CHAPTER twO
CHAPTER twO
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Collace: Dry Bones and Living Water
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
There is a village in Perthshire called Collace, set at the foot of Dunsinnane Hill, half-hidden among trees and hedgerows in the rich, level lands of Strathmore. To the north, the long dark line of the Grampians throws a distant grandeur over the soft Lowland scenery. A square-towered parish church peeps out from the trees. And over the doorway of the manse — the house that became my home, my study, my place of prayer, and my launching pad into ministry — I had carved in Hebrew the words that had become the motto of my life: He that winneth souls is wise.
I arrived at Collace in 1838, a young minister of twenty-eight. The old minister before me had served the parish for nearly fifty years, and in all that time it was reckoned that only one woman in the entire congregation had received any lasting spiritual good from his ministry. He himself had confided to others that he feared the coming of someone who would preach what he called the new doctrines. I was that someone. And the doctrines I preached were older than Edinburgh, older than Scotland, older than the Church itself — as old as the Cross of Calvary and the empty tomb outside Jerusalem.
When I came to Collace, there were perhaps not more than half a dozen living Christians in the whole place. The Sabbath congregation sat through services in a kind of spiritual torpor that broke my heart. Family worship was almost unknown in the cottages. The public house in the village was at least as well attended as the church. People were polite, even outwardly religious in manner, but the fire of the Holy Spirit had not touched them. They were, in the language of the prophet Ezekiel, dry bones — a whole valley of them.
(Ezekiel 37:2 KJV)
“And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.”
People sometimes ask what a minister does when he arrives in a new parish and finds it utterly cold. The answer is: he prays. He prays in his study before the sun rises. He prays as he walks the roads to his visiting. He prays at the bedsides of the sick and the dying. He prays over the names of his people, one by one, as a mother prays over the names of her children. And he trusts that the God who has sent him is not unaware of the coldness of the field He has assigned him. The coldest field in Scotland is not beyond the reach of the rain of the Spirit.
And I had come to prophesy. Not in my own strength — God forbid that any minister should trust his own strength for a single morning’s work, let alone a lifetime’s ministry. But in the strength of the Lord who had sent me, and in the power of the Spirit who had called me, I had come to Collace to preach the Word until the valley shook and the dry bones took on flesh and the breath of God filled them.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE SHAPE OF MY DAYS: PRAYER, PREACHING, AND PASTORAL WORK
My days at Collace settled into a rhythm that I believe was appointed by God. I rose early — at six o’clock in the summer mornings, seven in the winter — and the first hours of the day belonged to God alone. Prayer was not a supplement to my ministry; it was the foundation of it. I had learned from my years of searching, and from watching the life of M’Cheyne, that a preacher who does not pray in private is only an actor in a pulpit. The words may come out the same, but the power is missing. And it is the power that saves souls.
I prepared my sermons with care, but I never fully wrote them out. In the pulpit I used only small pieces of paper on which the main points were jotted down in shorthand. One windy day, preaching in the tent at Kinrossie after the Disruption had sent us out of doors, a puff of wind blew my notes clean off the pulpit. The congregation watched, wide-eyed, to see what I would do. I am glad to say the sermon continued without them. The truth was already in my heart. The notes were only scaffolding; they were not the building itself.
Every Sabbath morning at ten o’clock I conducted a Bible class for young men and women, which was attended with much blessing. I watched that class become a means of stirring up many to search the Scriptures, and of leading them to Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. One old woman who had come to love the Word of God said to me with a simplicity that made me smile and think at the same time: “I wonder how God’s people get through the Bible, for I am often stopped a whole day at one verse.” I thought: if all my people read the Bible like that — stopping a whole day at a single verse to let it speak — Scotland would be a very different country.
