CHAPTER five
CHAPTER five
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Robert Murray M’Cheyne: A Friendship Forged in Eternity
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
There are friendships that merely accompany a life, and there are friendships that shape it. My friendship with Robert Murray M’Cheyne was of the second kind. It reached so deep into the formation of my ministry, my theology, my understanding of what a minister of Jesus Christ is called to be, that I cannot speak honestly about my own life without speaking extensively about his. He was younger than I by a year, yet in the things of God he was always the elder. He was taken at twenty-nine years of age, yet the influence of his life has outlasted my own long ministry of more than half a century. This is one of the mysteries of God’s ways — that a brief life lived wholly for Christ can do more than a long one lived in diluted devotion.
We met in the early 1830s in Edinburgh, in that remarkable circle of young men who were then preparing for the ministry. Dr. Moody-Stuart, who was among us, described our early meeting: his introduction to me came through M’Cheyne, and M’Cheyne invited a small group to meet weekly for prayer in his house. Those weekly prayer meetings, Moody-Stuart later wrote, were “a singularly pleasant and fruitful meeting, for we were of one heart and one mind, and the Lord Jesus, according to His promise, was in the midst of us with the joy of His salvation.” Those words capture something true about what those student years were like. We were young, we were imperfect, we had much to learn. But we were in earnest, and the Lord was among us.
M’Cheyne was unlike anyone I had ever known. Dr. Candlish remarked to Moody-Stuart in those years: “I can’t understand M’Cheyne — grace seems to be natural to him.” A minister in the north who met him said: “He is the most Jesus-like man I ever met with,” and went to his room to weep. A servant girl in a house where he stayed described him simply as “deein’ to hae folk converted.” That was the essence of it. He was dying to have people converted. Not professionally concerned with conversion, not theoretically interested in it — dying for it. Spending himself in it. And the spending showed.
I was not without my own earnestness in those years, and I hope it was genuine. But in M’Cheyne I saw something qualitatively different from myself, and I was both humbled and stirred by it. The holiness that his contemporaries remarked on so consistently was not the holiness of the recluse or the ascetic. It was the holiness of a man wholly given over to Jesus Christ — a man for whom Christ was not a doctrine to be defended but a Person to be loved, and whose love for Christ expressed itself in a burning, aching desire for the salvation of souls. I have never known anyone else quite like him. And the ache of his early death has never entirely left me.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
LETTERS BETWEEN FRIENDS: IRON SHARPENING IRON
M’Cheyne and I were in regular correspondence during the years when he was at Dundee and I was at Collace. Those letters — some of which I have preserved and which I hope will outlast both of us — are among the richest records of what a godly friendship between two ministers can look like. They are full of theological discussion, of pastoral concern, of mutual encouragement and mutual rebuke. They are the letters of two men who took each other’s spiritual welfare as seriously as their own.
In 1836, when I was working as a missionary in Edinburgh without any prospect yet of a settled sphere of labour, M’Cheyne wrote to me from Dundee:
“Dear Andrew, God is keeping you in the hollow of His hand. When a warrior begins to fight, he never throws his best dart at the enemy first. He throws some weak arrows among them, just to begin the contest; he keeps his polished shaft for the hottest of the fight. Your day is coming, or, if you be lifted away from the scene of conflict to the land of peace and triumph, we will both adore the Sovereign Father of our Lord Jesus, who loves some so well that He must have them to minister to Himself in praises rather than in conflicts.” —Robert Murray M’Cheyne, letter to Andrew Bonar, January 19, 1838
Those words meant a great deal to me in a season of uncertainty and waiting. The polished shaft for the hottest of the fight — that image stayed with me through the long months of patient preparation for a ministry I could not yet see. God was doing something with the waiting that could not have been done in the working. The delay was not waste. It was sharpening.
When the call to Collace came in 1838, M’Cheyne wrote immediately with his characteristic blend of Scripture, affection, and directness:
“Now then, dear Andrew, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech men by us. We, then, as fellow-workers with God must beseech men not to receive the grace of God in vain. May God count you faithful, putting you into the ministry, and may the arms of your hands be made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob.” —Robert Murray M’Cheyne, letter to Andrew Bonar, July 17, 1838
He also, in the same period, gave me some perfectly practical advice about my preaching that I have never entirely forgotten: “Dear Andrew, study to express yourself very clearly. I sometimes observe obscurity of expression. Form your sentences very regularly. It sometimes strikes me you begin a sentence before you know where you are to end it, or what is to come in at the end.” That is the kind of thing a friend can say, and only a friend. A man who takes such a correction in a spirit of humility and applies it will be a better preacher for it. I tried to be that man.
