Two Years after their documentary and pictorial Life of Robert Roberts (reviewed in The Testimony, December 1984) the Christadelphian Scripture Study Service have followed it up with a companion volume on the life of Dr. Thomas. Produced to the same high standards of format and design, this new book is to be welcomed principally as a convenient and easily digested introduction to the life and work of one who, though modest about his own remarkable achievements, was undoubtedly one of the most important of our Christadelphian ‘pioneers’.
Brother Roberts himself, of course, wrote and published a Life & Work of Dr. Thomas, and that biography should still be recommended reading for every Christadelphian, especially because of the light it casts on the dedicated labours of an earlier generation of believers. The book is still widely available in a number of modern editions; but it was published in 1873, only two years after Brother Thomas’s death, and was perhaps more an act of thanksgiving for his work than a complete historical account of his life. The new book now under review is, in a sense, both of these in one; and in addition its essentially pictorial approach makes its subject ‘come alive’ with relatively little effort on the part of the reader. With the advantage of over a century’s retrospect, and a clarity of structure and presentation of contents, the compilers have produced a most useful and valuable reminder of one who, as his tombstone rightly claims, “brought to light anew the long lost faith of the Apostles”.
The book is divided into a number of convenient sections of various lengths, put together into an easy-to-follow chronological sequence. A family tree is followed by an outline sketch of Brother Thomas’s parental background and of his own early years, in London ( where he was born in 1805), in northeast Scotland (where his father moved in 1810 to become the pastor of a congregation of Independents), in Clapham and Richmond (where the Thomas family moved again in 1812 and 1818), and in Chorley, Lancashire (where the Thomases lived from 1819 to 1820 and where the fifteen-year-old John began his medical studies under the direction of a local private surgeon). A photograph of the diploma in anatomy and surgery issued to him in the 1820s by St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, chronicles his return to the capital and the successful continuation of his medical studies at the highest level.
A short period of medical practice in London, during which his professional expertise was shown by a number of interesting contributions to The Lancet, was followed in 1832 by the well-known providential sea-voyage to America. The Thomas family, it seems, were “seized with the American emigration fever” and wanted to seek escape from “the priest-ridden state of society in England”. The twenty-seven-year-old John, however, had by then apparently drifted away from his family’s religious views, and he sailed across the Atlantic principally to ‘spy out the land’ for them as well as to broaden his own experience. The story of the dreadful storm at sea (ominously illustrated here by a fascinating recent chart of the many shipwrecks on Sable Island, off Nova Scotia, where the Doctor’s ship ran briefly aground) is vividly depicted, with its decisive effect on the ship’s young surgeon. His mid-storm resolution that he would not rest, should he be spared, until he had found the truth about God, was followed up on the safety of American soil by earnest effort: the Doctor was as good as his word.
Early contact with the Campbellites, whose radical teachings were then beginning to sweep the American Midwest in a kind of revivalist ‘reformation’, led to the young doctor’s premature baptism in 1832. But further acquaintance with Alexander Campbell himself and, most important of all, deep study of the Word of God soon led to disagreements over fundamental teachings. Marriage in Philadelphia in 1834, and a more settled way of life in Richmond, Virginia, gave opportunity for careful exposition of Scripture and a wider circle of contacts through the issue of the Doctor’s first monthly magazine, The Apostolic Advocate. Continuing feuds and discussions with Campbell, lecture tours, long-running series of articles in various journals and magazines, were mingled with medical practice and farming and a perpetual struggle to keep the wolf from the door. From Virginia to Illinois, and from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, the seeker-after-truth restlessly pursued his goal, learning as he went and bringing countless others to an awareness of the inadequacy of their existing beliefs.
The Investigator was begun in 1842 and helped to sharpen still further the expository skills of its editor and the keenness of his doctrinal understanding. The inevitable break from Campbellism followed in 1844; and by 1847 Brother Thomas’s Herald of the Future Age was totally renouncing what he called the “husks and useless speculations” offered by Campbell to his disciples. This was the crucial turning point, when the Doctor published his ‘Confession, Abjuration and Declaration’ and was baptised into the Hope of Israel, in the certain knowledge, from his extensive Bible study, that “after a journey of fourteen years, (he) had found the truth, which on the ocean (he) had declared (he) would not rest till (he) had found”.
And so the account continues, into the more familiar territory of the Doctor’s first return visit to Britain in 1848, the writing of Elpis Israel in 1850, the commencement of The Herald of the Kingdom in 1851, the removal to New York, and the repeated American lecture tours of the 1850s. Familiar too is the story of his determination to continue to preach the Truth in spite of the American Civil War, and of his efforts on behalf of the brethren who refused to take up arms (the situation which gave rise to the Doctor’s coining of the term Christadelphian). From this period, also, emerged the early volumes of Eureka, and a number of pamphlets setting forth in detail various important aspects of the Truth—including Anatolia (sub-title: Russia triumphant and Europe chained) and Phanerosis (on the vital doctrine of God-manifestation).
In 1862 came a second lecture tour of Britain, organised principally by the twenty-three-year-old Robert Roberts, with whom Brother Thomas stayed at his home in Huddersfield. It was there that the Doctor urged Brother Roberts to move to Birmingham and to start his own magazine for the brethren in what he rightly judged to be fertile soil for the propagation of the gospel.
The end of the Doctor’s life story is one of failing health a sad reminder of the frailty of even the greatest of the servants of God. Brother Thomas had suffered periodically from bouts of sickness and ill health, owing to the many privations of his extensive work as a gospel missionary. But in the late 1860s he was repeatedly beset by attacks of gall-bladder trouble, and it was such an attack which brought about his death, in March 1871. Yet before then he had managed to make a third tour of Britain and was at the time of his death actually planning to move to Birmingham on a permanent basis, to become part of the large and thriving community of brethren and sisters there who owed so much to him and Brother Roberts.
It was the latter’s sad task to conduct his spiritual mentor’s funeral in New York, where Brother Roberts himself was to be laid to rest some twenty-seven years later; and the photographs of the Greenwood cemetery, reproduced towards the end of this book, are a touching reminder that these two ‘pioneer’ brethren, so closely associated in life, now lie side by side in death, “in brief repose, waiting the return of the Lord from heaven”. Meanwhile, as the compilers of the book no doubt wished deliberately to emphasise with a final section listing Brother Thomas’s publications, his work lives on after him through the agency of the printed word: “he being dead yet speaketh”.
The whole volume is written and put together in a most interesting and readable way, and the numerous charts and photographs serve to cast light on points made in the text. Especially useful in this respect are the many maps, graphically depicting the huge distances travelled by Doctor Thomas in the service of the Truth. The book is rounded off with a reproduction of the 1871 ‘Pictorial illustration of Deity manifested in the flesh‘, designed by “the late Dr. John Thomas, M.D., of West Hoboken, New Jersey, of whose many works this is the last”.
Testimony readers are warmly recommended to read this book: it is a timely tribute to a pioneer whom we ought never to forget.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)