LATE DR. F. B. MEYER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 626, 1 April 1929, Page 14

LATE DR. F. B. MEYER

LIFE OF GREAT PASTOR SERMON AT GRANGE ROAD The Rev. A. S. Wilson at last evening's service at the Grange Road Baptist Church referred to the death of Dr. F. E. Meyer, advice of which was recently cabled. In many pulpits on this Sunday, he said, references were being made to the remarkable life work and the magnificent witness to the power of Christ as exemplified in the life of F. B. Meyer. Grange Road Church had in its membership no fewer than three who had been in different churches in England of which Dr. Meyer was pastor. Though a mystic in thought and teaching, he was a practical mystic as his prison work and his effective protest against many houses of ill-fame showed. Me held a high place among English Christianity and to their Baptist minister the Archbishop of Canterbury two years ago wrote: *‘l should like your fellowship in thought and prayer.” His books reached a circulation of 2,500,000. In the “eighties” of the last century Meyer came out for a very definite experience—so marked was it that some likened it to a second conversion.

Prior to laying by their worldly prospects and going out to China with the "Cambridge Eight” to join Hudson, Taylor Stanley Smith, the stroke for Cambridge University boat race with Oxford, and Charles Studd, a cricketer of international fame, conducted meetings in Meyer’s church in Leicester.

They, so, impressed him with the power attending their work that he sought their secret and found it. and immediately a new power with God and men attended his ministry. Not, however, without a crisis. It seemed to Meyer that the Lord asked him for “All the keys of his life on the ring of his will,” One key, a small secret key ho was unwilling to give up, he said, but the Lord would have all or none. He yielded all that was the watershed of his life. From that hour he was blessed and useful as never before. He became a noted teacher of these great truths of the “rest of faith” and “hourly victory over sin,” of which, said Mr. Wilson, so many Christians were lamentably ignorant. Plis teaching might be summed up: God claims all and the blessed life ought to be the normal life of every Christian. In conclusion the audience’was urged to step out as a definite act and claim holiness of life by faith. Many Christians had lost all joy and power in their Christianity. They were like salt that has lost its savour and as the Bible said, was worthless and should be cast out and trodden underfoot. That was not the type of Christianity they needed. They wanted a religion of the type of Dr. John R. Mott, who had been described as the greatest Christian layman of the day. distinguished service for the Students’ Volunteer movement and the world secretaryship of the Y.M.C.A., great men of three continents met to do him honour on the 40th anniversary of his Christian service. “Three sentences changed my career,” said Mott, and these were uttered by Sir Kynaston Studd, Lord Mayor of London, when visting America as a famous athlete: “See Rest thou great things for thyself. Seek them not. Seek ye first the kingdom of God.”