M’Cheyne also gave me one of the most searching rebukes I ever received in my preaching life. We had both been at St. Peter’s, Dundee, and I had preached on the text, “Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty.” It was a sermon I felt good about — full of the glories of Christ, intended to lift the hearts of believers toward the vision of God. As we walked home together afterward, M’Cheyne said to me: “Brother, I enjoyed your sermon; to me it was sweet. You and I and many, I trust, in our congregations shall see the King in His beauty. But, my brother, you forgot there might be many listening to you tonight, who, unless they are changed by the grace of God, shall never see Him in His beauty.”
I have never recovered from that rebuke, and I thank God that I have not. From that evening I made it my fixed practice never to preach a sermon in which I did not commend Christ to the unsaved, and rarely, if ever, to close a message without urging on my hearers the immediate acceptance of the Saviour. The most glorious sermon about the beauty of Christ, if it does not lead the unconverted to the One of whose beauty it speaks, has left its most important work undone. A preacher who forgets there are unsaved people in his congregation is a shepherd who has forgotten the lost sheep.
(Luke 19:10 KJV)
“For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
M’CHEYNE AT COLLACE: THE NIGHTS THAT WOULD NOT END
M’Cheyne visited me at Collace more than once during the years of his ministry at Dundee, riding over on horseback through all weathers to help with services and to spend time in prayer and fellowship. Those visits left an impression on the people of Collace that lingered for decades afterward. My old servant used to tell, years after, of M’Cheyne’s last visit to Collace. He preached in the church, and the people were “standin’ out to the gate,” she said, with the windows pulled down so that those outside could hear. He preached on the text “Lest I myself should be a castaway.” The service lasted until eleven o’clock at night, because the folk could not give over listening and M’Cheyne could not give over speaking.
My servant remembered: “I mind the time when Mr. Bonar couldna get his tea ta’en for folk comin’ and speerin’ if conversion was true. Oh, to hear Mr. M’Cheyne at prayers in the mornin’! It was as if he could never gi’e ower, he had sae muckle to ask. Ye would hae thocht the very walls would speak again. He used to rise at six on the Sabbath mornin’, and go to bed at twelve at nicht, for he said he likit to have the whole day alone with God.”
That last detail — rising at six, retiring at midnight, the whole Sabbath spent in the presence of God — was characteristic. M’Cheyne’s relationship with God was not an occasional resource to be drawn on when needed. It was the atmosphere in which he lived, as constant and as necessary as the air he breathed. He could no more have functioned without that communion than a fire can burn without oxygen. And it showed in everything he said and did. When he came to a village, people felt that something had entered the room with him. They did not always know what to call it. It was holiness — not the defensive, anxious holiness of a man who is afraid of sinning, but the radiant, overflowing holiness of a man who is in love with the God of all holiness.
As he came to the door of the manse one wintry day, he said: “I have been riding all the way today through the pure white snow, and that verse has been in my mind all the time: ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’” That is M’Cheyne in a sentence. The whole created world was, to him, a continuous sermon about Christ. The snow preached justification. The sunrise preached resurrection. The deep places of the sea preached the unfathomable mercy of God. He could not look at anything without being reminded of the Saviour. And that instinct — the Christ-saturated perception of creation — is something I prayed for and pursued all my own life, though I never attained it as fully as he did.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DEATH OF ROBERT MURRAY M’CHEYNE: MARCH 25, 1843
M’Cheyne died on the 25th of March, 1843. He was twenty-nine years old. I was thirty-three. He had been ill — had overtaxed himself terribly in the service of Christ, pouring out his physical strength in visitation during a typhus epidemic in Dundee, and his body, never robust, had given way. He was attended on his deathbed by those who loved him, and he passed with a quietness that those present described as beautiful. The last word he was heard to say was “Holy.”
