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FW Boreham with the officers of the Hobart Baptist Church, 1909

World War I took a large toll on FWB. In 1915-16, the deacons at Hobart Baptist Church were extremely supportive and caring of their now broken pastor. The Honour Boards hanging in the Fellowship Hall of Hobart Baptist Church even to this day point to cause of F.W. Boreham’s physical and emotional breaking. His health was so damaged that his physician, Doctor Harry Benjafield (1845-1917), told him, “Of course you must go. It is your only hope. If you remain here any longer in your present condition, your health will be irreparably ruined” (T. Howard Crago, The F.W. Boreham Story, p. 165). With that, Boreham accepted the position of a well-staffed church, Armadale Baptist, in Melbourne, where he was freed from many of the administrative duties that he had found taxing at Hobart. When he arrived at Armadale though he was still a broken man who had recently had yet another serious fall—yet again re-breaking his leg. It would be some time before he regained confidence to walk on his fragile leg and hit his stride as a internationally world-renowned preacher.

By my reckoning, it took about 8-years before Dr. Boreham was back ‘at the top of his game’ so to speak. Arriving in Melbourne he vowed never to preach on war again. He copped some criticism for this from his ministerial colleagues especially after World War II broke out. Instead he decided to focus on eternity, immensities, and infinities. From 1924 he began to preach and write some of his finest work. In 1929 he published The Three Half Moons largely featuring his alter-ego John Broadbanks. In his essay, The Hall of Mirrors he explored a topic still being asked today, Who am I? By 1929, the now retired pastor, but still active preacher, Dr. Boreham was once again using his pen to reach millions of people around the world with enchanting stories of his time in New Zealand and the reflections from some of the interactions that had taken place there. In this essay he writes about mirrors and how sometimes the best mirror a person can benefit from is another person’s honest view of us.

I walked home across the park thinking of the fast, fond friendships of earlier years and thinking also of the mirrors, And somehow the two subjects blended into one. As, in fancy, I reviewed the old familiar faces, I seemed to be strolling, like Pearl and Algie, among the mirrors. For, of friends and acquaintances, there are two kinds; there are those who lead me to a false estimate of myself, and there are those who teach me to know myself. There are those whose influence upon me makes for affectation and there are those whose influence upon me makes for revelation. There are those who make me turn my back upon myself, and there are those who compel me to look myself straight in the face and to know myself for what I am. When Smith introduces Jones to Robinson he performs one of the most sacred rites of friendship but when he introduces Jones to Jones he exercises the loftiest prerogative of all.

Not, by any means, that every man who, in honest Anglo-Saxon, tells me the plain unvarnished truth about myself is necessarily my best and dearest friend. No, no ! My best and dearest friend exercises a sacred ministry of self -revelation, but he does it as the mirrors do. And the way of the mirrors is a quiet and kindly way.

I encourage you to read, enjoy, and reflect on F.W. Boreham’s 1929 essay, The Hall of Mirrors.

Dr. Andrew Corbett, Legana, November 2023