Visitation was the second great pillar of my ministry. I believed then, and I believe now, that there is a blessing that rests on visiting which no amount of pulpit eloquence can replace. A minister who knows only his people’s faces but not their circumstances, their sorrows, their temptations, their slow growth in grace — that minister is missing half his calling. I wrote to a friend in those Collace years: “I would go on in this work weekly, if not daily, even if not a soul got good from it but myself. I see the sad wounds of my flock. I see their slow growth in grace. I discover how few really are awakened, how few are in earnest, how very few are saved. It is humbling and painful beyond most things.”
Those visiting rounds took me into cottages where the floors were earth and the fire was peat, into farmyards where men worked from first light to last, into the homes of old women who had lived their whole lives in the shadow of Dunsinnane Hill. I rode on horseback from hamlet to hamlet, stopping to ask after a sick child, to pray with a dying man, to sit with a young woman in spiritual distress. My methods of finding out the state of souls were often simple. I would ask a household, “What was your chapter at family worship this morning?” In that one question I could discover whether a family had family worship at all, and whether they paid it any real attention.
On one occasion I called on a good woman who was busy at her washing-tub. She looked up apologetically: “O Doctor, you always find me in a mess.” I looked at her and said, “But there’s someone helping you.” She looked around, puzzled. “No.” I said, “Yes — your Elder Brother is with you.” She told me afterward that from that day to her last, she never began a day’s work without remembering those words: “My Elder Brother is with me.” That is the kind of pastoral word that costs nothing to speak and lasts a lifetime in the soul that hears it. It costs the minister nothing because the truth already exists. He simply has to give it its right name.
I went also to an old bed-ridden man who reminded me, after many years had passed, of a sermon I had preached. “I mind,” he said, “you spoke about the Cave of Adullam. ‘Do you like the Cave, and do you like the Captain? Then come in — come in no other condition.’ My, it sank into my heart like oil.” Years had passed since that sermon. The old man had carried those words all the long time between, turning them over in his memory like a precious stone, drawing comfort from them in the long nights of sickness and doubt. I never despised the slow work again after that visit. God does His ripening in His own time, and the fruit that takes longest is sometimes the sweetest.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE REVIVAL COMES: SCOTLAND’S GREAT AWAKENING OF 1839–40
I had been in Collace only a year when the great revival of 1839–40 swept through Scotland. I was away from my parish at the time, having been appointed as one of four members of a deputation to travel to the Land of Israel. When we returned, we came home into scenes of spiritual awakening such as Scotland had not witnessed in living memory. The blessing reached Collace as it reached many other places, and the pastor’s heart rejoiced to find souls seeking Christ in all parts of the parish.
What struck me most about that revival was its depth and reality. This was not shallow excitement or emotional agitation that passes as quickly as it comes. There was deep conviction of sin — a genuine, shattering awareness of how far men and women had lived from God. One man who had been a drunkard was brought to the Saviour and became afterward an elder in the church and a consistent follower of Christ. On his deathbed he said: “I am going to the God of the Bible to enjoy Him. I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Another, describing his conversion, said: “Havena I been stoopid, sir? It was sae simple, just as if I had stoopit down and lifted up a clod at my feet.”
I remember a sawyer who was busy at his work when the light of Christ broke upon him. He was so overwhelmed with joy that he began to preach to his fellow workman on the spot, and had to cry out: “Lord, keep back some o’ the licht, for this poor vessel is not able to contain it!” A man in the village of Sachar had been so terribly awakened that for many days he was almost ready to take his own life in his misery — so fierce was his conviction of sin and his terror of God’s judgment. After his conversion he became a useful member of the church, and his frequent prayer at our prayer meetings was the most earnest thing I ever heard: “Wauken them up, Lord, wauken them up!” He had been there himself. He knew what it was to be asleep, and he could not bear to see others slumbering in the same condition.
One woman, much in spiritual distress, dreamed that she saw a wide river rolling between her and Christ. She looked and looked at Him on the other side, and as she looked, she suddenly found herself standing beside Him. She awoke and saw the meaning of her dream. That is grace. That is the Gospel in a picture. There is no river between the soul and Christ that His own love cannot bridge. The very act of looking toward Him is the beginning of the crossing.
