The published text of “From Death Into Life” by William Haslam (1818-1905)
The Reverend William Haslam is often described as the “Parson converted though his own sermon”.
- A modern biography written by Chris Wright was published by Highland Books in 2005 with the title Haslam's Journey.
- This is mainly compiled from extracts from two of his autobiographical works: (FDIL & YNI).
- An Amazon Kindle edition is now also available.
- A biographical pensketch of William Haslam is available at the Revival Library.
- The author trained for the Church of England ministry at the University of Durham.
- Before his spiritual conversion in 1851, the author described himself as a Puseyite.
- After his conversion, he became very active in preaching salvation by faith in Christ alone.
- His methods have often been likened by both friend and foe to those of the early Methodists.
- In later years, the author was closely involved in the early Keswick Movement.
- It’s apparent from some of his writings that he adopted a form of dispensationalism as part of his beliefs.
FDIL is in the Public Domain. It was first published in 1880.
The work is provided here in Markdown format with one file per chapter, etc.
- The table of CONTENTS is formatted as monospace to preserve column alignments.
- Page numbers therein refer to the original 1880 edition.
- In some CHAPTER files, I have judiciously used blockquote markup for some conversations.
The original work included a few illustrations. These need to be scanned and uploaded as images.
The text for FDIL at Project Gutenberg is eBook #14578.
- This is based on a Canadian reprint edition by Rev. W. J. Watchorn printed by the Standard Book Room, Brockville, Ontario.
- It was digitised by Michael Madden and released on January 3, 2005.
- This is deficient in that CHAPTER 25 was missing and subsequent chapters were misnumbered.
- The Gutenberg text has not been corrected for OCR errors.
The etext was also formerly available from the Revival Library maintained by Tony Cauchi.
FDIL is readily available in printed format from various suppliers, having been reprinted by several publishers since the 1960s.
My own copy is the Adam Gordon Reprints facsimile edition published in 1994, which is now out of print.
In chronological order:
- Perran-Zabuloe: With an Account of the Past and Present State of the Oratory of St. Piran in the Sands, and Remarks on Its Antiquity, 1844
- The Cross and the Serpent: A Brief History of the Triumph of the Cross, Through a Long Series of Ages, in Prophecy, Types and Fulfilment, 1846
- Notes of an address on Faith, at St. Paul's Cathedral, etc., 1874
- Personal Experience; being Lectures on Bunyan‘s Pilgrim’s Progress, 1876
- The Threefold Gift of God: Or, Christ Jesus, the Object of Faith, Hope and Love, 1875
- A Personal Christ, 1878
- From Death Into Life: Twenty Years of My Ministry, 1880
- “Yet Not I”: or, More Years Of My Ministry, 1882
- ‘Full Salvation’, as Seen in Bunyan‘s Pilgrim’s Progress, 1884
- Building From The Top, and Other Readings, 1884
- The Lord Is Coming: A Plain Narrative of Prophetic Events in Their Order, 1888
- Leaves From My Note-book, 1889
- Notes from Keswick, 1890
- Gleanings From The Harvest, 1894
- A few of the more general titles are now available from some Print on Demand publishers.
- There are also a number of letters and sermon notes of William Haslam in some libraries.
There is a website dedicated to William Haslam maintained by Alasdair Denton of Cardiff.
There used to be an online Bulletin Board too, linked to an earlier version of the website.
This became defunct a few years ago, but a snapshot from 2008 still exists.
The signifcance of the WH Bulletin Board lies in the fact that some of the forums contain text uploads of various works by and about William Haslam. These are still accessible through the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive.
There's now a private group on Facebook about William Haslam: Rev'd William Haslam - converted by his own sermon, in his own pulpit!
Although my surname is Haslam, I have not been able to establish any direct family connection with the author.