|
Dear Rebekah,
Hello. In the years of work on the edition of The Complete Works of Frances Ridley Havergal, I have been so much benefited and enriched by the life and works of F.R.H., coming to know her extensively. Around her, one finds and meets others who also greatly benefit and bless the reader, true gems of the Lord’s making. Among these are Frances’ father, Rev. William Henry Havergal, her mother, Jane Head Havergal, her sister Maria Vernon Graham Havergal, her sister Ellen and Ellen’s husband, Giles Shaw, her friends Samuel Gillespie Prout, Charles Busbridge Snepp, Elizabeth Clay, and others. In this e-mail, I will give three quotations of Mrs. M. A. Teed, the director of a boarding school that Frances attended, and then quotations by or about her father, Rev. William Henry Havergal.
This is part of a letter written by the director of Great Campden House (later moved to Belmont), a girls’ and young ladies’ boarding school near London, which F.R.H.—and also her three older sisters before her—attended. This letter was addressed by Mrs. Teed likely to one of Frances’ sisters (the addressee not known). Mrs. Teed was profoundly important to F.R.H.’s three older sisters before her, and to Frances. Here is a glimpse of this lady’s true labor of love, her desire to point her students to the Lord Jesus and to encourage them to live a life of love to Him.
Great Campden House, 183_.
. . . . Your letter, dear child, has been long unanswered: are you thinking of me, as we so often dare to think of our Best Friend—“Oh, I am forgotten”? And how is my dear child prospering? are you looking into self, where no good thing dwells, or looking unto Jesus Who is all fair, and in Whose righteousness we are all fair too? Are you an unrighteous sinner, living by faith upon the perfect righteousness of the God-man Christ Jesus? This is very hard, born as we are under a covenant of works, but we are born again under a covenant of grace; and as an old woman said to one who was reading the law to her, “Oh, sir, I have been taught that my lawgiver is my law-fulfiller.” The effect of this righteousness is peace and quietness and assurance. And holy living, too, will follow; for if our garments have been made white at such a cost, there will be a holy fear of spotting them. Keep near to Jesus, my beloved child—near in prayer, near in reading his word, near in hearing, and “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.” May God the Holy Ghost show you the fulness of Jesus! We must know our need to draw out of that fulness—grace for grace. The Lord bless you more and more. May our meeting at dear Campden, which has been blessed to you in time, be only the beginning of a happy eternity. Ever yours, most affectionately—
M. A. T.
(This quotation and the next two quotations of Mrs. Teed were part of an article entitled “Great Campden House” by Maria Vernon Graham Havergal, Frances’ sister who was 15 years older than her, published in the December 19, 1863 issue of the Sunday at Home magazine, and also on pages 127–130 of Volume IV of the Havergal edition.)
Maria in the same article on Great Campden House also gave this quotation of Mrs. Teed:
My dear child, see that you live Jesus. Live by what He did for you on Calvary, live by what He is now doing for you at God’s right hand in heaven. Live for Jesus in a life devoted to his sweet service. A dove does not like her silvery wings to be fluttering in the dust; oh, see that you keep yourself unspotted from the world.
In this same article, Maria quoted these dying words of Mrs. Teed: “I am fast going home, but I find the blood of Jesus my all-sufficient sufficiency!”
William Henry Havergal (1793-1870) was a pastor, musician, scholar, and an example of the believer. His sermons are true gold, so good, fully at the level of rich benefit of sermons by J. C. Ryle, Charles Spurgeon, and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Accounts of his pastoral ministry are true examples, glowing the Lord and His truth. Oh, there are so many details about W.H.H. that I want to give here, important, valuable details, but I also do not want to make this e-mail too long nor overload my readers with too much.
Frances Ridley Havergal was not identical to her father (people are like snowflakes: no two alike, each one unique, the Lord’s creation), but she was similar to him. They were very close, devoted to each other. Both loved the Lord Jesus Christ in truth with all their being. Similar in their gifts, both were rarely gifted, and rarely diligent with their gifts.
