders; the flash of the eye; the knitting of the brows; the curling of the lip; the stamping of the foot; the clenching of the fist; the nodding of the head; the pointing of the hand,—here is a language which is known to everyone. It has no alphabet, no grammar, and no syntax; but the simplest can understand it. Indeed, the simplest understand it best. The savage is a master of gesture. He speaks with every nerve and muscle. And the little child is no less eloquent. Playing with her doll on the floor behind my chair is a small scrap of humanity who has as yet uttered no word that a lexicographer would recognize. And yet it would be absurd to say that she has not spoken. Her pushings and pullings, her beckonings and pointings, her smilings and poutings, are as expressive as anything in any of your vocabularies. She has found a speech for which the builders of Babel sighed in vain—a speech that can be understood by men and women of every nation under heaven. It is the language of signals.

We are living in a universe that is constantly trying to talk. It does not understand any of your artificial or manufactured languages—your Hebrew or Greek or Latin; your English or German or French—but it understands the universal language, the language of gestures, the language of signals. ‘The air,’ says Emerson, ‘is full of sounds, the sky of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object is covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent.' The stars above my head are signalling; the astronomer masters the code and reads the secrets of the universe. The stones that I tread beneath my feet are signaling; the geologist unravels the code and interprets the romance of ages.

All Nature is one intricate system of signals as any naturalist will tell you. Let Richard Jefferies speak for them all. In discussing the birds that shelter in the ivy under his gable, he says that often a robin or a wren will pounce upon a caterpillar whilst the grub is still concealed among the grass. How is it done? It is all a matter of signals. `The bird's eyes, ever on the watch for food, learn to detect the slightest indication of its presence. Slugs, caterpillars, and such creatures, in moving among the grass, cause a slight agitation of the grass blades; they lift up a leaf by crawling under it, or depress it with their weight by getting on it. This enables the bird to detect their presence, even when quite hidden by the herbage, experience having taught it that, when grass is moved by the wind, broad patches sway simultaneously, whilst, when an insect or caterpillar is the agent, only a single leaf or blade is stirred.' The birds learn the code and readily interpret the signals. Those who live near to Nature soon acquire the same habit. The poetry of the countryside abounds with rhymes and couplets that are, after all, only expositions of Nature’s signals.

When elm leaves are as big as a shilling,
You may sow French beans if you be willing.

What is this but the interpretation of the code? The whispering elm leaves are the farmer's signal-flags. The universe, like the baby on my study floor, is always pathetically trying to talk to me; and the pity of it is that I am so slow to understand.

The language of signals is, I have shown, the one universal language. That is why, when man has something really great to say, he says it, not audibly, but visibly. The lover abandons the dictionary; he can say what he wishes to say so much more expressively by means of signals. A look; a pressure of the hand; a ring; a kiss,—what vocabulary could compare with a code like this? And it is a code that is comprehended in every nation under heaven. Or what man could express in so many words all that he feels when, for example, he waves his country's flag? ‘Have not I,’ Carlyle makes Herr Teufelsdrockh inquire, ‘have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crow’s meat for a piece of glazed cotton which they call their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three grochen? Did not the whole Hungarian nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser
Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown, an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horseshoe? It is in and through symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being; those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognize symbolic worth and prize it the highest. For is not a symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?' When, that is to say, man has something really great to say he says it by some mute sign or silent symbol. Similarly, when God has something to say to the Jew alone, he may perhaps cause His messenger to say it in the Hebrew tongue; but when He has something to say to all people everywhere, He always speaks the universal language, the language of gesture and symbol and sign. He speaks to the universal heart by means of the Ark, the Scapegoat, the Passover, the Mercy Seat, the Serpent in the Wilderness, the Cities of Refuge. Such signs need no translation; they speak to people of every clime and time. In the New Testament the same principle holds true.

He talked of lilies, vines, and corn,
The sparrow and the raven,
And tales so natural, yet so wise,
Were on men’s hearts engraven.
And yeast and bread and flax and cloth,
And eggs and fish and candles;
See, how the familiar world
He most divinely handles.

When God has something really vital to say to people, God says it in a language that requires no translation or interpretation. God says it in a way that all people can comprehend. 'The veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom.' All people everywhere can see the awful and profound significance of such a signal. A person may be unable to grasp the doctrine of the Atonement; but where is the heart that does not respond to the Vision of the Cross?

We are inveterate signalmen. We begin to make signals as soon as we crawl from our cradles; we are still making them when tottering down to our graves.
`It may be, master,' said Richard Bannatyne, John Knox's faithful serving-man, 'it may be that you will still he able to recognize my voice after you have become oblivious to every other sight and sound. When you are apparently unconscious, I shall bend over you and ask if you have still the hope of glory. Will you promise if you are able to give me some signal, that you will do so?

The old reformer made the promise, and, a few days later, turned into his room to die.

Grim in his deep death-anguish the stern old champion lay,
And the locks upon his pillow were floating thin and grey,
And, visionless and voiceless with quick and labouring breath,
He waited for his exit through life’s portal, death.

‘Hast thou the hope of glory?’ They bowed to catch the thrill
"That through some languid token might be responsive still,
Nor watched they long nor waited for some obscure reply,
He raised a clay-cold finger and pointed to the sky.

So the death-angel found him, what time his brow he bent,
To give the struggling spirit a sweet enfranchisement.
So the death-angel left him, what time earth's bonds were riven,
The cold, stark, stiffening finger still pointing up to heaven.

It is a great thing when the signalman's last signals are as unequivocal as that.

F W Boreham, ‘The Signal-Box’, The Uttermost Star (London: The Epworth Press, 1919), 9-18.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Romsey Signal Box

Boreham on The Squirrel's Dream

2009-05-21T01:51:00.000-07:00

At the Melbourne Art Gallery this afternoon my attention was captivated and monopolized by a noble painting by the late John Pettie, R.A. It is entitled Challenged, and once adorned the walls of the Royal Academy in London. A gay young aristocrat has been called from his sumptuous couch in the early morning by a challenge to a duel. There he stands, attired in his blue dressing gown, holding the momentous document in his hand. His old serving-man, who has delivered the missive to his master, is vanishing through the distant door; a sword reposes suggestively upon a chair. But the whole artistry of the picture is concentrated in the face. It is the face of a thoughtless, shallow, self-indulgent young man-about-town suddenly startled to gravity and something like nobleness. By means of that face, the artist has skilfully portrayed the fact that life becomes smitten with sudden grandeur the moment it is challenged by stupendous issues. Life and death confront this young lord, and he becomes a new man as he realizes their stately significance.

No man amounts to much until all his faculties have been challenged. There must come a moment when a trumpet-blast, a pistol-shot, a bugle-call stirs all his pulses. And, this being so, life takes good care that, sooner or later, we shall each find ourselves dared by some tremendous situation. Therein lies the secret of that thirst for adventure which is the hall-mark of humanity.

I was listening last night to Dr. Adrian Carter, the principal of Clarendon House. Dear old Dr. Carter-'Magna Charta' as the boys irreverently call him! I would not miss the old gentleman's Speech Day oration for a king's ransom. His very appearance is a sight for sore eyes. He looks for all the world like a reincarnation of Mr. Pickwick. Everything about him—his chubby face, his prominent glasses, his expansive waistcoat, and even his trick of keeping his left hand, when speaking in public, under his coat—tails and flicking those coat-tails to emphasize his crucial points—intensifies the similarity to Mr. Pickwick. In his Speech Day deliverances, Dr. Carter lays down the law in such a way that every sentence seems a crystallization of the ultimate wisdom. On the theme with which he is dealing, there appears to be nothing more to be said. And yet, on the way home, you often catch yourself wondering.

This year, in his Speech Day address, the little old gentleman deplored the decay, in the rising generation, of the spirit of adventure. The world has been knocked into shape, he said, by people who scorned comfort and courted hardship. Anybody, he declared, flicking his coat-tails with special energy, anybody can follow the line of least resistance; anybody can settle down to the first job that comes; anybody can hug the coast. `I trust,' he impressively observed in conclusion, `I trust that the boys of Clarendon House will seek life's distant and more difficult tasks and thus maintain the most splendid traditions of the glorious past! 'He resumed his seat, I need scarcely say, amidst a storm of tumultuous applause.

This is excellent—as far as it goes; the only trouble is that it does not carry us very far. For, to begin with, it is evident that it is some little time since the doctor himself was a boy. He has forgotten one or two things pertaining to his boyhood. For, in point of fact, no boy needs to have revived within him the spirit of adventure. It pulses in his blood all the time. No boy could have presented to the world a less adventurous appearance than did I. I do not recall one solitary occasion on which I became involved in censure through any daring escapade such as those of which the writers of school-boy stories love to tell. To my parents and teachers my life must have appeared utterly placid, utterly tranquil, utterly commonplace. Yet, looking back, I can see that, all unsuspected, the spirit of adventure was throbbing within me. The worst crime ever laid to my charge was the crime of being absent-minded. The headmaster stigmatized me as 'an incorrigible wool-gatherer.' I distinctly remember a certain Examination Day. We had been told overnight that the Inspector was coming. We were to arrive at school next morning in our best Sunday clothes, with clean collar, brightly polished boots and finger-nails destitute of any funereal suggestion.

All went well until the Inspector tested our class in matters of geography. He asked some question about Western Canada which sent my mind hurtling off on eventful journeys of its own. All at once, the boy sitting next me, giving me a dig with his elbow that almost fractured my ribs, whispered 'Java.' I then realized to my dismay that the Inspector was looking straight at me. Taking my school-fellow's violent but well-intentioned hint, I shot up my hand and said `Java!'

`Exactly,' the great man replied with a patronizing smile,' and now perhaps you will repeat the question that I asked you!'

I was floored, for the question had completely eluded me. His previous inquiry concerning Western Canada had despatched my mind on a personally-conducted tour to the Rocky Mountains, and I was in the midst of a titanic struggle with a grizzly bear at the very moment at which he asked his further question relating to Java. Reviewing my boyhood, I can see that this sort of thing happened frequently. My unimaginative teachers obstinately insisted on asking their most ridiculous questions concerning Latin conjugations and recurring decimals at exciting moments when I was engaged in snatching a beautiful girl from the horns of an angry bull, or pursuing, single-handed, a powerful tribe of Iroquois Indians, or delivering a charming princess from a blazing palace or winning the Victoria Cross under circumstances of unprecedented gallantry.

The doctor was anxious, he said, to awaken in his boys the spirit of adventure. Has it never occurred to him, I wonder, that, in itself, the spirit of adventure is a pitifully poor thing? Two of the best books ever written—books that all the boys at Clarendon House will read before they are many days older—were written to show that, in itself, the spirit of adventure is worthless and even dangerous. It only becomes sublime when consecrated by a noble aim.

In the early pages of Hereward the Wake, Kingsley describes his hero as he first becomes conscious of his insatiable craving for adventure. Longing for a hectic and perilous career, he looks this way and that way in search of some opportunity of performing desperate and doughty deeds. He wearies of the humdrum of home. Out in the wide, wide world, beyond the borders of the too-familiar Bruneswald, he fancies that every hill and valley is swarming with dragons, giants, dwarfs, ogres, satyrs and similar weird and fantastic creatures. Where shall he go? To Brittany where, in the depths of the forest, beautiful fairies may be seen bathing in the fountains, and possibly be won and wedded by a sufficiently bold and dexterous knight? To Ireland, and marry some beautiful princess with gray eyes and raven locks and saffron smock and enormous bracelets made from the gold of her own native hills? No, he will go to the Orkneys and join Bruce and Ranald and the Vikings of the northern seas! Or he will go up the Baltic and fight the Letts upon the water and slay the bisons on the land! Or he will go South; see the magicians of Cordova and Seville; beard the Mussulman outside his mosque and perhaps bring home an Emir's daughter! Or he will go to the East, join the Varanger Guard, and, after being thrown to the lion for carrying off a fair Greek lady, will tear out the monster's tongue with his own hands and show the Orient what an Englishman is made of! At this stage, it will be observed, Hereward is seeking adventure for its own sake. The purpose of the exploit may be admirable or execrable: it does not matter. It may leave him a hero or a cut-throat: he does not care.

Happily, Hereward discovered, comparatively early in his career, that a deed can only derive its lustre from its motive and its aim. No deed, however audacious, is worth while unless it relieves the oppressed, raises the fallen, and makes the world a better place for everybody. This discovery represents the spiritual development of Kingsley's massive hero; and it is to trace this subtle evolution in Hereward's character that Kingsley wrote the book.

Pretty much the same may be said of Don Quixote. Cervantes saw to his sorrow that chivalry was running wild. The stories told by the men who were returning from the wars were inflaming the imagination of the youth of Castile to a positively dangerous degree. Hot-headed young enthusiasts were swept off their feet by an insatiable desire to cover themselves with glory. They would fight something or somebody, whether that something or somebody needed to be fought or not. Cervantes wrote his book to show that it is better to stay at home breaking stones by the roadside than to rush forth and hazard one's life in tilting at windmills.

It is not enough, therefore, to urge boys to develop the spirit of adventure. The spirit of adventure, undirected and unconsecrated, made Hereward the Wake a ruffian, made Don Quixote a clown; and has made many a boy a criminal. Dr. Carter must go one step further.

He must show that, provision having been made in the eternal scheme of things for the gratification of every legitimate appetite, provision has been made to gratify the thirst for adventure. In a quaint, fantastic and vivacious little play entitled The Squirrel's Cage, Tyrone Guthrie has demonstrated that each of us is like a squirrel shut up in a twirling prison. The very globe on which we live revolves continually. The year follows the same law: spring, summer, autumn, winter: the cycle goes round and round and round. A babe is born, a child develops, a youth matures, a man marries, a babe is born; and so the circle is again completed. Within this revolving cage it is natural that everything should tend towards monotony. All things go round and round and round!

Now, if I had been writing Tyrone Guthrie's play, I should have pointed out that, just beside the whirling cage, there is a small box-like compartment in which the squirrel sleeps. The little creature's antics in the open may be wonderfully spectacular; but, to me, his dreams in the sleeping compartment are much more enticing. Curled up there, he dreams—dreams every night the same dream—a dream of felicities that might have been. It is a dream of the vast woods, the swaying tree-tops, the arching boughs that look like bridges specially constructed to make easy a squirrel's progress from one end of the forest to the other. It is a dream of rich clusters of tawny filberts, of the greensward littered with beechnuts, of oak trees twinkling with innumerable acorns, and of a wondrous abundance of sweet forest seeds. It is a dream of a cosy little nest, lined with fur and fibre and leaves and moss, high up in the fork of the fir tree; it is a dream of the sweetest, shyest, daintiest little squirrel that ever hid coyly behind the bole of an elm tree; and of four tiny wee squirrels, scarcely to be recognized as squirrels, nosing and jostling each other in the secrecy of the quiet nest. But when he gets to this part of his dream the sleeper wakes up with a quiver and a start, stretches himself, passes out into the revolving cage, and, partly in sheer desperation, partly to throw off the memory of his dream, and partly to make himself believe that he is racing madly about the forest, he twirls his treadmill like a thing bewitched. Lookers-on laugh when they see him doing it: but he himself is not laughing. He has come back to the monotony of his treadmill after his dream of a wonderful and romantic escape.

The whole point of Tyrone Guthrie's play is that, at least once in every squirrel's life, the cage door is left open. And everything depends upon his behaviour in that critical hour. Will he dare to pass out into the world to enjoy the actual realization of his dreams. Will his adventurous visions crystallize at last into actual experience? Or will he tremble in the presence of the unknown, and, terrified, creep back into his cage once more? That hour is the hour of his challenge; the greatest epoch in his life. Such a challenge comes, at some time and in some form, to each of us. We are presented with a sensational opportunity of escape. As a rule, when that sublime opportunity comes, we shrink from the unknown, hug the familiar cage, and allow the door to shut us in again. Tyrone Guthrie's hero, Henry Wilson, had the chance, in early youth, of going out to Africa. It appealed to all the adventurous instincts that tingled through his frame. But, on second thoughts, he felt that the exploit was extremely risky; his father pointed out the assured comforts that would accrue from his succeeding to the business; and so Henry, letting the cage-door close, went off to town every morning by the 9.23 and returned by the 6.13. Round and round and round!

The Church's evangel presents people with the most sublime of all those challenges. In his Everlasting Man, Mr. Chesterton says that life is a great game of Noughts and Crosses. The Nought—the circle—represents the basic monotony of life. Like the squirrel's cage, it goes round and round and round. Oriental religions, Mr. Chesterton points out, became infected by the dreariness of this fundamental monotony. The most typical and most eloquent symbol on an Eastern temple is a serpent with its tail in its mouth—a complete circle—a round that ends where it begins—a grind, a routine, a treadmill.

But beside the Nought, Mr. Chesterton says, stands the Cross. And, to play the game rightly, you must put the Cross inside the Nought. The four extremities of the Cross will pierce the Nought at four separate points, and, by the Cross, the monotony of life will be shattered into fragments and shattered for ever.

It is a perfect parable, needing neither elaboration nor application. But, having begun with a famous painting, I will close with another. Just two hundred years ago, Stenburg at Dusseldorf painted his Gipsy Girl. As his model posed upon the dais, her black eyes wandered round the studio. They were arrested by an altar-piece painted for Father Hugo of the Church of St. Jerome—a representation of the thorn-crowned face of Jesus. When the gipsy stepped down from her platform, she begged the artist to explain the picture to her. He tried, but found it difficult; for the thought of Christ stirred no profound emotion within him. When he had finished, the girl remarked simply: 'You must love Him very much, Signor, when He has done all that for you!'

The artless words pierced the painter's soul. They filled him with shame, for, in point of fact, he did not love Christ at all. But he soon did. And, when he did, he painted another picture—a picture of the Christ he now adored. Underneath the thorn-crowned face on the new canvas he inscribed the words:

All this I did for thee;
What hast thou done for Me?

He then presented it to the public gallery at Dusseldorf. And one day Count Zinzendorf was among the visitors who stood before it. Young, rich, gay and impressionable, the picture powerfully appealed to him, whilst the question beneath it rang through his soul like a challenge. It was a challenge, and he accepted it. He went out to serve his Saviour. He became the founder of Moravian Missions. Within a few months missionaries were sent to the Esquimaux and to the people of the West Indies. In a year or two, evangelists of the Cross were despatched to all parts of the world. The Moravian Brethren became, in 1738, the means of the conversion of John Wesley, and thus the amazing revival of the eighteenth century was initiated. The Cross had shattered the indolent monotony of Zinzendorf's life. He became a new man; the Church became a new Church; the world became a new world! The soul-stirring challenge had been accepted: the great escape had been made: and, as long as the world endures, people will rejoice in the sensational developments that followed.

F W Boreham, ‘The Squirrel’s Dream’, A Witch’s Brewing (London: The Epworth Press, 1932), 89-99.

Dr Geoff Pound

Boreham on The Supremacies of Life

2009-05-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

Life has a wonderful way of tapering majestically to its climax. It narrows itself up towards its supremacies, like a mountain rising to its snow-capped summit in the skies. Our supreme interests assert themselves invincibly at the last. Our master passions are 'in at the death.' Let us glance at a pair of extraordinarily parallel illustrations.

Paul is awaiting his last appearance before Nero. The old apostle is caught and caged at last. He is writing his very last letter. He expects, if spared, to spend the winter in a Roman dungeon. 'Do your very best,' he says to Timothy, ‘to come to me before winter.' 'And,' he adds, 'the cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments’!

Under circumstances almost exactly similar Paul's great translator, William Tyndale, was lying in his damp cell at Vilvorde awaiting the fatal stroke which set his spirit free a few weeks later. And, as in Paul's case, winter was coming on. 'Bring me,' he writes, `a warmer cap, something to patch my leggings, a woollen shirt, and, above all, my Hebrew Bible'!

Especially the parchments!
Above all, my Hebrew Bible!

The emphasis is upon the especially and upon the above all. Paul knows how isolated he will feel in his horrid cellar, and he twice begs his young comrade to hurry to his side. He knows how cold he will be, and he pleads for his cloak. He knows how lonely will be his incarceration, and he says, 'Bring the books'! Yet he feels that, after all, these do not represent the supremacies of life. It is not on these that he is prepared to make his final stand. 'But especially the parchments'! Much as he yearns for the clasp of Timothy's hand, he is prepared, if needs be, to face the stern future alone. Much as he longs for his warm tunic to shelter his aged limbs, he is prepared, if needs be, to sit and shiver the long winter through. Gladly as he would revel in his favourite authors, he is prepared, if needs be, to sit counting the links in his chain and the stones in the wall. But the parchments! These are life's supreme, essential, indispensable requisites. These represent life's irreducible minimum. 'Especially the parchments'! `Above all, my Hebrew Bible'! These are the supremacies of life.

The hero of romance erects a pyramid upon its apex. He sets out in life with one or two friends. He soon multiplies the number. He counts them, as the years pass, by the score and by the hundred. And he dies at last in the possession of friendships which can be numbered by the thousand. It is a false note. The thing is untrue to experience. `The first true gentleman that ever breathed' found His path thronged with friends at the outset. But, as time wore on, they wore off. 'Many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him.' Twelve remained, such as they were; but even that remnant must be sifted, and of the twelve a selection had to be made. And into the chamber of death, and up to the Mount of Transfiguration, and into the Garden of Gethsemane 'Jesus taketh with Him Peter and James and John.' The pyramid is narrowing up towards its apex. And when He passes from Gethsemane to Golgotha John alone stands by the cross, and even he had wavered. `And Jesus said unto John, Son, behold thy mother.' It had tapered sharply to the unit at last. `Especially John.'

Sir William Robertson Nicoll has a story of an old Scotsman who lay a-dying. His little room was crowded with friends. Presently a number of them rose and quietly left. There remained his old wife, Jean, and the trusted companions of a long pilgrimage. As his frame became more feeble and his eye more dim one after another reverently rose, lifted the worn old latch silently, and left the room. At last the old man pressed the withered hand in which his own was clasped, and whispered faintly: 'They will a' gang: you will stay!' And at last he and she were the sole occupants of the little chamber. `Especially Jean.' Which things are an allegory. The pyramid narrows to its apex. Life contracts towards its supremacies. 'Especially the parchments'! 'I have hosts of friends,' wrote Lord Macaulay in one of his beautiful letters to his sister, 'but not more than half a dozen the news of whose death would spoil my breakfast.' And of that half-dozen he would probably at a later stage have made a selection. Friendship has its supremacies.

The same is, of course, true of our libraries. Like the apostle, we are all fond of books; but our book-shelves dwindle in intensity as they grow in extensity. As life goes on we accumulate more and more volumes, but we set more and more store on a few selected classics of the soul. The number of those favourites diminishes as the hair bleaches. We have a score; a dozen; and at length three. And if the hair gets very white, we find the three too many by two. 'Especially the parchments'!

Sir H. M. Stanley set out upon his great African exploration with quite a formidable library. One cannot march eighteen hours a day under an equatorial sun, and he gave a prudent thought to the long encampments, and armed himself with books. But books are often heavy—in a literal as well as in a literary sense. And one by one his native servants deserted him (the pyramid towering towards its apex). And, as a consequence, Stanley was compelled to leave one treasured set of volumes at this African village, and another at that, until at last he had but two books left—Shakespeare and the Bible. And we have no doubt that, had Africa been a still broader continent than it actually is, even Shakespeare would have been abandoned to gratify the curiosity of some astonished Hottentots or pigmies.

It all comes back to that pathetic entry in Lockhart's diary at Abbotsford: 'He [Sir Walter Scott] then desired to be wheeled through his rooms in the bath-chair. We moved him leisurely for an hour or more up and down the hall and the great library. "I have seen much," he kept saying, "but nothing like my ain hoose—give me one turn more!"

Next morning he desired to be drawn into the library and placed by the central window, that he might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should read to him. I asked, from what book. He said, "Need you ask? There is but one!" I chose the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel.' He listened with mild devotion, and, when Lockhart had finished reading of the Father's house and the many mansions, he said, 'That is a great comfort!' The juxtaposition of phrases is arresting: `In the great library'—'there is but one book!' The pyramid stood squarely upon its solid foundation, but it towered grandly and tapered finely towards its narrow but majestic summit.

'Come,' says Paul the Aged, `for I am lonely; bring the cloak, for I am old and cold; bring the books, for my mind is hungry; but, oh, if all these fail, send the parchments!' Especially the parchments! Life's supremacies must always conquer and claim their own at the last.

F W Boreham, ‘The Supremacies of Life’, The Luggage of Life (London: Charles H Kelly, 1913), 40-45.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “Like a mountain rising to its snow-capped summit in the skies.”

Boreham on The Tireless Trudge

2009-05-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

Whilst the fire crackled cheerily between them two friends of mine discussed a knotty point. The question under debate was, briefly, this: Which is the most trying part of a long journey? One argued for the initial steps on setting out. The weary road, he said, stretches out interminably before you. Every stick and stone seems to be shouting at you to turn back and to take your ease. His friend, on the other side of the hearth, thought quite differently. He contended stoutly for the final stage of the pilgrimage. He vividly pictured the exhausted pedestrian at the end of his journey, scarcely able to drag one blistered and bleeding foot in front of the other. It is certainly rather a fine point; but, after all, it was really not worth discussing, for nothing is more absolutely clear than that they were both wrong. Which, of course, is the usual fate of controversialists.

Now the worst part of a journey is neither at its beginning nor at its close. There is a certain indescribable exhilaration arising from the making of the effort which imparts elasticity to the muscles and courage to the mind, at starting. The road seems to dare and challenge the pilgrim, and he swings off along the taunting trail with a keen relish and a buoyant stride. And, at the other end, the twinkling lights of the city that he seeks help him to forget that he is footsore and choked with the dust of the road. His blood tingles with the triumph of his achievement and the delight of nearing his goal. But there is another stage concerning which neither of my friends had a word to say. What of the intermediate stage? What of the long and lonely tramp? What of the hours through which no applauding voices from behind can encourage and no familiar fingers from before can beckon? This, surely, is the worst part of the way! There is no intellectual stimulant so intoxicating as the formation of a noble purpose, the conception of a sudden resolve, the making of a great decision. And, in the luxurious revelry of that stimulus the prodigal finds it easy to rise from the degradations of the far country and to fling himself with a will along the great Phoenician road. And at the other end! Surely the most overpowering of all human instincts and emotions is that which holds captive every nerve at the dear sight of home! No; neither the first nor the last steps of that familiar journey were very hard to take. But between the one and the other! What questionings and forebodings! What haltings and backward glances! What doubts and fears! Yes, there can be no doubt about it, both my friends were wrong.

It is the intermediate stage that tests the mettle of the person. It is the long, fatiguing trudge out of sight of both starting-point and destination that puts the heaviest strain on heart and brain. That is precisely what Isaiah meant in the best known and most quoted of all his prophecies. He promises that, on the return from Babylon to Jerusalem, `they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' Israel is to be released at last from her long captivity. Imagine the departure from Babylon—its fond anticipations, its rapturous ecstasies, its delirious transports! Those first steps of the journey were not trying; they were more like flying. The delighted people walked with winged feet. And the last steps—with Jerusalem actually in sight, the pilgrims actually climbing the mountains that surrounded the holy and beautiful city-what rush of noble and tender emotions would expel and banish all thought of weariness! But Isaiah is thinking of the long, long tramp between-the drag across the desert, and the march all void of music. It is with this terrible test in mind that he utters his heartening promise: 'They shall walk and not faint.' They would fly, as on wings of eagles, out of Babylon at the beginning; they would run, forgetful of fatigue, into Jerusalem at the end; but they should walk and not faint. That is life's crowning comfort. The very climax of divine grace is the grace that nerves us for the least romantic stage of the journey. Farewells and welcomes, departures and arrivals, have adjusting compensations peculiar to themselves; but it is the glory of the gospel that it has something to say to the lonely traveller on the dusty track. Religion draws nearer when romance deserts. Grace holds on when the gilt wears off.

Two cases come to mind. I know a man whose whole delight was in his boy—a little fellow of six or so. Then, suddenly, like lamps blown out by a sudden gust, the lad's eyes failed him, and he was blind. The father was the recipient of scores of touchingly sympathetic letters. All sorts of people called. Kindly references were made in press and pulpit. The man had no idea until that moment that he had so many friends. All the world seethed to bepaying homage to his sorrow. That was the beginning. After many years the boy had been taught to interpret the world again by means of his remaining senses. There was nothing he could not do. He earned his own living, and his sightlessness seemed no real hindrance to him. That was the end. But the father told me that the strain of it all came between these two. There came a time when the postman brought no cheering letters. Friends uttered no heartening words. The world had transferred his boy's blindness into the realm of the normal and the commonplace. Nobody noticed. But in the home the little fellow staggered about, and his parents' hearts ached for him. What was to become of him? It was during those intervening years lying between the first crushing blow and the final relief that the real strain came. That was by far the worst stretch of the road.