I cannot speak of those days without emotion, even now, after half a century. When the news came I felt as though one of the pillars of my world had been removed. Not only a friend — though he was the dearest friend I had in ministry — but a standard-bearer, a man whose holiness had been a constant silent reproach and encouragement to my own spiritual life. With M’Cheyne alive and praying in Dundee, I felt that Scotland was in better hands than my own. With him gone, the weight of what remained felt heavier.
I wrote afterward that his early death, “though regarded as an irreparable loss to the Church of God, was destined, through the publication of his Memoir, to effect perhaps a greater work than his prolonged life could have accomplished.” That was not mere consolation — it was something I came to believe more deeply with every passing decade. The Memoir has gone around the world. It has reached places his feet never visited and touched souls who were born a century after his death. I have received letters from ministers in America, in India, in Africa, who say that the Memoir of M’Cheyne was what God used to set their hearts on fire for the Gospel. And every one of those letters humbles me with the same question that I wrote in my diary in America in 1881: “Why was I commissioned to write that book? How poor have been my returns of thankfulness.”
The 25th of March was always remembered by me as the day on which Robert M’Cheyne went home. Thirty years after his death, visiting St. Peter’s Church in Dundee, I wrote: “There is still some peculiar fragrance in the air round Robert M’Cheyne’s tomb!” That fragrance is real. Not a physical thing, of course — but a spiritual reality. The life that was so thoroughly consecrated to Christ leaves something behind, even in the places where it was lived, that others can sense. There are spots on this earth that are holy because of the prayers that have been prayed there, the tears that have been wept there, the surrenders that have been made there. The churchyard at Dundee is one of them.
(Hebrews 11:4 KJV)
“By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
WRITING THE MEMOIR: A SACRED AND HUMBLING TASK
The task of writing the Memoir of Robert Murray M’Cheyne fell to me almost by default. I had been his closest friend among those who were now in a position to undertake it. I had his letters, his journals, his sermons, his diary. I had my own memories of him stretching back to the student prayer meetings of the 1830s. And I had a conviction — which I believe was from God — that his life should not be allowed to disappear from the record without an account that would do justice to what God had done in him.
I wrote it quickly, in the white heat of grief, in the months following his death. And I wrote it with prayer — prayer that has followed the Memoir’s course ever since, and to which, I am convinced, the extraordinary blessing that has attended it is largely owing. I have sometimes said to people who thanked me for the Memoir: “Do not thank me. Thank the God who made M’Cheyne what he was, and who was pleased to use this broken record of that life for purposes far beyond my expectation.”
I never felt adequate to the task. I felt it through the whole of the writing and I feel it still. The simplicity of style that readers have remarked upon was not a literary choice so much as an acknowledgment of inadequacy. I was describing a life that was, in its quality of fellowship with God, beyond my full understanding. All I could do was report what I had seen and heard and read, and trust the Holy Spirit to take those bare facts and make them live in the hearts of those who read them. That is all a biographer can do. The living is done by the subject, not the writer.
Of his preaching, I wrote in the Memoir that it was “in a manner the development of his soul’s experience — a giving out of the inward life.” That sentence has been quoted back to me more times than any other I have written. And I believe it is right. The preaching that has the most power is not the most eloquent or the most learned. It is the preaching that comes from deepest within a life that has itself been penetrated by the Gospel — from a man who is not performing truth but living it, and whose words carry the weight of that lived reality. M’Cheyne’s preaching was like that. Every sermon was the overflow of something real in his own soul.
The most widely known of my works, the Memoir has made my name known in places I have never visited and given me a standing in the Church of God that properly belongs to M’Cheyne, not to me. A lady reading it in her house in the Highlands of Scotland found life to her soul as she read. An unconverted curate in the Church of England had M’Cheyne’s sermons sent to him by his brother, began reading them to his congregation, and was amazed to find his people coming to him with questions about things they had never spoken of before. An American gentleman, brought to Christ while reading the Memoir, came to Dundee to spend his first Sabbath in Scotland worshipping in St. Peter’s, the church where M’Cheyne had preached. These stories are not my doing. They are the fruit of a man whose life was poured out for Christ, continuing to pour itself out long after its earthly container was emptied.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
WHAT THE SERMONS OWED TO M’CHEYNE’S REBUKE
I want to dwell a moment longer on that rebuke at St. Peter’s, because it was one of the most fruitful rebukes I ever received, and because the lesson it contains is one that every preacher needs to hear again and again. I had preached, as I said, on the text about seeing the King in His beauty. It was a sermon about the glory of Christ in eternity — a vision sermon, a comfort sermon, full of good doctrine and genuine delight. And M’Cheyne loved it, as one who loved both Christ and good preaching. But he also saw what was missing from it, and he told me plainly.
