08. Preface to Mr. Warburton's Last Days

08. Preface to Mr. Warburton’s Last Days THE following testimony to the loving-kindness and faithfulness of the Lord in supporting and comforting on the bed of languishing, and blessing with so glorious and triumphant a death, his son and servant, the late Mr. Warburton, has been put into my hands that I might arrange it for the press, and prefix to it a short preface. My great esteem and affection for my departed friend, as well as my deep respect for him as so eminent a servant of God, made me at once accept the labour of love; and when I learnt that the little work would be published for the benefit of his bereaved widow and family. I felt a more than additional willingness to render any aid that lay in my power, had it even demanded ten times as much of my time and attention. Indeed, I consider it a very high honour put upon me to be allowed to aid in presenting the church of Christ with such a testimony, and to be but as a servant to place on the table what I hope may be to many dear saints of God, ``A feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.’ Light indeed has been my labour, for I have scarcely altered a word from begin­ning to end, and have made neither omission nor addi­tion to these simple records. To have made the slightest alteration in the words which dropped from the dear man’s lips would have been, in my eyes, and I think in those of most of the readers, little short of sacrilege; and the connecting links are so brief, so unassuming, and so much to the purpose, that any recasting of them would have but marred their original strength and simplicity. As I have undertaken the task of presenting the fol­lowing pages to the church of God, I trust I shall be excused if I advert for a few moments to the circum­stances under which I first came to know and love Mr. Warburton, that I may offer some valid reason for showing this my last friendly mark of respect and affection to his memory.

I shall never forget my first interview with him, which was some time in the year 1833 or 1834. I was at that time a minister in the Church of England, and fellow of a college at Oxford, but was living in a little village in Oxfordshire, named Stadhampton, which was one of the parishes then under my care. When I first went to Stadhampton, in the year 1828, it was with the intention of riding backwards and forwards to Oxford, and thus maintaining my connection with the University, where I took pupils, and where I was looking for the highest offices in my College. But I soon found that there was no mixing together the things of God and man. Persecution from the heads of the College fell upon me, which much severed the tie, and broke to pieces the pleasing prospects I was indulging of worldly advancement. A great gulf seemed placed also in my feelings between my former friends and myself; and one day in particular, in the year 1829, as I was sitting on my horse, near the College gates, it was so im­pressed on my mind that Oxford was no place for me, that I gladly turned my back upon it and went to reside permanently at Stadhampton. A long and trying illness in the year 1830, from which indeed I have never fully recovered, was also made a means of deepening a sense of my own sinfulness and opening up the truth more clearly and fully to my soul; and the solitude of a country village, with an entire seclusion from all worldly society, much favoured prayer, meditation, and reading the Scriptures. Powerful temptations also as­sailed my soul, and trials and sorrows of various kinds were spread in my path. I mention these things, not from any desire to dwell on personal flatters, but to show how far my mind was prepared to break through those barriers of pride and prejudice which separate the Churchman, and more especially the Clergyman, from the Dissenter, and make me desirous of seeing and hearing a man of God, out of my own narrow pale.

It was then some time in the year 1833 or 1834 that Mr. Warburton came to Abingdon to preach at the chapel of my dear friend, Mr. Tiptaft, whom I had intimately known for some years previously as a brother clergyman, and whose secession a year or two before from the Establishment had not broken or impaired our union in mind and heart in the great things of God. I went over, therefore, to Abingdon, about eight miles distant, to see and hear Mr. Warburton. I was then, and had been for some time, a good deal exercised in my mind about eternal things, and went with many fears and under much bondage, both on account of my position in the Church of England, which I was then beginning to feel, and the state of my own soul, which was, as I have hinted, then passing through various trials. Though reared in the lap of learning, and instructed almost from childhood to consider mental attainments as the grand means of winning a position in the world, I had, some six or seven years before, been taught by the weight of eternal realities laid on my conscience, to value grace as the one thing needful; and the trials and temptations I was passing through in a lonely village, separated from all society but that of a few people who feared God, had deepened the feelings in my breast. Under these circumstances I went to Abingdon, feeling my own want of grace, and therefore with more fears than hopes, as about to see and hear a servant of God so eminently possessed of it, and anticipating rather a frown than a smile both in the pulpit and the parlour.

