CHAPTER nine
CHAPTER nine
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Evening Light: The Last Years, the Thinning Circle, and the Journey Home
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
There is an entry in my diary from the later years that I have returned to often in my mind. “I have been thinking tonight,” I wrote, “that perhaps my next great undertaking may be this: appearing at the judgment-seat of Christ, when I give an account of my trading with my talents.” The word “undertaking” is the minister’s word — the word of a man still thinking in the categories of work and commission and responsibility. Even in the prospect of the end, the habit of ministerial consciousness persisted. There would be an accounting. There had always been an accounting, in every sermon and every visit and every letter. The difference was only that this accounting would be final, and the One receiving it would be the One for whom all the work had been done.
I did not fear that accounting. But I took it seriously. “See that your last days are your best days,” were my words to believers in those later years — not like David, of some of whose descendants it was said in praise that they walked in the first ways of their father David, as if the first ways were already his best. I had a solemn fear lest I should lose the things I had wrought and not receive a full reward. Not a fear about my standing before God — that was settled and settled long since. But a minister’s proper fear about whether he had been faithful to the last, whether the last sermon was as carefully prepared as the first, whether the last visit was as prayerful as those of the years of full vigour.
The image I came back to was the palm-tree. “We are not to indulge for a moment the belief: ‘I must count on a season of languor in my Christian life.’ Where did you find that in the Bible? ‘Like the palm-tree flourishing.’ Ask any gardener and he will tell you it is a sad indication of any plant to stop growing.” I said that when I was old, and I believed it. Our root is in Christ, and in the love that passeth knowledge. If the roots go deep enough, the fruit can be abundant in old age. In my younger days a great deal was blossom. As I grew older it was fruit. It does not make such an appearance, but it is more enduring.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE BROTHERS: HORATIUS, JOHN, AND THE LAST OF ELEVEN
I was the youngest of seven brothers. By the time I reached my seventies and eighties, the world that had been peopled by a large and vital family had grown very quiet. Brothers and sisters had gone ahead, one by one, into the country that grows more full and familiar as the company here grows thinner.
Horatius — my brother and the hymn-writer whose songs had blessed the whole English-speaking Church — was taken home in 1889 after two years of weakness and suffering. I had loved him all my life. We were very different men in our gifts and temperaments: he the lyric poet, I the Bible scholar and pastor; he the man whose words set congregations singing, I the man who sat for hours at a desk unpacking a single verse of Leviticus. Yet we were one in the thing that mattered — the love of Christ and the certainty of the Gospel. When I think of the hymns Horatius wrote — “I heard the voice of Jesus say,” “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,” the great Communion hymn with its burning stanzas — I think of a man who had found the same Saviour I had found, and who expressed it in a different tongue but with the same heart.
Two years after Horatius, my brother John quietly fell asleep in the eighty-ninth year of his age. John — distinguished for his culture and scholarship, for the eloquence and grace of his preaching, for his immense fund of humour and his genial exuberance of spirits — had been the older brother whose loving interest in my spiritual welfare had marked the early years of my ministry. It was John who wrote to me with a father’s tenderness when I was waiting at Collace for the revival that seemed so long in coming. It was John whose letters I had kept for decades, whose care for my soul had been among the instruments God used in shaping the kind of minister I became.
When the last of my brothers was taken away and I alone was left behind, I stood beside his grave — the only mourner — with a smile on my face. As the earth was heaped on the coffin, I turned to a friend beside me and said: “I know that he shall rise again!” More than once, referring to my age in those last years, I said: “I don’t feel that I am an old man, but I know I must be, for Barzillai was fourscore years old and the Bible says he was a very aged man.” My friend Major Whittle asked me one day if I had found it harder to be a Christian as an old man than as a young man. I turned my sunny face toward him and said: “Oh, I don’t think anything about growing old. I just keep on, doing each day’s work by itself, and looking to the Lord for daily grace. I don’t feel old. I feel just as young as I ever did.”
