Frederick William Robertson

For two years he worked hard in preparing for the army, but, by a singular conjunction of circumstances and at the sacrifice of his own natural bent to his father's wish, he matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, just two weeks before his commission was put into his hands.

He did not find Oxford wholly congenial to his intensely earnest spirit, but he read hard, and, as he afterwards said, "Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards; passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution."

Ordained in July 1840 by the bishop of Winchester, he at once entered on ministerial work in that city, and during his ministry there and under the influence of the missionaries Henry Martyn and David Brainerd, whose lives he studied, he carried devotional asceticism to an injurious length.

The crisis of his mental conflict had just been passed in Tirol, and he was now beginning to let his creed grow again from the one fixed point, which nothing had availed to shift: "The one great certainty to which, in the midst of the darkest doubt, I never ceased to cling—the entire symmetry and loveliness and the unequalled nobleness of the humanity of the Son of Man."

After this mental revolution he felt unable to return to Cheltenham, but after doing duty for two months at St Ebbe's, Oxford, he entered in August 1847 on his famous ministry at Holy Trinity Church, Brighton.

As his biographer says, thousands found in his sermons "a living source of impulse, a practical direction of thought, a key to many of the problems of theology, and above all a path to spiritual freedom."