Robertson, FREDERICK WILLIAM, was born, eldest of the seven children of an artillery captain, in London on 3d February 1816, and spent his first five years at Leith Fort. He had his schooling at Beverley, Tours, and Edinburgh Academy; and after a short time of study at Edinburgh University, and a year in a solicitor's office, he returned to his home at Cheltenham to prepare for the army, but was, after much misgiving, persuaded of his vocation to the ministry. He matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1837. Here he felt no real affinity with Newmanism, but clung firmly to the Evangelicalism of his upbringing, tempered by a charity and tolerance all his own. He was ordained by the Bishop of Winchester in July 1840, and for nearly a year thereafter held a curacy at Winchester. His health now broke down at once from over-devotion to work and a course of ascetic austerities through which, in this period of bondage to the letter, a hypersensitive conscience prompted him to seek after a higher level of Christian life. A walking tour on the Continent restored him to health, and at Geneva he married, after a short acquaintance, a daughter of Sir George William Denys. In the summer of 1842 he became curate to the incumbent of Christ Church, Cheltenham, and here for nearly five years he laboured with unbroken devotion, despite depression of spirits, conviction of failure, and a painful and prolonged mental struggle through which he fought his way upwards to certainty in his grasp of the realities of Christian truth. His faith in Evangelicalism was first shaken by the intolerance and bitterness of its partisans, and the spiritual agony of the revulsion shook his soul to its foundations, and again broke down his health. In September 1846 he set out for the Continent, and, after three months of travel and preaching at Heidelberg, returned a follower of no school to accept the curacy of St Ebbe's in Oxford. Here the power of his preaching had already made itself felt among his poor and even among the undergraduates, when in August 1847 he accepted an invitation to Trinity Chapel, Brighton.
He had now grown to his full stature as a disciple of Christ, and his rare union of imaginative with dialectic power, the beauty and freshness of his thought, his earnestness, originality, wide sympathy, and knowledge of the human heart at once arrested public attention. He brought the religion of Jesus to bear on everyday life and the perplexing social problems of the time, and pointed out the path to the true liberty, equality, and fraternity in service and disciplinship as sons of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. But his motives were misunderstood by many, and, especially after the excitement of 1848, he was branded for his sympathy with working-men as a revolutionist and enemy of social order, and subjected to much misrepresentation and many a cruel and unjust attack. He established the Working-men's Institute in Brighton, and taught its members how to govern and to respect themselves, and he flung himself with a passionate and chivalrous enthusiasm into every battle waged in his day against tyranny and wrong. Stern in denunciation of moral evil, he was tolerant of intellectual error, and thus his influence, like his Master's, extended to men hitherto outside the pale of Christian sympathy. The strength and absolute sincerity of his convictions, and the broad rationality and certitude on which these were based, gave new strength to many a troubled and doubting heart, and added in almost unexampled degree the seal of power and comprehensiveness to his ministry. To him the Incarnation was the centre of all history; Christ, God's idea of human nature realised. He was no mere negative theologian, for the central point of his preaching was ever the historical reality of the life of Christ, revealing at once sonship with God and brotherhood with man. Men are sons of God by virtue of His image stamped upon them in creation; they become so de jure by baptism, but de facto by faith. The suffering of Christ makes atonement for our sins by making possible in us the potentiality of sympathetically suffering for others; while faith converts this potentiality into an actual reality, as the foundation of union with God and the spring of Christ-like qualities within us. The characteristic fruit of faith is a pervasive love to Christ and to one another; and one of the privileges that flow from it is an elevation from the bondage of the letter, and a security in the freedom of the spirit. Hence came Robertson's honest refusal to sign the petition for an enactment against opening the Crystal Palace on Sundays—a protest against binding the chains of Judaical legalism on the Christian conscience which cost him much odium and inspired one noble sermon. Robertson grasped the idea of the vast comprehensiveness of the Christian ideal, with its unity of spirit under diversity of form, recognising that theological systems must be continually modified by new conditions of life and thought in the historical development of the ages. The intolerant absolutism of the Evangelical school, and the High Church subservience to form, as well as its search for an ideal in the Christianity of the past rather than in the present or the future, were alike repugnant to him; yet he possessed all the emotional fervour which used to be claimed as the monopoly of the one, and which he loved in his own day to recognise in the fresh enthusiasm of the other, together with the strength of thought and the philosophic breadth usually associated with the more liberal theology. He himself summed up the cardinal principles of his teaching in these propositions: (1) The establishment of positive truth, instead of the negative destruction of error. (2) That truth is made up of two opposite propositions, and not found in a via media between the two. (3) That spiritual truth is discerned by the spirit, instead of intellectually in propositions; and therefore Truth should be taught suggestively, not dogmatically. (4) That belief in the human character of Christ's humanity must be antecedent to belief in his divine origin. (5) That Christianity, as its teachers showed, works from the inward to the outward, and not vice versa. (6) The soul of goodness in things evil.
In the pulpit Robertson's voice was low but clear and musical, with occasional startling modulations, and that peculiar thrill of suppressed emotion which is the innermost secret of eloquence. He stood almost motionlessly erect, his fine face, delicate and mobile features, and deep blue eyes all eloquent in harmony with his words. Intensely sensitive as he was, all self-consciousness vanished as he spoke, his brain and heart aglow with a fire of earnestness that burned up his physical strength. His sermons were kneaded with his heart's blood, hence their reality, as he never spoke what had not become a part of himself. In preparing them he jotted down his thoughts on scraps of paper, next wrote out his main ideas with some fullness in logical sequence of thought, then made on a small slip of paper a brief abstract of the whole with merely the heads and a few of the leading thoughts. This he took with him into the pulpit, but hardly had he warmed to his subject ere it was crushed in his grasp and flung aside as useless.
During his last years Robertson suffered intense pain from a disease of the brain, which was heightened by the excitability and unrest of his temperament, and the misrepresentations that fell like blows upon a hypersensitive nervous organisation. He preached his last sermon in Trinity Chapel on 5th June 1853, having resigned because his vicar had refused on entirely inadequate grounds to confirm his nomination of a curate. After a few more weeks of cruel suffering he died, 15th August 1853, with the last words on his lips, 'I must die. Let God do His work.' Eight days later he was laid in the Extra-mural Cemetery at Brighton amid the sorrow of the entire population of the town. Its citizens knew well what Stopford Brooke's biography twelve years later revealed to the wider world, that his whole life had been a passionate imitation of Christ.
Robertson of Brighton published in his lifetime but one sermon—the four series (1855, 1855, 1857, 1859–63) so well known over the English-speaking world, and constituting so unique a monument of religious genius, were not written for delivery or preservation, but are really recollections sometimes dictated by the preacher himself to the younger members of a family in which he was interested, sometimes written out by himself for them when they were at a distance. Yet another volume, The Human Race, &c., was issued in 1880. Other works that have also been published are Expository Lectures on St Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians (1859); Lectures and Addresses (1858); An Analysis of 'In Memoriam' (1862); a translation from Lessing—The Education of the Human Race (1858); and Notes on Genesis (1877). The Life and Letters—the latter only inferior in value to the sermons—by the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, appeared in 1865, and has already taken its place among the classics of English biography.