The season of sorrow that the deaths of Horatius and John brought was not one from which I emerged unchanged. I wrote in October 1882, after a season that sent me back to the memory of Isabella’s death: “This season has been sending me back to eighteen years ago — a never-to-be-forgotten time. I thought then that life could never again be lightsome, but I find that the more of Christ we enjoy, the more we are able to bear.” That observation grew more confirmed with every year. The capacity to bear is not a natural resilience that strengthens with exercise, like a muscle. It is a spiritual capacity that grows in proportion to the enjoyment of Christ. Those who have most of Christ can carry most. Those who have least of Him are broken by the loads that those with more can sustain. I did not choose to be the last of eleven. But I was given, for the carrying of it, more of Christ than I had known how to ask for.
I had said long before, in a letter to an old friend: “Oh, the memories of the past! It needs the Man that is the Hiding-place to keep them!” That was the truth of the later years put plainly. The memories were very full. The faces were very many. And the only way to carry the weight of so much accumulated grace and grief without being crushed by it was to carry it in company with the One who had been present for every moment of it — the One who kept all my tears in His bottle and remembered every prayer I had ever prayed and every soul I had ever wept over.
(Psalm 23:4 KJV)
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE FRIENDS WHO HAD GONE BEFORE: LETTERS FROM THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
Often in those later years I wrote or spoke of those who had passed through the veil before me. The circle of friends that had been the great gift of my life — M’Cheyne, Somerville, Miller, Burns, Milne, Hamilton, and all the others — had thinned steadily as the years advanced. Each death was a loss and a summons. A loss because the fellowship of those who had prayed and laboured together is irreplaceable. A summons because every departure from the company here was a reminder that the company there was growing, and that the gap between the two was narrowing.
I wrote to a friend about William Burns, who had given himself to China and died there in 1868: “You notice William Burns must have got over the river, and in at the gate of the Celestial City a month at least before John Milne. Well, he and Milne and Patrick Miller and Robert M’Cheyne and James Hamilton have been talking over the past.” I loved that image. The conversation that began in the Collace manse and the Glasgow prayer meetings and the Monthly Fasts had not been interrupted by death. It had been continued, at a higher level, in a better room.
When Dr. Keith died in 1880 — in a good old age, eighty-nine, like the Patriarchs — I wrote: “He has gone on to New Jerusalem, and soon probably the last of the four who in 1839 travelled Palestine together may make up to him. Oh, it will be glorious to stand within the gates of Jerusalem that cometh down from heaven, and to see the King in His beauty in His own land — Immanuel’s Land!” Dr. Keith, Dr. Black, M’Cheyne, and I had gone out together to the Holy Land in 1839. Now three of us were inside what we had only glimpsed from the outside in that long-ago journey, and I was still here, still preaching, still waiting.
I had written a sentence about the departed friends that became one of my most quoted observations: “I have been thinking that saints certainly remember those they left behind, and are certainly looking forward to the day of our gathering together in Him; but they do not miss us as we miss them.” That sentence contains a theology of the intermediate state and a pastoral word for the bereaved, all in one. Those who have gone are not reduced. They are not diminished by our absence. They are not sitting in some dim waiting-room, grieving for the company they left behind. They are with Christ, which is far better, and in His presence the sense of loss is swallowed up in the fullness of what they have gained. It is we who are diminished by their absence, not they by ours. And that asymmetry is itself a comfort, rightly understood.
I also said something during those years about the quality of unity among believers that had been one of the chief gifts of the whole ministry. “In holiness we must go on together, not alone. You will not get on by separating yourself to read and pray. It must be along with them that call on the Lord. We are to climb Pisgah together, and from the top see the stretch of the land. But we are not to go alone.” That was my experience. The solitary Christian, however devout, does not know what the Christian in company with other Christians knows. God loves unity. He loves a united cry, a petition signed by more than one. Christ liked to come to the feast when He was going to give blessing. He liked to come to the upper room when they were all assembled there. The thinning of the circle in the later years was therefore a real diminishment — real in a way that only those who have known such a circle can fully understand. But the comfort was also real: the reunion lay ahead, and what was interrupted was not ended.
