Like Joseph Parker, Dinsdale T. Young was a Northumbrian, having been born in 1861 at Corbridge-on-Tyne, where his father was a physician.

In early life he decided to become a Methodist preacher and began to preach at the age of fifteen. He attended Headingley College, Leeds. He was ordained in 1879 and was the youngest person till then to be ordained a Methodist preacher.

After twenty-seven years of "travelling," as Methodists call it, in large city circuits he came to an anchorage in London. In 1906 he became minister of Wesley's Chapel, and within a very short time he had become a fixed star for Methodists. The historic chapel soon became crowded.

Something was lost, in point of picturesque fitness, when he was transferred to the Central Hall, Westminster. There was a certain incongruity between the modern Mission Hall -- with its tip-up seats and its concert-room decorations -- and the stately head and ambassadorial bearing of the frock-coated preacher.

The great congregations that came in undiminished numbers to the Central Hall proved baffling to the liberals who declared repeatedly that Young would soon preach to empty seats because of his fundamentalism.

Young was a superb orator and a defender of evangelical doctrine. However, he never attacked his opponents. He was content to set forth the teachings of God's Word in a positive way and pay no heed to his critics.

He often preached or lectured seven or eight times in a single week and travelled an average ten thousand miles a year to keep his preaching engagements. During some years of his ministry he had a highly distinguished neighbor in Dr. Jowett at Westminster Chapel, who was a far more celebrated man than Young and by far his superior in intellect and pulpit quality. Yet it was a familiar saying that "Jowett gets Dinsdale Young's overflow."

Jowett once asked an office-bearer why so many people arrived twenty minutes late and were distributed through such vacant seats as were left. He was rather shocked to be told that they had come away from the Central Hall, unable to get a seat.

Young was a man of remarkable gifts and attractive personality. He was natural, unassuming and kindly to a degree. He always moved with a certain grandeur and was never seen without his frock coat and silk hat. He grew old picturesquely, his white locks streaming out behind him as though he were Liszt, while two triangles of white hair flanked the high pink dome of his forehead.

He preached for twenty-four years at the Central Hall, not only to the largest congregation in London, but to the largest in Britain. A glorious voice, wonderfully used, was one of his great gifts. It was an organ voice, rich, full and resonant in tone.

Having chosen his text, he went straight to the best commentaries he could find on his well-filled library shelves. He often mentioned his delight in Calvin, Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke, and, above all, Thomas Goodwin. He frequently consulted the writings of Spurgeon, Newman, Dean Vaughan and Alexander Maclaren.