Like F.R.H. (his sixth and youngest child), W.H.H. was a musician to the core, a rarely and finely gifted one. He was a master at the keyboard (his improvisations were profoundly rich), he had a fine, beautiful voice, and he composed valuable scores. Early in his life, he was offered a professorship in music at Oxford University, a very high honor in that day (there were far fewer University professorships in music then than now), but he declined that and a career in music to be a pastor. Few could so well compose music, yet he preferred to write a sermon than to compose a score. Though music was so very important to him, and he used music to enrich his ministry and benefit his hearers (he was the music leader in the churches he pastored), yet music was a secondary pursuit to him, and an enjoyment and relaxation, not his priority, unless his physical health precluded pastoral work. Though his priority was pastoral work, he composed more when his health precluded him from pastoral ministry, and when he had times of rest. He was the foremost church musician in England in his generation (Dr. William Crotch was the generation before W.H.H., and William Sterndale Bennett was not primarily a church musician), and was very highly regarded by knowledgeable people for his compositions and his knowledge of music. The eminent American music leader Lowell Mason wrote concerning his second trip to England, in 1850, that W.H.H.’s church music was the best that he heard there, “excellent in all particulars and far in advance of anything that he heard in England.” This quotation was found in The Poets of the Church: A Series of Biographical Sketches of Hymn-Writers with Notes on Their Hymns by Edwin F. Hatfield, D.D. (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, 1884), page 302, in his entry on William Henry Havergal.
He was also a finely gifted poet, leaving richly edifying poems and hymns. His poem “Rest in the Lord” is given below this.
William Henry Havergal preached more than 2,000 sermons over more than five decades (likely approaching or exceeding 3,000 sermons, based on his handwritten record of his sermons from 1816 to 1869), each sermon a true labor of love, a heart work, sermons searched from the Scriptures and taught to him by God, diligently prepared, preached to parish congregations and other audiences. Only four volumes of his sermons were published; he very likely was ready to publish many more if an opportunity were given, but these that we have are very rich, full of treasure.
Writing about William Henry Havergal’s practice of preparation to preach his sermons, his daughter Maria V. G. Havergal wrote these comments at the bottom of an announcement sheet of Two Sermons on behalf of the Church Missionary Society preached on Sunday, October 21, 1860 in the Parish Church of Shareshill (found among Havergal manuscripts and papers):
One Sermon always written by Wednesday p.m. – the 2nd by
Saturday before breakfast. ! (No “hours of darkness” work! N.B.
It was my fathers rule to carefully look over all the Scripture, for
each Sunday’s service, & select his text from these. (Exceptions
– also). He generally did so after each Sunday’s work over. So
getting a clean week to meditate on his texts ! ! [This transcription
leaves Maria’s precise text as she wrote this, not correcting her
mistakes, which are minor.]
Remember that he was a true Anglican, and thus would have been mindful of the Scripture lessons to be read in church each Sunday morning and evening through the calendar year.
His daughter Miriam (the first-born of the six children, and the last one to die, 1817-1898) wrote a richly valuable account, Records of the Life of the Rev. William Henry Havergal, M.A. (London: Home Words Publishing Office, 1882). In this biography (original book page 29, page 593 of Volume IV of the Havergal edition), Miriam quoted this part from a letter dated October 23, 1821, early in his ministry:
'My parish has called me out a good deal, while my indoor hours have been fully occupied in attending to my pupil and in preparing sermons. In this latter employment my thoughts have little rest. I am an anxious sermon writer. Few things are more painful to me than to be obliged to preach a sermon I have used before, and it is so for two reasons: first, every old sermon skeleton rather pains me by its defects; and secondly, I love to preach that which I have felt and desire, and desire to feel that which I preach, and these things are only effected when the heart and the head and the hand have been engaged in the work of preparation."
In the same biography (Records, original book page 330, page 662 of Volume IV of the Havergal edition), Miriam wrote this of him near the end of his ministry:
"My father was again alarmingly ill early in January, 1869, and expressed himself as distressed at not being able to preach at Christ Church for Dr. Bickmore, as arranged for the very day after his illness began. He frequently preached for his friends in Leamington when at all able to do so, especially at Milverton and Holy Trinity, in which district he resided. He used in his study a folio Bible on a lecturn, and having looked out his text would ruminate on it for a day or two, and then write down the heads of the subject; but in the pulpit delivering the sermon without notes, and enlarging upon it extemporaneously."
Next are four more quotations from Miriam’s biography of W.H.H.
This was written by his second wife, Caroline Ann, on September 23, 1857, concerning a period of W.H.H.’s very severe illness:
“Wednesday, 23rd.—He was fully dressed for the first time. A kind message from his curate (the Rev. S. B. James) elicited, ‘I thank him from the depths of my heart, and pray the Lord to sustain and comfort him.’ Poor Fanny had had an alarming attack of erysipelas, brought on by imprudence, but as she was recovering he said, ‘God is better than our fears.’ I have omitted one little thing: as Fanny one evening bent over him to bid him good-night, saying to him, ‘What a gem you are!’ he said, ‘Hush, hush, my child, your father is unworthy, unworthy—a worm and no man.’” [This was found in Records of the Life of the Rev. William Henry Havergal by his daughter, Jane Miriam (Havergal) Crane (London: Home Words Publishing Office, 1882), original book page 244, page 643 of Volume IV.]
