The year 1976 is noteworthy in evangelical circles because it marks the one hundredth birthday of the subject of this biography and also the centennial of Loizeaux Brothers, Inc., its publisher.
The Loizeauxs wanted to commemorate their own anniversary in a special way. The best-selling author of the firm’s history is Harry Ironside, a fact that stands even though he has been gone for a quarter century. A new generation of readers has come along that knows his books but not their author. What better way to celebrate the double centennial event, the publishers asked themselves, than to tell again the life story of H. A. Ironside and his ministry? So they invited me to undertake the writing, not only, I suppose, because I wrote the earlier biography but also because I knew Harry Ironside well and was a part of some of his experiences during the last fifteen years of his life.
This volume is much more than a revision of H. A. IRONSIDE, ORDAINED OF THE LORD. The 1946 biography, which takes him to 1943, has been condensed and almost completely rewritten. The record of the years between that and 1951, when Ironside was called into God’s presence, is entirely fresh and contains some highly interesting incidents of his later years.
It has been rewarding to review the remarkable life of a remarkable man of God. I am confident that whoever reads his moving life story will be excited by it and drawn closer to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Man in the glory whom Harry Ironside loved fervently and served faithfully and fruitfully for sixty years.
E. S. E.
Merion, Pennsylvania
January 1976