The thing that was missing was the sinner’s urgency. The sermon had been addressed, in its heart, to believers — to those who could say with confidence that they would one day see the King. But in any congregation in Scotland, in any congregation anywhere, there are those who cannot yet say that. They are still outside the gate. They are still hearing the Gospel with something of the carelessness of people who believe they have time. And a sermon that speaks only to the assured believer, however accurately and beautifully, leaves those people untouched and perhaps untouched forever, if they die before the next Sabbath comes round.
M’Cheyne felt the weight of that possibility in a way I had not fully felt it that evening. He was not content to preach beautifully to the saved while the unsaved sat in the same pews and went home unaddressed. The Saviour he loved was the Saviour who had said: the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. And to preach Christ without that saving urgency was, to M’Cheyne, a kind of betrayal — not of the doctrine, but of the commission. After that night I resolved that every sermon would contain a word for the seeking soul, and that I would not leave a congregation without pressing the immediate claims of Christ upon the unconverted. That resolution shaped my preaching for more than fifty years. It came from a kindly rebuke spoken between two friends on a dark street in Dundee in 1842.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE BROTHERHOOD OF FRIENDS: AN EXTENDED FELLOWSHIP
M’Cheyne was the closest of my ministerial friendships, but he was not the only one. God gave me, through my student years and my years of ministry, a company of brothers in Christ whose fellowship sustained me and whose example shaped me. The names come back to me with warmth and tenderness: Alexander Somerville, John Milne, James Hamilton, William Burns, Patrick Miller. These were the men with whom I prayed and corresponded and laboured, and from whose company I drew strength for the long years of solitary country ministry.
I believed deeply in the communion of saints as a present reality, not merely a future hope. I used to say that in holiness we must go on together, not alone. A minister who tries to sustain his spiritual life entirely in isolation is like a coal removed from the fire — it loses heat quickly. The warmth of Christian fellowship, the sharpening of iron against iron, the shared prayer and shared burden and shared joy — these are not luxuries in the Christian life. They are necessities. God designed us to need one another. The hermit who thinks he can do without the company of believers has misunderstood the Body of Christ.
I wrote to friends constantly — short letters, mostly, but each one containing, as those who received them observed, something that made the letter worth keeping. I wrote to stir up prayer, to share a word from the morning’s reading, to enquire after the spiritual welfare of a brother whose congregation I had heard was struggling. I never found it easy to be away from the people I loved for long stretches of time. Writing was my substitute for presence, and I tried to make it as close to presence as ink on paper could be.
One of the most beautiful customs of those years was the monthly day of prayer that a group of ministers kept together, one day every month set apart from morning to evening for fasting and prayer. I wrote to James Manson in 1846 inviting him to join: “Surely we need much to pray and to sigh and cry for the land. How little fulness in our messages! How little of the love that is as a most vehement flame! How seldom we feel commissioned by God at the time! One spark of lightning is worth a thousand tame candle-flames — so, one sentence given us by the Holy Ghost is worth volumes of any other.”
The monthly days of prayer that a group of us kept were among the most quietly powerful things we did. There is something about a whole day given to prayer and fasting that accomplishes what no amount of ordinary prayer meeting can. The hours of the morning are full of confession and petition. The afternoon deepens into intercession — specific, name-by-name, congregation-by-congregation, nation-by-nation intercession. The evening, if God is gracious, brings a kind of stillness and certainty that feels like arrival. I do not know how to account for these days in any way except by the plain promises of Scripture about fasting and prayer. God honours them. He answers. Not always in the way we expect, and often not in the time we expected, but He answers. I have seen enough of those answers in my own life and ministry to say that without qualification.
