Broken Bread, from an Evangelist's Wallet

Thomas Champness was an evangelist who understood that faith, like wheat, requires tending before it can nourish. Written in 1888, this collection of spiritual fragments reads like a pastor's notebook opened before you: personal, urgent, and threaded with the agricultural imagery that made Victorian preaching so vivid. Champness believed the church had grown complacent, its soil depleted by habit and routine. His meditations demand active engagement with one's own spiritual condition, using metaphors of plowing, planting, and harvest to challenge readers toward genuine revival. These are not abstract theological musings but practical exhortations written for those who lead congregations and care for souls. The title itself, evoking the broken bread of communion, suggests nourishment offered freely to the spiritually hungry. Whether you approach it as a historical document of evangelical thought or as a devotional resource for personal reflection, Broken Bread offers a window into an era when faith was understood as demanding labor, vigilance, and honest self-examination.