Who Was Octavius Winslow? The Life of the Pilgrim's Companion
Octavius Winslow was a preacher and devotional writer who lived from 1808 to 1878. He was born near London, grew up in New York, and spent most of his ministry in England, first as a Baptist pastor in Leamington Spa and Bath, and in his last years as a minister of the Church of England in Brighton. He wrote dozens of books for ordinary Christians on the person of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, prayer, and comfort in sorrow. His best-known book, Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul, is about how a believer grows cold and how God brings him back. He has been called "the Pilgrim's Companion," and the name fits: his books keep a Christian company on the road.
Here's his story, what he taught, and which of his books to read first.
A family that crossed the ocean
Winslow was born on August 1, 1808, in Pentonville, then a village just outside London. He was the eighth of thirteen children. His father, Thomas Winslow, was an army officer from a family descended from Pilgrims of the Mayflower. His mother, Mary Forbes Winslow, had grown up in Bermuda, where she met and married her husband while his regiment was stationed there.
Around 1815 the family was preparing to join Thomas in New York when word came that he had died. Mary took the children across the Atlantic anyway and raised them in New York. She was a woman of deep, practical faith, and she shaped her son more than anyone else. Years later he wrote her life in Life in Jesus, a long memoir woven from her letters and journals. In it he says plainly how delicate it is for a son to write about his mother, and then he shows why her counsel meant so much to so many.
Conversion and first ministry in New York
Octavius came to faith as a young man in New York and was baptized in the Hudson River in 1827. He studied for the ministry, partly at Columbia College, and was ordained as a Baptist minister in New York in 1833. He helped gather a new congregation in the city and later served in Brooklyn. In 1834 he married Hannah Ann Ring. They had ten children.
Those American years gave him a lasting love for revival and for plain gospel preaching. American Christians kept reading his books for the rest of the century.
Leamington Spa and Bath
In 1839 Winslow returned to England. He became pastor of a Baptist church in Leamington Spa, a spa town in Warwickshire, and stayed nearly twenty years. Most of his famous books were written there: Personal Declension, The Inner Life, The Glory of the Redeemer, and The Inquirer Directed to the Work of the Holy Spirit.
In 1858 he moved to Bath, where he founded Kensington Chapel and became its first minister. By then he was well known as a writer on both sides of the Atlantic, and two New York schools had given him honorary degrees.
Sorrow in the family
Winslow wrote so much about comfort in grief because he knew grief well. His daughter Sarah died young. His mother died in 1854. Then in August 1856 his son John Whitmore Winslow, a gifted student at Trinity College, Dublin, died suddenly at twenty-one. Years later the father published his son's journals and letters in Hidden Life. His conclusion was not bitter:
When a believer in Jesus is matured by grace for glory, the Lord of the harvest takes him to heaven.
Hidden Life, Chapter V
His wife Hannah died in 1866, and he never remarried.
The last years in Brighton
In 1867 Winslow left the Baptist pastorate. He went to Brighton on the south coast, where he ministered at Emmanuel Church, and in 1870 he was ordained a deacon and priest in the Church of England. He kept preaching and writing until a short illness ended his life on March 5, 1878. He was sixty-nine. He was buried in Bath beside his wife.
What he taught
Winslow's books are warm, full of Scripture, and always pointed at Jesus. One line from Christ Ever with You could stand over all of them:
The Gospel is Christ first, Christ last, Christ midst, Christ without end.
Christ Ever with You, The Farewells
Four themes come up again and again.
Christ grows more precious. Winslow believed a true Christian doesn't outgrow his need of Christ. He grows into it. In The Precious Things of God he wrote:
Christ is not only supremely, but He is increasingly precious to the believer.
The Precious Things of God, The Preciousness of Christ
Believers can decline, and God restores them. Personal Declension traces how a Christian cools: in love, in faith, and above all in prayer. Winslow is searching, but he never leaves a reader in despair. He insists that real grace can be weakened but never killed:
Divine grace in the soul can never really die; true faith can never utterly and finally fail.
Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul, Incipient Declension
His counsel for a cold heart is simple. Don't try to fix yourself first:
Take your deadness to Christ, — take your barrenness to Christ, — take your decay to Christ, — take to Christ your frame of mind just as it is.
The Inner Life, The Re-quickening of the Inner Life
The Holy Spirit is God, and His work is to glorify Christ. Winslow wrote a whole book to guide new believers in what the Bible teaches about the Spirit: His Godhead, new birth, indwelling, sealing, witness and comfort.
God gives songs in the night. In books like Midnight Harmonies he wrote for the sick, the lonely and the bereaved, and he wrote as one who had been there:
You are still a child, and God is still a Father.
Midnight Harmonies, Songs in the Night
Why he's still read
Winslow isn't hard to read, but he isn't shallow. He takes the great doctrines of grace and turns them toward the heart, so that a reader comes away loving Christ more, not just knowing more about Him. Pastors have used Personal Declension for generations to help Christians who have drifted. Others keep one of his small books by the bed for hard nights. Many of his titles have been reprinted again and again.
Where to start
TheWay Library has twelve of Winslow's books, all free to read. If your faith has grown cold, start with Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul. If you're grieving or suffering, start with Christ Ever with You, a short book on Christ's promise, "Lo, I am with you alway." For a book that simply makes much of Jesus, read The Precious Things of God.
Our guide to Octavius Winslow's books describes all twelve, and our collection of Octavius Winslow quotes gathers his best lines. You'll find every book on the Octavius Winslow author page.