I knew a woman. Without a moment's warning she was plunged into widowhood, and left to battle for her five little children and herself. There was an extraordinary outburst of affectionate sympathy on the part of all who knew her. Then came the funeral. After that the world went on its way again as though nothing had happened. That was the beginning. After the years, the battle had been well fought and well run. The children had been clothed, educated, and placed in positions of usefulness and honour. That was the end. But my widowed friend told me that she did not forget when the world forgot. Every morning her grief woke up with her. And every night it followed her to her rest. Every day, as she struggled for her little ones, the haunting question tortured her: What would become of them if sickness or death seized upon her? That was the killing time. That intermediate stretch was the worst part of the desolate way.

As it is with individuals, so it is with great causes. A crusade is launched amidst vituperation, derision, and execration. And there is enough fight in most of us to lend a certain enjoyment to the very bitterness of antagonism. And at last the self-same movement is crowned with triumph. But the real inwardness of the struggle lies midway. William Wilberforce used to say that he was less dismayed by the storm that broke upon him when first he pleaded the cause of the slave than by the `long lull' that followed when the country accepted his principles, but did nothing to hasten their realization. In America the same thing happened. The war against slavery was undertaken with a light heart. Young men sprang to the front in thousands with the refrain of 'John Brown's body' on their lips. But the real struggle was not then, nor towards the close, when victory and emancipation were in sight. But who can forget the long agony of disaster that intervened between those two? It was when the nation was trudging tearfully along that blood-marked track that the real suffering took place. The same experience repeats itself in the history of every great reform. Some one has said that every movement has its bow-wow stage, its pooh-pooh stage, and its hear-hear stage. Of those three phases the central one is infinitely the most difficult to negotiate. Between the howl of execration that greets the suggestion of a reform and the shout of applause that announces its final triumph there is a long and tiresome stretch of steep and stony road that is very hard to tread. They are God's heroes who set a stout heart to that stiff brae, and walk and not faint.

In his Autobiography Mark Rutherford tells of his fierce struggle with the drink fiend. On one never-to-be-forgotten night he resolutely put the glass from him and went to bed having drunk nothing but water! 'But,' he continues, 'the struggle was not felt just then. It came later, when the first enthusiasm of a new purpose had faded away.' And, in his Deliverance he applies the same principle in a more general way. He is telling of the stress of his life as a whole. 'Neither the first nor the last,' he says 'has been the difficult step with me,' but rather what lies between. The first is usually helped by the excitement and promise of new beginnings, and the last by the prospect of triumph. But the intermediate path is unassisted by enthusiasm, and it is here we are so likely to faint.'

I cannot close more fittingly than by setting those two striking sentences over against each other: `It is here we are so likely to faint,' says Mark Rutherford, speaking of the long and tiresome intermediate phase. 'They shall walk and not faint,' says the prophet in reference to precisely the same circumstances and conditions. Wherefore let all those who are feeling the toilsome drudgery of the long and unromantic trail pay good heed to such comfortable words.

F W Boreham, ‘The Tireless Trudge’, The Luggage of Life (London: Charles H Kelly, 1913), 70-77.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “It is the intermediate stage that tests the mettle of the person.”

Boreham Books For Sale

2009-04-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

A person in New Zealand is selling the following Boreham books. Let me know if you want the email address to chase them up.

Dr Geoff Pound

First Editions.
A Temple of Topaz
Mushrooms on the Moor (Signed)
The Last Milestone
The Silver Shadow (3) One first, one signed, one second ed.}
The Nest of Spears (Also 2nd ed.)
A Casket of Cameos( 2 1st eds)
The Blue Flame (2)
Rubble and Roseleaves
The Three Half Moons (2)
A Reel of Rainbow
Faces in the Fire
The Crystal Pointers ( 1 1st ed and 2 others)
Boulevards of Paradise

Signed copies. (Not 1st Eds.)
The Fiery Crags (3 one signed)
Mushrooms on the Moor
The Luggage of Life (2 copies Facsimile signed)
Gospel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Cliffs of Opal (Possible 1st ed.)
Mountains in the Mist (2 copies one signed)
The Gospel of Crusoe
The Other side of the Hill
The Silver Shadow

Other Titles.
The Golden Milestone
The Passing of John Broadbanks
Wisps of Wildfire
A Late Lark singing
A Bunch of Everlastings (2 copies)
Faces in the Fire
The Prodigal
Arrows of Desire (2 copies one a p/back)
Dreams at Sunset
In Pastures Green
Empty Pitchers –Published Essay with photos
My Pilgrimage. Autobiography

.

Rare F W Boreham Library for Sale

2009-03-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Les Nixon’s personal collection of eighty-five of his F. W. Boreham volumes is now available for a donation, for Missions.

The books are rare collectors’ items perhaps suitable for a theological or a personal library. They will be sold as a unit and not broken up.

Nixon’s previous Boreham library was placed in a Bible College Library in 1997, for a gift of $4500.

Inspect this collection (he lives in Australia) or see a photo of the books, and make an offer.

They consist of forty-five hard-cover volumes, and 38 pocket-editions, in good condition, with author’s greetings and autograph. Some are around 60-years old; several a hundred, worth a thousand each in the US market. Valuable for research.

Contains numerous exquisite Christian essays, said to be ‘on most Pastor’s shelves and in everybody’s sermons, and many elegant speeches’. Epworth Press London - from 1891 to 1861.

A complete list of the books with details are available.

Do let me know if you are interested and I can send the list or put you in contact with Les.

Dr Geoff Pound

Boreham Book for sale

2009-03-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

A reader from England has Boreham's most popular autobiography for sale.

Dr Lesley Weatherhead of London's City Temple wrote to F w Boreham saying that he thought My Pilgrimage was one of the most helpful books to give to an aspiring pastor.

She writes: "I have a copy of FW Boreham 1954 6th Impression My Pilgrimage. This is a signed copy "most gratefully yours, FW Boreham" underneath his photo.In the top right hand corner on the facing page is, in different hand written"To all in memory of Jessie Down/Dunn Auntie Jessie Died Jan 20th 1964."

The sale price is US$30 plus P & P.

Do let me know if you would like to buy this book and I can link you with the present owner.

Geoff Pound

Home of the Echoes Web Site

2009-02-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

I came across a web site of a couple by the name of Steve & Jennifer Cuttino who now live in the Czech Republic.

Their web site is entitled, ‘Home of Echoes’, which Boreham fans will know is the title of a book by F.W. Boreham.

In explaining the name of their site the Cuttinos say:
“It means that Life is meant to respond to Life, and when that happens it creates an echo that goes on for eternity…Life is designed to respond with Life, and Jesus said, that whoever believes on me will have everlasting life, which means a life having an echoing effect to all around it. We want to have an ECHOING EFFECT in the Czech Republic.”

A great name and a lofty aspiration.

Their site is at this link:

Home of the Echoes

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Steve & Jennifer Cuttino

Boreham on Waiting for the Tide

2009-01-13T23:28:00.000-08:00

WAITING FOR THE TIDE

Sauntering through the Melbourne Art Gallery—a favourite haunt of mine—on Friday afternoon, I was captivated by a picture that I had never seen before. I need scarcely say, therefore, that it was not hanging on the wall. The people who visit the galleries are always worth watching. On Friday my wayward eyes were arrested by a young couple—she in brown and he in navy-blue—sitting in earnest conversation in front of one of the paintings. Whether they were a honeymoon couple or merely sweethearts, I cannot say: her left hand was provokingly gloved: but it does not matter, the question is of moment to nobody but themselves. She was leaning forward—face in hands, and elbows on knees—absorbed in the study of a picture. He was eyeing it less intently, yet with genuine interest, moved thereto partly by the skill of the artist and partly by the infection of her enthusiasm.

The picture was Mr. Arthur Boyd's Waiting for the Tide. It represents a sheltered and tranquil cove in which a couple of boats are lying. The boat in the foreground is occupied by two men. They are doing nothing, for there is nothing to be done. The boat leans heavily over, showing that it is hard and fast upon the muddy bed of the little inlet. Until the tide comes swelling in, lifting and liberating it, its occupants are helpless. But their presence in the boat sufficiently indicates their determination to ply their oars and leave the bay the moment that the waters rise. Till then they are waiting—idly waiting—eagerly waiting—watchfully waiting—waiting, just waiting for the tide!

`It reminds one,' I heard the young fellow in navy-blue remark, as I slowly passed behind them, `it reminds one of Mr. Micawber waiting for something to turn up!'

I did not catch her reply: I should dearly like to have done so. I hope that, being the wise little woman that she looked, she gently reproved his lack of penetration and discernment. The observation was as shallow as the water in the picture. For between the men sitting in their stranded boat, waiting for the flowing of the tide, and Mr. Micawber pusillanimously waiting for something propitious to happen, there is all the difference in the world. Having had a good look at the picture, let us submit Mr. Micawber to a similar scrutiny.

It is in the eleventh chapter of David Copperfield that we are introduced to Mr. Micawber. He is, as ever, on the brink of ruin; and, as ever, he alternates with lightning rapidity, between the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair. 'It was nothing unusual for him to begin a conversation by sobbing violently and to finish it by bursting into song. I have known him,' says David Copperfield, `I have known him come home to supper with a flood of tears and a declaration that nothing was now left but a gaol; and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of fitting the house with bow-windows, in case anything turned up. This,' David adds, 'was his favourite expression.'

Three pages further on, Mr. Micawber is contemplating his release from prison under the Insolvent Debtors' Act. 'And then,' he exclaims, `I shall, please Heaven, begin to live in an entirely new manner if—if—if, in short, if anything turns up!'

I turn three more pages and find Mr. Micawber, out of the bitterness of his own experience, pouring sage counsel into the ears of David. `My dear young friend,' he says, `I am older than you; a man of some experience in life, and—and of some experience in difficulties, generally speaking. At present, and until something turns up (which I am, I may say, hourly expecting) I have nothing to bestow but advice.'

And so on. In the daytime Mr. Micawber mingles with the throng upon the city streets, hoping for something to turn up among the faces that he meets there. In the evening he throws himself into his chair, adjusts his spectacles, and settles down to the newspaper, 'just to see whether anything turns up among the advertisements.'

There, then, is Mr. Micawber! Anything more unlike the boatmen in Mr. Boyd's painting it would be very difficult to imagine. Something may or may not turn up to gratify the baseless optimism of Mr. Micawber: as a rule nothing of the kind eventuates, and Mr. Micawber is left lamenting. But the tide! The tide is bound to turn! And not only so but it is bound to turn at a certain time. My morning paper tells me that it will be high water today at 8.57 a.m. and 7.51 p.m. Mr. Micawber's newspaper—the paper in which he expected something to turn up among the advertisements—never once mentioned the hour at which that nebulous and mysterious happening would take place! The men in the picture, on the contrary, know the exact moment at which the waters may be expected to come surging in; and they have everything in readiness.

That, in their case, is the beauty of it! And that, in Mr. Micawber's case, is the wretchedness and the pathos of it. Yes, the pathos of it! I think of W. J. Wills, the young astronomer and explorer, the most gallant figure among all our Australian pathfinders. The Burke and Wills expedition—the expedition in which, although only twenty-six, he was second in command—was the first to cross the continent. Leaving Melbourne on August 20, 1860, they reached the northern coast early in the following year. But disaster overwhelmed them on the return journey. Their supply of provisions gave out, and they were left to perish miserably in the hot and barren desert. Gray was the first to die. Burke, feeling that his end was near, attempted to stagger to Cooper's Creek, knowing that there his body would be discovered and taken to Melbourne for burial. Unwilling to see his leader go to a solitary death, King—the junior member of the party—decided to accompany him. Leaving Wills alone, the two set out into the wilderness. They had not gone far when Burke fell upon the sands, and King hurried back to Wills. But, during the absence of his comrades, Wills, too, had passed away. And there, lying near the body, was his journal, kept as was Burke's, to the very last:
'Here I am,' says the final entry, `here I am, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up!'

There lay the pathos of it! Waiting, like Mr. Micawber! In that brave young heart of his, Wills knew that, as in Mr. Micawber's case, nothing was likely to turn up; but he made up his mind to keep smiling to the last. Waiting like Mr. Micawber! There is an infinity of difference between that and Waiting for the Tide!
The something for which Mr. Micawber and our gallant young explorer are waiting—is a spectral contingency, a remote possibility, a shadowy chance, a forlorn hope. The tide—for which these boatmen are waiting—is the natural representative of those stable and reliable forces that dominate life at every turn. The tide stands for the stately dependabilities by which we are encompassed and surrounded. The masterly mechanism of the universe—the rising and the setting of the sun; the persistence in their orbits of the stars; the paths of the planets; the phases of the moon; the revolution of the earth; the cycle of the seasons; the round of the year—all this, like the ebbing and the flowing of the tide, is wonderfully reliable. The astronomers tell us that a comet that was last seen shortly after midnight on March 3, 1603, will again make its appearance at 9.30 p.m. on September 17, 1962; and we know for certain that, on September 17, 1962, the dazzling phenomenon will again adorn the evening sky. The astronomers tell us that, in a few years' time, there will be a total eclipse of the moon, visible in such-and-such a latitude and at such-and-such an hour ; and we know that, to the very minute, the earth will be darkened and the silver moon obscured.

Obviously, there is about all this nothing that savours of Mr. Micawber. We are not the children of chance. Life is controlled by a superb combination of certainties. They may, with the most implicit confidence, be waited for; and they will always prove themselves to be worth the waiting. The thoughtless observation of the young fellow in the navy-blue suit was hopelessly wide of the mark. I sincerely hope that his fair companion, with characteristic charm and sweetness and delicacy, demonstrated to him his egregarious blunder and tactfully set him right. The tide represents our best friends –the friends in whom we can always trust: the friends who never fail—and since she is likely to be the truest, dearest, most constant friend that be will ever know, there is a sense in which the tide represents her! And it would be painful to think of hurt as leaving the Art Gallery without a clear perception of the essential difference between her fond fidelity and the phantom-like fickleness of the will-o'-the-wisp after which Mr. Micawber was perpetually dancing.

I find it singularly pleasant today to think of those young people—she in brown and he in navy-blue—sitting in front of Mr. Boyd's picture. I hope they remained there long after I myself left the gallery—long enough, at least, to become impressed by the subtle significance that lurks in the lovely canvas. If they did, they will make time, through all the happy years to come, for just such quiet and restful hours as they were enjoying together today. For the tide—the tide for which the men in the picture were waiting—is the emblem of all the leisurely things in life. The tide cannot be hurried; there is nothing for it but to do as the men in the picture are doing; you must wait for it.

We have accelerated the pace of almost everything. The wheels of life revolve a hundred times as swiftly as they used to do. We dash through the years at a break-neck pace. And we have every reason to be proud of our achievements. But one cannot check a flush of pleasure at the thought that there are a few things—and those are the best things—that still jog along at the same old pace. An oak takes just as long to grow in my garden as it took in the Garden of Eden. The tide ebbs and flows today exactly as it ebbed and flowed in the days of the Pharaohs. It soothes the brain and steadies the nerves and sweetens the soul to fasten one's eyes for awhile on these leisurely and unhurriable things. They breathe a benediction of peace on all beholders.

If these young people—she in brown and he in navy-blue—are as wise as I suppose them, they will take the hint. In the years ahead of them they will be tempted to smile disdainfully upon the days when they loitered in Art Galleries and wasted time in doing nothing. To be forewarned is to forearmed; and therefore I forewarn them. Let them, as they sit in front of Mr. Boyd's, eloquent picture, pay good heed to the lesson that the tide is trying to teach them. The men in the boat may be in a perfect agony of impatience; it makes no difference; they must wait. The tide takes its time; it waits for no man: it compels all men to wait for it.

If these young people learn the lesson of the tide, I shall meet them again in the Gallery. It may be in ten years' time; it may be in twenty: I cannot tell. But, however pressing the claims of business and society may become, they will always contrive to set aside a few delicious hours in which they can sit at their ease, and sit together, luxuriating in the beauty of the world. If the hour appointed proves wet or cold or windy, they will come to the Gallery and enjoy the beauties of Art. If, on the other hand, the chosen day proves sunny, they will stroll in the fields, or ramble in the woods, or sit in the park and enjoy the beauties of Nature. The tide declines to be infected by tile fever of the folk who wait for it; let the girl in brown and her lover in navy-blue take that hint.

Let no man misinterpret! The doctrine of the tide is not a doctrine of Indolence: it is a doctrine of Activity. In point of fact, the tide is never still. Although it does its work in a restful and leisurely way, it does it. And it does it well. It is ever so; the world's best work is done by those who never know the fret and fever of haste. In their impatience the boatmen may feel that the tide is slow; but they know that it is sure. And they know that, before so very long, the tide will bring them their priceless opportunity.

For the tide—the tide for which they are waiting—does not intend these men to spend their lives waiting with folded hands in the seclusion of a narrow bay. The tide, for which they have waited so impatiently, comes at last! And then, if they have the will for it, and the strength for it, they can leave the tiny inlet in which they have been enclosed, and court a more adventurous experience on the broad waters beyond the bay. And then, as they do business in deep waters, they will feel that the tide, which seemed so long in coming, was worth the ordeal of waiting, after all!

I wonder if those young people—she in brown and he in navy-blue—heard the picture whispering that secret to their hearts! The tide—so faithful and so sure—offers every man, sooner or later, the chance of escaping from the tiny cove of the Here to the broad bosom of the Everywhere, from the little bay of Self, to the infinite sea of Service; and they are life's most enviable voyagers who, when the sublime opportunity presents itself, are all alive and all alert, waiting, with oars in rollocks, to make the most of it. It is the hour of destiny. The kingdom of heaven pours its wealth into the heart of the man, who is ready when that hour strikes. He was waiting: but only waiting for the tide!

F W Boreham, ‘Waiting for the Tide’, The Nest of Spears (London: The Epworth Press, 1927), 48-57.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Waiting for the Tide.

New Year Message from F W Boreham

2008-12-31T22:51:00.000-08:00

F W Boreham wrote this essay on the last night of the year:

'PLEASE SHUT THIS GATE!'

It was at Criccieth; and Mr. Lloyd George was playing golf. It happened that, after a round, he and a friend had to cross some fields in which cattle were grazing. ‘I was so eager to catch every word that fell from Mr. Lloyd George's lips,' explains his companion, `that I failed to close one of the gates through which we passed.' But Mr. Lloyd George noticed it, paused, went back and carefully shut and latched the gate. They resumed their walk. 'Do you remember old Dr._____ of _____?' asked Mr. Lloyd George, mentioning a local worthy not long deceased. 'When he was on his death-bed a clergyman went to him and asked him if there was anything he would like to say or any message he wanted to deliver. "No," answered the doctor, "except that through life I think I have always closed the gates behind me!"'

There is, I fancy, a good deal in that. I had in my congregation at Mosgiel a little old man of singular serenity of countenance and sweetness of disposition. Nothing seemed to ruffle his faith or disturb the perfect tranquillity of his spirit. One evening, in the early autumn, he came down to the manse to bring me a basket of freshly gathered fruit. We sat for a while on the verandah chatting. It was an hour for confidences, and he opened his heart to me. I asked him how he accounted for the calm that seemed a perpetual rebuke to our fretfulness and worry. He would not at first admit that he possessed any features that distinguished him from the rest of us. But I pressed my point, and at length he became more communicative.
`Well, I'll tell you this,' he observed, 'I've always made it a rule that, when I've shut the door, I've shut the door I'

I sat pondering in silence this cryptic utterance. My friend saw that I was somewhat mystified, and hastened to the rescue.
`Years ago,' he explained, `I used to take all my troubles to bed with me. I would lie there in the darkness with closed eyes, fretting and worrying all the time. I tossed and turned from one side of the bed to the other, as wide awake as at broad noon. As life went on, the habit grew upon me until it threatened to undermine my health. Then, one night, things reached a crisis. I could not sleep, so I rose from my bed and sat at the open window. The garden below and the fields beyond were flooded in silvery moonlight. Not a breath of wind was stirring; the intense stillness was positively uncanny. The perfect tranquillity mocked the surging tumult of my brain. How quiet the room seemed! And I had entered into it—for what? My behaviour seemed absurd in the extreme. I had come to this haven of peace; Nature had wrapped around me her infinite calm; and here was I allowing all the worries of the world to fever my brain and break upon my rest! Why had I locked the office door so carefully if I wished all the ledgers and day-books and order-forms to follow me home? Why had I closed the bedroom door so carefully if I wished all the cares of life to follow me in? I knelt down there at the window-sill, with the delicious air of the still night caressing my face, and I then and there asked God to forgive me. And, since then, when I've shut a door, I've shut a door!'

I have often since, when the fret and fever of life have been too much for me, recalled my old friend's story. It is a great thing to be able to go through life, like Mr. Lloyd George's doctor, closing all the gates behind one. Take our decisions, for example. I have sometimes to make up my mind—to buy or to refuse; to sell or to hold; to go or to stay; to accept or to decline. The process of decision should be as leisurely and unhurried as the circumstances will permit. But when a verdict is reached, that judgement should be final. I have no right to insult my own intelligence. I must learn to treat it with respect. There can be no profit in establishing within my mind Courts of Appeal that have no power to carry their findings into effect. Nine times out of ten the verdict of the first court is irrevocable; why then rehear the case? When a man has once made up his mind, let him close the gate behind him, or he will never know happiness again. He has weighed all the evidence; he has balanced all the issues; and he has pronounced sentence. Very well; let it go at that. Why review it again and again? If the decision was sound, why question it? If the decision was doubtful, the sooner it is forgotten the better. Why torture yourself dwelling upon it? The horse is sold; the house is bought; the contract is signed; the situation is declined; the step taken cannot be retraced. A wise man will firmly and finally shut the gate. It is the better way.

I know that it would have been a great thing for my friend George Cairncross if he had been able to acquire this art. George is a minister; we were in college together; and we have been on the most intimate terms ever since. When he entered the ministry, he settled in a small country church at Langford. The work prospered exceedingly, and he was as happy as any man could be. After seven years the pastorate of the church at Grenville, a large town some distance away, fell vacant, and George was unanimously invited. He was at his wits' ends. The cause at Langford was so prosperous and he was so perfectly content. And yet he was young, and Grenville offered much wider scope! But at last the hold of his own people upon his affections proved too strong to be broken; and he declined the tempting overture from the larger church. So far, so good! But it was afterwards that George made his mistake. From that time forth, whenever the least thing went wrong at Langford, George turned his thoughts towards his lost opportunity at Grenville. As surely as a fit of the blues overlook him, he began to dream about Grenville. In poor George's brain Grenville became enveloped in a golden haze of romance. If only he had gone to Grenville! Oh, if only he had accepted the call to Grenville! In his better, wiser, saner, stronger moments he laughed at this frailty of his. He knew that he had decided rightly in remaining at Langford. But there were weaker moments. And in those weaker moments George harked back upon himself. It would have saved him a world of misery if he could have closed firmly and for ever the gate that divided the Langford field from the Grenville field.

Eight years later, after a most notable and memorable ministry, George did leave Langford. The church at Bellhaven called him; and, after another desperate inner struggle, he resolved to go. But after the excitement of the farewell, of the removal, and of the welcome, there came the inevitable reaction. Every day George missed at Bellhaven something to which he had grown accustomed at Langford. To be sure, there were compensations; but George was not in the humour to pay much attention to them. The strange conditions grated upon him. At Langford everybody knew him; at Bellhaven he walked the streets a stranger. Every mail from Langford intensified his malady. He thought of the people there who needed him, and whom he seemed to have forsaken; and his soul as filled with bitterness unspeakable. This, so far; is it went, was entirely to his credit; but unfortunately he allowed it to go too far. He let it develop into a habit. Whenever the least thing went wrong at Bellhaven, he convinced himself that he should never have left Langford. It was Langford that now became enveloped in a golden haze. If only he had remained at Langford! Oh, if he had never left Langford! In his better, wiser, saner, stronger moments he felt ashamed of this weakness of his. But there it was! And it would have saved him a world of distress if, when he left the Langford field for the field of Bellhaven, he had closed the gate firmly and finally behind him.

We are expressly told that cattle were grazing in the field that Mr. Lloyd George and his friend were leaving behind them. That is the trouble. There are always things in the fields behind us that may escape unless we carefully close the gates. Who is it that says:

I have closed the door on Fear,
He has lived with me far too long,
If he were to break forth and reappear,
I should lift my eyes and look at the sky,
And sing aloud, and run lightly by:
He will never follow a song.

I have closed the door on Gloom,
His house has too narrow a view,
I must seek for my soul a wider room,
With windows to open and let in the sun,
And radiant lamps when the day is done,
And the breeze of the world blowing through.

It is true that my life cannot be divided into watertight compartments. It is a whole—one and indivisible. But it is a whole, as a fine estate is a whole, with green hedges and white gates conveniently separating one part from another. The gates may be opened and closed at will; but it is good to have them there. We do not want the cattle to stray indiscriminately everywhere. It is pleasant to have some fields from which they are shut out—fields where the children can gather mushrooms and blackberries without fear.

I am very fond of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. Does the world contain such a triumph of gate-shutting? Our gentle angler lived through the most turbulent years of British history. He was born in the spacious days of great Elizabeth. He was ten years old when the illustrious Queen died. He saw the rise of the Stuarts, the Civil War, the ascendancy of the Puritans, and the execution of Charles the First. He lived all through the days of the Commonwealth; and he witnessed the Restoration! Yet who that has read his book would suspect that bloodshed and civil strife were raging around as he wrote? From the first page to the last, as Professor Jackson has pointed out, we have nothing but 'the murmur of brooks, the rustle of the wind in the trees, the shower falling softly on the teeming earth, the sweet smell of the soil after rain, the shining of the sun on green spaces.' It is a fine thing for a man to be able to shut out the cattle as effectively as that!

Or what about Wordsworth? Was it by some whimsical freak of circumstance that Wellington and Wordsworth were contemporaneous? Was it a mere oddity of chance that a generation almost wholly absorbed in the momentous issues that hung upon the fleets that grappled at Trafalgar, and the armies that fought at Waterloo, should find something very much to its taste in the poetry of Wordsworth? The terrible and long-drawn-out conflict, which ended in the complete overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo, lasted, with scarcely a break, from 1793 to 1815. Now, singularly enough, it was in the first year of the war—in 1793 that Wordsworth published his first poem; through all these critical years in which the fate of the Empire hung trembling in the balance the poet continued to ravish the ear of the British people; and it was just as the armies of Wellington and Napoleon, of Ney and Blücher, were being drawn up in readiness for ‘that world-earthquake, Waterloo,’ that the ‘Excursion’ was to the nation. Whilst Europe reverberated with the thunder of guns, and shuddered beneath the tramp of armies, Wordsworth sang of the cuckoo and the skylark; of the redbreast and the butterfly; of the linnet and the nightingale; of the sparrow and the daisy. And to such music all the world listened. And why? Simply because we love to escape at times from the horned cattle, and to roam at will in the meadows in which the cowslip may turn its face to the sun, in which the lark may build her nest among the grasses, and in which lovers may wander in the gloaming undisturbed. Walton and Wordsworth helped people to shut the gate; that was all.

I am writing on the last night of the year. It is an hour for gate-shutting. If the fields behind us contain any creatures that we do not wish to meet again, let us carefully close the gate.

Let us forget the things that vexed and tried us,
The worrying things that caused our souls to fret,
The hopes that, cherished long, were still denied us,
Let us forget!

Let us forget the little slights that pained us,
The greater wrongs that rankle sometimes yet;
The pride with which some lofty one disdained us,
Let us forget!

It is of small use hoping for a happy New Year unless I carefully fasten all these gates behind me.

But the best possible illustration of my theme is to be found in the Old Testament. When the children of Israel, in hot haste, escaped from bondage, the Egyptians close upon their heels, a strange thing happened. ‘The angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face and stood behind them; and it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel.' A screen of Deity interposed itself between pursued and pursuers. The gate was divinely closed behind them lest the cattle of the land of Egypt should rush out and trample on the chosen people. And, long centuries later, when Israel escaped from Babylon, and dreaded a similar attack from behind, the voice divine again reassured them. 'I, the Lord thy God, will be thy rearguard.' There are thousands of things behind me of which I have good reason to be afraid; but it is the glory of the Christian evangel that all the gates may be closed. It is grand to be able to walk in green pastures and beside still waters unafraid of anything that I have left in the perilous fields behind me.

A while ago I preached upon this theme. An old gentleman, a regular member of my congregation, was present. I noticed that he followed me with the closest interest and attention. Next day he quite suddenly passed away. But, before going, he turned to those about him and exclaimed, 'I have shut the gate! I have shut the gate!' Like that of Mr. Lloyd George's doctor, it was a fine testimony! May my sunset be as serene!

Source: F W Boreham, ‘Please Shut the Gate’, The Silver Shadow (London: The Epworth Press, 1918), 109-119.

Dr Geoff Pound

The F W Boreham Book Collection at Dunedin Public Libraries

2008-12-27T19:54:00.001-08:00

Barbara Frame wrote an article on Boreham book collections for Nga Purongo: New Zealand Libraries-The Journal for Library & Information Management, Vol 49, No. 12, March 2005.

Here is the summary to give the gist of the article:

“The works of F.W. Boreham (1871-1959) are of growing interest to collectors worldwide. The small town of Mosgiel, near Dunedin, was for several years Boreham's home and provided the inspiration for much of his writing. The Mosgiel Library's incomplete collection has been added to and developed into a special collection on permanent display.”