(Romans 5:8 KJV)
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
A little company of factory girls used to walk seven miles from Stanley to attend the services at Collace during those times of blessing. They had to cross the river Tay on their way, and when they were returning home late one night, the ferryman refused to take them over. So they lay down cheerfully to sleep among the bushes till the morning. The thirst for the Word of God was very great. Not only did the people walk long distances to hear, but they never seemed to grow tired of listening. The Word was living and powerful, and they knew it.
When I came to Collace there were perhaps not more than half a dozen living Christians. By the time the revival had run its course, the parish looked entirely different. Few idlers were to be seen outside the cottage doors on a Sabbath day. Family worship was conducted morning and evening in nearly every household. The one public house in the parish was closed through my efforts and the influence of a friend — and it was never reopened. Even from the outside, Collace had been transformed.
Yet I was never satisfied. Even in the midst of revival blessing, I longed for more. I wrote to my brother Horatius: “It is truly encouraging to hear of souls awakened, and yet it is also alarming that there should be so few — alarming to ourselves who preach, since we have a promise. I often feel quite certain that my own prayerlessness is the reason why so few of my people are awakened. The thought fills me with pain, and excites me to a new course of prayer.” That was always my response to both revival and drought alike: more prayer.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DISRUPTION OF 1843: WALKING OUT FOR CHRIST’S HEADSHIP
No account of my Collace years would be complete without the great Disruption of 1843 — both one of the most painful and one of the most glorious events in Scottish church history during my lifetime. The crisis had been building for years. Many ministers believed the government had assumed too much control over the Church of Scotland, particularly over the appointment of ministers to parishes. The principle at stake was simple but profound: Is Jesus Christ the head of His church, or is the state? Could a congregation be compelled to receive a minister chosen by a patron against the will of the people and the judgment of the church herself?
For men of conscience, there was only one answer. In May 1843, at the General Assembly in Edinburgh, more than four hundred ministers rose from their seats, signed the Deed of Demission, and walked out of the Established Church to form the Free Church of Scotland. I was among them. We gave up our church buildings. We gave up our manses. In many cases we gave up our salaries and our security. We walked out into an uncertain future with nothing but our conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord of His church, and that no earthly power has the right to override Him.
Some have asked whether I hesitated. I will not pretend I did not feel the weight of what we were doing. To leave behind the walls where I had preached and prayed, to see my people uncertain and afraid — this was not a thing to be done lightly. But the clarity of the principle made the decision, in the end, not difficult. There is a higher loyalty than loyalty to an institution. When loyalty to an institution and loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ conflict, a minister of the Gospel can have only one answer.
The old minister who remained in the establishment, when asked afterward how he was getting on without the congregation, replied with characteristic Scottish humor: “Oh fine — opposition’s the life of trade!” But for our Free Church congregation, the early months after the Disruption were a genuine testing. We met for worship in a large canvas tent near Kinrossie, come rain or shine. Many remarkable scenes were witnessed in that tent. People came from miles around for the Communion services. The very inconvenience of our situation — the tent with its canvas walls, the summer wind pressing against them, the congregation packed close together — seemed to drive us closer to God.
(Hebrews 13:14 KJV)
“For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”
One Communion season in that tent stands most vividly in my memory. It was in June, shortly after the Disruption, and a great crowd had assembled — including many who had come all the way from Dundee, where M’Cheyne had been their beloved minister. He had died just a few months before, in March 1843, at only twenty-nine years of age. When I gave the closing address after the Tables and referred to him as standing now on the mountain of myrrh until the day break, a great hush came over the congregation. Then the sound of weeping — quiet, deep, sorrowful weeping from the Dundee people who had loved him. I was much affected myself. It was a weeping congregation. The loss of M’Cheyne was a wound that would not close quickly. But even in that grief, Christ was present. The bread and the wine were still on the Table, pointing to the One who had gone before us and who would come again to receive us to Himself.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
MARRIAGE AND THE MANSE: ISABELLA AND THE LIFE OF THE HOME
In 1848, ten years after my settlement at Collace, I married Isabella Dickson of Edinburgh — a woman of remarkable grace, deep spiritual life, and unwavering devotion to Christ and to those she served. She was the kind of partner for whom a minister of the Gospel can only give thanks to God.