Those last years brought an indescribable sweetness and mellowness that I have been told characterised my old age and robbed it of all sadness. Left alone, the last of a family of eleven brothers and sisters, with old friends nearly all gone from me, my joy in Christ triumphed over every sorrow. This was not the achievement of a resolute temperament. I was, as I have said before, inclined naturally to depression. It was the achievement of sixty years of daily access to the Mercy-seat — sixty years of bringing the accumulating weight of loss and grief to the One who carried everything and gave back peace.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE LAST SUMMER: PORTPATRICK, 1892
My last summer holiday, in 1892, was spent at Braefield in Portpatrick, on the Galloway coast. The pleasant walks and the open air and the sea did me good, and those who were with me that summer have told me it will always be a sunny memory. I preached in the Free Church during my stay and took a great interest in the open-air meetings that my son-in-law Mr. Oatts had begun on Sabbath afternoons. On the last Sabbath of August I conducted the meeting myself, standing in the open air at eighty-two years old, preaching to whoever would come and listen.
As I was walking home after that last open-air service, a stranger came up beside me and asked if he might speak with me. He said he had been thirty-seven years in America and was home for a holiday, and that he had read all my books but had never expected to see me in person. I shook his hand and we walked together for a little way. There is something deeply satisfying about meeting at the very end of ministry someone who has been reached by what was written forty years before. The books outlive the writer. The words go further than the preacher’s feet can carry him.
When returning to Glasgow a few days later I stopped at Stranraer to visit my old friend Mrs. Cunningham at North-west Castle. Her son the Reverend J. G. Cunningham met me at the railway station, and I told him I must call on another old friend, the Reverend George Sherwood. My family remonstrated against the additional fatigue, but I went anyway — I had always found it hard to be persuaded that a call on a friend was a fatigue rather than a refreshment. On the way I was accosted by an ostler from one of the hotels who asked Mr. Cunningham to tell him the name of the old minister he was with, for he had heard me preach at the Port in the open air and had been glad to hear me. I shook his hand warmly. That unlooked-for encounter gave me as much pleasure as any formal reception.
The meeting between old Mrs. Cunningham and me that day was, as her son described it, truly affecting. We both knew it was our last meeting on earth. We had been friends for many years, and we had both lived long enough to know what a last meeting looks like. We spoke with calm and grateful hearts of the goodness and mercy that had followed us both for more than fourscore years of pilgrimage, and of our hope of welcome at no distant date into the house of the Lord for ever. Within a few months both of us had entered that better country into which no enemy ever entered and from which no friend ever went away.
(Psalm 23:6 KJV)
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE COLLEAGUE AND THE LIGHTENED BURDEN
After much persuasion, I agreed in 1891 to the appointment of a colleague. On the anniversary of my own ordination at Collace fifty-two years before, the Reverend D. M. M’Intyre of College Park in London was inducted as co-pastor and helper in my work at Finnieston. I had resisted the step for longer than was perhaps wise. The reluctance was not born of pride in my own powers. It was the reluctance of a man who could not quite bring himself to believe that the work he had been called to in 1856 was approaching its end.
But the appointment proved to be a great gift. With the burden of the labours thus lightened, my friends rejoiced that years of quiet service might yet be granted. The Sabbath evenings I had formerly given to a final service were now spent in the study in prayer. That, at least, was gain. The hours that the ministry could no longer absorb in the way it once had were given back to the foundational work of the ministry — the prayer that had always been the root from which everything else grew. A man who has given his life to the active work of Christ’s Kingdom need not apologise for the quieter form his service takes in old age. Prayer is not a lesser work than preaching. It is, I sometimes think, the greater one.
I wrote to a friend who was serving in Christ’s work in those years: “Meanwhile, pray for all the congregation and all the souls in the Mission District without ceasing. And so, with the words of another old friend whom the Spirit clothed, this letter closes: Peace, peace be unto thee, and peace be to thine helpers; for thy God helpeth thee.” That sign-off — taking the benediction from First Chronicles twelve, which the armour-bearer of Amasai spoke over David at Ziklag — was the kind of letter-closing that expressed my entire relationship with the work. God helps. The work belongs to Him. Our part is faithfulness. His part is blessing. And that division of labour holds as long as there is work to do and breath to do it with.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
DEATHBED WORK: MINISTRY IN THE LAST DAYS
The last days of my life were spent in the same unceasing ministry for others that had been the joy of the whole of it. As I lay on my dying bed, it was to my work that my thoughts were ever turning. This was not the feverish restlessness of a man who could not let go. It was the habit of a lifetime — the orientation of a soul that had found its deepest satisfaction in the work of saving men and women, and that could not simply turn that orientation off because the body was failing.