To read the article, go to this link.

Source: Thanks to Robert Bonte and Rowland Croucher for passing the article to me.

Link: Dunedin Public Library, Boreham Collection.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Cabinet of Boreham books, Mosgiel Public Library. (Image courtesy of above link)

David Doran on F W Boreham

2008-12-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

David Doran, an exiting student at Sydney’s Moore College and from 2009 the Assistant Minister at St James Anglican Church in Minto, has written an essay on F W Boreham.

I appreciate David’s willingness to allow his essay to be published on this Boreham site, thus enabling many others to benefit from his research. My apologies for not being able to reproduce the same formatting, especially with the endnotes. GRP.

An account of the life and ministry of Frank W. Boreham.
In 1936 at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland Professor Daniel Lamont introduced Frank W. Boreham as ‘the man whose name is on all our lips, whose books are on all our shelves, and whose illustrations are in all our sermons.’1 Reflecting on their publication of 50 of Boreham’s books, the head publisher of Epworth Press said, ‘It was the discovery of F W Boreham [which was] the Book Room’s greatest catch, from John Wesley’s day to down to my own.’2 These and other tributes give a sense of the mass appeal and respect Frank W. Boreham’s preaching and writing won in the early twentieth century. John Henry Jowett wrote to his protégés, ‘I would advise you to read all the books of F.W. Boreham.’3 In one brief history of the Baptist denomination in Australia, Boreham is described as the best known graduate of Spurgeon’s Training College ever to serve in our country.4 In 1959, in what would be the year Boreham died, Billy Graham paid him a personal visit to thank him for the way his books had enriched his evangelistic ministry.5 All this is most impressive, but perhaps even more so for Sydney Anglicans is the report in Boreham’s biography that Bishop Howard Mowll visited Boreham and ensured a photographer came along with him!

Who was this man and what characterised this life-long ministry that won such massive appeal and affection? The major part of this essay is dedicated to answering these questions, firstly through a biographical sketch outlining the major movements and achievements of his life. Following that, through a study of a sample of his writings, a portrait is built of Boreham according to the passions that characterise his ministry. Reflecting on this story and portrait, I will then dedicate a section arguing the cultural movement of Romanticism, especially imbibed through F.B. Meyer and J.J. Doke, was the most significant influence shaping Boreham’s passions and style. Finally, through the grid of Bebbington’s quadrilateral of Evangelicalism we will describe the nature of Boreham’s evangelicalism, proposing that Boreham was dominated by conversionism and activism, who, due to a deliberate avoidance of theological controversy was understandably misinterpreted as happy with any branch of Christianity, including Liberalism or Roman Catholicism.

A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Ministry of F.W. Boreham
Frank W. Boreham was born in 1871 and grew up in the English rural village of Tunbridge Wells. His parents were devoted members of the Anglican church there but it was not until Frank moved to London at the age of 18 that faith dominated his life. He could not recall a specific moment of conversion rather that, ‘at that critical juncture, Christ laid His mighty hand upon me and claimed me as His own.’6 On arrival in London, he attended a Non-conformist church named Immanuel and through friends became involved in the London City Mission, where it is clear he became captivated by the work of evangelism and mission. It was through participating in evangelistic events they ran that Frank ‘glimpsed the unutterable preciousness of a single human soul.’7 With an enormous spiritual zeal he avidly attended F.B. Meyer’s Saturday Bible Classes, and ventured around London to hear preachers like C.H. Spurgeon, Joseph Parker and Archibald Brown. He began attending meetings of China Inland Mission but was advised by Hudson Taylor that his permanently injured leg would make missionary work in China untenable. He continued however to give himself to city evangelism and preached his first sermon on the street within months of his arrival in London. Although he did have an immersion baptism in 1890 it was more his friendship with James Douglas that brought him into Baptist circles. It was Douglas who encouraged Frank to apply for admission into Spurgeon’s Training College.8 Clearly he did not exclusively affiliate with Baptists though, because at that same time he accepted a request to preach at the Park Crescent Congregational Church and he continued this for five months.

In his early years in London his keenness and ability to write were also evident. In 1891 he got a 1,000 word essay about poverty in London published in the Clapham Observer, and later that year had a booklet published about some reflections on Genesis 24, which included an introduction written by F.B. Meyer.9 In August 1892 he began studying at Spurgeon’s College and at the end of two years there, Boreham answered a call from Thomas Spurgeon (Charles’ son) to become pastor of the rural Baptist congregation at Mosgiel in New Zealand. In the course of his farewell address to the church where he had been student minister, he expressed his hope ‘that in the course of my ministry I shall hold three pastorates, and then be free to travel in many lands preaching the everlasting Gospel among all the denominations.’10 He went on to do exactly that.

From 1895 to 1906 he was the pastor at Mosgiel, a time Boreham always reflected on fondly. He described it as the church where he was ‘learning at their hands to be a minister of the everlasting gospel.’11 In 1896, after proposing via letter to his would-be bride who lived in England, he married Stella and with her they would go on to have five children. In New Zealand his writing career began to flourish as he soon wrote a sermon a week in the local newspaper, and later fortuitously scored a place writing editorials for the Otago Daily Times.12 His activities at Mosgiel were voluminous, as shown for example in his heavy involvement in Temperance campaigns,13 and his quick rise to become president of the New Zealand Baptist Union.14 During his time in Mosgiel he struck up a close friendship with older minister J.J. Doke, the man who became his treasured mentor in these early years of ministry.

With a great degree of sadness at leaving Mosgiel but an excitement to take on a city pastorate, Boreham began his ministry at the Hobart Baptist Tabernacle in 1906. Here he thrived even more than at Mosgiel, having grown confidence as a preacher15 and a drive to plunge himself into all manner of causes.16 The church thrived under his leadership, with church membership going from 180 to 320 during his ten years there.17 During his time at Hobart he started his ‘Texts that changed the world’ series, which entailed biographical sermons on Christian heroes focusing on the verse of Scripture that compelled their conversion. Boreham would later call this sermon series his all-time favourite: ‘It was certainly the longest and the most evangelistic and the most effective.’18 Such sermons would later form the content of the books A Bunch of Everlastings, A Casket of Cameos and A Faggot of Torches.

In 1912 Boreham’s first big selling book was published, The Luggage of Life. This book was a series of short essays, each one having a spiritual lesson illuminated through a range of illustrations. It was typical of the kind of book that Boreham would
go on to write again and again and sell by the thousands. At the end of his time at Hobart, because of his books, Boreham could be described as a household name among Australian churchgoers.19

The workload at Hobart could not be sustained forever, and after a particularly draining year of 1915 with the extra stresses that war brought, in 1916 Boreham accepted a call to be pastor of the Baptist church at the populous and attractive Melbourne suburb of Armadale. Boreham felt that Armadale exactly suited him.20 It was a large church that was well resourced enabling him to concentrate on writing and preaching. His ministry at Armadale was again warmly received and resulted in good growth for the church.21 In one year the church added 52 new members to their roll.22

At this stage Boreham had established a substantial overseas readership and so in 1928 he was able to travel the United States and Canada on a preaching and lecturing tour. In the same year the McMaster Baptist University of Toronto awarded him an honorary doctorate in Divinity, in recognition of his work as a preacher and author. The time was right for Boreham to fulfil his final dream of itinerant ministry, and so he retired from pastoral ministry after 12 years service at Armadale. Boreham remained in Melbourne, active as ever, guest preaching at churches that were not only Baptist but Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, Salvation Army and Anglican as well. This included six month relief stints at the Melbourne Methodist Central Mission and at the Pitt Street Congregational Church in Sydney. At the age of 65, with Boreham still possessing an insatiable desire to preach, he accepted the offer of the pulpit at Scots Presbyterian Church Melbourne, for the Wednesday lunch-hour service conducted for businessmen. Furthermore he began contributing to The Age newspaper’s Literary Supplement essays. He would continue to have articles in The Age for twenty years and preached at Scots Church for the next 18 years. In 1954 he received an Order of the British Empire ‘In Recognition of his distinguished services to religion and literature as preacher and essayist.’23

When Frank W. Boreham passed away at the age of 88, he left behind an astonishing literary output of 49 books and around 3,000 newspaper editorials.24 His pastoral work and preaching had formed the basis of this work, and his times at Mosgiel, Hobart and Armadale had demonstrated his immense gifts as a church leader. Through his writing and later touring he attracted devotees in Australia and beyond, and we turn now to examine the passions that Boreham possessed that found resonance around the world.

The Passions of F.W. Boreham
The following portrait of Frank W. Boreham is deliberately framed in terms of his ‘passions’, for he was a man who was strongly imbued with a sense of passion and believed strongly in the need for deep fervour and emotion for effective ministry. The primary documents shaping this portrait are a sample of his books, ranging from The Luggage of Life (1912) to The Last Milestone (1961), including his autobiography, My Pilgrimage (1940).

Evangelism and Mission
Boreham’s biographer quotes Frank saying these words on the 50th anniversary of his ordination, but we also find them verbatim in his autobiography in the chapter entitled ‘Evangelism’:

“From the day of ordination to this day, the one passionate desire of my heart has been to lead my hearers to Christ.” 25

This was no doubt driven by his conviction of the gospel of Christ, but it was also driven by the sheer thrill of being involved in the someone’s conversion. Noting the trademark Boreham flourish, it is hard not to catch some of the zeal described in these words taken from The Luggage of Life:

“No Christian knows what Christianity really means until he has experienced such days as that day of Lydia’s and such nights as that night with the jailer. Religion catches fire and becomes sensational. The moment when two weary workers kneel with their first convert has all eternity crammed and crowded into it.” 26

For Boreham, once someone has played a part in one conversion, ‘he will be restless and ill at ease until the vessels are filled to the brim.’27 These words explain in a large part why Boreham was primarily an evangelist even though he involved himself in many other ventures. For example, according to Crago Boreham was heavily involved in the Temperance movement, but these rate only a very brief mention in his autobiography. The pinnacle moments of Boreham’s ministry in his mind were the time God used him to bring people into the kingdom.

In accord with this passion for evangelism was Boreham’s deep commitment to seeing the gospel win converts from every nations: ‘foreign missions have been the dearest passion of my heart.’28 No doubt part of the reason he travelled to New Zealand was this missionary impetus (which had been thwarted in regard to China), and of the many committees he took part in Mission ones were high on his agenda.29 Boreham was one who had been caught up in the grand quest of the Church to make disciples of all nations:

“[…]when the Church comes to understand the love with which God loved the world, she will be restless and ill at ease until all the great empires have been captured, until every coral island has been won.”30

Preaching and Writing
Ever since he moved to London Frank W. Boreham was eager to write and in London his passion for preaching was ignited. He was a man who had a firm conviction in the power of words, particularly to convert people to Christ. In his introduction to A Faggot of Torches, he says ‘words are very powerful, just as God spoke creation into being,’31 the event of someone being converted through the word was when ‘the ancient drama of Creation is repeated on a really imposing and majestic scale.’32 Thus he gave himself studiously to the labours of preaching and writing.

It is hard to split the preaching and writing of Boreham because all his writings grew out of his pulpit ministry.33 This means we can gain accurate insight as to the content of his sermons from his books, especially those based on his ‘Texts that Changed the World’ Series. His aim in both endeavours was to present Christ, but not through sustained theological argument. Crago said Boreham was ‘convinced that it is the preacher’s mission to make impressions and to create visions rather than to state reasons.’34 Boreham puts it this way: ‘Happy the preacher, however unlettered, who knowing little else, knows how to direct such wistful and hungry eyes to the only possible fountain of satisfaction.’35 Boreham believed sermons explaining theology would not arrest hearers but theology rather formed the invisible skeletal shape to the
sermon.36 An example of this is in one sermon where he raises the question of what faith is, but rather than offer any kind of theological definition, he merely paints an illustration to make his point.37 We shall explore the effects of this aversion for explicit theology on an account of Boreham’s evangelicalism later in the essay.

Being a firm believer in the power of artful rhetoric, Boreham invested a lot of time and energy in developing his oratory skills as a preacher.38 Part of his motivation for doing so was the maintenance of respect for the gospel in the public sphere: ‘I felt strongly that since a preacher is a public speaker, no speaker in any other department of public life should put him to shame.’39 Clearly his hard work paid off in this area, as Boreham developed a reputation as a masterful orator, as witnessed by the words of this non-Christian observer of him at a public function during the Hobart days:

“A while back, Alfred Deakin, Australia’s leading artist in words, told us peroration was dead. Mr Boreham doesn’t think so. On Tuesday night he winged his flight from State to State, from continent to continent, from world to world, and from sun to sun.
And the audience approved the oratorical flight.”40

Undoubtedly his honed oratory skills were a key ingredient in the effectiveness of his preaching. His oratory abilities were matched by his ability to craft language of high passion and gripping fervour. He was particularly adept at using repetition to impress one point through numerous descriptions, or build a momentum to a stirring climax. To exemplify the former, take these words opening his sermon about the text that changed John Bunyan’s life:

“By its radiance he extricates himself from every gloomy valley and from every darksome path. Its joyous companionship beguiles all his long and solitary tramps. It dispels for him the loneliness of his dreary cell. When no other visitor is permitted to approach the gaol, John Bunyan’s text comes rushing to his memory as though on angel’s wings.” 41

To exemplify the latter, read these words about George Whitefield’s conversion:

“I cannot explain the creation of the universe; but for all that, here is the universe! I cannot explain the mystery of birth; but what does it matter? Here is the child! I cannot explain the truth that, darting like a flash of lightning into the soul of that Oxford student, transforms his whole life; but, explained or unexplained, here is George Whitefield!”42 (emphasis his)

Boreham’s sermons obviously were designed to move the heart but they were also characterised by a dominance in content of illustration and metaphor. One writer quotes (without reference) Boreham as saying, ‘The world is full of sacramental things,’43 and it is easy to recognise the pervasiveness of this belief in Boreham’s books. These words from the essay ‘The Prudentialities of Life’ sum up Boreham’s approach:

“The microscopic is often as eloquent and as revealing as the majestic. Divinity often trembles in a dewdrop. A trifling incident may reflect a tremendous principle.44 So his books follow a similar pattern where small essays present one dominant metaphor that is teased out and developed to make a forceful spiritual point. For example, in the essay ‘The Candle and The Bird’ he explores how the rejection of the gospel is more like the frightening away of a bird than the extinguishing of a candle.45 In another piece he writes how the cry of a child seeking to see his father’s face is just like our desire to know our Heavenly Father’s face upon us.46 Or, we could sample this method of Boreham’s in the ‘Poppies in the Corn’. Poppies are splendid to the eye amidst the duller surrounds of corn but each conceals a cross. In the same way we can speak of the Cross:

“Yes, it is impossible to think of the red, red poppy without thinking of the black, black Cross. That is why the day of the Cross is the ruddiest and most radiant poppy in the whole field of human history. It is the blood mark which shall glorify and sanctify every ear of common corn as long as the world shall stand.”47

Myriad upon myriad of these word pictures, often based on normally very innocuous things, occupy Boreham’s writings as he mined what he saw as a highly sacramental world for spiritual truth. This is why Crago concludes his book by describing Boreham’s legacy as ‘the lovely lines, the sweetening influence, and the signposts pointing to the Saviour.’ 48

His Churches
While it may be easy to simply focus on the skill and success of Frank W. Boreham the preacher and writer, any account of his ministry would be deficient if it did not acknowledge his dedication as a pastor. Another great love that shaped his life was the churches he shepherded, as the dedication prefacing his book A Bunch of Everlastings (1920) shows: ‘At the feet of those three elect ladies. The churches at Mosgiel, Hobart and Armidale I desire, with the deepest affection and respect, to lay
this Bunch of Everlastings.’

Boreham was someone who tirelessly worked at following up his pulpit ministry with personal care. Records of his practise week by week indicate he sought to follow the example of Richard Baxter, whom he obviously admired:

“During the week he (Baxter) exhausted all his energy and time - though never free from pain- in trying to save the souls of his people one by one. He gathered them in groups; he formed them into classes; he dealt with them family by family; he appealed -earnestly, pleadingly, yearningly- to each individual alone.”49

So Boreham says when he was in good health he would spend four afternoons a week engaged in visitation.50 During the war he laboured to keep up with soldiers he knew by writing to them individually.51 Even with his lunchtime ministry at Scots, after preaching he would make himself available for one on one pastoral talks with people.52 His practise always demonstrated a deep commitment to the welfare of each and every member of his congregation.

It appears, as for his preaching, his pastoral ministry was very well received. He clearly developed a personal touch that communicated genuine love. Crago records this public tribute offered by one Judge C.H. Book near the end of Boreham’s life: ‘But above all, I rejoice that I have spoken with him face to face, and then he makes you feel that it is you who have his interest and love.’53 Part of this ability no doubt came to him naturally, but it is also clear Boreham worked at his pastoral ministry. Such can be gleaned from the story of J.J. Doke engaging in a role play with his protégé just prior to a visit Boreham had to pay to a dying person.54 Thus his close friend C. Irving Benson wrote this about him: ‘As a brother minister he was an apostle of encouragement and as a pastor he had a rare skill in the art of comforting.55

Books, Nature and History
Another tribute C. Irving Benson paid to Frank Boreham sums up the final passion that defines him, Boreham’s passion for life itself!

“What a relish he had for living and how vastly he enjoyed being alive! He was interesting because he was interested in everybody and everything.”56

This zest for life and God’s world repeatedly comes out in his writings, where his wealth of knowledge of literature, nature and history are all mustered to drive home his points. A classic example of this is found in his essay entitled ‘Our Desert Islands’ in The Luggage of Life, where there are mentions of Robinson Crusoe, Enoch Arden, Patmos, Napolean, the nature of islands, Defoe, Tennyson, Andromeda and Perseus, all on the first page! 57 He believed, in God’s world, ‘Truth is always and everywhere friendly to Truth,’58 so he avidly pursued knowledge and simply delight from any source he could. At the beginning of his time in Mosgiel, he pledged to buy a book a week and read the same, and this he did for 20 years.59 A lot of what he read was history (not theology), and the book that really inspired his passion for reading and history was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.60 His love for nature must have fuelled his love of photography that Crago reports.61 These pursuits are key indicators of Boreham’s Romanticism, and all his work is infused with a fascination and love for all that nature, history and art could teach him.

Explaining Frank W. Boreham
Having provided a biographical sketch of Frank W. Boreham and an exploration of the passions that shaped his ministry, I now turn to argue what best explains this prolific man. It is clear Boreham was not a man moulded by denominational convictions. We do not get very far trying to explain Boreham as a Baptist. He was heavily involved in Baptist Unions in New Zealand and Australia but these seem more about combining resources for gospel proclamation rather than a preservation of
denominational distinctiveness,62 and so it makes sense that an evangelist like Boreham would be committed to them. Boreham never explicitly identifies himself with any branch of Baptist faith, he never speaks much of Charles Spurgeon or his training College, but what is always dominant is his keenness to work with other denominations and emphasise the commonality he shared.63 What most explains the person and ministry of Frank W. Boreham, apart from his gospel faith, is the cultural movement of Romanticism.

The Influence of Romanticism
David Bebbington names Romanticism as one of the key cultural movements affecting British and American evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.64 This movement ‘stressed […]the place of feeling and intuition in human perception, the importance of nature and history for human experience.’65 Its impacts were immediately to make ‘preaching more elaborate, rhetorical, and charged with metaphor.’66 Over the longer term it inclined people toward doctrinal liberalism and a focus on ethics.67 We will discuss whether the label ‘liberal’ sits fairly with Boreham in the final section of this essay, but our analysis of his preaching for starters seems to match nicely the style of preaching borne out of Romanticism.

Given Bebbington’s description of Romanticism, it is already clear how Boreham aligns with the Romantic movement. We have outlined his passion for history and nature. Our analysis of his preaching matches the characteristic Romantic preaching style. What has not been demonstrated already is the premium Boreham placed on ‘feeling and intuition’. But this is ever-present in Boreham’s writings. For example, look at these words that come in the context of a classic Romantic polemic against the emptiness of philosophical debate. The first quote comes from an exposition by Boreham on the Beatitude, ‘Blessed are they that mourn’:

“Blessed are they that mourn!- the Saviour says; and I think I begin to understand Him. Blessed are those who feel! - he seems to say.”68 (emphasis his)

He goes on to say the feeling is especially about deep sorrow for sin, but the emphasis on feeling is very strong. The second quote just as strongly evidences Boreham’s Romanticism as he explains the key way gospel transforms:

“And it is by the things we feel that life is dominated and controlled[…] It was not that men’s minds were illuminated by a new light; it was that their hearts suddenly glowed with a new passion. The priceless evangel of the New Testament is not a system of philosophy, but a divine love letter.”69 (emphasis his)

Boreham exhibited the ways of a Romantic and it appears he learnt and imbibed these from the two most important intellectual and spiritual influences on his life: F.B. Meyer and J.J. Doke.

According to Ian Randall, who has conducted extensive study on F.B. Meyer, Meyer could be described as ‘a thoroughgoing Romantic. For him, Wordsworth and all his followers were students in the school of Jesus Christ.’70 From the records of Boreham’s formative years in London, it appears F.B. Meyer had a huge impact on him. It was then that he devotedly attended Meyer’s Saturday afternoon Bible classes and where Meyer ‘captured [his] whole heart.’71 Indeed, he and his classmates regarded Meyer as ‘the father of us all.’72 Crago reports that Boreham’s love of Meyer began with him voraciously reading his books.73 The fact that Meyer was willing to pen an introduction to Boreham’s first book shows that, at least at that stage for both of them, Meyer and his pupil were very much like-minded. Indeed, Randall’s account of F.B. Meyer bears out striking resemblances to Boreham and it appears we would go a long way (not completely) towards understanding Frank W. Boreham by studying F.B. Meyer.74 Thus undoubtedly Boreham’s Romanticism is largely attributable to the F.B. Meyer’s strong influence in his life.

The next most important influence on Frank W. Boreham must be J.J. Doke, the man who has simply been called Boreham’s ‘mentor’.75 Boreham relishes the memory of the times Doke would ‘pour the golden treasure of his mind and heart into my hungry ear.’76 This was also at another formative time in Boreham’s life when he was carrying out his first pastorate at Mosgiel. In terms of Boreham and Romanticism, Boreham credits Doke as beginning his insatiable reading and guiding him as to what to read.77
For instance, Doke began Boreham’s obsession with history by urging his pupil to read Gibbon. In addition, as a personal model Doke was a passionate Romantic- a man of liberal education, who painted, who was a photographer and who even started his own zoo!78 Boreham’s passion for life and zest for God’s world mimic in a lot of ways that of his mentor, so it is clear Doke also would be a reliable window into the workings of Frank W. Boreham.

To summarise this section, the style and loves of Frank W. Boreham demonstrate the heavy influence Romanticism had on his life, and that is best explained by two people who taught him a great deal about life and ministry: F.B. Meyer and J.J. Doke.

The Evangelicalism of Frank W. Boreham
One only has to note Frank W. Boreham’s inclusion in The Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography,79 to see Boreham has historically been regarded as evangelical. However, it is hard to be precise about how Boreham fitted into the evangelical landscape and there are suggestions he drifted toward liberalism in his later years. Two quotes present the puzzle of Boreham’s evangelicalism well. The first, taken from Crago’s biography, is a report of how the Presbyterian Standard assessed Boreham when he visited America:

While all were charmed with his style and entertained by his peculiar technique in the pulpit, his hearers gladly detected the evangelistic note and the earnest purpose of the speaker. Montreat accords him the seal of orthodoxy and rejoices in his common loyalty and devotion to the common Lord.80 Boreham had an idiosyncratic way about him, but these conservative Evangelicals were happy to welcome him. The next quote, which raises questions (I think misguidingly) even about the label ‘evangelical’ and Boreham, comes from his close personal friend, C. Irving Benson: 81

“I do not remember his name being associated with any controversy. With Fundamentalist, with High Church and Evangelical, with Roman Catholic and Protestant, he had no discernible quarrel. With true catholicity of spirit he moved among them with the easy grace of a man who picked flowers from all their gardens.”82 (emphasis added)

This intended tribute to Boreham suggests Boreham tied himself to no theological brand but moved with whatever attracted him. What was the nature of Frank W. Boreham’s evangelicalism? Indeed, is it historically true to label Boreham an ‘evangelical’?

To answer these questions we will apply David Bebbington’s inductive definition of evangelicalism,83 assessing how each part of the fourfold grid sits with Boreham. We will achieve this with insights gleaned from the foregoing analysis, and with particular attention to The Tide Comes In (1961). This was the last book of devotional essays Boreham compiled and notably the one which he writes contains pieces ‘of which he was particularly fond.’84

According to Bebbington, the mark of evangelicalism called conversionism is ‘the belief that lives need to be changed’, and another one called activism is ‘the expression of the gospel in effort.’85 Given Boreham’s passion for evangelism and mission and the sheer volume of gospel enterprise and preaching he conducted to the very end of his life, its fair to say conversionism and activism dominated his life. As to his conviction that a man needs to be converted to enter fellowship with God there
could be no clearer statement of it than this one offered in the essay ‘So It’s Your
Birthday!’:

‘[…] life presents man with two supreme and indispensable imperatives. Its says: Ye must be born! And it says: Ye must be born again.’86 (emphasis his)

Furthermore it is clear his passion for activism directed toward evangelism still burns
bright as essays like ‘The Wafted Fragrance’,87 ‘The Angler’88 and ‘Wagon Wheels’89 are basically pieces calling on Christians to evangelise. Judging by the first two marks of Bebbington’s definition, Boreham is vibrantly evangelical.

It is when we turn to Bebbington’s two other marks of evangelicalism: crucicentrism (‘a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross’90); and biblicism (‘a particular regard for the Bible’91) that people may find ground to question Boreham’s evangelicalism. We could recall Boreham’s glorying in the Cross as the centre of ‘human history’ in his essay ‘The Poppies in The Corn’ to show his commitment to preaching it in his early years. And, in The Tide Comes In he continues to speak of the Cross in the highest terms: it is the ‘supreme revelation’ of God;92 the place where our sins are taken away;93 and a rejection of the redemption it secures is ‘the sin of sins.’94 However, one quote, which appears in another of Boreham’s books as well,95 could be construed as a movement in his thinking away from crucicentrism. The words, in an essay simply entitled ‘God’, denote a self-reflective re-evaluation of thought and are quite intriguing:

“If I had my ministry over again, I would talk more about God; I would indeed. Not about works or His ways, His power or His bounty. But about His very, very self - His omnipotence; His unutterable goodness, His ineffable holiness, His splendour, His glory, His beauty, His love. For if I could make men very sure of God, they would soon hurry to that divine Saviour who is able to save to the uttermost those who come unto God by Him.”96

One could understandably take these words and claim Boreham had drifted from teaching the Cross at the centre of his gospel, away from the works of God’s Son. Whether this was fair may come down to an analysis of Boreham’s preaching in his latter days, of which we do not have direct access. But given the aforementioned strong and theologically orthodox statements about the Cross in his last book, we would be hard pressed to seriously question Boreham’s crucicentrism.

Whilst it is probably true, as some commentators say, Boreham was ‘a man of one Book,’97 his writings make his biblicism nebulous. There is only one essay I found that explicitly contends for the supreme authority of Bible (explicitly opposing Roman Catholicism) - in his first major book, The Luggage of Life. There is always an everpresent belief in the power of and love of the Bible, but the problem is his Romanticism drowns out the elevation of the Bible as being the authoritative revelation we have today. That is, his method of mustering as much from nature, literature and history as the Scriptures has the effect of placing the Bible as one source of truth along with many others. In The Tide Comes In in one essay he describes the Bible as like a telescope, because it is ‘a revelation’ which we need to see through to know God.98 This is uncontroversial in itself, but the problem is in the next paragraph Boreham speaks of the Church in the same way, as an agent of revelation. A sensible conclusion from this essay is that the Bible is a revelation but not the revelation for us now of God. Crago speaks of this tendency positively, but it does undermine Boreham’s biblicism: ‘He welcomed truth wherever he found it, and exultingly proclaimed it in the name of the Author of all truth.’99 It may be unintentional and unrepresentative of his convictions but the reader is left understanding Boreham’s regard for Scripture to be a little less than that of the supreme authority traditionally reserved for it by evangelicals.

Thus to summarise the findings from our analysis according to Bebbington’s criteria we see Boreham very strong on conversionism and activism, demonstrably crucicentric but veering from the norm in biblicism. Perhaps Boreham’s evangelicalism could be described as a forerunner to the evangelicals of the mid-twentieth century, who Bebbington says were characterised by the high order of activism.100 Another perspective may be to say that Boreham was more concerned with being ‘evangelistic’ than ‘evangelical’, the very thing that was urged by a leading Australian Baptist, C.J. Tinsley, to his fellow Australian Baptists in 1912.101 Whatever the case, if Bebbington was accurate, Boreham deserves to be known unreservedly in history as evangelical, even if not in the mainstream.