I afterwards learned that the poor dear man, having heard I was a man of great learning, was almost as much afraid of meeting the Oxford scholar as the Oxford scholar was of meeting him. But how much better grounded were my fears than his! and how much his grace outshone my learning!

He received me, however, with much kindness, and talked pleasantly and profitably on the weighty matters of the kingdom of God. I heard him very comfortably in the evening, and next morning after breakfast he would have me engage in prayer, which I did with a trembling heart, but seemed helped to express simply what I knew and felt. We afterwards went inside the coach together to Dorchester, about seven miles off, conversing the chief part of the way, and there we parted very affectionately. I do not wish to speak of myself, but I afterwards heard that my feeble lispings had given me an abiding place in the dear man’s heart, and laid a foundation for that friendship and union which have subsisted unbroken ever since between us. In March, 1835, I was compelled, from the pressure upon my conscience, to secede from the Church of England, and was led by a singular providence, and in marked answer to a prayer by a friend on my behalf, to pitch my tent for a while at Allington, near Devizes. Wiltshire, where, in the following September, Mr. Warburton baptised me; and I shall never forget the power with which he preached that morning. Soon afterwards I went down to Trowbridge to supply his pulpit, and found there a gracious people, most of whom were his spiritual children. He several times supplied for me at Stamford and Oakham, after my lot was cast in those places; and there are those still there who can bear testimony to the power and savour with which he spoke. We have for many years generally met annually at the Calne anniversary, a well-known and remarkable gather­ing of the saints of God in that district of North Wilts, where we have been in the habit of preaching together, and I hope ever met and parted with renewed affection.

I have heard Mr. Gadsby preach as great, perhaps greater, sermons; but I never met with a minister whose prayer in the pulpit, or whose conversation out of it, was so weighty and savoury. Indeed, I never heard a man ever ask a blessing at the breakfast or dinner table like him. There was such a simplicity, such a rever­ence, and yet childlike approach unto God; such a savour in his few words, that it seemed to sanctify the meal in a peculiar way. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have borne witness to the power and savour which rested on his ministry; but the blessing he has been made to the church of God will never be fully known until that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed. The crowning testimony is given in the following pages, wherein we see the aged servant of God sup­ported amidst all the languishing of disease, blessed with what he had always contended for- a feeling reli­gion, enjoying the presence and power of his dear Lord, and favoured with a glorious and triumphant departure. In life he stuck by a feeling religion, and in death a feeling religion stuck by him. His desire was, as a Christian, to experience the sweet inflowings of the love of God to his soul; and, as a minister, to debase the sinner, exalt the Saviour, and trace out the work of the Holy Ghost in the heart, from a feeling, living and daily experience of it in his own conscience. As he lived, so he died, never wavering from the truth, never carried about with divers and strange doctrines, never venturing beyond his depth, never speculating or reasoning beyond what he knew and felt for himself; ever seeing more and more in himself to loathe and abhor, and ever more and more in the Lord Jesus to admire and love.

He has run his race, has fought a good fight, and finished his course with joy, and left us still to sigh and groan in the wilderness, but looking to the same Lord, and hoping in the same rich, sovereign and super-abounding grace. But I am writing a preface, and will therefore no longer detain my readers from what is far more worthy of the perusal than anything which can drop from my pen. May the God of all grace, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, bless with the unction of the Holy Ghost, the testimony contained in these pages to the souls of His dear people and the manifestation of His own glory.

J. C. PHILPOT Stamford, May 5th, 1857

#THE following interesting description of Mr. Warburton appeared in the Gospel Standard, June, 1857, in a review, by Mr. Philpot, of the first edition of the "Account of Mr. Warburton’s Last Days"

God designed him for a great work in the church of Christ, and therefore abundantly and eminently quali­fied him for it. However at the time hidden from his eyes; his heavy trials in providence; his deep and long poverty; the sinkings of his own desponding mind; the continual embarrassments into which he was plunged; his dismal and gloomy forebodings of a still worse future; his fears of bringing a reproach on the cause of God; the temptations of Satan with which he was assailed; the hidings of the Lord’s face; his quakings and tremblings lest he had run unsent; and the whole series of anxiety and distress through which he was called upon to pass; all, connected as they were with the manifestations of God’s love and mercy to his soul, were mysteriously tending to make him what he eventually was, a minister to the suffering church of Christ, a feeder of the flock of slaughter. a feeling experimental man of God to the mourners in Zion, the broken in heart, and the contrite in spirit.