Not long before my death I was asked to visit a family in great affliction. They were not members of my church, but I went at once and continued my visits until they were no longer needed. Both the father and daughter were dying at the same time. The father was full of joy at the prospect of being with Jesus, singing of victory in the midst of great bodily weakness. With the daughter it was different — she had peace, but not the confident assurance and triumph her father had, and this troubled her. She told me how it distressed her. I said: “Jeanie, you have peace, have you not? You are resting on what the Lord Jesus has done for you? You see your father was much older when he came to the Lord, and he had more to be forgiven. Consequently his joy at so many sins forgiven is greater than yours.” This answer cheered and comforted her. So much blessing did she receive from my continued visits that she longed daily and hourly for them. Six weeks after her father’s death she fell asleep in Jesus on a Sabbath morning. Throughout the day before, whenever there was a ring or a knock at the door, she said to her mother: “I hope this is Dr. Bonar now, mother!” Shortly before she passed away she was heard saying: “Do come now, quickly, Lord Jesus. Oh, please do come!”
There was also, in those last months, the woman in the hospital who had been given the task of prayer. I said to her “remember us in prayer” and she found in that commission a dignity that her illness had threatened to take away. She was not merely the object of others’ prayers. She was a worker in the army, stationed at a post of intercession while others went out to fight. The image of Aaron and Hur on the mountain with their arms uplifted while Joshua battled below in the valley was one I had used many times for those who were laid aside from active work. The person on the sick bed who prays is not merely waiting. She is holding up the arms of the minister who stands in the pulpit and the worker who knocks on the doors of the closes. Without her prayers, the arms grow heavy. With them, the battle tips.
I also visited, not long before my death, a young woman taken to the hospital and incurably ill. Before leaving I said to her: “Remember us in prayer.” She had been feeling very sad, and those words were like new life to her. Not “we will remember you” — which would have made her the object of kindness — but “you will remember us,” which made her a worker still, a giver still, someone from whose prayers those on the outside world could benefit. She saw that there was still work for her to do, though laid on a bed of sickness. The sick person who prays is not on the margins of the Kingdom’s work. She is at the very centre of it — on the mountain with Aaron and Hur while Joshua fights in the valley below.
On the morning of the last day of my life, a friend called just as I was having a poultice administered for my illness. I looked up brightly and said: “I am just like Hezekiah: I am getting on a plaster!” The reference was to the second book of Kings, where Isaiah commanded a lump of figs to be laid on Hezekiah’s boil for his healing. That a man should be making a scripture allusion and turning it into a small joke on the morning of the day he would die says something about the texture of a life in which the Bible had become so thoroughly the medium of all thought that it surfaced even in weakness, even in the final hours, even in the last breath of morning conversation before the day closed.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE VISION OF THE CROWN: WHAT I BELIEVED ABOUT DYING
When I thought about dying, I said once, I thought of it something in this way. I imagined myself going home from a meeting some night, not feeling very well. Growing worse. Becoming unconscious. And then knowing nothing more until I was in the presence of a Throne. There were seats around the Throne, and I was pointed to one that was vacant. I was told it was for me. Then I saw a Hand, and when I looked at it I saw it was a pierced Hand — the hand that had borne the nail for me — and it held a crown over my head. But the weight of glory was so great I could not bear it, and so I lifted it off and cast it at the foot of the Throne, saying: “Thou art worthy; for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood!”
That vision of the crown and the casting down expresses everything I believed about what death is for those who belong to Christ. It is not a defeat. It is not an interruption. It is a completion — the moment when the work done in the long dimness of faith gives way to the full light of vision, and the first response of the soul that has at last seen the King face to face is not self-congratulation but worship. I will not be thinking about my ministry in that moment. I will be thinking about His.
I had said often in my preaching: “When I think of dying, I think of it as going home from a meeting.” I used the ordinary word. Not going to judgment. Not entering the unknown. Going home from a meeting. The man who has spent his life in the company of Christ has nothing to dread in the moment of leaving the meeting and walking home in the dark. He has walked home from meetings a thousand times. He knows the road. He knows the One who walks with him. The only difference is that this time, instead of the door of the manse at the end of the walk, it will be the door of the Father’s house. And the light inside will never go out.
