Robert Cleaver Chapman of Barnstaple, Preface and Introduction

The preface was By W H Bennet
With Introduction by James Wright

“I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Glasgow:
Pickering & Inglis, Printers and Publishers.
London: H. A. Raymond, 16 Paternoster Square, E.C.

Printed by Pickering & Inglis,
73 Bothwell Street,
Glasgow.
The Introduction was By W H Bennet
My own personal acquaintance with Mr. Chapman commenced, so far as I can remember, in the winter of the year 1841. I think it was on the evening of a Lord’s Day, after he had been addressing a Sunday School in the afternoon in another part of the city, that he met a few believers of varying ages in an ante-room of Bethesda Chapel, Great George Street, Bristol, before the evening meeting, and conversed with us about the manifestation of Himself, by the Lord Jesus to His disciples, after their night of fruitless toil, as recorded in the twenty-first chapter of John’s Gospel; and the peculiarly tender and sympathetic tones with which he recited the words “Children, have ye any meat?” are, after all the years that have since elapsed, still fresh in my memory and heart.

Since then, again and again, has his mere reading aloud of the Word of God edified me, and I fully endorse the remark of a Christian friend who once said to me, “To hear Mr. Chapman only read a psalm is as good as a sermon!”