The question remains what it is to be made of Irving Benson’s remarks about Boreham having ‘no discernible quarrel’ with any branch of Christianity. There are three things which can be cited to argue that while one may think Boreham had no difference with anyone, in reality he did, but he refused to show it, in the interests of peace-keeping. Firstly, from all reports Boreham was a very gentle man. This is evident by noting how much he was affected and made unhappy by a rift with a friend during his time at Mosgiel, at the end of which he learns what he calls the ‘futility’ of controversy.102 One can imagine the peace-loving Boreham reacting to the anti- Catholic sentiment so prevalent amongst Protestants in the early twentieth century by personally showing love to Catholics, which may be misinterpreted as having ‘no quarrel’ with them. Secondly, Boreham made a deliberate decision to avoid controversy or quarrel in his writing and preaching. In The Tide Comes In, he wholeheartedly upholds the contention of Francis of Assisi that the godly man ‘has no need to resort to words in order to rebuke the iniquities that disfigure the Church and world around him.’103 Thus, even if Boreham had a quarrel with someone - he would never mention it! Finally, as already alluded to, his language and method presented his theology quote ambiguously at times. We could cite as examples of this his comments about preaching more about God (even though in other places the Cross is central), or his statement in his last essay in The Tide Comes In that ‘Harmony and light are, therefore, the two biggest things in the universe.’104 Such language tends to leave the theology accompanying it ‘in the eye of the beholder’, and one can imagine Catholics or Liberals happily adopting these words as at least a concession to them. This is why Crago can say Boreham’s books ‘were read with equal avidity by theological liberals and conservatives.’105 If Boreham had any issue with them he never explicitly argued it, and his language at terms courted an inclusiveness that perhaps he never intended. There is definitely enough evidence positively of traditional Protestant evangelicalism on the part of Boreham in his writings to suggest Boreham would have staunchly opposed Roman Catholicism and Liberalism, it is simply that he avoided that fight. In support of this is the absence of record of any preaching in Catholic churches, he always worked with Protestant ones. From my estimate, James Townsend, who made an extensive study of Boreham’s theology, makes an accurate summation of the man. On soteriology, Townsend says Boreham ‘tended to swim with the Evangelical mainstream.’106 However, Townsend emphasises more that ‘Boreham’s bent is more often to build bridges where they can built’107 and according to Boreham, ‘Rightness never need be accompanied by rudeness.’108 Though it is hard to detect at times, Boreham at heart was a theologically orthodox Protestant evangelical, who chose to work through a love that never criticised to win over those he disagreed with.

Concluding Reflections on Frank W. Boreham
What have I gained from a study of Frank W. Boreham? His significance is not really found in enlightening a case study of Baptists in Australia. He does give us concrete insight into how Romanticism influenced an evangelical, but really Frank W. Boreham was simply an outstanding Christian individual, and as such it is the person himself that is the lesson. If I am to be critical, I have learned that to avoid theological controversy risks losing theological distinctiveness, which may result in a loss of the gospel itself. This cannot be said to be true of Frank W. Boreham’s life and churches, but the long-term trajectory of his Romanticism and decision to avoid theological argument gives his devotees that option. Trumping that wariness though is a sheer admiration of and inspiration from a man who loved the Lord Jesus, and laboured incredibly to see him glorified. Most strikingly in Frank W. Boreham we meet a Christian who sought to truly connect to people in order to connect them to Christ, and the sales of his books and the growth of his churches show that he did connect with people, and he did win converts to Christ. So while his style is quite foreign to preaching I am accustom to, I can learn from Boreham the value of illustration and the
colour wide reading can bring to the pulpit. His deliberate commitment to and connection through the written word raises the question of whether ministers these days too often neglect the pen for the sake of the pulpit - Boreham always looked to hone both arts for the sake of the gospel. Overall what stands out about Frank W. Boreham is that he was one uniquely gifted, but one who dedicated these gifts to tireless evangelism and shepherding the flock given to him, and in this regard he is a model I have been privileged to study.

Endnotes
1 Frank W. Boreham, My Pilgrimage (London: Epworth Press, 1940), 251
2 Geoff Pound, ‘F. W. Boreham: The Public Theologian’ Baptist World Alliance: 3. Online:
http://www.bwa-baptist-heritage.org/sl-borhm.htm Cited June 18, 2008
3 James Townsend, ‘F.W. Boreham: Essayist Extraordinaire’ JGES 14:26 (2001): 2. Online:
http://www.faithalone.org/journal/2001i/townsend.html Cited June 18, 2008
4 Ken Manley, Baptists in Australia: An Historical Introduction (Hawthorn: Baptist Union of Australia 1999), 2
5 Pound, ‘Public Theologian’, 4
6 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 60
7 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 74
8 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 87-89
9 T. Howard Crago, The Story of F.W. Boreham (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1961),
39-43.
10 Crago, Story of FWB, 57
11 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 122
12 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 147-148
13 Crago, The Story of FWB, 106-108
14 Crago, The Story of FWB, 98
15 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 183
16 ‘at Hobart.[…] I felt it my duty, as the representative of a central church, to take part in every helpful movement in the city. I was on every committee and was invited to speak at all kinds of public gatherings.’: Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 216
17 Crago, Story of FWB, 160
18 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 196-197
19 Crago, Story of FWB, 167
20 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 216
21 F.J. Wilkin, Baptists in Victoria Our First Century 1838-1938 (Baptist Union of Victoria:
Melbourne, 1939) 144
22 Crago, Story of FWB, 171
23 Crago, Story of FWB, 248
24 Pound, ‘Public Theologian’, 1, 3
25 Crago, Story of FWB, 237; Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 207.
26 Frank W. Boreham, The Luggage of Life (London: Epworth Press,1912): 31
27 Frank W. Boreham, Mountains in the Mist (London: Epworth Press,1914), 96
28 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 231
29 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 231
30 Boreham, Mountains in the Mist, 20
31 Frank W. Boreham, A Faggot of Torches (London: Epworth Press, 1926), 8
32 Boreham, Faggot of Torches, 8
33 Crago, Story of FWB, 248
34 Crago, Story of FWB, 171
35 Frank W. Boreham, A Bunch of Everlastings (London: Epworth Press, 1920), 136
36 Crago,The Story of FWB, 180
37 Boreham, Bunch of Everlastings, 27
38 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 94,140; Crago, Story of FWB, 133
39 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 141
40 Crago, Story of FWB, 121
41 Boreham, Bunch of Everlastings, 56-58
42 Frank W. Boreham, A Casket of Cameos (London: Epworth Press, 1924), 50-51: In passing notice his intentional avoidance of an attempt to explain the theology of regeneration.
43 Townsend, 2
44 Boreham, Luggage of Life, 46
45 Frank W. Boreham, Boulevards of Paradise (London: Epworth Press, 1944), 103-113
46 Frank Cumbers, Daily Readings from F.W. Boreham, (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1976), 25
47 Boreham, Mountains in the Mist, 285
48 Crago, Story of FWB, 256
49 From the sermon on ‘Richard Baxter’s Text’: Boreham, Faggot of Torches, 164
50 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 185
51 Crago, Story of FWB, 170
52 Crago, Story of FWB, 241
53 Crago, Story of FWB, 244
54 Frank W. Boreham, Lover of Life F.W. Boreham’s Tribute to His Mentor (Eureka: John Broadbanks Publishing, 2007), 14-15
55 C. Irving Benson, ‘Dr Frank W. Boreham – The Man and the Writer’, in The Last Milestone
(ed. C.Irving Benson, The Epworth Press: London,1961), 8
56 Irving Benson, 7
57 Boreham, Luggage of Life, 10
58 Boreham, Luggage of Life, 80
59 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 143
60 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 142-143
61 Crago, Story of FWB, 130, 150
62 In New Zealand, Leonard says of a ‘prelude’ to a Baptist Union: ‘[…] was founded “to advance the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ by promoting the formation of Christian Churches, by the sustenance of Evangelists, by the assistance of Pastors, by giving counsel if requested[…]”.Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways A History (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2003): 299
63 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 250
64 David W. Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism in Modern Britain and America: A Comparison’ in Amazing Grace Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States (ed. George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1993) 189-191
65 Bebbington, ‘Comparison’,189
66 Bebbington, ‘Comparison’,191
67 Bebbington, ‘Comparison’, 191
68 Frank W. Boreham, The Heavenly Octave A Study of the Beatitudes (London; Epworth Press,1935) 33
69 Boreham in The Gospel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin 29 in Cumbers, 23.
70 Ian Randall, ‘A Christian Cosmopolitan: F.B. Meyer in Britain and America’ in Amazing Grace Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States (ed. George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1993), 164
71 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 65
72 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 65
73 Crago, Story of FWB, 32
74 For instance, Meyer’s avoidance of theological controversy (Randall, 180-181); and focus on evangelism with involvement in things such as Temperance campaign (Randall, 172). I wouldn’t say Boreham shows as big a devotion to the holiness / Keswick movement as Randall says Meyer did but every now and then we see glimpses of a similar spirituality in Boreham: he uses language of ‘higher spiritual plane’ (My Pilgrimage, 70) and in another places teaches purity in the heart is no impossible ideal (Heavenly Octave, 113)
75 Geoff Pound, ‘Foreword’ in Lover of Life, vii-x
76 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 130
77 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 141
78 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 129
79 Susan E. Emilsen, ‘Frank William Boreham’, ADEB, 44-45
80 Crago, The Story of FWB, 211
81 Benson prayed the memorial prayer at Boreham’s funeral; Crago, Story of FWB, 255
82 Irving Benson, ‘Frank W. Boreham’, 8
83 David W. Bebbington Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730’s to the 1980’s (London: Routledge,1989): 2-3 Ironically, I am using Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism which was gained inductively in a deductive way - does Boreham meet this given, predetermined standard? It is simply a tool to use to see if Boreham fitted in with the evangelicalism of his day.
84 Frank W. Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 7
85 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 3
86 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 16
87 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 34-36
88 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 49-51
89 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 57-58
90 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 3
91 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 3
92 Boreham. The Tide Comes In, 33
93 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 108
94 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 112
95 The words verbatim appear on the lips of Boreham’s fictional, admired character ‘John Broadbanks’, who shares this reflection approvingly with Frank: Frank W. Boreham, I Forgot to Say A Gust of Afterthought (London: Epworth Press, 1939), 186 96 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 60
97 Frank Cumbers, ‘Foreword’ in Daily Readings from F.W. Boreham, 8; Crago, Story of FWB, 13
98 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 65
99 Crago, The Story of FWB, 180
100 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain,4; It would make an interesting study to compare Boreham’s evangelicalism with the man who paid him a personal visit, Billy Graham. Iain Murray in Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000 (Cambridge, Banner of Truth, 2000): 24-50 argues Billy Graham’s emphasis on evangelism to the extent of sharing a platform with Roman Catholics weakened evangelicalism - perhaps the same dynamic operated over the course of Boreham’s life?
101 Leonard, Baptist Ways, 297
102 Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 168
103 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 22
104 Boreham, The Tide Comes In, 117
105 Crago, Story of FWB, 180
106 Townsend, 11
107 Townsend, 9
108 Townsend, 10

BIBLIOGRAPHY: PRIMARY SOURCES CITED
Boreham, Frank W. A Bunch of Everlastings. London: Epworth Press, 1920.
________________ A Casket of Cameos. London: Epworth Press, 1924.
________________ A Faggot of Torches. London: Epworth Press, 1926.
________________Boulevards of Paradise. London: Epworth Press, 1944.
________________ I Forgot to Say A Gust of Afterthought. London: Epworth Press,
1939.
________________Lover of Life F.W. Boreham’s Tribute to His Mentor. Eureka, CA:
John Broadbanks Publishing, 2007.
________________ Mountains in the Mist. London: Epworth Press, 1914.
________________My Pilgrimmage. London: Epworth Press, 1940.
________________ The Heavenly Octave A Study of the Beatitudes. London: Epworth
Press, 1935.
________________ The Luggage of Life. London: Epworth Press, 1912.
________________The Tide Comes In. London: Epworth Press, 1958.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: SECONDARY SOURCES CITED
Bebbington, David W. ‘Evangelicalism in Modern Britain and America: A Comparison.’ Pages 183-212 in Amazing Grace Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. Edited by George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll. Grand Rapids, USA: Baker Books, 1993.
_______________ Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730’s to the 1980’s. London: Routledge, 1989.
Cumbers, Frank. Daily Readings from F.W. Boreham. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976
Crago, T. Howard. The Story of F.W. Boreham. London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1961
Emilsen, Susan E. ‘Frank William Boreham.’ Pages 44-45 in The Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography. Edited by Brian Dickey. Sydney; Evangelical History Association, 1994.
Irving Benson, C. ‘Dr Frank W. Boreham – The Man and the Writer.’ Pages 7-20 in The Last Milestone. Edited by. C.Irving Benson. The Epworth Press: London, 1961.
Leonard, Bill J. Baptist Ways A History. Valley Forge, USA: Judson Press, 2003.
Manley, Ken. Baptists in Australia: An Historical Introduction. Hawthorn: Baptist Union of Australia, 1999.
Murray, Iain. Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950 to 2000. Cambridge, UK: Banner of Truth, 2000.
Pound, Geoff. ‘F. W. Boreham: The Public Theologian’ Baptist World Alliance -Heritage and Identity Commission General Council Meeting July 2004: Cited June 18, 2008. Online: http://www.bwa-baptist-heritage.org/sl-borhm.htm
Randall, Ian. ‘A Christian Cosmopolitan: F.B. Meyer in Britain and America.’ Pages 157-182 in Amazing Grace Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. Edited by George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll. Grand Rapids, USA: Baker Books, 1993.
Townsend, James. ‘F.W. Boreham: Essayist Extraordinaire’ Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society 14:26 (2001). Cited June 18, 2008. Online: http://www.faithalone.org/journal/2001i/townsend.html
Wilkin, F.J. Baptists in Victoria Our First Century 1838-1938. Baptist Union of Victoria: Melbourne, 1939.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: PRIMARY SOURCES NOT CITED
Boreham, Frank W. The Last Milestone. .Edited by C. Irving Benson. London: Epworth Press, 1961.
_______________ Bread Upon the Waters. London: Epworth Press, 1949.
Cranston, Jeffrey S. ‘So This is Boreham’ Cited May 9, 2008. Online: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/4636.htm.
Jensen, Philip, ‘A new vision of Evangelical History’ Briefing 178 (1996): 3-10
McBeth, H. Leon. The Baptist Heritage. Nashville, USA: Broadman Press, 1987.
Piggin, Stuart. ‘An Old New Vision of Evangelical History’ Briefing 181 (1996): 6-9

Image: Stella and Frank Boreham, Hobart, Australia.

Boreham on Being Blessed

2008-11-28T18:56:00.000-08:00

The blessed of the Beatitudes is suggestive of natural fruitfulness; it stands related to the roses round my lawn, to the corn in yonder valleys and to the autumnal harvest of the orchard. It has to do with joys that arise spontaneously and inevitably from certain fixed conditions.

It is the word Macaria, a name that was once given to the Island of Cyprus because that island was said to be so fertile as to be able to produce upon its own shores everything that its inhabitants could either require or desire. Such is the blessedness of the poor in spirit. The Kingdom of Heaven—the only true Macaria—is theirs; and, when they at last finish their long fight with self and sin, they shall inherit that happy land where all their chastened appetites shall be fully gratified and all their purified cravings be abundantly appeased.

Well may Sextus Rufus hint that Cyprus, the Isle of Macaria, famous for its fertility and wealth, presented a constant temptation to the Romans; they lusted to seize upon it and make so rich a prize their very own. The wonder is that the Kingdom of Heaven—the brighter, grander, fairer Macaria—does not entice all earth's knightliest spirits to venture along the lowly track that winds its way through the Valley of Humiliation in quest of such abounding and abiding felicity. Blessed are the lowly and the contrite, for the true Macaria shall be theirs!

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ It was the King of the Kingdom who said it; and, depend upon it, He knows the laws by which His happy subjects win their glorious victories and gain their glittering crowns.

F W Boreham, The Heavenly Octave (London: The Epworth Press, 1935), 23-24.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “Blessed are the poor.”

Boreham on Believing, Loving, Obeying

2008-11-28T01:58:00.001-08:00

When Samuel Rutherford was staying for a while at the house of James Guthrie, the maid was surprised at hearing a voice in his room. She had supposed he was alone. Moved by curiosity, she crept to his door. She then discovered that Rutherford was in prayer. He walked up and down the room, exclaiming,
‘O Lord, make me to believe in you!’ Then, after a pause, he moved to and fro again, crying,
‘O Lord, make me to love you!’ And, after a second rest, he rose again, praying, ‘O Lord, make me to keep all your commandments!’

Rutherford, … had grasped the spiritual significance of the divine order.
‘O Lord, make me to believe in you!’—the commandment that…includes all the commandments!
‘O Lord, make me to love you!’—for love, as Jesus told the rich young ruler, is the fulfillment of the whole law.
‘O Lord, make me to keep all your commandments!’ The person who learns the Ten Commandments … will see a shining path that runs from Mount Sinai right up to the Cross and on through the gates of pearl into the City of God.

F W Boreham, A Handful of Stars (London: The Epworth Press, 1922), 66-67.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Samuel Rutherford.

Boreham on Believing in People

2008-11-27T03:04:00.000-08:00

The novelist Laurence Sterne was a member of an extraordinary family. They were incessantly on the move. They seem to have gone into a place; stayed there until a child had been born and a child buried; and then jogged on again. He would be a bold historian who would declare, with any approach to dogmatism, how many babies were born and buried in the course of these nomadic gipsyings. They seem to have lived for a year or so in all sorts of towns and villages, and, with pitiful monotony, we read of their regret at having to leave such-and-such a child sleeping in the churchyard. ‘My father's children,’ as Sterne himself observes, ‘were not made to last long.’ Lawrence himself, however, was one of the lucky ones.

At the age of ten, having survived the jaunts and jolts to which the wanderings of the family exposed him, he was ‘fixed’ in a school at Halifax, and was profoundly impressed by the conviction of his Yorkshire schoolmaster that he was destined to become a distinguished man.

… On one occasion the ceiling of the school room was being white-washed. The ladder was left against the wall. ‘One unlucky day,’ says Sterne, ‘I mounted that ladder, seized the brush, and wrote my name in large capital letters high up on the wall. For this offence the usher thrashed me severely. But the master was angry with him for doing so, and declared that the name on the wall should never be erased. For, he added, I was a boy of genius, and would one day become famous, and he should then look with pride on the letters on the schoolroom wall. These words made me forget the cruel blows that I had just received.’

The words did more. They implanted a glorious hope in the boy's breast: they inspired efforts that he would never otherwise have made: they account, in large measure, for his phenomenal success.

If the schoolmaster who welcomed the awkward little ten-year-old in 1723 lived, by any chance, until 1760, he must have felt that his handful of hopeseed had produced a most bounteous harvest. For, in 1760, Tristram Shandy took the country by storm. It was chaotic: it was incoherent: it was an audacious defiance of all the conventions: but it was irresistible. Its originality, its grotesque oddity, its rippling whimsicality set everybody chuckling.

Immediately after its publication, Sterne went up to London. He was the lion of the hour. His lodgings in Pall Mall were besieged from morning to night. ‘My rooms,’ he writes, ‘are filling every hour with great people of the first rank who vie with each other in heaping honors upon me.’ Never before had a literary venture elicited such homage. And when, a few months later, he crossed the Channel, a similar banquet of adulation awaited him in France.

F W Boreham, The Three Half-Moons (London: The Epworth Press, 1929), 89-91.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: ‘I mounted that ladder, seized the brush, and wrote my name in large capital letters high up on the wall.’

Boreham on Befriending One’s Fears

2008-11-25T23:45:00.001-08:00

I wish I could do for Cecil what a very eminent physician recently did for a young patient to whom he was called. It is Dr. H. E. Fosdick who tells the story. The boy's nerves were being frayed and lacerated by a terrible dream that came to him, night after night, with pitiless regularity. As soon as he dropped off to sleep he found himself confronted by a frightful tiger. At their wits' ends, his parents called in a specialist in child psychology. After thinking it over, the great man took the child on his knee.

‘See here, sonnie,’ he said, ‘they tell me that every night you meet a tiger. Now, really, he is a nice, kind, friendly tiger, and he wants you to like him, so, the next time you meet him, just put out your hand and say, "Hello, old chap!" and you will find that he will chum up to you and become a pet!'

That night, after a period of pleasant repose, the boy manifested all the symptoms of his former terror. He tossed about, ground his teeth, puckered his face, and broke into a violent perspiration. Then, all at once, we are told, his muscles relaxed. ‘He thrust a small hand out from under the bed-clothes and murmuring softly: ‘Hello, old chap!” his frightened breathing quietened into the perfect restfulness of natural sleep.’

He had discovered that the tiger, however terrible in aspect, was not necessarily hostile, after all!

F W Boreham, A Witch’s Brewing (London: The Epworth Press, 1932), 229.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “He is a nice, kind, friendly tiger…”

Boreham on Becoming Reconciled With Ones Lot

2008-11-25T03:38:00.001-08:00

Life has a wonderful way of coaxing us into a frame of mind in which we not only become reconciled to our lot: we actually fall in love with it. No memory of my early days on this side of the world is more vivid than the recollection of a horrid terror, a cold paralyzing apprehension, that often made me start in the night. I, a young Englishman, loving every stick and stone in England, had come out to New Zealand. Suppose I were to die here! My bones to be buried in New Zealand soil! It was an appalling thought, and I broke into a clammy perspiration whenever it took possession of my mind!

Later on, another nightmare, just as dreadful, came to keep it company, and I was haunted by the two of them. I married: little children gladdened our home: and we were as happy as two people could be. But suppose, I would say to myself, suppose these children grow up to regard themselves as New Zealanders, totally destitute of the emotions that bring a tug at their parents' hearts and a tear to their parents' eyes at every mention of the dear Homeland! How those ugly thoughts tyrannized me, shadowing even the sunniest of our early days under the Southern Cross!

When, later on, we found ourselves once more in England, we made two startling discoveries: we discovered that England was even more lovely and more lovable than, in our most sentimental moments, we had pictured her. But we discovered, simultaneously, that our hearts insisted on turning wistfully back to the lands in which so many of our years had been spent. The visits home were, from first to last, a dream of unalloyed delight; we were overwhelmed and touched to tears by the most astonishing kindnesses and hospitalities, yet, in the midst of it all, we found that we had become citizens of the distant south. The wattle and the gum thrust their roots very deeply into one's heart in the course of the years. It is a way that life has, and a very wonderful way, of putting us on the happiest of terms with the place in which we are destined to live and with the work that we have been appointed to do.

F W Boreham, My Pilgrimage (London: The Epworth Press, 1940), 137-138.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “The gum thrust their roots very deeply into one's heart in the course of the years.”

Boreham on Becoming Alive

2008-11-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

In his Priest of the Ideal Stephen Graham makes one of his characters rebuke another because of his failure to recognize the intrinsic splendour of life. ‘Why, man,’ he exclaims, ‘your opportunities are boundless! Your whole life should be a miracle! Instead of merely making a living, you can live! Instead of finding a calling, you can listen for the call! You are; but you have also to become! A wonderful world about you is beckoning you, enticing you to become!

To become! …. I am only in the making as yet.

F W Boreham, Home of the Echoes (London: The Epworth Press, 1921), 57.

Dr Geoff Pound

Boreham on Being True to Yourself

2008-11-23T03:55:00.000-08:00

John Constable’s name will always be held in honour on several grounds. His landscapes are admittedly incomparable. His cloud-effects and sky-effects have never been surpassed. The delicacy of his color-sense has been the admiration and the despair of all his disciples.

But the finest thing about him was his fidelity to his own ideal. He insisted on seeing every object through his own eyes and in depicting it as he himself saw it. As Sir Charles John Holmes says, ‘he hated painters who take their ideas from other painters instead of getting them direct from Nature’. It was the glory of Constable that he shattered, and shattered for ever, a particularly stubborn tradition. As the late E. V. Lucas said, ‘he brought the English people face to face with England—the delicious, fresh, rainy, blowy England that they could identify. Hitherto there had been landscape painters in abundance; but here was something else: here was weather!'

There is a famous story to the effect that Henry Fuseli, the historical painter, who, in Constable's time, was keeper of the Academy, was seen one day engrossed in the contemplation of one of Constable's paintings. It represented an English landscape in a drizzling rain. Lost to all the world, the old man became saturated in the spirit of the picture that he was so ardently admiring, and, to the astonishment of the onlookers, he suddenly put up his umbrella!

So triumphant a thing is truth! Let every person who is charged with the solemn responsibility of expressing his soul for the public good take notice! Let no painter paint in a certain way simply because he fancies that it is in that particular way that painters are expected to paint! Let no preacher preach in a certain way simply because he fancies that it is in that particular way that preachers are expected to preach!

I remember one evening standing at a street-corner listening to a chain of testimonies being given at an open-air meeting. They were all excellent; but—they were all exactly alike! I could see at once that each speaker was saying what he imagined that he was expected to say. Then there stepped into the ring a man whose lips were twitching with emotion: he said one or two things that sent a shudder down the spines of his hearers: but the force of his testimony was overwhelming. He had done, in his sphere, precisely what Constable did in his.

Let each painter, each preacher, each person whose duty it is to write a newspaper article or lead a Christian assembly to the Throne of Grace, realize that his view of God and of Humanity and of the Universe is essentially an individualistic view. He sees as nobody else sees. He must therefore paint or preach or pray or write as nobody else does. He must be himself: must see with his own eyes and utter that vision in the terms of his own personality. He must, as Rudyard Kipling would have said, paint the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are. And, expressing his naked and transparent soul by means of his palette, his pulpit or his pen, he will find sooner or later—sooner rather than later—that truth, like wisdom, is justified of all her children.

F W Boreham, I Forgot To Say (London: The Epworth Press, 1939), 131-133.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “The delicacy of John Constable’s color-sense has been the admiration and the despair of all his disciples."

Boreham on Controversy

2008-11-21T22:03:00.001-08:00

F W Boreham has been writing about finding himself in controversy when he continues with these personal words:

You know how, when one dominating idea holds all your mind, everything that you see and hear seems to stand related to it. So was it with me.

I was reading at the time an old classic by Isaac Barrow, Newton's famous preceptor. I had scarcely opened the book that morning before the old professor began on this very theme. "Avoid controversy at any cost," he says. "The truth contended for is not worth the passion expended upon it. The benefits of the victory do not atone for the prejudices aroused in the combat. Goodness and virtue may often consist with ignorance and error, seldom with strife and discord."

With a heavy heart, I laid the volume aside; and took down Richard Baxter, who first taught me how to be a minister. But—would you believe it?—I had not got through half a dozen pages before my old master burst out upon me. "Another fatal hindrance," he said, "to a heavenly walk and conversation is our too frequent disputes. A disputatious spirit is a sure sign of an unsanctified spirit. They are usually men least acquainted with the heavenly life who are the most violent disputers about the circumstantiality of religion. Yea, though you were sure that your opinions were true, yet when the chiefest of your zeal is turned to these things, the life of grace soon decays within. The least controverted truths are usually the most weighty and of most necessary and frequent use to our souls." I felt that my old master had but rubbed brine into my smarting wounds, and I returned him sadly to the shelf.

That very afternoon I had occasion to dip into John Wesley's Journal, .and under date October 9, 1741, I stumbled upon this: “I found Mr. Humphreys with Mr. Simpson. They immediately fell upon their favourite subject; on which, when we had disputed two hours, and were just where we were at first, I begged we might exchange controversy for prayer. We did so, and then parted in much love, about two in the morning."

In sheer despair I returned Wesley to his place, and forsook the theologians altogether. I picked up a volume of Darwin which, newly purchased, lay uncut on the desk. But, to my amazement, he was harping on the same old theme. "I rejoice," he said, "that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good, and caused a miserable loss of time and temper." I put the volume back on the desk; and, fancying that relief would surely come with fiction, I slipped a novel into my pocket and, after tea, went out into the fields. It happened to be Mark Rutherford's Revolution in Tanner's Lane. Imagine my consternation on finding one of the characters, Zachariah Coleman, talking on this very subject! No controversy can be of any use, he says. "It leads to everlasting debate, and it is not genuine debate, for nobody really ranges himself alongside his enemy's strongest points! It encourages all sorts of sophistry, becomes mere manoeuvring, and saps people's faith in the truth."

I went back to the house. How I spent the rest of the evening does not matter much to you or anybody else; but from that day to this I have never entangled myself in controversy again.'

F W Boreham, The Uttermost Star (London: The Epworth Press, 1919), 156-158.

Interestingly, F W Boreham later commented that his habit of evading controversy and not grasping the nettle was a mistake.

Further information: Boreham and Controversy.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Churchill and Wells engaging in controversy.

Boreham on Appropriating the Inexhaustible

2008-11-20T23:47:00.000-08:00

One afternoon, a man chanced to pass a Tourist Agency and saw in the window a colored representation of Niagara Falls. He entered; secured a copy of the telling advertisement; and pasted across the foot of it ‘More to Follow!’

Could anything be more to the point? However great the demand that the falls may make upon the river, there is always more and more water to come! However great the demand that my needs have made upon the divine grace, there is always more and more at my disposal!

