00.3 A Biographical Sketch

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH By Howard A. Bridgenan, D. D., Editor of “The Congregationalist"

INTO the forty-nine years of his earthly life Charles Silvester Horne poured a measure of service in behalf of his nation, his church and the world at large, such as can be credited to few of his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic. He was fortunate in his ancestry, his training, his environment, his family, his friends, and in the opportunities that, from time to time, crossed his path, but the greatest of God’s many gifts to him was a sense of the glory and seriousness of life and an eagerness. with God’s help, to do his own part in the work of the world. A son of the manse he was born in Cuckfield, Sussex, England, April 15, 1865, took his arts course at Glasgow University, entering upon graduation the newly established theological school at Oxford known as Mansfield College, whose principal, the late Dr. Andrew M. Fairbairn, was renowned for his learning and his personal influence over his pupils. Before the young Theologue, who at once evinced his unusual qualifications for the ministry, completed his course, a church in London claimed him as its leader and there at Kensington for ten years in a fashionable section of the world’s metropolis Mr. Horne preached and labored, building up a compact and vigorous organization and gaining distinction even in his earliest years as a pulpit and platform orator. Then came the pull on his sensitive, daring nature of London’s poverty and need. Leaving his attractive pastorate, where he had won popularity among all classes, he assumed the leadership at Whitefield’s Tabernacle in the heart of the city, close to the homes of the poor and to haunts of shame. Into this new enterprise he entered with characteristic zeal and soon developed a great church of the institutional type, pervaded with a homelike atmosphere and ministering Sundays and week days alike to clerks, artisans and other types of working people, and exercising a beneficent influence over the neighborhood, which sadly needed something to counteract the influence of the gin-house and brothel.

Meanwhile the Congregational Churches of England, and the Free Churches generally, had been claiming Mr. Horne’s efficient assistance in the support of important enterprises. Invitations to speak here and there were showered upon him. He was honored with the chairmanship of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. Pressing public issues like the controversy over the Education Bill drew him into the arena of politics, and he became known as one of the most gallant and earnest fighters for freedom in Church and State. His rare oratorical gifts made him one of the favor-ire spokesmen of the Non-conformist conscience on many public occasions. It was natural, in view of the reliance placed upon him, that he should at last yield to the strong demand that he stand for Parliament, and in 1910 he was returned as junior Member for Ipswich. For a time he undertook to carry the burden of his great church along with his Parliamentary duties, but at the end of ten years of the hardest kind of work at Whitefield’s he relinquished his leadership, only, however, to give himself more untiringly to clamorous calls for his services. He felt especially the appeal of the Brotherhood Movement, and was planning as National President to give much time to its advocacy and to details of administration.

All through the years of active ministry he wielded a facile pen and many articles in newspapers and magazines bear witness to his literary fertility, While even more substantial and enduring in their influence are his valuable volumes, "A Popular History of the Free Churches," "A Modern Heretic," "A Story of the London Missionary Society," "The Ministry of the Modern Church," and "David Livingstone." His last and in many respects his noblest literary production was the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale, to the preparation of which he devoted much time during the last year of his life, and which are embodied in this volume. As preacher, organizer, publicist, author, pastor and friend, Silvester Horne did a work in his short life that in volume and quality made him one of the remarkable religious leaders of his age. And over and around everything that he did, touching it with enduring beauty, was the radiance of a pure, joyous and unselfish life.

Boston.