What Mr. Warburton might have been had his naturally strong and vigorous intellect been cultivated by a sound education in early boyhood and youth cannot now be said. But most probably, we might rather say most certainly, it would have spoilt him. We might have had Warburton the acute lawyer, or Warburton the learned divine; but we should not have had Warburton the preacher, Warburton the feeling and experimental minister, the tried and exercised man of God. That he might not be thus spoiled, God Him­self took charge of his education by placing him in early youth, not in an academy for young gentlemen, nor in a classical and commercial establishment, but in the school of Christ. Moses was made his schoolmaster, and first caught hold of him in Bolton Church, where, instead of charming his ears with the tones of the new organ, he sounded in them such a terrible peal of death, hell, and judgment to come, that his pupil dropped down half dead at his feet. Here he learnt his A B C in experimental religion; here Moses shook over him for the first time the rod; here the first lesson set him, amidst many sighs and tears, was to learn to spell the first letter of that dreadful sentence, ’Cursed is every one that contiueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them.’ What school or college could have experimentally taught him what he first learned in Bolton church--that he was a sinner under the curse of God’s righteous law? What laboured course of lectures, free library, or mechanics institute could have made him cry out, ’God be merciful to me a sinner,’ all the way home, till his breastbone was sore?

Education is admirable in its way, excellent for a time state; but no education, classical, theological, moral, or religious, could have made, though it might have marred, a John Warburton, either as a Christian or a minister, or brought him with sighs and groans to the Redeemer’s feet. And when peace and pardon first reached his heart, when rich, free, sovereign and superabounding grace poured salvation into his soul as he sat in Mr. Roby’s chapel, he learned more in one moment what the love of God was, whence it came, and whither it led, what it could do, and what bliss and blessedness it could create, than all the doctors and proctors, pastors and masters, schoolmasters or scholars, lecturers or libraries, teachers or tutors, could have taught him in half a century. When fierce temptations assailed his soul, when hell rose up in arms, and Satan, enraged to see so apt a tool lost to his service and enlisted in God’s, hurled his fiery darts thick and fast against him, he was still at school, still learning better and wiser lessons than the academy or the university could have taught him. When dark clouds rested upon him in providence, when poverty and want knocked hard at his door, when little work and scanty wages, hard times and an increasing family plunged him into a sea of embarrass­ment and distress, he was still learning deep and blessed lessons, never taught at Cheshunt or learnt at Bradford. When the clouds of darkness broke in showers on his head, when the Sun of Righteousness gleamed upon his path in providence and grace, when he could set up an Ebenezer here and a hill Mizar there; when he could ’look from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lion’s dens, from the mountains of the leopards,’ and see the valley beneath all flowing with milk and wine, what books or authors could have taught him there was such a God in Israel, or have raised up in his heart such faith, hope, and love towards Him? So with all his long experience of the ups and downs, ins and outs, joys and sorrows, risings and sinkings, feastings and fastings, smiles and tears, songs and sighs, mercies and miseries, heavens and hells of a living experience, what substitute could be found in human genius or human learning, for this course of heavenly instruction?

He was naturally gifted with much sound good sense, knew the weakness and wickedness of the human heart, and seeing how soon divisions arise in a church, and what havoc they make of its prosperity and peace, he at once, with his broad, weighty foot trampled upon the rising flame which other ministers of weaker and less determined minds, would let smoulder on, lest, in putting it out, they should burn their own fingers. Want of order and discipline is a prevailing evil in our churches; and when a pastor uses the authority which the Lord has given him to rule as well as feed the church, a cry is soon raised by those who are opposed to all order and discipline that he is tyrannical and arbitrary. He might sometimes, when thwarted and opposed, speak sharply, and look angry; and there was something in his fine, portly person, commanding look and loud voice that struck terror into the timid and silenced the talkative, but a tenderer heart never beat before the throne of grace and at the footstool of mercy. There indeed he was a little child, a babe, a humble, broken-hearted sinner.