This vision of grace overwhelming and overflowing, rebukes the paltriness of my appropriation.

I recall the story that Macaulay tells in his essay on Lord Olive. When Olive was on his trial, answering his impeachment before his peers, he was charged, among other things, with having taken a sum of two hundred thousand pounds from the Indian princes.

‘Two hundred thousand pounds!’ exclaimed Clive.
‘Two hundred thousand pounds! Is that possible?’

He described the way in which the Indian princes had admitted him to their treasure-chests, displaying to his astonished eyes heaps of glittering gems, wealth incalculable, gold beyond the dreams of avarice. ‘I was invited,’ Olive exclaimed, ‘to help myself, to take as much as I would! And is it possible that I contented myself with a paltry two hundred thousand pounds? Great God, I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

So must every person feel who stands with me beside this reservoir. He ponders the monumental, majestic, mountainous phraseology with which the New Testament sets forth the illimitable riches and indescribable wonders of the divine grace. The most tremendous terms falter and seem ashamed of their own pitiful inadequacy. The infinities of grace make the very universe appear tiny. Yet the amazing thing is that we have actually appropriated so insignificant a fragment of the glittering hoard. We have been mendicants when we might have been millionaires. We must learn a higher wisdom. We must lay daring hands upon the inexhaustible supplies that we have so shamefully neglected and live in the enjoyment of an affluence that we have never before known. Ashamed of the past, we must turn shining and expectant faces to the future, giving glory to God for all the grace we have not tasted yet.

F W Boreham, Boulevards of Paradise (London: The Epworth Press, 1944), 202-203.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Niagara Falls

Rowland Croucher Reviews New Book by Storyteller F W Boreham

2008-11-11T00:02:00.000-08:00

F W Boreham, A Packet of Surprises, John Broadbanks Publishing, 2008.

I've been a Boreham collector for 50 years, and have often reflected on why he's still so popular. Yes, he's an outstanding wordsmith (how often have you alluded to 'rich clusters of tawny filberts' in passing?); yes, he's widely read (at least a book a week for most of his adult life); and yes he touches issues about which 'the common man' has a deep interest.

Boreham had a prodigious memory. I have in my possession a photocopy of one of his 10cm x 15 cm cards with hand-written headings from which he preached. His biographer Howard Crago tells us each sermon was preached from memory in almost the exact words in which it was printed.

But I reckon there's another reason for his popularity: respect. Frank Boreham had such an abiding respect for his audiences, that, bower-bird-like, he assiduously collected thousands of quotes, literary allusions, stories and ideas. This discipline produced some astonishing 'connections' in his sermons and essays.

This new volume of 'the best of the best' of Boreham's essays and sermons begins with Dr Geoff Pound's introduction/rationale for making his selection; then there's a profile of Boreham's life and work by Howard Crago (whom I was privileged to know, when I was his pastor for eight years). At the back there's a subject and name index.

From his first pastorate Boreham resolved 'never to condemn anything but always present a positive aspect. (As he put it) "the best way to prove a stick is crooked is to lay a straight one beside it".' His many hearers and readers obviously appreciated this softer irenic approach: in each of his three pastorates he doubled the membership. (But, if I might add a footnote to that, many drifted away from at least one of those churches - Armadale Baptist Church in Melbourne - when he left).

Each of these chapters is just long enough to develop a theme, to be read in a short sitting. (But they're never so long that you flip to see if you're near the end. People wonder about that with sermons in church too, don't they?). The longest chapter here (15 pages) is from his first major book - The Whisper of God - with its thesis: 'The truth of a whisper is as great as the truth of a shout. A whisper from God is enough to tell me that God is, it is enough to tell me that he cares for me... God never thunders if a whisper will do'.

Here are some examples of his wonderful 'turns of phrase':

* '... Our best Sunday clothes, with clean collar, brightly polished boots and finger-nails destitute of any funereal suggestion...'

* 'There are books that we bought by mistake; books that we know to be valueless; books whose room is of much more value than their company'

* 'I drew aside to collect my thoughts. But my thoughts politely, but firmly, declined to be collected'

And a rare mixed metaphor: 'No menagerie since the world began could hold a candle to it'

We meet Frank Boreham the man here: a couple of his favourite places were the Melbourne Art Gallery, and Melbourne Cricket Ground. He writes about one of his major detestations - 'ready-made clothes'; another was the telephone (he's in good company there!).

Some of his most famous sermons are here: 'He Made as Though' (on the story of the Emmaus Road); A Prophet's Pilgrimage (Jonah); The Powder Magazine (Paul and Barnabas's dispute over John Mark); and perhaps the best in the book - and maybe in all of Boreham - his great missionary sermon 'The Candle and the Bird' (with its thesis: 'a period of spiritual sterility invariably represents, not the extinguishing of a candle, but the frightening away of a bird').

He has an essay on the astonishing coincidences in his own life, and elsewhere (pp 245 ff.). I won't spoil it for you by mentioning them, but Boreham has the impertinence to suggest that any one of us will find 'a wealthy hoard' of similar coincidences stowed away in our memories. Well, most won't, sir, at least not on this scale!

The chapter on Interruptions is brilliant. I remember an experienced minister reminding me early in my pastoral career that most of Jesus' healings were the result of interruptions: 'Interruptions,' my wise friend said, 'are not disturbing your ministry-plans: they ‘are’ your ministry!'

Finally, a few insightful and/or memorable tid-bits:

* (The cryptic utterance of a parishioner): 'When I've shut the door, I've shut the door'

* 'Doubt is a very human and a very sacred thing...'

* 'The gravest mistake made by educationalists is [to suppose] that those who know little are good enough to teach those who know less'

* 'Ritualism [is] perilous. "Now abideth"... what? Altars? vestments? crosses? creeds? catechisms? confessions? Now abideth faith, hope love - these three; and the greatest of these is love'

* 'Orthodoxy and heterodoxy stand related to truth just as those wonderful wickerwork stands and plaster busts that adorn every dressmaker's establishment stand related to the grace and beauty of the female form'

A minor complaint: Boreham would not have liked his writing being 'corrupted' by American spellings (luster, favorite, gray, molded, behavior; but interestingly 'gaol' is retained). If we're going to fiddle with spellings, why not do the same with his sexist language? Now that would be a challenge!

Thanks to Rowland Croucher for this review and permission to reprint it.

Further:
Another article entitled ‘Ten Reasons to Read Boreham’s New Book ‘A Packet of Surprises’ is at this link.

Availability:
Check out Mike Dalton’s site to discover how you can get your hands on this book.If you live in the southern hemisphere you may want to order your books from Peter and the COC Online Bookshop which is based in Brisbane.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Front Cover of ‘A Packet of Surprises’.

Rowland Croucher Reviews The Chalice of Life by F. W. Boreham

2008-10-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Here's another John Broadbanks Publishing (2008) contribution to our enjoyment of the wisdom of a wonderfully gifted wordsmith and pastor.

In his Foreword Geoff Pound writes: 'This book is a collection of five addresses that F W Boreham delivered at some major stages of life, and this is accompanied by two further essays in which the author develops the theme of life's milestones...

'Throughout these pages one feels the sheer exuberance that Boreham had for life. He possesses a sense of wonder about the newness of each day.

'His approach is to greet each day with expectancy and to make the momentous decisions with which life confronts us. F W Boreham claimed that the greatest day of a person's life was not their birthday, their wedding anniversary, or the date of their death, but "The greatest day in a man's life is the day on which he finds himself overwhelmed and bowed to earth by a sense of the greatness of God".'

I read a chapter a day from this small volume last week, and here are some items which 'gave me pause'. I offer them as teasers to whet your appetite, and encourage you to buy the book. (Let's forgive Boreham for the non-inclusive language we all used back then).

'I congratulate the men and women of thirty in my congregation on having survived a period that proved fatal to the overwhelming majority of their remote predecessors and distant contemporaries' (p.2)

'Middle-aged people are in the practical or prosy stage of life. The romance of youth has worn off; the romance of age has not arrived. They are between the poetry of the dawn and the poetry of the twilight' (p. 13)

'There is a time when a peach, being ripe, proceeds to sweeten: at fifty a man reaches that stage' (p.24)

'No man of sixty knows that he is sixty. He may think that he does; but that, of course, is quite another matter. As our wives so frequently and so truthfully remind us, we men think that we know lots and lots of things of which, in reality, we know absolutely nothing' (p.29). 'A man of sixty has entered into the autumn of life. Of all the seasons, autumn is the most idyllic' (p. 33)

Two offerings in the category 'Why didn't I think of that?': 'The Red Indians of North America held that the loveliest hues of all the flowers that fade in the forest are gathered into the skies, reappearing in the gorgeous beauty of the rainbow' (p. 45)

'When I think of what might have happened if some old forbear of mine, away back in the age of the cave-men, had taken it into his head to marry the woman he murdered, or to murder the women whom he married, it seems to me a perfect miracle that I got here' (p. 49).

Boreham says of his craft: 'A serious journalist must write on current events and open his article with a dignified reference to the recent happening. But an essayist scorns such restrictions: his work is ‘apropos de rien’: it has no connections or relationships. He may open his lips whenever he likes on any topic that takes his fancy...' (p.32)

I'm personally grateful that thousands of topics took Boreham's fancy in a long and fruitful life. You can buy new publications of these 'fancies' from http://fwboreham.blogspot.com/ .

Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher

I am most grateful to Rowland for this further book review--Geoff Pound

Ordering
You can order any of our Boreham titles by emailing Mike Dalton at dalton.michael@sbcglobal.net

You can also order through AbeBooks, Amazon and eBay.

You can order through Peter Geizer at PeterGeizer@coc.org.au

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Front covers of The Chalice of Life.

Rowland Croucher Reviews F W Boreham's ‘Second Thoughts’

2008-10-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

Dr F W Boreham was introduced at an international conference of pastors in 1936 as 'the man whose name is on all our lips, whose books are on all our shelves and whose illustrations are in all our sermons.'

Frank Boreham lived in England, New Zealand and Australia between 1871 and 1959. He authored 55 books, wrote 3,000 editorials in major papers and was a premiere preacher. He is the most 'collectible' religious author Australia has produced.

Michael Dalton (USA) and Geoff Pound (UAE) have teamed up to establish John Broadbanks Publishing to produce new books by or about F W Boreham. So far, All the Blessings of Life: The Best Stories of F W Boreham (2007), Lover of Life: A Tribute to F W Boreham's Mentor (2007), Second Thoughts (2007), A Packet of Surprises: The Best Essays and Sermons of F W Boreham (2008) and The Chalice of Life: Reflections on the Significant Stages of Life (2008) have come off the press.

Second Thoughts comprises five of Boreham's typically brilliant essays - Second-Hand Things, The Second Crop, Second Fiddles, Our Second Wind, and Second Thoughts. This last week I've read one each day. (Ravi Zacharias in his Introduction/Tribute says he tries to read one Boreham chapter every day: a wonderful discipline).

How about this for a wordsmith's brilliance (in Second Hand Things): 'Hester Spanton - Auntie Hester, as everybody called her - was the tenant of a large second-hand store and a small asthmatic body. I used at times to think that the adjectives might be regarded as interchangeable...' Or this: 'The lamp by which my path is lit all day, the lamp that burns in heaven's eternal noon, is second-hand...'.

When I was pastor of a Baptist Church in Melbourne, a couple of our parishioners were members of a church where Boreham was an interim minister (Kew Baptist Church). They showed me a note he wrote to them on an important milestone in their lives, and affirmed him as a 'wonderful encourager and friend'. The story of Dan and Mollie (The Second Crop) has priceless pastoral insights. The text was from Obadiah: 'The house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.' The message (as we would put it today): one person can have lots of stuff, and not enjoy any of it; another just a few possessions and enjoy them all. (I must give away more books I won't need again).

The chapter on The Second Fiddle really got to me. Is a person a 'first fiddle' because he or she cannot be a 'second fiddle'? Gladstone and Disraeli were both first fiddles, and had to form separate political parties because neither could tolerate being a second fiddle...

About endurance in stressful times: 'The Duke of Wellington used to say that British soldiers were no braver than Frenchmen, but they could be brave ‘five minutes longer’.

And an idea I've never thought before: 'Conscience expresses itself like the lightning, instantaneously; the mutterings of reason and self-interest, like the thunder, come lumbering along later.'

As Geoff Pound writes in the Preface, 'Frank Boreham said that within the everyday, commonplace things there was a romance, a quality that was usually not immediately apparent.' So true.

If you see any Boreham books in second-hand bookstores or church fetes, snap them up. Keep them at your bedside, and read a chapter a day. You won't be disappointed.

Rowland Croucher October 2008
John Mark Ministries

Ordering
You can order any of our Boreham titles by emailing Mike Dalton at dalton.michael@sbcglobal.net.

You can also order through AbeBooks, Amazon and eBay.

You can order through Peter Geizer at PeterGeizer@coc.org.au

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Front cover of Second Thoughts.

Ten Reasons To Read Boreham’s New Book ‘A Packet of Surprises’

2008-10-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

Have you got yourself a copy of the new F W Boreham book that has just been released?

I think it is one of the most important books to read for these ten reasons:

1. This is the first time the best sermons and essays of Dr F W Boreham have ever been brought together. Over the years commentators on preaching have selected one representative sermon from Boreham’s preaching archive to put in their Best Preaching of the Twentieth Century books, which is testimony to his prominence. But A Packet of Surprises is the first selection of the Best of Boreham’s sermons and essays.

2. For the many newcomers to the writings of F W Boreham, and there are a growing number in the younger generations, this is a wonderful starter as it draws thirty essays and sermons from more than twenty of the more than fifty-five books that he wrote.

There is an informative introduction in the book to the person and ministry of F W Boreham. This is written by Howard Crago who was Boreham’s biographer.

3. New and old readers of Boreham books have great difficulty finding Boreham books and when they do, the price often puts it out of their reach (one of the best sermons comes out of Boreham’s book, The Whisper of God which, when it is on sale through eBay fetches prices of well over US$500).

Mike Dalton and I, through John Broadbanks Publishing, have published five new Boreham books in the last three years to make the writings of Boreham accessible to a new generation of Boreham readers.

We have deliberately self-published (not drawing any money for ourselves) in order to keep the cost of these books as low as we can for our readers. We have not made a profit but in keeping with the wishes of the Boreham estate we send 10% of the income we receive to help fund the cost of training pastors and Christian workers throughout the world (two passions of Dr Boreham). When you buy a copy of this book you are investing in the important work of training Christian leaders and we thank you for this.

4. A Packet of Surprises is a must for homiletical scholars and students of the craft of preaching. The selection draws sermons from the first decade of Boreham’s preaching ministry, some from the last decade of his life and many from in between, thus offering samples from the different stages of Boreham’s career.

There are a great variety of sermon types represented, ranging from the textual sermon (‘The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ…’), to doctrinal (The Meaning of Easter), a biblical exposition (on the book of Jonah), some Life Situational sermons (Handling interruptions and exploring the meaning of coincidences) through to Boreham’s innovative biographical preaching (Abraham Lincoln’s Text). A big part of Boreham’s popularity then and his enduring significance is his preparedness to innovate and try out many different types of preaching.

5. This volume includes three sermons from the longest, most popular (judged by congregational response and sale of books) and most evangelistic series that Boreham ever delivered. There are valuable lessons in this trio for modern day Christian communicators.

6. A Packet of Surprises gives ample evidence of Boreham’s creativity. Readers will see his brilliance as a marketer with his catchy titles that were printed on billboards and advertising leaflets—titles like ‘Sermons and Sandwiches’, ‘I.O.U’, ‘Dominoes', ‘Mind Your Own Business’ and ‘Please Shut the Gate'.

7. F W Boreham was the Rick Warren of his age as he was a much-loved preacher who wrote many books and magazine articles. Like Warren, Boreham was on the best sellers list many times and over a million copies were sold causing the manager at Epworth Press to say that Boreham was their ‘greatest catch’ since John Wesley. Rick has about another 40 books to write before he can get near to Frank Boreham’s number of published books.

Such was his influence that FWB was once introduced to a Pastor’s Conference as “the man whose name is on all our lips, whose books are on all our shelves and whose illustrations are in all our sermons!” A Packet of Surprises is full of vivid illustrations and stories you can use to great effect.

8. Boreham has enriched many communicators and leaders down through the years through his writings. When Billy and Ruth Graham visited Australia in 1959 he said that the person he wanted to meet more than any other was F W Boreham because his books had so enriched his spiritual life and ministry. They did meet and they exchanged books. During his amazing campaign Billy got some time for pursuing another passion of his viz. golf. Out on the fairway when he was mulling over a sermon to preach at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (which incidentally became the largest gatherings ever to fill the huge MCG), Dr Graham said to his golfing mate and host, “Where can I find the amazing illustration by Dr Boreham about…?” I can give you the details if you’re interested concerning this event but that sermon is included in The Best of Boreham’s Essays and Sermons.

Contemporary leaders including Gordon Moyes and Ravi Zacharias have testified to their habit of reading one sermon a day from Boreham’s books to feed their minds and kindle their spiritual devotion.

9. F W Boreham once wrote, “When a man has been fifty years in his grave it ought to be possible to review his work dispassionately. The sentiment that is born of human fondness has by that time evaporated; and the prejudices that arise from personal animosity have died down.”

Next year (2009) it will be fifty years since the death of F W Boreham and for many reasons it will be an important year to reflect on his contribution and distil the insightful lessons from his life. The Packet of Surprises will therefore be a timely book to read and….

10. A wonderful gift to give.

Purchase
Check out Mike Dalton’s site to discover how you can get your hands on this book.

If you live in the southern hemisphere you may want to order your books from Peter and the COC Online Bookshop which is based in Brisbane.

See the list of new books below to order more than one book.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Front cover of A Packet of Surprises.

P.S. Permission to send this article to others and reproduce it in letters and magazines is freely given and this practice is encouraged.

P.P.S. Other Boreham books published by John Broadbanks Publishing include:

All the Blessings of Life: The Best Stories of F W Boreham (2007)

Lover of Life: A Tribute to F W Boreham's Mentor (2007)

Second Thoughts (2007)

The Chalice of Life: Reflections on the Significant Stages of Life (2008)

Get these for your library, your seminary library and your public library.

Your Invitation to Subscribe to Postings from this Site

2008-09-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

I’d love you to subscribe to postings from this site because:

1. It is free (unlike most subscriptions).
2. You don’t have to become a ‘member’ of this site.
3. I travel a lot and therefore postings are not always regular.
4. When you subscribe you will get an alert that a new article has been written.

Click
Click on the Subscribe button (see pictured) to get article alerts coming to your computer via Google Reader, Bloglines, or however you manage your favorite web site feeds.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: This has become the universal Subscribe Button on most Internet web sites.

The Chalice of Life by F W Boreham

2008-09-23T00:49:00.000-07:00

Fancy a total abstinence campaigner stating that “the richest wine in the chalice of life still waits their thirsty lips.”

This book took decades to write for Dr Boreham wrote his chapters 'Life at 40', 'Life at 50' and right through to 70 soon after reaching those momentous milestones.

Boreham doesn’t seem to have written about 'Life at 20' or 'Life at 80' but we have added an article first published in the Hobart Mercury in his 87th year, which was the last year of his life, and another essay on the art of reaching and living into ‘Life’s Landmarks’.

F W Boreham in his seventies was asked to give a series of talks which he entitled ‘Our Golden Milestones’. This appears to be the first time he brought his thinking together but he had to write a new essay entitled, ‘Life at 30’.

When Boreham gave this series he drew a warm and appreciative response from his audience.

The Chalice of Life is a Boreham version of what others have attempted, notably John Claypool in his book Stages: The Art of Living the Expected (also called The Saga of Life) and Gail Sheehy in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Boreham skillfully weaves the biblical stories with some contemporary texts and his personal reflections as a practiced observer of life.

Frank Boreham takes his readers on a journey through life and reflects not only on the increase in years but the art of drinking in the richness that is to be enjoyed at each stage. The author is not blind to the bitterness that can sometimes be found at the bottom of the chalice as he points out the dangerous decades and the challenges for each phase. Overall, this book exudes the author’s exuberance and love for life.

The author does not dominate the reader with his own pontificating and prescriptions. Rather, in the typical Boreham style, he writes like a pointer to the Southern Cross, allowing the reader to bounce off the author’s thoughts and ponder one’s personal reflections.

Four Reasons to Buy this Book
1. This Boreham book has never been published before.
2. Like all of Boreham’s books, this will become a collector’s item.
3. It will do you good to think often about your own development.
4. It is an ideal and reasonably priced gift for people of all ages.
5. It is only 60 pages in length.
6. You can purchase this easily with two of the other very popular new Boreham books, 'All the Blessings of Life: The Best Stories of F W Boreham and its companion, 'A Packet of Surprises: The Best Essays and Sermons of F W Boreham'.

F W Boreham, The Chalice of Life: Reflections on the Significant Stages of Life (Eureka, CA: John Broadbanks Publishing, 2008).

Sources:
Michael Dalton
eBay.
COC Online Bookshop, Australia

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Chalice Covers.

Thrilling New Boreham Books Have Arrived!

2008-09-09T02:47:00.000-07:00

It was certainly a packet of surprises that arrived in the post yesterday. Mike Dalton had told me that two more Boreham books had come off the printing presses but it was such a thrill to open the carton and unwrap two new books: ‘The Chalice of Life’ and ‘A Packet of Surprises’.

F W Boreham had a ritual when the postman delivered a copy of his new books when they arrived from London. His son and daughter-in-law told me that he would take the book, kiss it and pass it around for all the family to do the same.

I know that thrill of smelling, touching and seeing the finished article after all the writing, proof reading and the hundred and one other things that have been done in the publishing process.

This thrill is only trumped by turning the pages and mining the treasure that is to be discovered between the covers.

I have read these manuscripts before but that was when they were on the computer screen when I was selecting, copying and editing. I am going to sit down with a cup of tea or two, in good Boreham fashion and read these books in an armchair over the next few days. I will note down some comments and write these up in some future posts.

I am going overseas in a few days. I now wish I had more copies of these books to take with me to give to the students that I will be teaching in the morning at an Asian seminary and to leave with the church leaders that I meet at the afternoon training seminars.

I am so grateful to Mike Dalton who has done all of the painstaking, fiddly work to ensure that these books are available to a new generation of readers. As for the covers, Laura, our graphic designer, has done a superb job.

Check out Mike’s site to discover how you can get your hands on these two books. Ask him how much will be the cost if you buy the two of these books together.

If you live in the southern hemisphere you may want to order your books from Peter and the COC Online Bookshop which is based in Brisbane.

Whatever you do, make sure you get a copy of these new books because after reading them you also will want to kiss them.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: The new Boreham book duo.

New Boreham Books Now Available

2008-09-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

My publishing partner, Michael Dalton, has written:

With summer fading and fall approaching in the northern hemisphere, it’s a good time to revisit an old friend. Fall was F. W. Boreham’s favorite time of the year.

To help remember this past master of Christian essay, John Broadbanks Publishing is pleased to make available two new collections of Boreham’s writings:

The Chalice of Life: The Significant Stages in Life
(58 pages) – US$ 7.00

A Packet of Surprises: The Best Essays and Sermons of F. W. Boreham
(298 pages) – US$ 14.00

The Chalice of Life includes "Life at Fifty," which is the first time this article has been part of a book. Boreham is eloquent throughout as he reflects on the major stages of life and the most important milestones.

The essays and sermons that fill A Packet of Surprises will amaze, delight and inspire.

You can order these through AbeBooks, Amazon and eBay.

You can make non-credit card orders (payment by PayPal or check) directly through me, Michael Dalton.

My email and PayPal address is dalton.michael@sbcglobal.net.

Checks should be made out to ‘Mike Dalton’ and mailed to 2163 Fern Street, Eureka, CA 95503.

Shipping in the US is US$ 3.75 for the first book and US$ 1.00 for each additional book.

Those outside the US can email their order quantity and location to get the shipping cost.

You may also want to order some of our previous titles:

Lover of Life: F. W. Boreham’s Tribute to His Mentor
(34 pages) – US$ 7.00

All the Blessings of Life: The Best Stories of F. W. Boreham
(288 pages) – US$ 14.00

Second Thoughts
(68 pages – includes an introduction written by Ravi Zacharias) – US$ 7.00

Please take advantage of this opportunity to visit with this beloved author.

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: Covers for The Chalice of Life and A Packet of Surprises.

Books by F W Boreham

2008-08-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

One F W Boreham fan is selling the following books.

He would ideally like to sell them together to someone who is wanting to begin their library.

The vendor lives in the USA and it would be easier and cheaper if a buyer was found in the same country.

I have no idea of the price but if you are interested in purchasing these books, write to me and I will link you with him.

Dr Geoff Pound
geoffpound[@]gmail.com

BOOKS BY F. W. BOREHAM, D.D.

Title copies

FACES IN THE FIRE 2
MUSHROOM ON THE MOOR 1
MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST 2
THE CRYSTAL POINTERS 1
A LATE LARK SINGING 1
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL 1
RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES 1
A TUFT OF COMET’S HAIR 1
THE IVORY SPIRES 1
A CASKET OF CAMEOS 1
A BUNCH OF EVERLASTINGS 1
THE DRUMS OF DAWN 1
BOULEVARDS OF PARADISE 1
THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE 1
THE GOLDEN MILESTONE 1
MY PILGRIMAGE 1
THE TIDE COMES IN 1
ARROWS OF DESIRE 1
CLIFFS OF OPAL 2
DREAMS AT SUNSET 1
A REEL OF RAINBOW 1
MY CHRISTMAS BOOK 1
THE LAST MILESTONE 1
THE HEAVENLY OCTAVE 1
THE SILVER SHADOW 1

Boreham Books Available

2008-08-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dan Rudge has alerted me to the sale of some second-hand Boreham books on Ebay.

Link:
This is a link to the books he is selling: http://shop.ebay.co.uk/merchant/djrudge

List:
FW Boreham - A Bunch of Everlastings HBDW
FW Boreham - Arrows of Desire HBDW FIRST EDITION 1951
FW Boreham - Cliffs of Opal 1948 FIRST EDITION HBDW
FW Boreham - The Beatitudes 1935 FIRST EDITION
FW Boreham - The Blue Flame HB 1930 FIRST EDITION
FW Boreham - Wisps of Wildfire HB 1924 FIRST EDITION

Good trading!

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: The Blue Flame.

Further Boreham Book in Pipeline

2008-06-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Reference was made recently to the new book that was due to be printed last Friday. It is entitled, The Chalice of Life and it is described in the posting at this link.

A larger manuscript is being finalized with the title, A Packet of Surprises: The Best Essays and Sermons of F W Boreham.

Publishing progress is being regularly reported at Mike Dalton’s F W Boreham Publishing News site with news (here is the latest at the time of writing) on how you might be able to order a first edition. Mike does so much of the unseen detail in getting the text looking superb and the challenges of negotiating with the printers

To get you excited, I have posted the beautifully symbolic cover on this page, created again by our wonderful designer, Laura Zugzda.

I thought you also might like a preview so I am posting here the preface to the Packet of Surprises:

Preface

Selecting the Best
Choosing the best essays of F W Boreham is as excruciating as selecting some children to get the honors and telling the others that they did not make the grade. As mentioned in the preface to The Best Stories of F W Boreham the selection is subjective. But there is some rhyme and reason to the choices. Some were voted in by current Boreham readers so they appear by popular demand. Others are clearly Boreham’s choice or were popular in his day. His biographer, T Howard Crago, reported that ‘The Other Side of the Hill’ (a variation of which was entitled ‘The Sunny Side of the Ranges’, was an address delivered 80 times and ‘The House that Jack Built’ was given 140 times to churches that requested Dr Boreham to give this lecture to their community as a fund raiser.[1]

In compiling this selection an effort has been made to include essays on a range of themes, those which illustrate different homiletical methods and others that are drawn from different periods in Boreham’s career. The sermons, ‘Mind Your Own Business’, ‘He Made as Though’ and ‘A Prophet’s Pilgrimage’ represent extensive reflections on Biblical stories. The chapters entitled, ‘Dominoes’, ‘Please Shut the Gate!’ and ‘I.O.U.’ are fine examples of the way F W Boreham told parables by taking ordinary, everyday objects or expressions and skillfully helped his hearers to discover a deeper truth. The messages on the favorite texts of Catherine Booth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Abraham Lincoln are representative of the 100+ addresses in the most popular Boreham sermon series that are contained in the five books on the theme, ‘Texts that Made History’. ‘The Squirrel’s Dream’ and ‘Waiting for the Tide’ offer glimpses into the way F W Boreham used paintings to illustrate his themes.

The sermon ‘The Whisper of God’ may at face value have not made the cut in Boreham’s best but it is included because it is the best of his earliest sermons and it illustrates how his preaching changed in style, structure and length. His contemporary, J J North, judged Boreham’s early literary ventures to be “long-worded” because “the terse Boreham had not arrived.”[2] Amid the many admiring reviews, it was said of Boreham’s first volume of sermons, The Whisper of God, that “if illustrations and incidents did not jostle so thickly on the pages and the poetical quotations were remorselessly reduced the sermons would gain much in value.”[3] The Best Essays of F W Boreham demonstrates the way that Boreham worked hard to remodel his writing and preaching through such things as the removal of wordy clutter for it is clear to see the emergence of a simple and flowing style.

