Charles Henry Mackintosh

Charles Henry Mackintosh was a nineteenth-century Christian preacher, dispensationalist, writer of Bible commentaries, magazine editor and member of the Plymouth Brethren.  

  
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.