I wrote to Alexander Somerville in 1842, when M’Cheyne was staying with me at Collace and Somerville had been ill: “Robert M’Cheyne is staying with me at present, and we joined heartily in prayer for you on Saturday evening especially.” Those are simple words. But behind them is the reality of two ministers, side by side in an evening prayer, carrying a sick brother before the throne of grace. That is what the communion of saints looks like in practice: not a vague spiritual feeling, but two particular people on their knees for a third, in a specific room, on a specific evening, calling on a God they knew personally to deal with a situation He already knew entirely.
As the years passed and the circle of friends thinned — M’Cheyne at twenty-nine, Hamilton at fifty-three, Burns and Milne and Miller following in their seasons — I found myself writing more often in a register of holy anticipation. “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.” That sentence was not mere sentiment. It expressed my genuine belief about what happens to the saints of God when they die: they are gathered, they remember, they are with Christ, and they await the day when those of us still on the road will join them.
(1 Thessalonians 4:17 KJV)
“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
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 asymmetry is a beautiful thing, when you sit with it long enough. The saints in glory are not diminished by our absence the way we are diminished by theirs. They have more of Christ, not less. They are complete in a way that we, still on the road, are not. The missing is ours to bear. And we bear it in hope, knowing that what is separated now will be joined again, and the reunion will be worth every day of the waiting.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
WHAT M’CHEYNE’S LIFE GAVE MINE: THE LASTING LESSONS
I have been asked what it was, specifically, that M’Cheyne’s friendship gave my ministry. Let me try to name it.
The first thing was a standard of holiness. Not a standard of perfection — M’Cheyne was not perfect, and he knew it more acutely than anyone. But a standard of seriousness about the inner life. He taught me, by the example of his life, that the minister’s own walk with God is not a private matter separable from his public ministry. It is the public ministry’s life-blood. Take that away and all the activity becomes, in Paul’s phrase, sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal — noise without music, motion without direction. I watched M’Cheyne’s public fruitfulness and saw that it was inseparable from his private consecration, and I determined that I would not try to separate them in my own life.
The second thing was a standard of urgency for souls. The rebuke he gave me after my sermon at St. Peter’s — “you forgot there might be many listening to you tonight who shall never see the King in His beauty” — was not a rhetorical flourish. It was the expression of a man who genuinely felt the weight of eternity pressing on every service, every sermon, every conversation. He could not speak about Christ without feeling the force of the fact that some of his hearers might die before the next Sabbath and stand before God with his words still echoing in their ears. That urgency became mine, and I have never been sorry for it.
The third thing was a model of friendship itself — of what it looks like when two people who love Christ love each other in Christ. We were honest with each other. We sharpened each other. We prayed for each other by name, across the miles between Collace and Dundee, with a regularity that I am sure produced effects neither of us knew about in this life. We will know about them in the next. I sometimes think the full accounting of what those prayer meetings produced — those student prayer meetings in the 1830s, those pastoral letters full of prayer and Scripture, those monthly days of fasting and intercession — will be one of the great surprises of the Day of Judgment. God keeps every prayer. None of them is lost.
My brother Horatius wrote a hymn in those early years that captured something of what we were all after. M’Cheyne loved it and quoted it often, and it has been in my heart ever since:
“Chosen not for good in me, Wakened up from wrath to flee, Hidden in the Saviour’s side, By the Spirit sanctified. Teach me, Lord, on earth to show, By my love, how much I owe.” —Horatius Bonar
My brother Horatius knew M’Cheyne well. He knew all of us — the whole circle of that praying company. And what he wrote in that verse was what we all felt, though most of us could not have said it so well. We were chosen, not for good in us. We were wakened up from wrath. We were hidden in the Saviour’s side. We were sanctified by the Spirit’s work. These things were not the fruits of our earnestness — they were the grounds of it. The reason we prayed was that we had been prayed for by One whose intercession never ceases. The reason we loved souls was that a Saviour had loved ours when we were still his enemies.
Teach me, Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I owe. That is the whole of the Christian life in a couplet. The love is not the ground of the Christian’s standing. It is the evidence of his gratitude. We love, as John says, because He first loved us. M’Cheyne’s love for souls was the overflow of a heart that knew, with unusual depth and clarity, how much it owed. The students of Edinburgh in the 1830s who sang that hymn in the weekly prayer meeting had no idea what God was going to do with them and through them in the decades that followed. But He knew. And He was already preparing the polished shaft for the hottest of the fight.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