Genre
Already the terms ‘essay’, ‘sermon’, ‘lecture’ and ‘address’ have been used in this introduction. Some of the chapters in his books are clearly one genre or another but F W Boreham was, as Lindsay Newnham described, the great ‘recycler’ who suited his style to his audience and tweaked his material to fit the allotted time or word limits.[4]

In a review of the book A Bunch of Everlastings, Dr. James Hastings, editor of the famous Dictionary of the Bible, asked a question that many readers have asked: “Is Mr. Boreham able to preach such sermons as these, exactly as they are printed here? Their interest is undoubted and intense. For Mr. Boreham is an artist. Every sermon is constructed. Every thought is in its place, and appropriately expressed. And there are no marks left in the constructing. To the literary student, as to the average reader of sermons, every sermon is literature.” Howard Crago, (whose text was read by F W Boreham) answered, ‘The fact was, of course, that each of these sermons was preached from memory in almost the exact words in which it was printed.’”[5]

Truth through Personality
If the content of these sermons and lectures were word for word the same as what we read in this volume they do not convey fully the total impact of the preaching event—the pausing, the modulation of his voice, the twinkle in the eye and the response of his hearers. Fortunately Howard Crago has recorded this colourful insight into how one of F W Boreham’s addresses was received:

“As time went on and ‘The House That Jack Built’ grew in popularity, the lecturer developed it and perfected its delivery until the whole thing flowed on for more than an hour of fascinating elocution and magnificent eloquence. He himself revelled in reciting it, and the audience enjoyed it to the full while being unconsciously influenced by its gentle suggestiveness.”

“A typical audience-reaction was that of the Rev. C. Bernard Cockett, M.A., who, after hearing the lecture in a Surrey Hills church said, ‘It is not to be wondered at that individuals who appreciate the words of an author are interested in him as a man, lecturer and minister. Therefore, when the Rev. F. W. Boreham's presence was heralded in a Melbourne suburb many people asked, `What is he like?' `Can he speak and preach as well as write?' `Has he personality and originality in the pulpit as well as in the study?' Boreham came-spoke-and conquered! He spoke for an hour; but the minutes passed by on shimmering wings. He speaks quite as well as he writes—the voice is strong and sweet; ringing, yet winning, and the word lives in the message. ‘The House That Jack Built’ was a brilliant drama, staged and performed by the author. And his control of the audience! A happy and original introduction; apposite stories from history, science, and romance, related with telling effect; soft touches on the varying notes of the human soul, making it tremble with childlike laughter, and then a sudden chord of richer music with concentrated and arresting power—while the listener perceives God through smiles.’”

“Moving a vote of thanks at Wangaratta [Victoria], a local farmer expressed a good deal when he said, ‘I enjoyed the lecture because I could see that Mr. Boreham was enjoying it so much himself.’”[6]

Inflaming Passion
These essays and sermons have been brought together not for literary inspection and homiletical interest but so they might speak powerfully to readers in this contemporary age. F W Boreham believed in the importance of heroes, he devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to two of his preaching models [7] and he encouraged preachers to study evangelistic models to “inflame your devotion.”[8]

But Boreham sounded a warning about copying the style of someone else. Writing on the topic, ‘A troop of apes’, he drew analogies from nature (lyre bird, jays, ostriches and apes) to state that, “life abounds in mimicry” and if our tendency to imitation is so strong and impossible to eradicate, then human beings must select “worthy models.”[9]

Be Yourself
The great hope for this new book is that it might stimulate among its readers one of the major themes of F W Boreham—that each person, with their God-given gifts might develop their unique style:

“He sees as nobody else sees. He must therefore paint or preach or pray or write as nobody else does. He must be himself: must see with his own eyes and utter that vision in the terms of his own personality.”[10]

Dr. Geoff Pound.

Image: Front Cover of A Packet of Surprises: The Best Essays and Sermons of F W Boreham.

[1] T Howard Crago, The Story of F W Boreham (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1961), 172-174.
[2] J J North, New Zealand Baptist, April 1943.
[3] Review of Whisper of God, (n.p., n.d.). This review appears in a cutting that Boreham kept in his own copy of his book Whisper of God.
[4] Lindsay L Newnham, ‘Recycling by Dr F W Boreham’, Our yesterdays 5 (Melbourne: Victorian Baptist Historical Society, 1997), 78.
[5] Crago, The Story of F W Boreham, 179.
[6] Crago, The Story of F W Boreham, 172-173.
[7] F W Boreham, My pilgrimage (London: The Epworth Press, 1940), 98-103.
[8] F W Boreham, I forgot to say, 42.
[9] F W Boreham, Mercury, 8 October 1955.
[10] Boreham, Mercury, 9 September 1950.

Boreham, Boreham Everywhere

2008-06-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Kibitzer writes about how he has recently been hearing the name ‘Boreham’ everywhere.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: The Armadale Baptist Church in Melbourne, Australia that Boreham pastored in the 1920s. How did he become so well know that even people like The Kibitzer are surprised? FWB became known internationally through his books.

New Boreham Book: The Chalice of Life

2008-06-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

Charge Your Glasses
According to Michael Dalton, my publishing partner, our new F W Boreham book, The Chalice of Life, is scheduled for printing today—Friday 13 June 2008.

Mike has information on his F W Boreham Publishing News site about how you may get a copy quickly and ensure you can read it and review it before it runs off the shelves.

One of the reasons why this book will be popular is that while it has some essays that have been previously published there are some pages that have never have published before.

Ordering and Purchasing
Mike says: “Don't miss these two new books. If you can't wait to order Chalice, you can send a PayPal payment of $7.00 for each book ordered and $3.50 for shipping and handling (add $1.00 for each additional book shipped) to dalton.michael@sbcglobal.net. You can also send a check to Mike Dalton, 2163 Fern Street, Eureka, CA 95503. Checks should be made out to Mike Dalton.”

“This is just if you want to preorder. The first books should be available for shipping towards the end of the month. Credit card orders will have to wait until I have the book listed on Amazon and AbeBooks. I won't do that until I have them in my possession.

Sample
To give you a sip and a taster I have posted the foreword that I have written for this book.

Foreword
This book is a collection of five addresses that F W Boreham delivered on some major stages of life and this quintet is accompanied by two further essays in which the author develops the theme of life’s milestones.

Most of these essays were written soon after Boreham attained the particular milestone even though for his later lecture series he gave them a polish and wrote a new one for a stage he had not written about earlier.

It is good to reflect on Frank Boreham’s life at the time he reached each age as he draws much upon his own experience. At the age of thirty (1901) F W Boreham was married with one daughter, he was pastor of the Mosgiel Baptist church in New Zealand, contributor to the Taieri Advocate and the Otago Daily Times, editor of the New Zealand Baptist, and President of the Baptist Union. At the age of forty (1911) he had two more daughters, was pastor of the Hobart Baptist Tabernacle, he had authored several books and he was soon to begin his marathon commitment with the Hobart Mercury. At the age of fifty (1921) Boreham was pastor of the Armadale Baptist church in Melbourne, he had fathered a boy and another daughter in this last decade and his publishing ministry was in top gear. At the age of sixty (1931) F W Boreham was officially retired from pastoral ministry and was serving as a minister-at-large, across the denominations of the church and undertaking preaching and teaching tours overseas. At the age of seventy (1941), Dr Boreham had published his autobiography, in which he signaled that he had entered into the final stage of life. This was not entirely accurate as he churned out several more books and his weekly ministry at Scot’s Church was blossoming.

It is interesting to note that F W Boreham did not have an article on Life at Twenty, especially as he was fond of quoting Southey who said, “However long a person’s life, the first twenty years represent by far the biggest half of it.”[1] It is also significant that Boreham did not appear to write an article on Life at Eighty, even though he was still publishing books and preaching weekly.

F W Boreham remarks in one of these addresses that the one thing that each of these milestones has is life. F W Boreham was a self-confessed “lover of life.”[2] This theme pulsates through this book and in all his writing and preaching. In an essay on the coming of Spring Boreham reflects on the source of his love for life when saying, “I have learned that my quenchless longing for life is, after all, all unconsciously, a secret, unutterable yearning after God; for how can you conceive of life apart from Him?[3]

Throughout the pages of this volume one feels the sheer exuberance that Boreham had for life. He is possessed with a sense of wonder about the newness of each day:

“Half the fun of waking up in the morning is the feeling that you have come upon a day that the world has never seen before, a day that is certain to do things that no other day has ever done. Half the pleasure of welcoming a new-born baby is the absolute certainty that here you have a packet of amazing surprises....Here is novelty, originality, an infinity of bewildering possibility.[4]

It is Frank Boreham’s love of life that motivates his curiosity and his ministry to people:

“I have so thoroughly relished the little bit of life that was doled out to me that I find myself clamoring for all the lives that I can see....the same hunger underlies my passion for biography and even my fondness for the Bible. …Life has been so sweet to me that I like to mark the relish with which others tell their enjoyment of it.[5]

F W Boreham was very attentive to anniversaries and he kept a ‘birthday book’ or Personal Almanac in which he recorded special dates. He noted down each year the arrival of the first swallow[6] and the exact day that the elms around his house, “attired themselves in their new spring dresses.”[7] Many of his editorials commenced with reference to the birth or death of his subject. Two of his books contain the word ‘milestone’ in the title. His autobiography is a comprehensive record of the important dates of his life and family and it describes the way he remembered and celebrated the key events of his ministry.

The Chalice of Life is not so much about the exact ages as the general stages of life—their pitfalls and their possibilities. What then was Boreham’s favorite stage in life? This question is like asking him to decide which of his children was his favorite. Concerning his three churches he spoke with equal warmth and affection, even though he highlighted their different qualities. In a similar fashion and at the risk of being told that “all his swans were geese” Boreham writes with high commendation of each age and stage of life. What is happening is akin to the way he explained his growing love for Australia, “Life has a wonderful way of coaxing us into a frame of mind in which we not only become reconciled to our lot: we actually fall in love with it.”[8]

In the final two essays of this book, ‘So It’s Your Birthday!’ and ‘Life’s Landmarks’, we see the way F W Boreham is not merely registering dates in a diary or counting commemorations on a calendar. His approach is to greet each day with expectancy and to make the momentous decisions with which life confronts us. F W Boreham claimed that the greatest day of a person’s life was not their birthday, their wedding anniversary or the date of their death but, “The greatest day in a man's life is the day on which he finds himself overwhelmed and bowed to earth by a sense of the greatness of God.”[9]

Enjoy this book and most importantly, drink deeply from “the chalice of life.”[10]

Dr. Geoff Pound.

Image: Front cover of The Chalice of Life, so beautifully created by Laura Zugzda.

P.S. F W Boreham’s son, Frank, told me that his wife Betty did most of the proof reading of his books. The ship would dock in Melbourne, the proofs would be delivered the next day and FWB and Betty would read and make the corrections before the ship left in a couple of days to return to England. When the first copy of each new book appeared FWB would take it warmly, kiss it and pass it to other members of the family for them to do the same. Producing Boreham books was a concern and a delight of the whole Boreham family.

Footnotes
[1] F W Boreham, My Pilgrimage (London: The Epworth Press, 1940), 91.
[2] F W Boreham, The Golden Milestone (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1915), 9
[3] F W Boreham, The Three Half-Moons (London: The Epworth Press, 1929), 125.
[4] F W Boreham, Faces in the Fire (London: The Epworth Press, 1916), 14.
[5] F W Boreham, On the Other Side of the Hill (London: The Epworth Press, 1917), 173.
[6] Boreham, The Golden Milestone, 34.
[7] F W Boreham, The Passing of John Broadbanks (London: The Epworth Press, 1936), 261.
[8] Boreham, My Pilgrimage, 137.
[9] F W Boreham, A Witch’s Brewing (London: The Epworth Press, 1932), 155.
[10] F W Boreham, A Bunch of Everlastings (London: The Epworth Press, 1920), 88.

Boreham on Nature

2008-06-12T18:45:00.001-07:00

All the untamed and untutored tribes of Central Africa and of the South Seas have dwelt with Nature for ages. And what has she taught them? They sit round their horrible camp-fires and tear like beasts at human flesh, whilst all the sublimities and transcendencies of Nature spread themselves out on every hand. Nor need we journey to Africa or the coral islands. Facts are stubborn things; and the stern facts of life, as reflected by our police-courts, demonstrate the folly of idealizing the bush. Some of our most revolting criminal cases come from those districts in the Never-Never Country where every prospect pleases, where the landscape is a riot of glorious forestry, and where the earth is a gay profusion of wild flowers. Yet those cases reveal a sordidness, an animalism, and a brutality that have shocked the very dwellers in the slums. Now why these terrible murder cases? Does Nature never say to her children, 'Thou shalt not steal ‘Thou shalt not kill I'? Does Nature give no code of morals to the children of Nature? 'Alas!' cries Nature, as she hangs her head, 'it is not in me! It is not in me!'

Yes, the dregs of life are not always found in city slums. The bush may become bestial as well as beatific. Let no one misunderstand me. I am not contending that the country is worse than the town. I am instituting no comparison. I am simply saying that there is nothing in the civilization of our cities that can save us apart from the gospel, and that there is nothing in the beauty of the bush that can save us apart from the gospel. Jesus is the only hope of country and of town. And the transcendent glory of the churches is that they exist to preach HIM.

F W Boreham, The Modesty of the Bush, The Golden Milestone, (London: Charles Kelley, 1915), 128-130.

Boreham on the Prophetic Use of Names

2008-06-10T05:15:00.001-07:00

It is very odd, the way in which history and prophecy meet and mingle in the naming of the baby.

A friend of mine has just named his child after John Wesley. He has clearly done so in the fond hope that the august virtues of the great Methodist may be duplicated and revived in a generation that is coming. It is an ingenious device for transferring the moral excellences of the remote past to the dim and distant regions of an unborn future. The phenomenon sometimes becomes positively pathetic.

I remember reading, in the stirring annals of the Melanesian Mission, of a native boy whom Bishop John Selwyn had in training at Norfolk Island. He had been brought from one of the most barbarous of the South Sea peoples, and did not promise particularly well. One day Bishop Selwyn had occasion to rebuke him for his stubborn and refractory behaviour. The boy instantly flew into a passion and struck the Bishop a cruel blow in the face. It was an unheard-of incident, and all who saw it stood aghast. The Bishop said nothing, but turned and walked quietly away. The conduct of the lad continued to be most recalcitrant, and he was at last returned to his own island as incorrigible. There he soon relapsed into all the debasements of a savage and cannibal people.

Many years afterwards a missionary on that island was summoned post-haste to visit a sick man. It proved to be Dr. Selwyn's old student. He was dying, and desired Christian baptism. The missionary asked him by what name he would like to be known. “Call me John Selwyn,” the dying man replied, “because he caught me what Christ was like that day when I struck him.”

F W Boreham, ‘Naming the Baby’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 253-254.

Image: “Call me John Selwyn.”

Further: F W Boreham wrote a biography on Bishop John Selwyn.

Boreham on Living up to your Name

2008-06-06T03:59:00.000-07:00

Booker T. Washington, the slave who carved his way to statesmanship, tells us that his greatest difficulty lay in regard to a name. Slaves have no names; no authentic genealogy; no family history; no ancestral traditions. They have, therefore, nothing to live up to. Mr. Booker Washington himself invented his own name. `More than once,' he says `I tried to picture myself in the position of a boy or man with an honoured and distinguished ancestry. As it is, I have no idea who my grandmother was. The very fact that the white boy is conscious that, if he fails, he will disgrace the whole family record is of tremendous value in helping him to resist temptations. And the fact that the individual has behind him a proud family history serves as a stimulus to help him to overcome obstacles when striving for success.'

Compelled to Honour the Name
Every student of biography knows how frequently people have been restrained from doing evil, or inspired to lofty achievement, by the honour in which a cherished memory has compelled them to hold the names they are allowed to bear.

Every schoolboy knows the story of the Grecian coward whose name was Alexander. His cowardice seemed the more contemptible because of his distinguished name; and his commander, Alexander the Great, ordered him either to change his name or to prove himself brave.

F. W. Boreham, ‘Naming the Baby’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 248-249.

Image: Booker T. Washington

Boreham on Getting Over Things

2008-05-29T05:29:00.000-07:00

WE get over things. It is the most amazing faculty that we possess. War or pestilence; drought or famine; fire or flood; it does not matter. However devastating the catastrophe, however frightful the slaughter, however total the eclipse, we surmount our sorrows and find ourselves still smiling when the storm is overpast.

I remember once penetrating into the wild and desolate interior of New Zealand. From a jagged and lonely eminence I surveyed a landscape that almost frightened one. Not a house was in sight, nor a road, nor one living creature, nor any sign of civilization. I looked in every direction at what seemed to have been the work of angry Titans. Far as the eye could see, the earth around me appeared to have been a battle-field on which an army of giants had pelted each other with mountains. The whole country was broken, weird, precipitous, and grand. In every direction huge cliffs towered perpendicularly about you; bottomless abysses yawned at your feet; and every scarped pinnacle and beetling crag scowled menacingly at your littleness and scowled defiance at your approach. One wondered by what titanic forces the country had been so ruthlessly crushed and crumbled and torn to shreds. Did any startled eye witness this volcanic frolic? What a sight it must have been to have watched these towering ranges split and scattered; to have seen the placid snowclad heights shivered, like fragile vases, to fragments; to have beheld the mountains tossed about like pebbles; to have seen the valleys torn and rent and twisted; and the rivers flung back in terror to make for themselves new channels as best they could! It must have been a fearsome and wondrous spectacle to have observed the slumbering forces of the universe in such a burst of passion! Nature must have despaired of her quiet and sylvan landscape. `It is ruined,' she sobbed; `it can never be the same again!'

No, it can never be the same again. The bright colours of the kaleidoscope do not form the same mosaic a second time. But Nature has got over her grief, for all that. For see! All up these tortured and angular valleys the great evergreen bush is growing in luxurious profusion. Every slope is densely clothed with a glorious tangle of magnificent forestry. From the branches that wave triumphantly from the dizzy heights above, to those that mingle with the delicate mosses in the valley, the verdure nowhere knows a break. Even on the steep rocky faces the persistent vegetation somehow finds for itself a precarious foothold; and where the trees fear to venture the lichen atones for their absence. Up through every crack and cranny the ferns are pushing their graceful fronds. It is a marvellous recovery.

Indeed, the landscape is really better worth seeing today than in those tranquil days, centuries ago, before the Titans lost their temper, and began to splinter the summits.

F W Boreham, ‘On Getting Over Things, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 236-238.

Image: Mount Ruapehu, NZ (still an active volcano but vegetation rejuvenating below); “We get over things. It is the most amazing faculty that we possess.”

Boreham on My Study

2008-05-28T08:39:00.001-07:00

Professor David Smith tells of a great lesson that he learned, as a young minister, from his old teacher and friend, the eminent Professor A. B. Bruce.

`He introduced me,' Professor Smith says, 'to my first charge; and that Sunday night, as we sat in my study, he said to me, "You will get no inspiration from your surroundings here; see that you seek it from your books."

I remembered his counsel, and I found it good. The years which I spent in that quiet parish proved very profitable. Many an evening I would come home sick of petty jealousies, and fretted by trivial narrownesses, and would get into my study; and, behold, I was in a large and wealthy place and in the fellowship of the immortals. My study was the most sacred and wonderful place on earth to me. It was my refuge and my sanctuary.'

My sanctuary, mark you! And it was probably with this reminiscence of his early ministerial days in mind that Professor Smith penned for us the following verses :

I bless You, Lord, that when my life
Is as a troubled sea,
I have, remote from its rough strife,
Harbours to shelter me.

I bless You for my home, where love
Her sweet song ever sings,
And Peace spreads, like a nesting dove,
Her gentle, brooding wings.

And for this chamber of desire,
Where my dear books abide,
My constant friends that never tire,
Teachers that never chide.

F W Boreham, ‘The Holly-Tree’, The Uttermost Star (London: The Epworth Press, 1919), 239-240.

Image: “My study was the most sacred and wonderful place on earth to me.”

Boreham on the Mayor of Mosgiel

2008-05-27T04:03:00.001-07:00

There is a great story in this essay on Tammas Dalgleish and a visit to a meeting of Dr. Grattan Guinness. I am posting the entire essay:

For many a long year Tammas Dalgleish was Mayor of Mosgiel, and reigned without a rival. At election after election the little old gentleman was returned unopposed. Indeed, it came to be regarded as the natural thing. Nobody quite knew why. I have a notion that it was just because Tammas was old. The other members of the Borough Council were aggressive young townsmen, the warmth of whose ardour incubated all kinds of municipal policies, and the restlessness of whose brains littered the council table with an infinite variety of schemes. The result was inevitable. As soon as Councillor MacDonald stated his policy, the council fell into two parts as though it had been cleft by a sword. Half the councillors said 'Hear, hear,' and half shook their heads sagaciously, and muttered to each other that it would never do.

And when, a few weeks later, Councillor Campbell outlined his scheme, the council was once more rent in twain. Half the councillors supported; half opposed.

The same fate befell each of the other councillors in turn. There was only one member of the council who never concocted a fresh policy or formulated a new scheme. That was Tammas Dalgleish. His abstinence in that respect gave him an immense advantage when the mayoral election came round. Councillor MacDonald would have made an excellent Mayor, and his claims upon the honour were considerable; but then, he had a scheme! His elevation to the mayoral chair would place him in a position of commanding influence; it would invest him with a casting vote and other dangerous prerogatives; and it would probably lead to the adoption of his scheme. The hostile councillors said once more that this would never do. And so it came to pass that none of the councillors, save Tammas Dalgleish, could command a majority of votes when the elections came round. Year by year, therefore, as regularly as the second Saturday in November returned, it was announced from the verandah of the council-chambers that only one nomination had been received, and that Councillor Dalgleish had been declared elected for a further term. The little old gentleman beamed, expressed his sense of the honour that had been done him, and promised that he would endeavour to prove himself worthy of the confidence of the citizens. Which meant, being interpreted, that he promised to sink peacefully into the chair for another year, never daring to think out a policy himself, or even to say Yea or Nay to any of the troublesome schemes that the younger and noisier councillors might present. It all passed off very pleasantly. There was speaking and cheering and drinking of healths. Everybody seemed perfectly satisfied with the turn things had taken. And certainly Tammas Dalgleish was.

He was an amiable little old man, not destitute of frailties. One of these was his excessive modesty. He was terribly afraid that we should forget either that he was a Scotsman, or that he was Mayor of Mosgiel. He had every reason to be proud of both these circumstances; and, as a matter of fact, there was not the slightest danger of our forgetting either; but he was obviously nervous about it. In the course of my twelve years at Mosgiel I came to know him pretty well, although only on two occasions did I have direct dealings with him. Of those two events I propose to tell the story now; and if into the first narrative there steals a suspicion of comedy, it will be seen that the, second story is sufficiently dramatic to atone for that defect in its predecessor. But to my tale.

It was in the days of the South African War. When it was announced that Lord Kitchener was conferring with the Boer leaders at Pretoria, everybody felt that peace was not far off. This conviction fastened upon the mind of old Tammas Dalgleish, and he decided to call a meeting of citizens to arrange for a worthy celebration of the glad event—when it should come. He was good enough to call at the manse and ask me to be present. I very cheerfully consented. At the meeting, over which he presided, a programme was drawn up, a committee was appointed to carry it into effect, and, at His Worship's suggestion, I was appointed convener. We soon got things into shape and only awaited the declaration of peace to have everything moving. At last the welcome signal was given. The screaming of syrens, the ringing of bells, and the booming of guns apprised all and sundry that the war in South Africa had passed into history. I hurried down to the council-chambers, found His Worship there before me, and we soon got to work. The morning was occupied with the distribution of medals to all the children of the town. The main event of the day was timed for two o'clock. All the townspeople were asked to assemble at the junction of the main streets; led by the local band, they were to sing first the Doxology and then the National Anthem; and, after that, the procession was to start.

At two o'clock, however, rain was threatening. The outlook for the procession and the subsequent events was very gloomy. When I entered the council-chamber a few minutes before the hour, I found His Worship in a state of extreme tension. He was tortured by visions of trees being planted and foundation-stones laid under torrential skies.
'Come on,' he said impatiently, as I saluted him, 'let us get the procession away at once! What's to be done?'
'Very little, your Worship,’ handing him a fresh copy of the programme. 'You have simply to ask the people to join in singing to the music of the band, first the Doxology and then the National Anthem.'

I saw at once that he was displeased. He was for waving his hand and ordering the procession to start. I held out for the programme, the whole programme, and nothing but the programme.

`Well,' he exclaimed at last, in a more conciliatory tone, 'let us split the difference. Let us drop the Doxology and sing the National Anthem!'

I pointed out that the Doxology was singularly appropriate to the occasion; that it was specially decreed at the meeting of citizens; that it was on the printed programme; and that its omission would seriously wound the sentiments of many of the citizen.

His worship lost all patience. I saw ten minutes later that he imagined the Doxology to be some ponderous kind of oratorio that might detain the procession for a good part of the afternoon. But I did not grasp his point of view until, looking daggers at me, he sprang up, rushed bareheaded on to the verandah, raised his hand to secure silence, called at the top of his voice, `The band will lead the people in singing the Doxology,' and then added, with terrific emphasis, 'One verse only.'

In the years that followed, it was quite a common occurrence, when things were getting lively in the council-chamber, for one of the councillors to suggest that they should sing together the second verse of the Doxology! And His Worship always smiled good-humouredly.

It happened, a year or two later, that Dr. Harry Grattan Guinness came to Dunedin and conducted a series of special meetings in the largest theatre there. I was unable to go into town to any of the earlier meetings, but I saw that the series was to conclude with a couple of illustrated lectures, one on South America and the other on the Congo. I promised myself at least one of these; and, on the night of the South American lecture, I set off for the city.

The lecture and the pictures far exceeded my anticipations. I was delighted, and resolved to return next evening. On my way to the station the following evening, whom should I meet but His Worship the Mayor? To this hour I cannot tell why I suggested such a thing; but before I knew what I was saying I was inviting him to accompany me! He was the last man on earth whom you would think of inviting to a missionary lecture.

`You ought to come, sir,' I was saying. 'I went last night, and did not mean to go again; but the lecture was simply splendid, and the pictures were magnificent. I am sure you would enjoy it.'

Before I realized what had happened, he had accepted my invitation, and we were walking side by side on our way to the station. I spent most of the time in the train wondering by what strange impulse I had asked His Worship to accompany me. That riddle was still unread when we reached the theatre. It was filling fast. Surveying the crowd we noticed a couple of vacant seats about half-way up the area and slipped into them.

As on the previous evening, the lecture was most interesting, and the pictures were among the best of the kind that I have ever seen. For all practical purposes we had left New Zealand miles behind, and were in the wilds of Central Africa. An occasional side-glance at my companion told me that he was as interested as I was. Then, suddenly, a change came over the spirit of our dream.

'I propose now to show you,' said the lecturer, 'the photographs of some of the men who have laid down their lives upon the Congo.'

I was afraid that this purely missionary aspect of African life would possess less interest for His Worship, and I was prepared for yawns and other indications of boredom. The coloured pictures of African scenery gave place to the portrait of a fine young fellow in the prime of early manhood. To my inexpressible astonishment His Worship almost sprang from his seat, grasped the back of the chair in front of him, and stared at the screen with strained and terrible intensity.
`It's my boy!' he cried, loudly enough to be heard some distance away. `It's my boy! It's my boy!'

I naturally supposed that he had been affected by some curious similarity of appearance. Fortunately his agitation had not been noticed from the platform, and the lecturer went on.
`This,' he said,' is a young fellow named Dalgleish who came to us as an engineer to superintend the construction of our mission steamer. . . . '

`It's my boy!' cried my companion, overcome now by uncontrollable emotion. It's my boy, my poor boy!'

Neither of us had eyes or ears for anything that followed. His Worship sat beside me, his face buried in his hands, swaying from side to side in silent agony. Every now and again he would start up, and I had the greatest difficulty in restraining him from rushing to the platform to ask more about his dead son.

Sitting there beside him, it came back to me that he had once told me of a boy who ran away from home and went to London. 'We were too angry at the time to answer his letters,' he had said, 'and so, after awhile, he gave up writing, and we lost all trace of him.'

When the great crowd melted away that night, I took His Worship to the lecturer's room, and introduced them to each other. The identity of the fallen missionary was established beyond all doubt, and Dr. Grattan Guinness arranged to come out to Mosgiel and spend the next day with the Mayor and his wife.

He did. I was not present, and I do not know what took place. But I often fancied, from little indications that I noticed afterwards, that the things that were said, and the tears that were shed, in the course of that visit were a means of grace to my friend, His Worship the Mayor.

F W Boreham, ‘His Worship the Mayor’, The Uttermost Star (London: Epworth Press, 1919), 217-225.

Image: Aerial view of Mosgiel today.

