Making Many Glad: The Life and Labours of Daniel Baker

This stirring biography, Making Many Glad, tells the story of Daniel Baker, the great evangelist of the American South, largely in his own words. Baker was one of those preachers who could not resist the call to 'preach Christ where he was not named', and wherever he went it was 'in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ'. His longest stay in one pastorate amounted to just nine years, whereas he was involved in gospel ministry for almost forty years, itinerating from Pennsylvania and Ohio, through Virginia, the Carolinas, his native Georgia and around the southern states to Texas.

Citing Isaiah 52:7, Professor Douglas Kelly writes of Baker: 'There could not be a better way of characterizing the effects of the life and preaching of this great Southern evangelist…than this verse about beautiful feet hastening with glad tidings across waste places.'

Rev William Mumford Baker (1825 1883) was the youngest son of Daniel Baker (1791-1857), the great evangelist of the American South. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1848. He was ordained an evangelist by the Presbytery of Little Rock on April 22, 1849, and for a short time served as minister at the Presbyterian church in Batesville, Arkansas. In 1850, Baker became the first pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

A unionist, Baker and his family moved north at the close of the Civil War, serving churches in Zanesville, Ohio (1866-72), Newburyport, Massachusetts (1872-74), and Boston, Massachusetts (1874-76).

From 1877 to 1881 he resided in Boston and concentrated on his writing. He prepared the biography of his father Making Many Glad: The Life and Labours of Daniel Baker, published by the Trust.

Baker died on August 20, 1883, after a two-year illness, and his body was transported back to Austin for burial beside his father in Oakwood Cemetery.