HASLAM’S JOURNEY
William Haslam
Ed. Chris Wright. Highland Books. 308 pages. £8.99
ISBN 1 897913 78 8
This account of the life of William Haslam, a High Church clergyman converted through his own sermon, makes enthralling reading. Here we have ‘two for the price of one’, for the editor, Chris Wright, has condensed Haslam’s own books, From Death into Life and Yet not I, into one volume. Reducing 214,000 words to 85,000 is no mean achievement. Occasionally the narrative seems disjointed, but on the whole it runs on smoothly, encompassing a ministry of 36 years.
Set in a period when God was powerfully at work in Britain, Haslam’s Journey begins in 1842 when, as a desolate young man whose fiancée has just died, he starts his first curacy in a Cornish village. His priority is to beautify the externals of worship and to make significant improvements to the church buildings, adding spires, candles, paintings, bells.