Boreham: The Stimulant of a Noble Purpose

2008-05-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

I came across James Ryle’s web site today on which he posts ‘rylisms’.

In his most recent posting James gave this fine quote:

F. W. Boreham wrote, “There is no intellectual stimulant so intoxicating as the formation of a noble purpose, the conception of a sudden resolve, the making of a great decision.”

Follow the link to read the rest of this interesting post entitled, The Unflappable Champion. Thanks James.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: “Pursuing a noble purpose.”

Boreham on Grasping & Passing the Torch

2008-05-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

The Brighton Baptist Church in Melbourne is close to the Armadale Baptist Church, where F W Boreham served as pastor.

On the history page of the Brighton Baptist web site are some words and a quote from Dr Boreham who participated in the church’s centenary celebrations:

“Brighton Baptist Church has a long history, being founded in 1851. We are still encouraged and remember the words of F.W. Boreham as part of the 1951 Centenary celebrations: ‘we grasp the torch handed to us by noble predecessors, and who, in due time, pass it on to eager and faithful successors. Each a link in a golden chain.’”

Dr Geoff Pound

Image: “pass it on to eager and faithful successors.”

Boreham with Truth for Ordinary Lives

2008-05-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

I am constantly amazed at how F W Boreham’s books continue to be quoted and increasingly by members of the younger generation.

Check out this article by Nathan Zacharias and also posted by Tim, who finds meaning in Boreham’s essay, The Poppies in the Corn, and applies it skillfully to his own life and clan.

Image: Poppies in the Corn

Geoff Pound on the Significance of 2009

2008-04-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

Important Anniversary
F W Boreham once wrote, “When a man has been fifty years in his grave it ought to be possible to review his work dispassionately. The sentiment that is born of human fondness has by that time evaporated; and the prejudices that arise from personal animosity have died down.”

Next year (2009) it will be fifty years since the death of F W Boreham and for many reasons it will be an important year to reflect on his contribution and distil the insightful lessons from his life.

Teaching and Preaching
I am booking in dates now for preaching and teaching appointments in different countries in 2009 and I wanted to see if you (your seminary, church, conference organizers etc.) were interested.

This might include:

* A one off lecture or after dinner talk about F W Boreham (with his books available for purchase afterwards).

* Several lectures, perhaps for pastors and leaders at an annual conference, which take a Boreham theme. For instance, I have been working on a series of lectures to inspire effective preaching and communication in various media with the title, ‘Fancy a Preacher Named Bore-ham: The Communication Secrets of F W Boreham’.

* I also have spoken on Boreham and His commitment to Public Theology—getting the conversation about God out of the churches and engaging with the important issues that are facing society.

* I am not confined to Boreham themes as I regularly lecture in different parts of the world especially on Leadership (Getting a Vision for your organization, Leading into Constructive Change, Working constructively through conflict) and on Mission (examining the many dimensions that make up the mission of Jesus Christ).

* I am also keen to share something of the vision and opportunities of service through Theologians Without Borders and to speak about Creative Things that Are Happening in Theological Education and how this Creativity can be Engendered in ministry and in the seminary.

RSVP
If you have anything from a vague idea to a definitive invitation, do let me know at the earliest time so I can coordinate the different appointments.

Dr. Geoff Pound
geoffpound@yahoo.com.au

Images: Frank William Boreham; Geoff Pound

Boreham on Fate, Destiny and Providence

2008-04-07T09:21:00.001-07:00

I was reading the other day Commander J W Gambier’s Links in my Life, and was amused at the curious inconsistency which led the author first to sneer at Providence and then to bear striking witness to its fidelity.

As a young fellow the Commander came to Australia and worked on a way-back station, but he had soon had enough. ‘I was to try what fortune could do for a poor man; but I believed in personal endeavour and the recognition of it by Providence. I did not know Providence.'
‘I did not know Providence!’ sneers our young bushman….

But on the very same page that contains the sneer Commander Gambler tells this story. When he was leaving England the old cabman who drove him to the station said to him, ‘If you see my son Tom in Australia, ask him to write home and tell us how he's getting on.’ ‘I explained,’ the Commander tells us, ‘that Australia was a big country, and asked him if he had any idea of the name of the place his son had gone to. He had not.’

As soon as Commander Gambier arrived at Newcastle, in New South Wales, he met an exceptionally ragged ostler. As the ostler handed him his horse, Mr. Gambler felt an irresistible though inexplicable conviction that this was the old cabman's son. He felt absolutely sure of it; so he said:
‘Your name is Fowles, isn't it?’
He looked amazed, and seemed to think that his questioner had some special reason for asking him, and was at first disinclined to answer. But Mr. Gambier pressed him and said, ‘Your father, the Cheltenham cab-driver, asked me to look you up.’

He then admitted that he was the man, and Mr. Gambier urged him to write to his father. All this on the selfsame page as the ugly sneer about Providence!

And a dozen pages farther on I came upon a still more striking story. Commander Gambier was very unfortunate, very homesick, and very miserable in Australia. He could not make up his mind whether to stay here or return to England. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘I resolved to leave it to fate.’ The only difference that I can discover between the 'Providence' whom Commander Gambier could not trust, and the `fate' to which he was prepared to submit all his fortunes, is that the former is spelt with a capital letter and the latter with a small one. But to the story.

‘On the road where I stood was a small bush grog shop, and the coaches pulled up here to refresh the ever-thirsty bush traveller. At this spot the up-country and down-country coaches met, and I resolved that I would get into whichever came in first, leaving it to destiny to settle.

Looking down the long, straight track over which the up-country coach must come, I saw a cloud of dust, and well can I remember the curious sensation I had that I was about to turn my back upon England for ever! But in the other direction a belt of scrub hid the view, the road making a sharp turn. And then, almost simultaneously, I heard a loud crack of a whip, and round this corner, at full gallop, came the down coach, pulling up at the shanty not three minutes before the other! I felt like a man reprieved, for my heart was really set on going home; and I jumped up into the down coach with a great sense of relief!’ And thus Mr. Gambier returned to England, became a Commander in the British Navy, and one of the most distinguished ornaments of the service. He sneers at 'Providence,' yet trusts to `fate,' and leaves everything to `destiny’!”

Boreham concludes that regardless of his sneering and confusion, Gambier is being guided by the Hand that longs to lead us home.

F W Boreham, ‘When the Cows Come Home’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 205-208.

Image: “I jumped up into the down coach with a great sense of relief!”

Boreham on Children and Simplicity

2008-03-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

In our last posting we heard F W Boreham talk of the importance of children and his indebtedness to children in his preaching ministry—“The children in the congregation are my salvation.” This new excerpt is from the same sermon and he extends the themes of children and simplicity in good communication:

Style of the Masters
Can anyone imagine John Wesley talking to his summer-evening crowd at Dublin about ‘nullifidian,’ or quoting German?

I will say nothing of the Galilean preacher. The common people heard Him gladly. He was so simple and therefore so sublime.

A little child, especially a little child of a distinctly restless and mischievous propensity, is really a great help to a minister, and it is a shame to deprive the good man of such assistance. It is only by such help that some of us can hope to approximate to real sublimity.

Keep Your Eyes on the Waiters
Lord Beaconsfield used to say that, in making after-dinner speeches, he kept his eye on the waiters. If they were unmoved, he knew that he was in the realms of mediocrity. But when they grew excited and waved their napkins, he knew that he was getting home.

Pick out the Stupidest
Lord Cockburn, who was for some time Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain, when asked for the secret of his extraordinary success at the bar, replied sagely, ‘When I was addressing a jury, I invariably picked out the stupidest-looking fellow of the lot, and addressed myself specially to him—for this good reason: I knew that if I convinced him I should be sure to carry all the rest!’

Speak to the Waiters
Dr. Thomas Guthrie, in addressing gatherings of ministers, used to tell this story of Lord Cockburn with immense relish, and earnestly commended its philosophy to their consideration. I was reading the other day that Dr. Boyd Carpenter, formerly Bishop of Ripon and now Canon of Westminster, on being asked if he felt nervous when preaching before Queen Victoria, replied, ‘I never address the Queen at all. I know there will be present the Queen, the Princes, the household, and the servants down to the scullery-maid, and I preach to the scullery-maid.’

Little children do not attend political dinners such as Lord Beaconsfield adorned; nor Courts of Justice such as Lord Cockburn addressed; nor Royal chapels like that in which Dr. Boyd Carpenter officiated. And, in the absence of the children, the only chance of reaching sublimity that offered itself to these unhappy orators lay in making good use of the waiter, the stupid juryman, and the scullery-maid…

Discuss Manuscripts with Your Students
Robert Louis Stevenson knew what he was doing when he discussed every sentence of Treasure Island with his schoolboy step-son before giving it its final form. It was by that wise artifice that one of the greatest stories in our language came to be written…

Expressing Love with Simplicity
We do not make love in the language of the psychologist; we make love in the language of the little child. When life approaches to sublimity, it always expresses itself with simplicity. In the depth of mortal anguish, or at the climax of human joy, we do not use a grandiloquent and incomprehensible phraseology. We talk in monosyllables. As we grow old, and draw near to the gates of the grave, we become more and more simple.

Perfect Simplicity
In his declining years, John Newton wrote, ‘When I was young I was sure of many things. There are only two things of which I am sure now; one is that I am a miserable sinner, and the other that Christ is an all-sufficient Saviour.’ What is this but the soul garbing itself in the most perfect simplicities as the only fitting raiment in which it can greet the everlasting sublimities?

Sublimity and Simplicity
‘Here are sublimity and simplicity together!’ exclaimed John Wesley on that hot July night at Dublin. ‘How can any one that would speak as the oracles of God use harder words than are to be found here? By this I advise every young preacher to form his style!’

Aspiring to be Great
‘He who aspires to be a great poet—as sublime as Milton—must first become a little child!’ declares the greatest of all littérateurs.

‘Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven!’ says the Master Himself, taking a little child and setting him in the midst of them.

‘Pity my simplicity!’ pleads this little thing with its soft arms round my neck.
‘Give me that simplicity!’ say I.

F W Boreham, ‘Pity My Simplicity!’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 153-157.

Image: “taking a little child…”

Boreham on Children in Church

2008-03-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

I am told that, away beyond the Never-Never ranges [remote areas of Australian outback] there is a church from which the children are excluded before the sermon begins.

I wish my informant had not told me of its existence. I am not often troubled with nightmare, my supper being quite a frugal affair.

But just occasionally I find myself a victim of the terror by night. And when I am mercifully awakened, and asked why I am gasping so horribly and perspiring so freely. I have to confess that I was dreaming that I had somehow become the minister of that childless congregation.

As is usual after nightmare, I look round with a sense of inexpressible thankfulness on discovering that it was only a horrid dream. An appointment to such a charge would be to me a most fearsome and terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself.

In a way, I envy the man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase, and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous assistance which the children render to some of us.

But I could not do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish young faces and mischievous wide-open eyes, I fancy I am ruined and undone. I watch with consternation as the little people file out during the hymn before the sermon, and I know that the sermon is doomed. The children in the congregation are my salvation.

F W Boreham, ‘Pity My Simplicity!’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 151-152.

Image: “When I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish young faces and mischievous wide-open eyes, I fancy I am ruined and undone.”

Boreham on the Rabbi and the Wine Glass Breaking Wedding Custom

2008-03-17T20:37:00.001-07:00

I was chatting the other day with a Jewish rabbi. We were exchanging experiences and somehow the conversation drifted round to the marriage service.

‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that, at a Jewish wedding, a wine-glass is broken as part of the symbolism of the ceremony. Is that a fact?’

‘Of course it is,’ he replied. ‘We hold aloft a wine-glass; let it fall and be shivered to atoms; and then, pointing to its fragments, we exhort the young couple to jealously guard the sacred relationship into which they have entered, since, once it is broken, it can never be restored.’

F W Boreham, ‘Jed Smith’ Shadows on the Wall (London: The Epworth Press), 200-201.

Image: Jewish groom breaking wine glass with his shoe.

Boreham on Strength of Character

2008-03-16T21:00:00.001-07:00

In my college days I used to go down to a quaint little English village for the weekend in order to conduct services in the village chapel on Sunday. I was always entertained by a little old lady whose face haunts me still. It was so very human, and so very wise, and withal so very beautiful; and the white ringlets on either side completed a perfect picture. She dwelt in a modest little cottage on top of the hill. It was a queer, tumble-down old place with crooked rafters and crazy lattice windows. Roses and honeysuckle clambered all over the porch, straggled along the walls, and even crept under the eaves into the cottage itself. The thing that impressed me when I first went was the extraordinary number of old Bessie's visitors.

On Saturday nights they came one after another, young men and sedate matrons, old men and tripping maidens, and each desired to see her alone. She was very old; she had known hunger and poverty; the deeply furrowed brow told of long and bitter trouble. She was a great sufferer, too, and daily wrestled with her pitiless disease. But, like the sturdier of the poplars by my gate, she had gathered into herself the force of all the cruel winds that had beaten so savagely upon her. And the result was that her own character had become so strong and so upright and so beautiful that she was recognized as the high-priestess of that English countryside, and every man and maiden who needed counsel or succour made a beaten path to her open door.

F W Boreham, ‘Gog and Magog’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 136-137.

Image: The Populars by Paul Cezanne. “Like the sturdier of the poplars by my gate, she had gathered into herself the force of all the cruel winds that had beaten so savagely upon her.”

Boreham on the Value of Struggle

2008-03-16T06:18:00.001-07:00

Was it not Alfred Russel Wallace who tried to help an emperor-moth, and only harmed it by his ill-considered ministry?

He came upon the creature beating its wings and struggling wildly to force its passage through the narrow neck of its cocoon. He admired its fine proportions, eight inches from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other, and thought it a pity that so handsome a creature should be subjected to so severe an ordeal. He therefore took out his lancet and slit the cocoon. The moth came out at once; but its glorious colors never developed. The soaring wings never expanded. The indescribable hues and tints and shades that should have adorned them never appeared. The moth crept moodily about; drooped perceptibly; and presently died.

The furious struggle with the cocoon was Nature's wise way of developing the splendid wings and of sending the vital fluids pulsing through the frame until every particle blushed with their beauty. The naturalist had saved the little creature from the struggle, but had unintentionally ruined and slain it in the process.

F W Boreham, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 135-136.

Image: Emperor Moth—“its glorious colors never developed.”

Boreham on the ABC

2008-03-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

The following Boreham essay/sermon or a variation of it was included in a book entitled: Ian Macpherson (ed.), Sermons I Should Have Preached (London: The Epworth Press, 1964), 30-37.

I know a pastor who each year preaches a series of sermons entitled, ‘Sermons I would love to have written’. (This is a good idea especially over a holiday period or when the pastor needs to crib a little more time for other tasks). This collection is in a similar vein.

This sermon is an example of Boreham’s rich creativity and it is planned to be included in the forthcoming, ‘The Best Essays and Sermons of F. W. Boreham’. It is posted here by request.

A BOX OF BLOCKS

I
We had a birthday at our house today, and among the presents was a beautiful box of blocks. Each block represented one of the letters of the alphabet. As I saw them being arranged and rearranged upon the table, I fell a-thinking. For the alphabet has, in our time, come to its own. We go through life muttering an interminable and incomprehensible jargon of initials. We tack initials on to our names—fore and aft—and we like to see every one of them in its place. As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, the postman hands me a medley of circulars, postcards, and letters. One of them bids me attend the annual meeting of the S.P.C.A.; another reminds me of the monthly committee meeting of the M.C.M.; a third asks me to deliver an address at the P.S.A. In the afternoon I rush from an appointment at the Y.M.C.A. to speak on behalf of the W.C.T.U.; and then, having dropped in to pay my insurance premium at the A.M.P., I take the tram at the G.P.O., and ask the conductor to drop me at the A.B.C. I have accepted an invitation to a pleasant little function there—an invitation that is clearly marked R.S.V.P. And so on. There is no end to it. Life may be defined as a small amount of activity entirely surrounded by the letters of the alphabet.

Now the alphabet has a symbolism of its own. The man who coined the phrase 'as simple as A.B.C.' went mad; he went mad before he coined it. There are, it is true, a few simplicities sprinkled among the intricacies of this old world of ours; but the alphabet is not one of them. I protest that it is most unfair to call the alphabet simple. Nobody likes to be thought simple nowadays; see how frantically we preachers struggle to avoid any suspicion of the kind! Any person living would rather be called a sinner—or even a saint—than a simpleton. Why, then, affront the alphabet, which, as we have seen, is working a prodigious amount of overtime in our service, by applying to it so very opprobrious an epithet?

'As simple as A.B.C.,' indeed! Macaulay's schoolboy may not have been as omniscient as the historian would lead us to believe but he at least knew that there is nothing simple about the A.B.C. The alphabet is the hardest lesson that a child is called upon to learn. Latin roots, algebraic equations, and the Pons Asinorum are mere nothings in comparison. Grown-ups have short memories. They forget the stupendous difficulties that they surmounted in their earliest infancy; and their forgetfulness renders them pitiless and unsympathetic. Few of us recognize the strain in which a child's brain is involved when, for the first time, he confronts the alphabet. The whole thing is so arbitrary; there is no clue. In his noble essay on The Evolution of Language, Professor Henry Drummond shows that the alphabet is really a picture-gallery. 'First,' he says, `there was the onomatopoetic writing, the ideograph, the imitation of the actual object. This is the form we find in the Egyptian hieroglyphic. For a man a man is drawn, for a camel a camel, for a hut a hut. Then, to save time, the objects were drawn in shorthand—a couple of dashes for the limbs and one across, as in the Chinese, for a man; a square in the same language for a field; two strokes at an obtuse angle, suggesting the roof, for a house. To express further qualities, these abbreviated pictures were next compounded in ingenious ways. A man and a field together conveyed the idea of wealth; a roof and a woman represented home; and so on.' And thus, little by little, our letters were evolved. But the pictures have become so truncated, abbreviated, and emasculated, in the course of this evolutionary process, that a child, though notoriously fond of pictures, sees nothing fascinating in the letters of the alphabet. There is absolutely nothing about the first to suggest the sound A; nothing about the second to suggest the sound B. The whole thing is so incomprehensible; how can he ever hope to master it? An adult brain, introduced to such a conglomeration for the first time, would reel and stagger; is it any wonder that these childish cheeks get flushed or that the curly head turns at times very feverishly upon the pillow?

The sequence, too, is as baffling as the symbols. There is every reason why two should come between one and three; and that reason is so obvious that the tiniest tot in the class can appreciate it. But why must B come between A and C? There is no natural advance, as in the case of the numerals. The letter B is not a little more than the letter A, nor a little less than the letter C. Except through the operation of the law of association, which only weaves its spell with the passing of the years, there is nothing about A to suggest B, and nothing about B to suggest C. The combination is a rope of sand. Robert Moffat only realized the insuperable character of this difficulty when he attempted to teach the natives of Bechuanaland the English alphabet. Each of his dusky pupils brought to the task an observation that had been trained in the wilds, a brain that had been developed by the years, and an intelligence that had been matured by experience. They were not babies. Yet the alphabet proved too much for them. Why should A be A? and why should B be B? and why should the one follow the other? Mr. Moffat was on the point of abandoning his educational enterprise as hopeless, when one thick-lipped and woolly-headed genius suggested that he should teach them to sing it! At first blush the notion seemed preposterous. There are some things which, like Magna Charta and minute-books, cannot be set to music. Robert Moffat, however, was a Scotsman. The tune most familiar to his childhood came singing itself over and over in his brain; by the most freakish and fantastic conjunction of ideas it associated itself with the problem that was baffling him; and, before that day's sun had set, he had his Bechuana pupils roaring the alphabet to the tune of Auld Lang Syne!

So ABC
D E F G
H I J K L M
NOPQ
RSTU
VWXYZ

The rhyme and metre fitted perfectly. The natives were so delighted that they strolled about the village shouting the new song at the tops of their voices; and Mr. Moffat declares that daylight was stealing through his bedroom window before the weird unearthly yells at last subsided. I have often wondered whether, in a more civilized environment, any attempt has been made to impress the letters upon the mind in the same way.

II
The symbolism of the alphabet rises to a sudden grandeur, however, when it is enlisted in the service of revelation. Long, long ago a startled shepherd was ordered to visit the court of the mightiest of earthly potentates, and to address him on matters of state in the name of the Most High. ` And the Lord said unto Moses, Come now, therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, and I will send thee also unto the children of Israel. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I am come unto them and shall say, The God of your fathers bath sent me unto you, and they shall say, What is His name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you!'
`I am—!'
`I am'—what?

For centuries and centuries that question stood unanswered; that sentence remained incomplete. It was a magnificent fragment. It stood like a monument that the sculptor had never lived to finish; like a poem that the poet, dying with his music in him, had left with its closing stanzas unsung. But the sculptor of that fragment was not dead; the singer of that song had not perished. For, behold, He liveth for evermore! And, in the fullness of time, He reappeared and filled in the gap that had so long stood blank.
`I am—!'
`I am'—what?
`I am—the Bread of Life!’ ‘I am—the Light of the World!' ‘I am—the Door!’ ‘I am—the True Vine!' 'I am—the Good Shepherd!' `I am—the Way, the Truth, and the Life!' `I am—the Resurrection and the Life!'

And when I come to the end of the Bible, to the last book of all, I find the series supplemented and completed.
`I am—Alpha and Omega!' `I am—A and Z!' `I am—the Alphabet!' The symbolism of which I have spoken can rise to no greater height than that. What, I wonder, can such symbolism symbolize? I take these birthday blocks that came to our house today and strew the letters on my study floor. So far as any spiritual significance is concerned, they seem as dead as the dry bones in Ezekiel's Valley. And yet `I am the Alphabet!' `Come,' I cry, with the prophet of the captivity, 'come from the Four Winds, O Breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live! 'And the prayer has scarcely escaped my lips when lo, all the letters of the alphabet shine with a wondrous lustre and glow with a profound significance.

III
For see, the North Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, and I see at once that they are symbols of the Inexhaustibility of Jesus! `I am Alpha and Omega!' `I am the Alphabet!' I have sometimes stood in one of our great public libraries. I have surveyed with astonishment the serried ranks of English literature. I have looked up, and, in tier above tier, gallery above gallery, shelf above shelf, the books climbed to the very roof, whilst, looking before me and behind me, they stretched as far as I could see. The catalogue containing the bare names of the books ran into several volumes. And yet the whole of this literature consists of these twenty-six letters on the floor arranged and rearranged in kaleidoscopic variety of juxtaposition. Which, I ask myself, is the greater—the literature or the alphabet? And I see at once that the alphabet is the greater because it is so inexhaustible. Literature is in its infancy. We shall produce greater poets than Shakespeare, greater novelists than Dickens, greater philosophers, historians, and humorists than any who have yet written. But they will draw upon the alphabet for every letter of every syllable of every word that they write. They may multiply our literature a million-million-fold; yet the alphabet will be as far from exhaustion when the last page is finished as it was before the first writer seized a pen.

`I am-the Alphabet!' He says. He means that He cannot be exhausted.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measures of Man's mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

The ages may draw upon His grace; the people of every nation and kindred and people and tongue—a multitude that no statistician can number—may kneel in contrition at His feet; His love is as great as His power and knows neither measure nor end. He is inexhaustible.

IV
And when the South Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the Indispensability of Jesus. Literature, with all its hoarded wealth, is as inaccessible as the diamonds of the moon until I have mastered the alphabet. The alphabet is the golden key that unlocks to me all its treasures of knowledge, poetry, and romance.

`I am the Alphabet!' He says; and He says it three separate times. For the words occur thrice in the Apocalypse. In the first case they refer to the unfolding of the divine revelation ; in the second they refer to the interpretation of historic experience; and in the third they refer to the unveiled drama of the future. As the disciples discovered on the road to Emmaus, I cannot understand my Bible unless I take Him as being the key to it all; I cannot understand the processes of historical development until I have given Him the central place; I cannot anticipate with equanimity the unfoldings of the days to come until I have seen the keys of the eternities swinging at His girdle.

The alphabet is, essentially, an individual affair. In order to read a single sentence, I must learn it for myself. My father's intimacy with the alphabet does not help me to enjoy the volumes on my shelves. The alphabet is indispensable to me; and so is He! There is something very pathetic and very instructive about the story that Legh Richmond tells of The Young Cottager. 'The rays of the morning star,' Mr. Richmond says, `were not so beautiful in my sight as the spiritual lustre of this young Christian's character.' She was very ill when he visited her for the last time. `There was animation in her look—there was more—something like a foretaste of heaven seemed to be felt, and gave an inexpressible character of spiritual beauty, even in death.'

'Where is your hope, my child?' Mr. Richmond asked, in the course of that last conversation.

`Lifting up her finger,' he says, 'she pointed to heaven, and then directed the same finger downward to her own heart, saying successively as she did so, "Christ there!" and "Christ here!" These words, accompanied by the action, spoke her meaning more solemnly than can easily be conceived.'
In life and in death He is our one indispensability. In relation to this world, and in relation to the world that is to come, He stands to the soul as the alphabet stands in relation to literature.

V
And when the East Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the Invincibility of Jesus. `I am—A and Z!' He is at the beginning, that is to say, and He goes right through to the end. There is nothing in the alphabet before A; there is nothing after Z. However far back your evolutionary interpretation of the universe may place the beginning of things, you will find Him there. However remote your interpretation of prophecy may make the end of things, you will find Him there. He goes right through. The story of the ages—past, present, and future—may be told in a sentence `Christ first, Christ last, and nought between but Christ.' Having begun, He completes. He is the Author and Finisher of our faith. He sets His face like a flint. Nothing daunts, deters, or dismays Him. `I am confident,' Paul says, `of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it unto the end.' He never halts at H or L or P or X; He goes right through to Z. He never gives up.

VI
But the greatest comfort of all comes to me on the Wings, of the West Wind. For, when the West Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the Adaptability of Jesus. The lover takes these twenty-six letters and makes them the vehicle for the expression of his passion; the poet transforms them into a song that shall be sung for centuries; the judge turns them into a sentence of death. In the hands of each they mould themselves to his necessity. The alphabet is the most fluid, the most accommodating, the most plastic, the most adaptable contrivance on the planet. Just because, in common with every person breathing, I possess a distinctive individuality, I sometimes feel as no person ever felt before, and I express myself in language such as no person ever used. And the beauty of the alphabet is that it adapts itself to my individual need. And that is precisely the beauty of Jesus. `I am—the Alphabet!' I may not have sinned more than others; but I have sinned differently. The experiences of others never sound convincing; they do not quite reflect my case. But, like the alphabet, He adapts Himself to every case. He is the very Saviour I need.

F W Boreham, ‘A Box of Blocks’, Rubble and Roseleaves (London: The Epworth Press, 1923), 236-248.

Boreham on Overcoming Handicaps

2008-03-04T03:08:00.001-08:00

When speaking of the difficulty which black young people experience in America in competing with their white rivals, Booker Washington tells us that his own pathetic and desperate struggle taught him that ‘success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.’ There is a good deal in that.

I was once present at a meeting of a certain Borough Council, at which an engineer had to report on a certain proposal which the municipal authorities were discussing. The engineer contented himself with remarking that there were serious difficulties in the way of the execution of the plan. Whereupon the Mayor turned upon the unfortunate engineer and remarked, ‘We pay you your salary, Mr. Engineer, not to tell us that difficulties exist, but to show us how to surmount them!’ I thought it rather a severe rebuke at the time, but very often since, when I have been tempted to allow my handicaps to divert me from my duty, I have been glad that I heard the poor engineer censured.

F W Boreham, ‘The Handicap’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 124-125.

Image: Booker T Washington.

Boreham on the Handicap

2008-02-20T04:05:00.001-08:00

It was a sunny autumn afternoon. The leaves were rustling about my feet, and the first nip of winter was in the air. It was Saturday, and I was out for a stroll. Suddenly a crowd attracted my attention, and, impelled by that curiosity which such a concourse invariably excites, I drew near to see whether it meant a fire or a fight. It was neither.

As I approached I caught sight of young fellows moving in and out among the people, wearing light many-coloured garments, and I guessed that a race was about to be run. Almost as soon as I arrived, the men were called up, arranged in a long line, and preparations made for the start. At a signal two or three of them sprang out from the line and bounded with an easy stride along the load. A few seconds later, three or four more followed; then others; until at last only one was left; and, after a brief period of further waiting, he also left the line and set out in pursuit. It was a handicap, Iwas told, and this man had started from scratch.

It was to be a long race, and it would be some time before any of the runners could be expected back again. The crowd, therefore, dispersed for the time being, breaking up into knots and groups, each of which strolled off to while away the waiting time as its own taste suggested. I turned into a lane that led up into the bush on the hillside, and, from that sheltered and sunny eminence, watched for the first sign of the returning runners.

Sitting there with nothing to do, it flashed upon me that the scene I had just witnessed was a reflection, as in a mirror, of all human experience and endeavour. Most people are heavily handicapped; it is no good blinking the fact. Ask a man to undertake some office or assume some responsibility in connexion with the church, and he will silence you at once with a narration of the difficulties that stand in his way. Ask a man to act on some board or committee for the management of some charitable or philanthropic enterprise, and he will explain to you that he has not a minute to spare. Ask a man to subscribe to some most necessary or deserving object, and he will tell you of the incessant demands to which he is subjected.

