Born on 5 June 1846 at Nottingham, he was accepted for the Wesleyan ministry and entered Richmond College in1865. He left for China as a missionary two years later and served for fifteen years in the new Canton (later 'South China') District. From his base in Fatshan he made pioneering journeys into the interior, in the course of which he founded a number of native churches. Fatshan became a centre of hostility towards foreigners, among whom he was singled out in particular. He became a leading opponent of the opium trade, then flourishing with British involvement.
Returning home in 1883, he served another fifteen years in English circuits and in 1891 was elected to the Legal Hundred. From1898 he was listed on medical grounds as a 'minister without pastoral charge', living in Bromley, where he died on 12 December 1910.
He was remembered not only as 'a thoughtful young man' but for his forthright manner and as one in whom 'the poor, the sick and the troubled found a wealth of sympathy'. As a preacher he was 'a master of style and remarkable for his skill in the art of illustration'. While in China he wrote a life of Christ in Chinese, which became a widely used textbook. Back home, in addition to several volumes of sermons, he was a contributor to books on the miracles and the parables of Jesus and in 1896 gave the Fernley Lecture on 'The Theology of Modern Fiction'. In its published form this consisted of studies of the work of George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, George Macdonald and Mark Rutherford.
'His convictions, always strongly held, were sometimes expressed in a manner far from conciliatory, and this often gave rise to great vexation of spirit. But of his devotion to the work of an evangelist to the Chinese there could be no question. The intensity of his spirit appeared in that as in other things, his name will be remembered as that of the founder of the North River Mission... [Back home...] he speedily became known far beyond the boundaries of the Methodist Church for the excellence of the religious literature which he published.'
Category: Person
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