His wife Caroline also recorded,
. . . . A lady calling, expressing her thanks to him for his sweet and comforting sermon, he meekly answered, “The Lord make it profitable, and then take all the praise.” Another thanking him said it was a precious sermon. “Nothing in itself,” he said, “all nothing; but the Lord can make it precious, and may He do so.” (found in Miriam Crane, Records of W.H.H., original book page 239; page 642 of Volume IV of the Havergal Edition.)
His former curate and later successor as Rector of St. Nicholas’ Church, Worcester, England, Charles Bullock, wrote,
"Yes, he knew and groaned under the “plague of his own heart.” He felt cause enough to lie low before God, whilst he was conscious of his integrity before man; and it was this combination of integrity and humility which gave such power to his testimony to the Gospel of God’s grace, and made him not only a preacher in the pulpit, but a preacher in the world—a preacher of what Herbert has beautifully styled ‘the visible rhetoric of a holy life.’” (Miriam Crane, Records of W.H.H., original book pages 380-381; page 673 of Volume IV)
Next is a larger quotation of Charles Bullock’s memorial sermon on W.H.H. Note especially the first sentence of the second paragraph, “In all that he did he was emphatically real.”
Not, indeed, that he was without faults or failings, for “there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not;” but Gospel grace wrought so manifestly in him “the fruits of the Spirit,” that, to a remarkable degree, he “adorned the doctrine of God his Saviour:” so that it would be difficult for those who knew him best to specify what those faults and failings were.
In all that he did he was emphatically “real.” There was harmony in his character; the counterpart of that harmony of musical genius which gave him a world-wide reputation. [W.H.H. as a church musician was very highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic.] None could fail to recognize his “godly sincerity.” He preached and said what he felt: and from the heart he spoke to the heart, as if he really had a message from God to deliver. He was always the pastor. His was not the ministry of official routine: it was the ministry of the life. His testimony respecting his friend, the Rev. John East, of Bath, when preaching his funeral sermon, applies most truly to himself:—
The livery of his Divine Master was always and
everywhere visibly upon him. Whether in the desk
or the pulpit, the committee-room or the platform,
the cottage or the mansion, the schoolroom or the
sick chamber, the street or the railway, he was
always the recognized but unostentatious servant
of the Saviour whom he loved. He was not ashamed
of his Master, or of His Name, or to speak a word for
Him, or to do an act for Him whenever a favourable
or fitting opportunity presented itself.
He advised, he admonished, he sympathized; and, to the utmost of his means, he aided those who stood in need of aid. And throughout his ministry he was eminently “faithful.” He did not hesitate, though he well knew the cost, to battle manfully with the vices and frivolities of the day. None could hearken to his conversation and think it possible to “serve God and mammon.” (Miriam Crane, Records of W.H.H., original book pages 373-375; pages 703-704 of Volume IV)
Andrew James Symington wrote this in his “Biographical Sketch” of W.H.H.:
As genial as he was gentlemanly, refined in his tastes, high-souled, and gifted, his own immediate home circle, relatives, and numerous friends, were all perfectly devoted to him; and no one could possibly approach him, even in a casual way, without feeling the radiation of Christian light and warmth from his heart and beaming face; for to the core he was a true man: true to God, and true to his fellow men. [This was found in The Pastor Remembered, and the Brethren Entreated: A Memorial of the Rev. W. H. Havergal, M.A. by Charles Bullock, with the “Biographical Sketch” by Andrew James Symington (London: W. Hunt & Co., S. W. Partridge & Co., and The Christian Book Society, no date, likely 1870), original book pages 52-53, page 714 of Volume IV of the Havergal edition.]
“. . . to the core he was a true man: true to God, and true to his fellow men.” This is reminiscent of Matthew 22:37-40, the two commandments.
These comments are only brief, very incomplete glimpses of W.H.H. Much more can be said of this genuine disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a true example, as Paul wrote, “Be ye followers of me even as I also am of Christ.” I Corinthians 11:1
He was a true gem, of the Lord’s making. Fame or praise of men was utterly of no interest to him, but he greatly desired that others know his Saviour.
Though little known today, William Henry Havergal was a man truly blessed by God and used by Him to bless many others. Similarly to Robert Murray M’Cheyne, John Newton, J. C. Ryle, Horatius Bonar, Alexander Bonar, and other godly ministers of his time more widely known today, W.H.H. is a large, rich gold-mine full of true treasure from the Lord. Thanks be to God. The Lamb is all the glory in Emmanuel’s land, the kingdom of God. David Chalkley
Next is one of his poems.
|
