John Angell James

John Angell James preached at Carrs Lane Chapel in Birmingham from 1805 until his death in 1859. In his own lifetime he was famous not for mottoes but for The Anxious Inquirer after Salvation (1834), a devotional handbook that sold over half a million copies and was translated into more than a dozen languages. The sentence that eventually became a motivational-poster staple was never meant as a slogan: he wrote it as a scrap of imagined self-examination, the kind of reflection he wished ordinary church members would rehearse to themselves.