Isabella had come to faith in Christ during the revival in Edinburgh in 1842. What had struck her most deeply was the holiness of M’Cheyne — not what he said, but what he was. She told me afterward: “There was something singularly attractive about Mr. M’Cheyne’s holiness. It was not his matter nor his manner either that struck me; it was just the living epistle of Christ — a picture so lovely, I felt I would have given all the world to be as he was, but knew all the time I was dead in sins.” The Gospel had reached her through the window of a holy life. And it held her, and sustained her, through all the years that followed.
Our home at the manse became a place of hospitality and prayer. Three children were born there before we moved to Glasgow. Isabella brought warmth and order to the household and a wisdom in ministry that I leaned on heavily. On the first Sabbath after our marriage, I gave out these lines of the Sixteenth Psalm to be sung by the congregation — and I meant every word:
“Unto me happily the lines in pleasant places fell; Yea, the inheritance I got in beauty doth excel.” —Psalm 16, as sung by Andrew Bonar on his first Sabbath as a married man
The years of our partnership at Collace taught me something I could never have learned from books: that pastoral ministry is not a profession but a life. It is not something a man does from nine to five and then sets aside. It is what he is. The shepherd does not stop being a shepherd when he goes indoors. He is thinking of the sheep at the supper table, praying for them at midnight. And the manse family becomes, in the best cases, a little embodiment of the Kingdom — a household where Christ is honored, where strangers are welcomed, and where the poor and troubled find both bread and comfort.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
SOULS THAT I CANNOT FORGET: STORIES FROM THE VISITING ROUNDS
Of all the things I did at Collace, it is the individual souls that remain most vivid. The sermons are mostly forgotten now, even by me. But the faces remain. The woman who wept at the church door after a sermon that had “grippit her sair.” The boy holding my horse outside a cottage, to whom I turned as I remounted and asked quietly, “Do you ever think you have a soul?” — and who never forgot that question for the rest of his life.
Coming home late one night from a meeting, I lost my way on the dark roads between the villages. As I wandered I said to myself: “Can I give thanks for this?” In a short time I came to a house, and was just going to knock for directions when a girl came out and exclaimed, “Mr. Bonar! You’re the very person I want to see.” I found she was in great distress of mind about her soul. I gave thanks that in losing my way among the hills I had been led to find a soul. The Lord plans our detours as carefully as our straight paths. He is never lost, even when we are.
On another winter evening, I was walking to Scone to preach and overtook a woman on the road. We talked as we walked, and when we parted I gave her a tract. Some time later a widow appeared at the church after a service and waited until the congregation had dispersed. She said to me: “I am the woman you spoke to that dark night on the road to Scone and never saw. You gave me a tract. My son at home, long ill, had been troubled about himself, and that tract was the very one for him, and brought light to his soul. He made me come over from Kinnaird to tell you.” I have never taken for granted the power of a simple word spoken in passing, or a small piece of printed truth pressed into a stranger’s hand on a dark road.
There was also a woman who was so sorely tried by the Tempter that she went out into the fields alone, hoping to find relief from his evil suggestions. Satan followed her there, and told her that the Old Testament was not true. She turned to the New Testament, but he said that was not true either. When she came at last to the Metrical Psalms, the devil said those were not true either — but she got a little rest at the paraphrase: Behold the Saviour on the Cross. Then the Tempter tried to persuade her that there was no God at all, and that she had no soul. When tempted to disbelieve everything, she sat down and told him that the places in the Bible were real — for Mr. Bonar had seen them when he was in Palestine. And the Tempter answered: “Mr. Bonar is a liar!”
