Charles Henry Mackintosh (October 1820 – 2 November 1896) was a nineteenth-century Christian preacher, dispensationalist, writer of Bible commentaries, magazine editor and member of the Plymouth Brethren.
Early life
Mackintosh was the son of Captain Duncan Mackintosh, an officer in a Highland regiment. He had a spiritual experience at age 18 through the letters of his sister and reading John Nelson Darby's Operations of the Spirit. In 1838, he went to work in a business house in Limerick, Ireland. The following year, he went to Dublin and identified himself with the Plymouth Brethren.
About 1874, Mackintosh reflecting on his course wrote, "I had not the honour of being among the first of those who planted their feet on the blessed ground occupied by Brethren. I left the Establishment about the year 1839, and took my place at the table in Dublin, where dear Bellett was ministering with great acceptance ... As a young man I, of course, walked in retirement, having no thought of coming forward in public ministry of any kind ... Indeed, I may say that nothing but the most solemn sense of responsibility could ever have induced me to stand up in public."
In 1843, Mackintosh wrote his first tract entitled Peace with God. When he was 24, he opened a private school at Westport, County Mayo where he developed a special method of teaching classical languages. This was during the Great Famine of 1845–50, and Mackintosh went around County Mayo preaching the gospel to the poor during school holidays. The effort required to run a boarding school in such a poor and famine-hit district caused Mackintosh to abandon the enterprise in 1853; he told John Nelson Darby that nothing could induce him to go on with a boarding school.
He tried farming for a time, but he wrote to Darby on 31 August 1853 that the Lord had "called me into larger service than ever", and he soon concluded that he must give himself entirely to preaching, writing, and public speaking.
Author and evangelist
Soon after he established a periodical named Things New and Old, which he continued to edit (with evangelist Charles Stanley, 1821–1890) from 1858 to 1890, and Good News for the Little Ones, later called Good News for Young and Old and some pages for the Little Ones from 1859 to 1876.
Mackintosh took a great interest in, and actively participated in, the great Irish Evangelical revival of 1859 and 1860 (see Revivalism).
Mackintosh's literary fame rests primarily upon his work Notes on the Pentateuch, beginning with a volume of 334 pages on Genesis, and concluding with a two-volume work on Deuteronomy extending to over 800 pages. These are still in print and have been translated into a dozen or more languages.
Brethren historian Roy Coad notes:
"Another popular writer among the exclusives was an Irish schoolmaster, Charles Henry Mackintosh, who preached extensively in the revival movement. The initials 'C.H.M.' became familiar in many pious evangelical households of the later Victorian and Edwardian years. No critical scholar, Mackintosh nevertheless had a marked gift for simple Biblical exposition, and his works on the Pentateuch had an enormous vogue as simple aids to devotional interpretation for the first five books of the Bible. He was, however, no theologian, and certain isolated sentences in those books referred to 'the heavenly humanity' of Christ (and thus verged on formal heresy), brought him much hostile notice from prejudiced opponents of the Brethren (who took his writings as being far more significant and representative than they deserved). He later withdrew the expressions, on Darby's insistence."
Arno C. Gaebelein says of Mackintosh, along with other Brethren writers, "I found in [these] writings... the soul food I needed. I esteem these men next to the Apostles in their sound and spiritual teachings."
Charles Spurgeon, who crossed swords with early Plymouth Brethren on their ideas of ministry, offers the following comment on C.H. Mackintosh's Notes on Leviticus: "We do not endorse Plymouthism which pervades these notes, but they are frequently suggestive. Should be read cautiously." On his Notes on Genesis, however, Spurgeon complimented their 'precious and edifying reflections'.