The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged by John Angell James

The minister was a scholarly but drowsy preacher. Spiritual power had been replaced by efficient refinement.

The local Independent church was typical of many in the last decades of the 18th century. His father's faith seems to have been nominal, at least until towards the end of his life but his mother was a devout Christian to whose prayers he was in later life to look back with deep thankfulness. John Angell James was born in 1785, the son of a draper, in Blandford Forum, Dorset. The sermon not only established him as one of the most sought after preachers in the land, but both as to its occasion and content summed up the major concerns of his lifelong ministry. The eloquent and rousing flow was interrupted only by a hymn at the end of the first hour, during the singing of which some of the congregation threw oranges into the pulpit to refresh the weary preacher and encourage him to go on! The sermon, preached from memory, and corresponding word for word with the manuscript, lasted for two hours. While he preached that morning his brother sat at the back of the pulpit with the preacher's manuscript in his hand, ready to prompt at the slightest hesitation. He had accepted this invitation to preach from the Mission's Director partly in the hope that it would help him to rise above his sorrows. Not yet thirty-four, he had lost his wife less than four months previously. What had brought this vast crowd together was not simply enthusiasm for the missionary enterprise initiated some twenty or so years earlier, but the growing reputation of the preacher. In the front row of the balcony sat many well known ministers of the day. In order to secure a seat the majority had arrived two or three hours before the service was due to commence. On the morning of Wednesday May 12th 1819 a vast throng of people filled the Surrey Chapel for the annual sermon of the London Missionary Society.

The Anxious Enquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged by John Angell James