That woman’s struggle taught me something I have never forgotten: that the enemy of souls is relentless, cunning, and without mercy. He will attack a believer at the most vulnerable point he can find. The answer is never to argue with him, but to press past his arguments to the Person of Christ and the facts of the Gospel. The Saviour on the Cross is the answer to every lie the devil can tell. He cannot produce a greater fact than Calvary. Let the believer plant his feet there and refuse to be moved.
(Isaiah 55:11 KJV)
“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE MISSION TO THE HOLY LAND: A SHAPING JOURNEY
Before closing this account of my Collace years I must speak of the mission to the Holy Land in 1839, which left marks upon my preaching and my thinking that never faded. Along with M’Cheyne, Dr. Alexander Black, and Dr. Alexander Keith, I was appointed by the General Assembly to travel to Palestine and investigate the condition of the Jewish people. We traveled through Europe, Egypt, the Sinai, the Holy Land and Syria, and returned to Scotland in the autumn of 1839. The journey was arduous, sometimes dangerous, and overwhelmingly beautiful.
To stand in Jerusalem — to stand on the Mount of Olives and look out over the city where Christ had wept, had been betrayed, had been crucified, had risen from the dead — was to have the whole Word of God open before me in another form. The desolation of the land, the scattered and suffering Jewish people, the broken walls and ruined vineyards — all of it was a living commentary on the faithfulness of God. If He had kept His word about judgment with such terrible precision, would He not keep His promises of restoration with equal faithfulness? I could not see how a man could visit that land with an open Bible and doubt the truth of a single promise God had ever spoken.
I brought back from that journey a stone from Mount Sinai, an olive leaf from Gethsemane, a shell from the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and a piece of desert shittim-wood. These became texts from which I preached for the rest of my ministry, making the scenes and incidents of the Bible real and living for my people in Perthshire. When I held up those ears of barley plucked on Mount Zion and said to a congregation, “If God keeps His threatenings so faithfully, will He not keep His promises?” — I was speaking not from imagination but from standing where it happened.
A beautiful incident occurred at Kelso not long after my return. My brother Horatius was preaching there, and I was assisting. When I showed some of those ears of barley plucked on Mount Zion and said, “If God keeps His threatenings so faithfully, will He not keep His promises?” — the next day an old woman sent for me. As soon as I entered her house she held up her hands and exclaimed: “Oh, those ears of barley! Those ears of barley!” She told me that when I spoke the night before, she had thought: if God kept His word about ears of barley, would He not keep it about the salvation of a soul? And all her doubts had fled. The living Word, illustrated by a handful of grain from the land where Christ walked — that was enough for God to work with. He needs very little to save a soul, when He chooses to save.
(Romans 11:26 KJV)
“And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
LETTERS TO FRIENDS: THE SOUL OF A SHEPHERD
During my years at Collace I was a prolific letter-writer. Not from a love of writing for its own sake — I had little enough time for that — but because letters were, in those days before the telegraph and the telephone, the only way a shepherd could reach sheep scattered across the country. And scattered they were: friends from my Edinburgh days now serving in distant parishes, converts from Collace who had moved to Glasgow or Dundee or Perth, young men struggling in their first years of ministry who needed encouragement. To all of them I wrote, often late at night by candlelight when the day’s work in the parish was done.
A letter I sent to my dear friend John Milne in Perth in 1846 gives something of the flavour of those years. The land spiritually was dry, the labourers were weary, and prayer seemed to be the only answer: “O what need of prayer! The land lies dead. Jesus is little loved even by His own. Who are the mighty men that will break through the host of the Philistines to bring Him one cup of water? O brother, let us lie low. Let us seek the mourning as for an only son.”
There is a danger, when we speak of great revivals and remarkable conversions, of making the ministry seem more dramatic than it is. The truth is that much of the work of a country minister in those years consisted of exactly that — lying low, mourning, praying, writing letters, and waiting for God. The harvest did not come every season. There were long dry summers when the preaching seemed to fall on stony ground, when the prayer meetings felt thin and formal, when the visiting produced nothing but polite exchanges. In those seasons the only resource was the Word of God and the memory of what God had already done.
