Biography
Octavius Winslow was born in August 1808 in Pentonville, London. His family was of English and American roots, and when he was still a boy they moved to the United States, where he grew up. He received his schooling there and his first training for ministry. As a young man he came to a living faith in Christ and turned his gifts to preaching. He was drawn to the Baptist communion and began to serve in the churches of New York State.
He was a gifted young preacher and his sermons drew crowds. In the early years of his ministry he served a congregation in Warwick, New York, then moved to larger work. In 1839 he returned to England and became pastor of a church in Leamington Spa, where he served for nearly twenty years. His preaching there was marked by a tenderness toward troubled souls. He loved to speak of the grace of God, the finished work of Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. People came from far and wide to hear him.
Later he moved to Bath and ministered there, and in the 1860s he went to Brighton and pastored a congregation until the end. Through those long years he wrote constantly. His books number in the dozens and many of them were written for the sick, the weary and the discouraged. Among his best known are Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus, Morning Thoughts, Evening Thoughts, The Work of the Holy Spirit and Glimpses of the Truth as It Is in Jesus. His devotional writings were widely read in Britain and America.
His style was warm, plain and full of Scripture. In Personal Declension he took up a subject few men of his day wanted to touch. He spoke of the believer who had grown cold, who had left his first love and had grown careless of sin. He did not scold such a person. He described the signs of backsliding with great honesty, and then he turned the reader to the mercy of Christ, who restores the wanderer. He wrote that the cure for a cold heart is not a greater effort but a return to the cross. The book has helped many who thought they were beyond help.
In No Condemnation he set before his readers the great truth of justification. He wrote about the believer who is accused by his own conscience and by the enemy, and he taught that the believer stands in Christ and cannot be condemned. He pressed this truth home with patience and gentleness, since he knew how many Christians live under a quiet cloud of guilt. He always connected assurance with holiness. A man who knows he is forgiven, he taught, will hate the sin that cost his Savior so dearly.
Winslow's ministry also had its trials. He lived in a century of religious debate and was often drawn into disputes over church order and doctrine. He also carried sorrows in his family life, and he lost loved ones and faced the same griefs that he wrote about. Some of his later writings show the weariness of a man who had been long in the work. He did not deny the reality of pain. He wrote of afflictions as the school in which God teaches His people to lean on Christ.
He had a gift for coming alongside people in distress. Those who read his books say that they feel as if a pastor is sitting beside them. He understood the heart and knew how to lead it to Christ without hurry. He gave himself to this work for over forty years.
He died on March 5, 1878, in Brighton, at the age of sixty-nine. He was laid to rest in the cemetery there. Many of his books have since been reprinted, and a new generation has found in them what earlier readers found. They see in him a pastor who understood that the soul needs more than information. It needs a Savior, and he spent his life pointing to Him.