The Christadelphian, April 1939, C. A. Ladson

“Centenary of the Birth of Brother Robert Roberts”

This month (April) one hundred years ago, brother Robert Roberts, the founder of The Christadelphian, was born, an “unhappy event” for himself, he writes in his Autobiography, but adds the saving clause “as yet.”

“I was born,” he writes, “in the city of Aberdeen on the 8th of April, 1839; so the evidence goes to prove. I believe the house is still standing in Link Street where the (for me as yet) unhappy event occurred. There is no affectation for me in the use of Jeremiah’s words, ‘Wherefore came I forth to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame . . . Woe is me my mother that thou hast made me a man of strife and contention to the whole earth.’ But there are many alleviations that make it easy for me to say, ‘The will of the Lord be done’.” 

Reduced facsimile of title-pages of “The Investigator,” 1859. The actual size is 7 ½ by 4 ½ inches.

The chief of these alleviations was a happy marriage which, as he says, was “nothing but a pure blessing, spiritually, and in all other respects.” But of this later.

His father was a sea-captain, and being absent from home the greater part of his time, the care of the family of six boys and one girl fell chiefly upon the mother, a woman whom brother Roberts describes as “a superior woman of an energetic and strongly religious turn of mind.” She had been a school teacher in London till her marriage.

There are those still living in Birmingham who remember “Grandma Roberts” in her old age, and can endorse her son’s description of her, and her sterling worth. “My mother brought us up in strict separation from loose and frivolous neighbours. Home was, however, rather a place of wholesome discipline than of love’s comfort, though my mother was not wanting on that side when other things were right. Looking back I can now better realise her difficulties and her worth.”

The stern quality of the old Covenanters that was strong in the mother till her death in Birmingham in February, 1900, was equally strong in the son, and at a very early stage of Robert’s growth, they clashed painfully on the matter of religion. But the fierce Presbyterian spirit was just and reasonable, when the first fire of resentment had died down, and both mother and son died in the Faith she had so conscientiously reprobated.

At ten years of age Robert was taken by his mother to hear Dr. John Thomas from America, in a chapel. “The doctor was then,” says brother Roberts, looking back to 1849, “a quiet, stern, firm, neatly made gentleman with a jet black beard.” The boy Robert slept peacefully through most of the discourse, and went home chiefly interested in the speaker’s beard, and resolved on the way home, never to shave—a resolve which he probably kept, judging by his photographs taken in young manhood. He was later to be much more interested in the bearded doctor and his words.

Beginning at 11 years of age as a clerk in a ropery, the boy was in turn during his youthful days, assistant in a grocery, a printing office, to a photographer, and to a druggist, and at length qualified himself for a reporter’s post. There was little in all this for the healthy development of boyhood, and thus early faced with the practical sordidness of life, and cut off from association with the usual amenities of childhood and youth, it was not to be wondered at that the boy was precocious and developed before its due time the solemnity and sententiousness fitting to a later age. 

We have to thank brother W. W Smith of Birmingham for the loan of the volume. See “The Christadelphian,” 1934, p. 314.

This, brother Roberts in his later years recognised, when referring to a letter he wrote to Dr. Thomas, at the age of 17; of which he says: “It now strikes me as being an inflated and raw production, of the sort that usually comes from impetuous youth when permitted to air itself—interesting only as the premonition of a laborious and painful day. There was no one to control or check me, otherwise the letter would never have crossed the Atlantic.”

While accepting this judgment as true, and being saddened somewhat by the thought of the crushing experiences that made a boy of 17 able to write such a letter, yet it is a good one, and indicative in many ways of the man who was to be. Evidently Dr. Thomas recognised this by the confidence he expressed in further correspondence, and in the almost unbroken unity of mind and spirit that marked their intercourse till the day of the Doctor’s death.

At the age of 13 Robert was taken to hear a fervid preacher from the Highlands. The boy was in a low physical state, and had an uneasy conscience because of some boyish escapade, and the ranting of this Calvinistic Baptist broke him down and he had “six months of tormented experience with occasional gleams of satisfaction” when in the struggle for his immortal soul God seemed to be having an advantage over the Devil.

The boy crammed his mind with religious literature such as The Young Man’s Anxious Enquirer. In the reading of the Bible he “found little satisfaction and that only in a very few parts.”

Still avid for more religious nourishment he was burrowing one day in a pile of neglected books and magazines, when he found an odd copy of The Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, published monthly by Dr. Thomas. This was very different matter from that he had been reading. He was first startled, then fascinated and absorbed. Here was the word of God exalted above the thoughts of men, here was argument instead of declamation and strained emotion. His mother was alarmed, his elder sister filled with satisfaction, when they discovered Elpis Israel and had monthly access to the Herald of the Kingdom.