I found great strength in a practice that I commended to every minister I knew: reading straight through the entire Bible, cover to cover, year by year. Not trusting to little text-books or devotional anthologies, however good, but living in the whole Book — the long genealogies, the detailed instructions for the Tabernacle, the difficult prophecies, the Psalms that cry out to a silent heaven, the promises that stretch beyond the horizon of any single human life. I used to ask my people: “Have you got a letter from the King today?” That was how I thought of the daily portion of Scripture. A letter from the King, written personally for the one who received it, full of news about His purposes and promises and plans.
The Word sustained me at Collace more than anything else. When the people were difficult, when the work seemed fruitless, when my own heart was dry and faithless, the Word was there — living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. I wrote to a friend: “Only the Word, and God there.” That is all. It sounds very simple. But in the long middle years of a country ministry, when the dramatic conversions of revival have given way to the steady unremarkable work of Christian nurture, “only the Word, and God there” is the whole of it. The minister who has learned to live by those words alone will finish his course with joy.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
FAREWELL TO COLLACE: WHAT EIGHTEEN YEARS TAUGHT ME
I served the parish of Collace for eighteen years. In October 1856 I accepted a call to Finnieston Free Church in Glasgow, and preached my farewell sermon to the people I had loved and served through revival and disruption, through births and deaths, through times of joy and times of grief. The people of Collace said to me at my jubilee celebration in 1888, more than thirty years after I had gone: “When you came among us in 1839, Collace, as regards spiritual life, was comparatively a desert. When you left, it was like a watered garden — a field that the Lord had blessed.”
I received those words with deep gratitude and considerable humility. The credit belonged entirely to God. I had only been the instrument. But God had chosen to work through faithful, prayerful, unspectacular pastoral ministry in a small country parish, and the result was a watered garden. That is the promise of the Word, and it did not fail at Collace.
My farewell sermon was among the most searching I ever preached. Standing in that familiar pulpit, looking out at the faces I had watched grow from uncertainty to faith, from childhood to age, I said:
“Shall I see any of these faces on which I have so often looked, and those which have so oft looked up to me, on the left hand? Shall any one here gaze on an angry Judge? I beseech you, by remembrance of past Sabbaths, by the many witnesses that the Lord sent among you, by the messages of grace so many and so varied — receive Christ now.” —Andrew A. Bonar, Farewell Sermon at Collace, October 19, 1856
The urgency of the Gospel never left me. At Collace I had learned that every sermon might be the last a soul would hear, that every pastoral visit might be the final opportunity to press Christ upon a heart that was drawing near eternity. That awareness did not produce panic or despair in me. It produced a steady, warm, unhurried earnestness — the kind that comes not from fear of failure but from love of the people and love of the Saviour.
Collace taught me patience — that revival does not come on demand, and that a minister must sow in tears before he reaps in joy. It taught me that small things matter enormously — a word to a boy, a tract on a dark road, a visiting question at a cottage door. It taught me the power of prayer beyond what I could calculate or observe. And above all, it taught me the preciousness of Jesus Christ as the daily companion of a minister’s life — the faithful Shepherd who carries His sheep even when they cannot see His face.
On riding home on Sabbath evenings after a full day’s work, I would sometimes feel overwhelmed by a sense of insufficiency — that I had said too little, loved too little, prayed too little, done too little for the souls in my care. But then the words of that great Psalm would come: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee.” And the sufficiency of Christ would cover the insufficiency of Andrew Bonar, and I would go home at peace.
That is the testimony of Collace. Not great preaching, though God was pleased to use the preaching. Not great pastoral skill, though I tried to visit faithfully. But great grace. The grace of a Saviour who showed up in a small Scottish parish, claimed the dry bones for Himself, and breathed life into them. To Him be all the glory.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