Now it is no good putting all this down to cant. We have no right to assume that these are merely the lame excuses of men who, in their secret souls, do not desire to assist us. We must not hastily hurl at them the curse that fell upon Meroz because it came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty. All that they say is perfectly true.

The difficulties that debar the first of these men from undertaking the work to which you are calling him are both real and formidable; the second man has every moment of his time fully occupied; the third man, because he is known to be generous, is badgered to death with collecting-lists from the first thing in the morning till the last thing at night. We must not judge these men too harshly. In the uncharitableness of our hearts we imagine that they have given us excuses which are not reasons. The fact is that they have done exactly the reverse; they have given us reasons which are not excuses.

We are on safer ground when we recognize frankly that it is very difficult for many people to devote much time, much energy, and much money to the kingdom of God. Many people are heavily handicapped.

F W Boreham, ‘The Handicap’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 117-119.

Image: “It was to be a long race, and it would be some time before any of the runners could be expected back again.”

Boreham on Spurgeon and His Friendships

2008-02-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

F W Boreham wrote the following foreword (pages 15-18), for the book written by his friend, A. Cunningham Burley. This book was published by Epworth in 1933 and was entitled, Spurgeon and His Friendships.

Author Mr. Burley
A cablegram from the author of this volume invites me to add a FOREWORD. I have not seen the book; but Mr. Burley is one of my oldest friends, and I know of the lifelong and patient research which he has applied to his present theme. We are living in an age of specialists; and for many years Mr. Burley has specialized on Spurgeon. A rumour that some trifle had been unearthed that might conceivably throw a fresh speck of light on the monumental personality of C. H. Spurgeon has many a time led Mr. Burley to drop everything that he might speed hotfoot to test the nugget of which intelligence had reached him. His must often have been the disillusionment that comes to children who scamper off in search of the crock of gold at the rainbow's foot; but such disappointments have never quenched his passion; and, in the course of his tireless quest, he must have amassed a prodigious wealth of carefully-sifted and thoroughly reliable information—a hoard such as few biographers are happy enough to possess.

C. H. Spurgeon
The centenary of Mr. Spurgeon's birth calls challengingly for a work in which we shall be able to contemplate his subtle and permeating influence in its true historic perspective. His rugged individuality stands out boldly against a striking, dramatic and picturesque background.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, English history took a surprising turn; the nation was made all over again. Its politics, its literature, its science, its commerce, its art, and, above all, its faith, were recast and refashioned; and the position of Great Britain among the world-powers assumed an entirely new character and importance.

Rise of Evangelism
In this renaissance Mr. Spurgeon played a conspicuous part; and he did it in two ways. He did it by creating a popular atmosphere for evangelism. This was his supreme triumph. In his famous Memoirs, Greville graphically describes Mr. Spurgeon—whose physique struck him as singularly reminiscent of Macaulay's—preaching, at an ordinary service, to nine thousand people. It impressed him, as it impressed all thoughtful observers, as an arresting and epoch-making phenomenon. It forced the evangelical pulpit into the glare of public attention. The world was compelled to take notice. It made thinkable and possible the work of all those ministers and evangelists who have since captured the attention of the populace. And when one attempts to estimate the spiritual, ethical and civic value of the impact of Mr. Spurgeon's flaming intensity upon each individual unit in the surging crowds that flocked every Sunday with wistful hearts to hear him, one realizes how generously and how vitally he contributed to the new order that sprang into being in his time.

Profound Influence
But Mr. Spurgeon had a second string to his bow. A great age produces great men, and, by the very men that it produces, is made greater. The annals of the Victorian era glitter, like a starry sky, with brilliant and illustrious names. There were giants in those days. But among those Homeric figures there was scarcely one upon whom Mr. Spurgeon did not exercise a profound and formative influence. I am thinking, not so much of those who were the direct fruitage of his far-reaching and regenerative ministry, but of men who moved in circles quite remote from that in which he shone and whose names were seldom or never mentioned in association with his. The leaders of all departments of British life and thought recognized that the spirit of Spurgeon represented the life-force of the ages. He magnetized and sometimes electrified them. They went to hear him; they sought his counsel; and they struggled to keep the movements that they directed in harmony with the atmosphere that he generated. The most skilful and penetrating historians will find it beyond their wit to account in so many words for Mr. Spurgeon's authority over the minds of the men who dominated his period. But the most cursory review of the history of the nineteenth century must convince any man that his sway was stupendous. A king-maker occupies a more exalted eminence than a king. And in that age of crisis and of transformation there were many kingly spirits who gratefully confessed that, but for Mr. Spurgeon's ministry—in public or in private—their own contribution to the development would have been negligible.

Massive Theme
This is stating an obvious fact in nebulous and abstract terms. Mr. Burley's pages will, I am certain, abound in vivid and telling narratives that will provide concrete vindication of this general principle. He has a massive theme; his whole heart is in his work; his able contributions to current journalism have proved that his pen is eminently capable of the honourable task to which he now aspires; and I welcome this opportunity of breathing an affectionate benediction on his venture.

F W Boreham
KEW.,
VICTORIA,
AUSTRALIA, June, 1933.

Thanks: I am grateful to Pastor Jeff Cranston for suggesting this good post so that lovers of Boreham’s writings might enjoy this foreword. Sincere thanks to Jeff’s assistant, Lynn Swanson for scanning and sending this article.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: C. H. Spurgeon.

Boreham Books into Chinese

2008-02-14T00:13:00.000-08:00

Some avid readers of this site may remember me writing about the future of Boreham publishing and saying that it would be good to get the works of F W Boreham into Chinese.

In April 2007 in a posting entitled, ‘Geoff Pound Speaks About Publishing Boreham Books’, I said:

“I am discovering that some readers of the Boreham Blog site are from China and I am waiting for someone from the Chinese speaking world to put their hands up and work with us on translating and publishing Boreham books into Mandarin or Cantonese.”

Following that posting I had one sound out that didn’t go anywhere but in recent weeks I have had a phone call from a Mandarin and English speaker who works as an interpreter and translator and he is passionate about translating FWB into Mandarin!

I met with him recently to talk about this venture. He is very self-effacing and does not want any publicity or fanfare. Already he has translated six essays as he is translating the forthcoming book (in English), The Best Essays and Sermons of F W Boreham.

He is commencing an F W Boreham Blog in Mandarin on which he will post stories from “All the Blessings of Life” to introduce Boreham to the Chinese world and to generate interest in Boreham books that will later be published in the traditional (not online) method.

This man has read about 10 of the Boreham books and is looking to purchase more (anyone got any spares?)

I asked him how he is finding the challenge of translating Boreham into Mandarin. He said: “It won’t be hard to translate Boreham. Mandarin is a very poetic and pictorial language and these are words that describe well the Boreham books that I have read.”

I will keep you posted on these developments especially for people who would like to write to Chinese-speaking friends and point them in the direction of the Boreham Blog in Chinese.

If you have any words or ways with which you would like to encourage this man, do write to me and I will be glad to forward them to him.

Dr. Geoff Pound

Image: The Lord’s Prayer

Boreham on Conclusions and Reasons

2008-02-11T22:20:00.001-08:00

I remember passing a window in London in which a sewing-machine was displayed. The machine was working. A large doll sat beside it, its hand on the wheel. The doll's hand appeared to be turning the handle. As a matter of fact, the machine was electrically driven, and the wheel turned the hand of the doll.

In the realm of cause and effect we are frequently the dupes and victims of a very dexterous system of legerdemain. The resultant quantity is invariably clear; the contributing causes are not what they seem.

I find myself believing today pretty much what I believed twenty years ago; but I find myself believing the same things for different reasons. As life goes on, a man learns to put more and more confidence in his conclusions, and to become more and more chary of the reasons that led to those conclusions. If a certain course seems to him to be right, he automatically adopts it, and he confidently persists in it even after the reasons that first dictated it have fallen under suspicion.

‘More than once in an emergency at sea,’ says Dr. Grenfell, the hero of Labrador, ‘I have swiftly decided upon a certain line of action. If I had waited to hem my reason into a corner before adopting that course, I should not be here to tell the tale.’

We often flatter ourselves that we base our conclusions upon our reasons. In reality, we do nothing of the kind. The mind works so rapidly that it tricks us. It is another case of legerdemain. Once more, it is the machine that turns the doll, and not the doll that turns the machine.

F W Boreham, ‘A Woman’s Reason’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 109-110.

Boreham on the Challenge of Drowned Hens

2008-01-03T05:21:00.000-08:00

A man lived in a very comfortable house, with a large, light, airy cellar. The river ran near by.

One day the river overflowed, the cellar was flooded, and all the hens that he kept in it were drowned.

The next day he went off to see the landlord.

‘I have come,’ he said ‘to give you notice. I wish to leave the house.’

‘How is that?’ asked the astonished landlord. ‘I thought you liked it so much. It is a very comfortable, well-built house, and cheap.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the tenant replied, ‘but the river has overflowed into my cellar, and all my hens are drowned.’

‘Oh, don't let that make you give up the house,’ the landlord reasoned; ‘try ducks!’

F W Boreham unfolds some of the issues of this story in his essay, recognizing the fine art of putting up with nasty things but encouraging the creative juices to flow to see if there is a better way to be living under difficult circumstances.

F W Boreham, ‘Landlord and Tenant’, Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 52-53.

Boreham Books to Make you Sing!

2008-01-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

Psychologist, Dr Bruce L Thiessen has written an enchanting review of All The Blessings of Life: The Best Stories of F W Boreham and Second Thoughts, also by F W Boreham.

Read about the way these books have helped Dr Thiessen to compose a new song (which you can listen to) and assist him in his musical career.

Link: Bruce L Thiessen, A Book Review You Can Sing To.

Where You Can Purchase Boreham Books:

Dalton Books

COC Online Shop

Amazon.Com

Image: Cover of All the Blessings of Life.

Boreham on the New Year

2008-01-01T09:52:00.001-08:00

New Year day marks both a burial and a birth. We stand reverently by the graveside of the past; we gaze curiously into the cradle of the year just born. It is at such moments that we exhibit, in full-orbed perfection, life's two monumental chivalries. A natural instinct restrains us from speaking ill of the dead; we are in honour bound to think as kindly as we can of the year that has passed, forgiving its blemishes and magnifying its benefits. And, as to the year that sprawls in its infancy before us, it becomes us to treat it as we ourselves were treated in similar circumstances.

Is there anything in the solar system more beautiful than the faith which on our first arrival, our parents reposed in us? They knew that we should be human, yet they idealised us until they thought of us as almost divine. They dreamed of all the good things we should do, and never for a moment suspected the bad. In their enraptured eyes, an aureole already encircled our brows. It is with some such rainbow-tinted chivalry that we extend our welcome to a newborn year.

Few things are more intriguing than our capacity for scraping together a presentable stock of glittering optimism at this particular season. We are subtly conscious of having turned a corner; entered upon a fresh phase, rounded a cape into warmer latitudes and sunnier seas. Something tells us that however unkind our yesterdays may have been, our tomorrows are unanimously and whole-heartedly on the side of the angels.

The High Art Of Self-Culture
In a sense, such mental processes and reactions are wholly illogical, perhaps a trifle absurd. After all, the year is a cycle. Nature recognises no day as its beginning; she indignantly scorns the thought of a close. To her, the succession of the seasons represents the inspired mechanism of perpetual motion. She knows no weariness, no monotony, no senility, no end. In spite of this, however, there is a modicum of sound sense in marking a certain point in the beginningless and endless circle, and in making that mystic point the theatre of a little discreet heart-searching. Are we on the right track? What progress are we making? Are we appreciably nearer our goal than when we last took our bearings ?

Obviously, the highest attainment in life consists in making the best of ourselves. But it is not easy. The outstanding fact in each man's pilgrimage is the terrifying fact of his own individuality. Each person is a pathfinder, blazing a trail through an unexplored continent. There are no maps or charts. Nobody else has ever had his life to live. Nobody else's experience, therefore, can serve him as a guide book for his own lonely trudge. By hook or by crook, he must find his way as he struggles on.

Wisdom Of Taking One's Bearings
It is all very well for metaphysicians and theorists to write books on "Life and How to Live It"; such a treatise is useless to the average man. He abhors the general; he craves the particular. He wants a book dealing distinctively with his own personal life. It must begin with his own birth; it must reach its climax with his own death; it must have his photograph as its frontispiece. And, because nobody on earth is competent to write it, and because nobody but himself would wish to read it, such a volume has never been published, and, in the nature of things, never will be.

It follows that if a man is to develop his personality and fulfil his mission in life at all successfully, he must stand occasionally on some lofty eminence, from the commanding heights of which he can survey the country that he has already traversed and map out for himself a path through the unknown territory that melts into infinity before him. Herein lies the rationale of our New Year celebrations. We arbitrarily fix a point in the circle as the beginning and the end of that circle; and on reaching that mysterious point, we pause to readjust ourselves to ourselves, to one another, to those around us, to God above us, and to the eternal scheme of things.

F W Boreham, This Day with F W Boreham, 1 January.

Image: “Each person is a pathfinder, blazing a trail through an unexplored continent.”

Boreham on the End of the Year

2007-12-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

This is a time for contemplation. It is true that when a person is on a journey, the important thing is to keep going. Yet there come times when, pausing for a meal or taking breath on the summit of a picturesque knoll, it is convenient—and even profitable—to review the ground that he has already covered and to take his bearings in relation to the unfinished portion of his trudge. It is with some such sensations that we shall spend the present weekend. The end of a year is not, in reality, a point of any consequence; yet it seems to represent the end of one stage and the beginning of another.

This fondness of ours for rounding things off is one of our most characteristic human instincts. Who is there, among those who delight in books, who has not read a dozen times Gibbon's infamous postscript to his monumental "Decline and Fall," the postscript in which he describes the tumult of emotion with which, after a quarter of a century of intense application, he wrote the last sentence of his history? Sir Archibald Alison tells of a similar experience. He called his wife into the room to see the last line written, and both found moisture creeping to their eyes when the pen was finally lifted from the page. And we all like to think of Sir Christopher Wren, old, feeble but tremendously excited, being driven to the city to witness the very last touches being put to his noble cathedral. Such incidents are notable because typical.

Is Man a Squirrel In a Revolving Cage?
The end of a year, however, differs essentially and fundamentally from the end of other things, inasmuch as it is, in its very nature, not only an end, but a beginning. It is a case of: "The King is dead; long live the King!" If the speech of the orator is ill-conceived and ill-finished, he will suffer for it in days to come by being permitted to contemplate from the platform a paralysing array of empty benches. If the manuscript of the author represents scamped and slipshod work, he will meet his Nemesis in the shape of universal neglect. In each case the public will punish the offender for the delinquencies of the past by peremptorily denying him a future. But nothing can deprive us the new year. Whatever the old year has done or left undone, we start afresh. By an amazing distortion of human reasoning, this inevitable system of succession—year following year without respect to the behaviour of the years—has been tortured by unhealthy minds into an excuse for pessimism. Thus, to the gloomy broodings of Nietzsche, it seemed to place humanity in the position of a squirrel in a revolving cage or a convict on a treadmill. The insensate thing twirls round and round unceasingly without regard to any kind of progress. It turns man into a kind of recurring decimal that walks on and on and on indefinitely, but never by any chance works out. The philosophy is a frigid one. We prefer to view the position in the light of a fine story that Lowell tells in the narrative of his travels in Europe. When crossing the Alps with a friend, the pair suddenly reached a summit from which they commanded a magnificent view to east and west. As Lowell gazed eastward, the pageant of antiquity seemed to unroll before his eyes. Baring his head he cried, in a transport of veneration: "Glories for the past, I salute you!" He then turned to his friend who turned his face in the opposite direction. Thinking of all the pregnant potentialities stirring within the life of those younger and more aggressive peoples, he exclaimed, "Glories of the future, I salute you!" Lowell confesses that his friend had the better of him. It is some such reflection—the rapture of the forward look—that dispels pessimism and excites expectancy as we turn our faces to the year that is about to be.

A Philosophy Of Sunshine And Apple Blossom
The cheerfulness thus generated must, however, be curbed by certain necessary modifications. Year may succeed year with the regularity and reliability of the law of gravitation. But what of ourselves? Do the years leave us as they find us? Do they simply break sportively over us as the waves break over the happy bathers? "My hair," explained Mrs. Glover, the actress, to Douglas Jerrold, the humorist, "is turning grey through using essence of lavender." "Are you sure,” Jerrold replied, grimly, "that it is not due to essence of thyme?" We suspect that the subdued melancholy of which we are all conscious at this period is due, not to the substitution of one year for another, but to a secret and subconscious recognition of change within ourselves. Yet, happily, even this pensive mood is not lasting. As soon as the bells ring in the new year, we shake it from us, and, with the ageing Ulysses, we resolve to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield.

We grow dreadfully old in December, but we are newborn babes in January. Longfellow's biographer has described a certain day on which the poet, his hair as white as snow but his cheeks as ruddy as a rose, was strolling in an orchard with a lady friend. "How is it," she asked, "that you are still so vigorous and that it is still possible for you to write so exquisitely?" "Look at that apple tree," replied Longfellow; "it is the oldest apple tree in the orchard and yet its blossoms this year are as beautiful as I have ever known them during the past fifty years. The secret is simply this: the tree makes a little new wood every year, and out of the new wood comes the wealth of blossom." It was merely a poet’s way of saying what, in his "Marius the Epicurean," Pater says of Cornelius Fronto. "The wise old man," he writes, "would seem to have carefully and consciously replaced each natural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent grace of culture." Essence of thyme can never age or wither such heroic spirits. Though the outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. It is impossible to depress men in whose minds the passage of the years awakens no philosophy, but one of sunshine and apple blossom!

F W Boreham, This Day With F W Boreham, 31 December.

Image: "We grow dreadfully old in December."

Boreham on ‘Such a Lovely Bite!’

2007-12-26T20:36:00.000-08:00

I was out on the river in an open boat, fishing. It was a glorious sunny afternoon when we pushed off; the great hills around were at their greenest; and the only reminder vouchsafed to us that tomorrow is midwinter's day was the glitter of snow away on the top of the mountain. The water around us, reflecting the cloudless sky above, was a sea of sapphire, out of which our oars seemed to beat up pearls and silver.

Arrived at our favourite fishing grounds, we lay quietly at anchor, and for a while the sport was excellent. But, later on, things quietened down. The fish forsook us, or became too dainty for our blandishments. The sun went down over the massive ridges. A hint of evening brooded over us. The blue died out of the water, and the greenness vanished from the hills. Everything was grey and cold. As though to match the gloom around us, we ourselves grew silent. Conversation languished, and laughter was dead. We turned up the collars of our coats, and grimly bent over our lines. But the cod and the perch were proof against all our cajolery, and would not be enticed.

At length my hands grew so cold and numb that I could scarcely feel the line. My enthusiasm sank with the temperature, and I suggested, not without trepidation, that we should give it up. My companions assented to the abstract proposition; but, with that wistful half-expectancy so characteristic of anglers, did not at once commence to wind up their lines. I was, therefore, just on the point of setting them an example when one of them exclaimed excitedly, “Wait a second; I had such a lovely bite!” That was all; but it gave us a fresh lease of life. For half an hour we forgot the hardening cold and the deepening gloom, and chatted again as merrily as when we baited our hooks for the first time. It was a bite; that was all. But, oh, the thrill of a bite when patience is flagging and endurance ebbing out!

A Bite
It is because of a certain cynical tendency to deride the value of a bite that I have decided to spend the evening with my pen. “A bite!” says somebody, with a fine guffaw. “And what on earth is the good of a bite, I should like to know? A bite is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring! A bite is of no use for breakfast, dinner, tea, or supper! Bites can neither be fried nor boiled, measured nor weighed. A bite, indeed!’-and once more the cynic loses himself in laughter. That is all he knows about it, and it merely supplies us with another evidence of the superficiality of cynicism. The critic is sometimes right, but the cynic is never right; and the roar of laughter that I hear from the cynic's chair, as he talks about bites, is, therefore, rightly translated and interpreted, a kind of thunderous applause. Why, in some respects, a bite is better than a fish. Only very occasionally does a fish look as well on the bank or in the boat as it appeared to the excited imagination of the angler when he first felt the flutter on the line. I have caught thousands of fish in my time; but most of them I have dismissed from memory as soon as they went flapping into the basket. But some of the bites that I have had! I catch myself wondering now what beauteous monsters they can have been.
“Well, and how many did you catch?” I am regularly asked on my return.
“Oh, a couple of dozen or so; but, oh, I had such a bite!...”

And so on. It is the bite that lingers fondly in the memory, that haunts the fancy for days afterwards, and that rushes back upon the angler in his dreams.

Attributing Super Qualities to the Unrealized
The bite is always the biggest fish. There is something very charming—something of which the cynic knows nothing at all—about this propensity of ours to attribute superlative qualities to the unrealized. It is a species of philosophic chivalry. It is a courtesy that we extend to the unknown. We do not know whether the joys that never visited us were really great or small, so we gallantly allow them the benefit of the doubt. The geese that came waddling over the hill are geese, all of them, and as geese we write them down; but the geese that never came over the hill are swans every one, and no swans that we have fed beside the lake glided hither and thither half as gracefully.

F W Boreham, ‘Such a Lovely Bite!’ Mushrooms on the Moor (London: Charles H Kelly, 1915), 42-45.

Boreham on Christmas at Midsummer

2007-12-24T22:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas is once more with us, although the migrants who have poured into Australia during the year may be pardoned if they find some little difficulty in recognising it.[1] To those who were reared in the older lands of the Northern Hemisphere, an Australian Christmas must always seem a weird, uncanny hotch-potch. Every Englishman settled in Australia cherishes in his heart a fond, though frantic, hope. He knows that it can never be realised; the stars in their courses are fighting against him; he is but crying for the moon. Yet, even though he be permitted to spend a hundred Summers beneath these sunnier skies, he will never quite relinquish that pleasing and passionate illusion.

He will steal furtively to the window every Christmas morning and will throw up the blinds to see if, at long last, his dream has all come true. How he would love to see the whole horizon a sheet of dazzling whiteness! He wants the snow; the graceful, fluttering snow; the deep and drifting snow; and, however long he lives, Christmas can never be Christmas to him without it. In his inmost heart he recognises that, in the nature of things, the old English Christmas can never be duplicated on Australian soil. The fireside frolics do not dovetail with the heyday of harvest-time. The things that pertain to the traditional Yuletide—the snowman in the garden and the snowballing on the street, the skating on the lake and the frosty walk to church; the snapdragons in the kitchen, and the ghost story in the flickering firelight—these, sigh for them as we may, can never fall within the range of Australian experience.

Christmas Is Christmas Under Any Stars
Yet it makes no difference. The yearning abides. Southey avers that, however long a man lives, the first 20 years of their life will always be the biggest half of it. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. The first two decades of our existence fasten upon our hearts sentiments and traditions that will dominate all our days. A man who has spent childhood and youth in the old lands of the north may come to Australia, may make himself perfectly at home here and win their way to happiness and prosperity. Yet whenever he beholds Father Christmas wiping the perspiration from his brow as he wanders among the roses and the strawberries of our fierce Australian mid-summer, he will feel secretly sorry for the good old man. He seems to be casting about for snowflakes and icicles and finding only cool drinks and ice creams.

Yet, after a very few years on this side of the planet, migrants discover to their delight that the joys of Christmas-tide are not restricted to any particular season of the year, nor are they bounded by the accidents of climate. Christmas is Christmas, whether it comes in Winter or in Summer, in drifts of snow or in a blaze of floral beauty. The lovely spirit of the thing remains the same, however its trappings and externals may change. Beneath scorching suns or amid glistening hoar frost, Christmas-time is the time when we all think a little more kindly of the people concerning whom we have cherished bitter thoughts. It is the time when we remember with a tug at the heart old friends whom we had almost forgotten. It is the time when we think of the poor, when we think of the children's stockings, when we think of each other, and think a good deal more of the pleasures that we can give than of the pleasures that we can get. Snow time or strawberry time, Christmas-time is Christmas-time.

The Yule Message Cosmopolitan And Perennial
And, after all, what have Summer or Winter, heat or cold, to do with the message that will be pealed by all the Christmas bells and carolled by all the Christmas choirs during the approaching festival? If Christmas means anything, it means that, at Bethlehem, heaven came palpitatingly close to earth. God so loved the world that He gave His Son. Humanity was bankrupt. As Matthew Arnold puts it, "on that old Pagan world disgust and secret loathing fell." Civilisation was played out. History seemed to be rushing towards the abyss. Wistful eyes turned in every conceivable direction in hope of finding a path to better things. Then, just as men were most tempted to yield to stark despair, the astonishment of the ages broke upon them. In the words of Dr. George Macdonald:

They all were looking for a King
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st a tiny baby thing
That made a woman cry.

The shepherds heard the angels sing their Gloria in Excelsis; the wise men saw the beckoning star blaze in their gloomy sky; the significance of that Judean idyll gradually dawned upon the nations; the entire course of history was diverted into a new channel, a better day had dawned; men felt that the world could never be quite the same again.

The sublime happening of that first Christmas was not only an incarnation; it was the beginning of innumerable incarnations. As Angelus Silesius sings:

Though Christ a thousand times
In Bethlehem be born,
If He's not born in me
My life is all forlorn.

Thus, the Incarnation multiplies itself a million-fold. The Manger becomes a casket in which all the jewels of divine revelation glitter with ever-growing lustre. Whether Christmas comes to us garlanded by icicles or rosebuds, its central significance and essential glory abide everlastingly the same.

F W Boreham, This Day with F W Boreham, 25 December 2007. (It first appeared in the Hobart Mercury, 23 December 1949.

Image: “The Manger becomes a casket in which all the jewels of divine revelation glitter with ever-growing lustre.”

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on December 23, 1949.

Boreham on the Magic of Christmas

2007-12-24T05:55:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to believe that within the bounds of Christendom there breathes a soul so dead that no little trills of pleasurable sensation tingle through his nerves as he anticipates once more the pealing of the Christmas bells, the spreading of the Christmas feast, and all the fun and frolic incidental to the time-honoured occasion. There is a magnetism about Christmas that transforms everything and everybody. At Christmas each individual undergoes a mysterious and magical metamorphosis.

Is it because at Christmas more than at any other time, the divine impinges upon the human, and the human upon the divine? It is this intensely human and yet profoundly sublime element in the Christian revelation—an element that is all the more appealing because it is infused with mortal tenderness as well as with celestial authority—that will make the Christmas message particularly grateful as we keep the feast this year.

We are living in a worried world. To a worried world most festivals would constitute themselves a form of mockery. Yet nothing could be more soothing and strengthening to those who are feeling the pressure of the hour than the timely reminder that the Highest is not remote from the anxieties of the lowliest, but has, at Bethlehem, assumed our very flesh and blood in order that He may render Himself the more intelligible and approachable. Christmas sweetens and sanctifies the joys of the glad and ministers comfort to those with whom the world is going hardly.

Appeal To The Gregarious Instinct
Nor is this all. For a subsidiary, and scarcely less attractive factor comes into operation. Quite obviously, one of the most important ingredients in the composition of the Yuletide sentiment is the element of contagion. There is always a peculiar satisfaction in thinking what everybody is thinking, feeling what everybody is feeling, and doing what everybody is doing. We are gregarious creatures; we go in packs and herds; we unconsciously stimulate each other to joy and sorrow, to admiration and execration, to emotion and excitement.

It is easy to laugh when everybody is laughing; easy to weep when everybody is in tears. The most solitary and phlegmatic man cannot walk through a park on a public holiday in exactly the same temper in which he would traverse it on a day on which he has its lawns and lakes and avenues all to himself. In spite of himself, he is influenced by the carnival atmosphere, and imbibes something of the spirit of the occasion. For pleasure is highly infectious. The gladness of the multitude communicates itself, almost irresistibly, to the individual. This vital principle never wields its spell with greater force than at Christmas time.

Christmas Spirit Deeply Ingrained
If there is anything at all in the doctrine of heredity, it may reasonably be supposed that a certain reverence for the Christmas festival must, by this time, have become ingrained in the very warp and woof of our British breed. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, an eminent sociologist, used to say that it would take 10,000 years to produce a full-blooded atheist out of the scion of 40 generations of Christianity. That being so, what of the Christmas sentiment? Beneath whatever stars a Briton happens to dwell, the old emotions will creep back upon him in December. Men who recognise no special authority in the sublime origin of the Christmas faith, nevertheless find the sacred traditions clustering about the season too magnetic and too compelling to permit of their being disregarded.

With shepherds and with sages they turn wistful faces towards Bethlehem. They cannot close their ears to the angels' voices; they cannot shut their eyes to the beckoning star. The music of the Christmas bells vibrates through all human sensations, evoking a response from every breast. Humanity has a few noble traditions too stupendous and too sacred to be classified as the peculiar property of any class, clime, or creed; and the tender and inspiring reflections suggested by the return of the Christmas season stamp it as an integral portion of that priceless heritage.

F W Boreham, 'This Day With F W Boreham, 24 December.