A struggle with his mother ended in Robert and his sister joining the little company of brethren in Aberdeen, by whom they were baptized. It was at this time he compiled the Bible Companion for his own private use. Its use soon spread and as our readers know, hundreds of thousands of them have been spread over the English speaking world. For about five years he met with this small company of believers.

Robert early decided that marriage was for him a necessity, “a wall that had to be climbed, a bridge that had to be crossed, before I could enter upon the earnest work of life.”

He had made tentative advances to acquaintance with young women, but “girls of my own age were frivolous. One with whom I tried to cultivate acquaintance in Aberdeen, asked me why I ‘jawed so much about the nations’.” But in sister Jane Norrie of Edinburgh he found one whose interest in the things that interested him never flagged, and on his twentieth birthday they were married, despite a discrepancy of eight years in their ages, for the bride was twenty-eight. Some of his friends were “scandalised,” but “time justified our policy.”

It was indeed abundantly justified. Forty years afterwards sister Roberts wrote, a few months after the death of her husband: “I can look back and see the hand of God in it all. We have devoted our few short years to the service of The Truth . . . We were of one heart and mind and each was prepared for the share of self-sacrifice that the Truth required. This was the secret of our unity and stability, our strength was rooted in God and in the loving daily study of His Word.”

Shortly after the marriage, the young man lost his place on The Caledonian Mercury, which he had obtained after various uncongenial situations; and the loss of the young couple’s first baby, a daughter, made them willing to consider a complete change of life.

This was found in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, where brother Roberts was employed on a local paper. The nearest ecclesia was at Halifax, about seven miles away, to which they used to walk every Sunday.

Brother Roberts turned his thoughts very early to the production of a monthly magazine and at the age of 20 in September, 1859, he issued a small manuscript magazine which he called The Investigator, taking the same name that Doctor Thomas had given to a short-lived magazine that he published in 1842. (See Dr. Thomas: His Life and Work, p. 111).

The Investigator ran for four or five numbers. He refers to this in his autobiography thus (p. 102):

“In a manuscript magazine which I had tried to carry on during the first year of my Huddersfield residence (a single copy sent from friend to friend through the post, but which did not get beyond perhaps the fourth or fifth number) I had set myself particularly to answer infidel objections so that I acquired a certain readiness in this direction.” This was useful later when he met Bradlaugh and other unbelievers.

After some months with a pair of travelling phrenologists, as reporter and recorder, brother Roberts returned to Huddersfield and again took up newspaper work. This was in 1861, and it was at this time that the book, Twelve Lectures, now called Christendom Astray, had its origin in the preparation of addresses given to good audiences considering all things, of from 50 to 100. The addresses were read. These were later published in penny numbers and then bound. In the two forms, Twelve Lectures and Christendom Astray, the circulation has been very large and still continues.

A great event to the young couple at this time was the visit of Dr. Thomas, now no longer black bearded. They enjoyed his company intensely.

Then in 1864 they came to Birmingham to 64, Belgrave Road, which a rapidly lessening number in Birmingham never pass without a heart-leap of early association, and a silent tribute to those who once dwelt there.

The Herald of the Kingdom had ceased, and Dr. Thomas advised the starting of a magazine for the help of the brethren, “but,” he added, “better there should be no magazine at all, if it is to be nothing better than the twaddling incoherencies and feeble uncertainties that some are content with.” So The Ambassador of the Coming Age was born, a name, says its editor later, that was an absurdity. In 1869 the name was changed to The Christadelphian at the suggestion of Dr. Thomas, who died in March, 1871, brethren Roberts and Bosher travelling to New York to lay him to rest.

In 1895, to the great joy of the brethren in Australasia, brother Roberts visited the great southern continent, and the writer of these brief lines well remembers the thrill of anticipation and realisation when we saw in palpable shape one who was beloved for his work’s sake. The story of the Australasian tour is told in The Christadelphian of that year.

In 1897 the pleasure felt by the Australasians in having made the personal acquaintance of brother Roberts was increased by the arrival with some view of permanent stay, in Melbourne, of himself and sister Roberts and their two daughters. What this meant to the present writer is not to be set down by pen and ink. It is the unwritten history of the past 40 years.

All plans were shattered by the death of Robert Roberts at San Francisco in 1898. The event carried grief into thousands of hearts and households.

The record of the burial is told by brother Walker, who went across to do what brother Roberts had done 27 years before for Dr. Thomas, by whose side he lies in Greenwood Cemetery at Brooklyn.

What his last spoken words were no one can say, for he died alone; but the last words he wrote for publication were, “God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave. The upright shall have dominion over them in the morning.”

Fitting words at the close of a life devoted to preaching by voice and pen the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and the things concerning the name of Jesus Christ.

Brother Robert Roberts was a misfit in some ways in such a world as this; he did a great work, and he made mistakes, as he himself recognised; but he will be at home in the Kingdom of God upon which he will open his eyes when redeemed from the power of the grave. He will find his place in a world where the upright shall have dominion.

C. A. Ladson.