By Austin B. Tucker
As he lay dying they tried to interview the professor, but it was the little child in him that answered them.
“What are your speculations?” they inquired.
“Speculations” he asked, in wondering surprise. “Speculations! I have none! I am resting on certainties. ‘I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day!’” And, reveling like a child in those cloudless simplicities, his great soul passed away.”3
In 1916, F. W. Boreham accepted the call of a church in a suburb of Melbourne. There he served as pastor for the next dozen years. Then in 1928 he entered a new and final phase of ministry: he resigned the pastorate to give full time to writing and itinerant preaching. When he was not on a preaching tour in these last years, he delivered a regular lunchtime sermon at the Scots Church in Melbourne.
The Hobart Mercury published some 3,000 of Boreham’s weekly editorials over 47 years (1912-1959). Another newspaper, the Melbourne Age, published many others.
Boreham continued writing for newspapers until he retired in 1956. Three years later he died.
It was largely from his regular weekly discipline of writing sermons and editorial essays that he published some 46 books. His last book, The Tide Comes In (1958), appeared only months before his death. Many of his books met wide acclaim all over the English-speaking world, none more so than the series of five books published between 1920 and 1928 from 125 sermons under the banner, Texts That Made History. They appeared in five famous books poetically entitled A Bunch of Everlastings, A Handful of Stars, A Casket of Cameos, A Faggot of Torches, and A Temple of Topaz.
There is today a lively trade in them on the Internet. Each sermon is based on a text that Boreham thought explained the essence of a famous person in history such as Martin Luther, William Penn, Aldus Huxley, William Booth, Andrew Boner, and William Carey. Others are based on texts that figure prominently in the story of fictional characters like Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom.
Some criticized his use of fictional characters to illustrate divine grace. Boreham did not apologize, but he did explain that a fictional story might convey divine truth as “a portrait of humanity, painted by a master hand.” He said, “Robinson Crusoe’s Text is really Daniel Defoe’s Text; the text that stands embedded in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the text that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stow had enthroned within her heart.”4
Notable about Boreham’s homiletical style is the way he captured attention in the opening words of the sermon. Almost any in the series would serve as an example. They are not constructed with cookie cutter sameness, but they invariably plunge the listener into an attention-getting narrative from the life of the character. This becomes the canvas for painting the Scripture text. Take “Hudson Taylor’s Text” as an example.
