It is a great pity that no biography of W. L. Watkinson has been published. All we have in addition to his sermons is a slight but precious volume Letters of Two Friends, a record of correspondence between Watkinson and another Methodist minister, F. W. Macdonald, in the closing years of their lives (1919-1925), showing how even in their eighties they kept their interest in life and literature.
William L. Watkinson was born in Hull, England, in 1838. He began to preach when he was eighteen and in 1858 was accepted as a candidate for the Wesleyan Methodist ministry. He was tall, thin and delicate; the examiners wondered if he had the physical stamina to bear the strain of the itinerant Methodist ministry. He was passed by a medical specialist for the home work but refused the opportunity to fulfill his heart's desire to be a missionary in India.
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Watkinson was sent to Richmond College but in six weeks was called out to take the place of a minister in Stratford-on-Avon who was ill. He served several circuits in the Midlands where he had the healthy stimulus of large and appreciative congregations.
In 1871 he was appointed to Bacup in Lancashire. His three years there were the really formative period of his intellectual life. He settled down to hard and methodical study and his profiting appeared not only in the richer variety and fullness of his preaching but in the splendid work of his Bible classes. Whole books of the Bible were studied carefully and the then novel but useful method of distributing multi-graphed summaries of each lesson was adopted.
In 1893, Watkinson became Connexional Editor which filled up the next eleven years of his life until he retired in 1904. He became president of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in 1897 and died in February, 1925. It was as a preacher of original genius and incisive power that Watkinson made his name known in the churches. He visited America about the turn of the century and delivered lectures at several theological seminaries, preached in a number of prominent pulpits and made an excellent impression everywhere.
Watkinson was noted for what Mrs. Herman calls "the explicit, architectural manner of preaching which is almost a lost art in these impressionist days. He draws out a bold and spacious ground-plan, builds his points up one by one, hammers away at them till they stand secure against the winds of inattention, and adorns his pillars with the fine, clear lilywork of illustration. He also caresses those points with a lover's regard, lingers over them with deliberate appreciation; preaches for himself, in short, as much as for his audience. Balance, weight, deliberate and loving workmanship are characteristic of all his utterance."1
His sermons are massive, yet his exquisite artistry saves him from any suspicion of heaviness. In all his work careful preparation lay behind his most popular sermons. He had delved his own ore, had crushed and separated it from all foreign matter, until it came forth refined from the heat of his inner life.