On the thirty-first of October 1892, two months before my death, I wrote to a friend about the sudden death of a colleague in Dundee: “What a surprise to find himself all at once among those who do immediately pass into glory. May we be found of Him in peace, like our brother, when our evening comes.” The evening came for me on the thirtieth of December 1892. After only two days of illness, I passed gently within the veil.
It was afterward written of me, as it was written of Enoch long before: “He walked with God, and was not, for God took him.” By my dying bed, as I passed, my children were singing the Twenty-third Psalm — the same psalm that their mother Isabella had sung through her trials forty years before, the psalm she had said was her never-failing resort, the one that had been “too much for her” to hear in church. Now it calmed the hearts of her children as they watched their father take his gentle passage through the valley of the shadow of death into the Father’s house beyond.
(Revelation 1:5–6 KJV)
“Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE LEGACY: HE BEING DEAD YET SPEAKETH
What is left when a man’s life is over? The books remain, and they speak. The Memoir of M’Cheyne, the Commentary on Leviticus, the Christ and His Church in the Psalms, the smaller books and tracts and lectures — these continued their work after the hand that wrote them was still. Letters came from ministers on every continent who had been set on fire by the Memoir. The lady in the Highlands who found life to her soul as she read it. The unconverted curate who began reading M’Cheyne’s sermons to his congregation and was astonished to find his people coming to him with questions about salvation. The American gentleman brought to Christ while reading the Memoir who came to Dundee to spend his first Sabbath in Scotland at St. Peter’s, that he might worship where M’Cheyne had preached.
The congregation at Finnieston remains. The men and women who were converted during forty years of ministry in the district along the Clyde — who came as strangers from the country and were put into Bible classes within the week, who came as drunkards and were drawn through the door of the Mission hall by a hand on the arm, who came as anxious inquirers to the manse door and left knowing that the blood of Christ covered all their sins. The faces that were at the Jubilee gathering in 1888, carrying the evidence of what Christ had done in them over thirty and forty years. The workers scattered across the world who received the prayer at the close of a student gathering: “And when we all meet together again, may it be with our bosoms filled with sheaves!”
The Hebrew words over the door of the new Finnieston church — He that winneth souls is wise — remain carved in stone. Those words were chosen as an indication of the object of the church’s existence, and also in the hope that some Jews passing by might see them and come in. I do not know whether any ever did. But I believe the hope was well-founded, because God takes note of what is done in hope as well as what is done in certainty. The Collace people said that when I came, the parish was a spiritual desert, and when I left it was a watered garden. The Finnieston people — after forty years in one of the poorest and most spiritually indifferent districts of industrial Glasgow — could make the same report. Not because of any special power in the minister. Because of the faithfulness of the God who said: my word shall not return unto me void.
What is also left is a model of ministry — a demonstration that fifty years of faithfulness to one calling, in two places, without fame-seeking or innovation for its own sake, anchored in daily prayer and daily Scripture and daily pastoral work, is the shape of a fruitful life. I did not want to be remembered as a great man. I said at my Jubilee what I meant: I never thought I did more than draw the water and let the flock drink. The water was God’s. The spring was God’s. The drawing and carrying was mine, and what is mine in the story is of no particular interest to anyone. What is His in the story is everything.
Those who knew me in life said: “I never met him without being the better for it.” The secret, as they themselves perceived, lay in the everyday fellowship with the Lord. Not in the gifts, not in the learning, not in the long experience of ministry. In the fellowship. A man who walks daily with Christ will, by the simple fact of the walking, become someone whose company leaves those around him better than it found them. Not because he is trying to improve them, but because what is in him overflows — because the cup that is being filled from above runs over onto those who are near it.
He walked with God, and was not, for God took him.
That is the whole of it. That is the life. The walking, and then the taking. Sixty-two years of walking that began on a Sabbath in October 1830 in a quiet room in Edinburgh, with a man reading Guthrie’s Trial of a Saving Interest and finding, to his amazement and joy, that he simply believed. That he received. That he did nothing but receive. And then sixty-two years of walking in the company of the One who had been received, through Collace and Finnieston and the Holy Land and Northfield and a thousand pastoral visits and a hundred thousand mornings at the Mercy-seat, until the long walk ended in the Father’s house on the thirtieth of December 1892 and the walking became sight and the faith became home.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