Irish Saint and Scholar

William Kelly

William Kelly (1821-1906), a Plymouth Brethren author, editor, and Bible teacher, was educated at Downpatrick and Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned the highest honors in classics. At age 24, he met John N. Darby, a leader in the Plymouth Brethren movement. He became his chief lieutenant and later edited his collected works. With Darby, he was one of the leading proponents of what is today known as dispensational theology.

After leaving the university, Kelly became a tutor in Sark. There he came to the assurance of salvation through the witness of a friend. Next, he located in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, where he devoted himself full-time to Christian work. He married Elizabeth Montgomrey and they had two daughters before her young death in 1850. Later he married Elizabeth Gipps; they had a son and four daughters together.

Kelly was active in preaching and teaching the Bible throughout the area. He contributed papers to the Bible Treasury and later became its editor. One contemporary referred to it as “the only religious magazine any longer worth taking.”

Kelly’s occasional excursions to London for lecturing and preaching brought good attendance and “deep impressions on many hearers.” He settled at Blackheath, near London in 1871. There his “remarkable gifts of exposition found ample scope.” Prophecy was a burning question in religious circles (as much in that day as this), and Kelly was “considered one of its ablest exponents.” Many of his messages were taken down in shorthand by his wife for later editing and publication, to meet the wide demand.

The first principal of the University College of Wales, Lewis Edwards, was “indebted to Kelly for his conversion to a premillennial understanding of prophecy.” Many others also benefitted greatly from his ministry. His publications were “the fruit of sound scholarship and of prolonged and devout study.” An American minister once testified that Kelly edified many “by his great Scriptural expositions.”

Kelly was “a book lover, through and through, not simply a collector but one who read extensively and deeply. It showed in his ministry.” Once a young unknown hopeful scribe with an urge to write but lacking “almost everything else” came for help. Kelly “from the treasures of his well stored mind gave sound advice and wise hints as to writing for publication.”

Kelly, who steadfastly opposed all forms of higher biblical criticism so prevalent in his day, donated his library of over 15,000 volumes to the town of Middlesborough in England. The titles of his own published works fill four pages of the British Museum’s catalog. They include: The Book of Revelation (which Kelly translated from the Greek); Lectures on the Second Coming and Kingdom of Jesus Christ; Lectures on the New Testament Doctrine of the Holy Spirit; Lectures on the Earlier Historical Books of the Old Testament; Elements of Prophecy; In the Beginning and the Adamic Earth; The Gospel of John Expounded; God’s Inspiration of the Scriptures; On the Gospel of Matthew; Isaiah Expounded; and many more.

Shortly before his homegoing in 1906, he testified, “There are three things real: the cross, the enmity of the world, and the love of God.” He deplored “the flimsiness of faith today compared with a former robustness of Christian character [and] the increasing worldliness of believers….”

Kelly “sought to forward growth in grace and divine knowledge to prepare both sincere milk and solid food for Christian growth ‘till we all come in the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature and the fullness of Christ.’ He pressed for the cultivation of truth in the inward parts [for the glory of Christ].”

Though criticized by some (including Spurgeon) for devoting his expansive talents too narrowly to the propagation of dispensationalism over the spreading of the Gospel, he was remembered as a man who loved the Lord and served His Christ by friends and critics alike. Kelly was indeed “one of Christ’s special gifts to the church.”

Bernard R. DeRemer chronicled the lives of dozens of heroes of the faith in more than a decade of writing for Pulpit Helps Magazine. He continues to serve in this capacity as a volunteer contributor to Disciple. He lives in West Liberty, Ohio.

References: This article is based on information from the Moody Bible Institute Library, and Wikipedia, “William Kelly.”