Samuel Chadwick

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Samuel Chadwick was born in the industrialized north of England in 1840 into a devout Methodist family. His father worked in a cotton mill; at the age of 8, Samuel joined him, working 12-hour shifts. At the age of 21, he became a lay pastor at Stacksteads in Lancashire.

After a major awakening and deepening of his faith in his late twenties via a personal epiphany in which he burned all his early sermons, he moved on to larger congregations and greater popularity, ending his career as Principal of Cliff College, a Methodist lay training center.

Chadwick began lecturing weekly at Cliff College in 1904, commuting from Leeds. In 1907, he was appointed to a faculty position as a biblical and theological tutor. Although he was doing mission work in the South Yorkshire coal fields when the principal of Cliff died in 1912, he immediately returned to the school and was formally appointed principal himself in 1913.

Famed outdoor evangelist Leonard Ravenhill was educated at Cliff College during Chadwick's tenure.

At Cliff, Chadwick wrote The Way to Pentecost, which went to print as he was dying in 1932. He also wrote The Call to Christian Perfection. Chadwick's works have been reprinted often since his death, and continue to be reprinted in new editions under various titles for modern study.

The Way to Pentecost contains this popular quote:

The soul's safety is in its heat. Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, make for a Church without power. Destitute of the Fire of God, nothing else counts; possessing Fire, nothing else matters.

Another of his most widely published quotes is:

The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.

[edit] Books by Chadwick

This is not an exhaustive list. Numerous editions under various titles have appeared since Chadwick's death.

  • Humanity and God, (1905), 356 pages, ASIN B00089ZBA2.

[edit] Further reading

Spirituality: Do Our Sermons Promote It? by Edward Braislin, reviewing, inter alia, Humanity and God (1905) by Samuel Chadwick in the American Journal of Theology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Jul., 1906), pp. 570-576.

Samuel Chadwick, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

[edit] External links

A Transdenominational British Wesleyan-Holiness Movement], a paper by Ian Randall hosted by The Wesley Center Online, placing Chadwick in the mainstream of Methodism and "traditional Wesleyan spirituality."

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