CHAPTER seven
CHAPTER seven
────────────────────────
The Fullness of Years: Later Ministry, Family, and the Daily Rhythm
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
There is a particular quality to the later years of a long ministry that the earlier years cannot produce. Not wisdom alone — wisdom can be possessed in some measure by the young. Not faithfulness — the young minister who has resolved to be faithful may be more consciously so than the older man for whom faithfulness has simply become the grain of the wood. What the later years produce, when a man has kept faith with his calling and his God, is something closer to depth. A depth of character, a depth of prayer, a depth of settled certainty about the things that matter, that comes only from having lived through everything the earlier years contained — the revivals and the dry seasons, the joys and the griefs, the answered prayers and the prayers that seemed to fall into silence.
By the time I reached my sixties and seventies the ministry at Finnieston had acquired a texture and a weight that the early Glasgow years could not have had. The congregation had been through much together. We had seen great seasons of blessing. We had buried our dead. We had sent our young men out across the world — to India, to America, to the mission fields, to country parishes and city ones. We had grown old together in the knowledge of Christ, and that growing old together is one of the chief gifts that a long pastoral relationship can bestow.
I wrote at the beginning of my ministry: “This is a time that seems to require prayer more than preaching even, at least so I often feel. And persevering prayerfulness day by day — wrestling and pleading — is harder for the flesh than preaching.” That was true when I wrote it, and it remained true to the end. But as the years passed, the main business of every day became more explicitly and deliberately prayer. It was not that preaching and visiting and teaching mattered less. It was that the foundation on which all of those rested had become, in my experience, unmistakably clearer. Without the prayer, nothing else had the weight it needed. With the prayer, everything else found its proper level.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE DAILY RHYTHM: ORDER IN THE SERVICE OF GOD
Those who knew my life at India Street in Glasgow during the later years of my ministry describe it with a consistency that tells me the habits I tried to maintain were actually maintained. Every morning, after breakfast, visitors to the study would find me standing at my writing-desk — I always preferred to stand, as the posture kept the mind alert — working through the morning’s correspondence. Letters from all parts of the world arrived, and I answered them all. Letters asking for prayer, for counsel, for direction. Letters from ministers in difficulty, from young men wrestling with a call, from old women on their deathbeds wanting a word of assurance. Each one was given the word it needed, usually brief, always freighted.
By the later years, when overwhelmed by work and visits and interruptions of every kind, I made it a rule to devote two full hours every day, before going out, to prayer and meditation on the Word of God. Those two hours were the hinge on which the whole day turned. If they were well spent, the visiting that followed in the afternoon was different in quality from what it would otherwise have been. A card hung on one side of my mantelpiece on which were printed the Latin words: Dimidium studii qui rite precatur habet — “He who has truly prayed has completed the half of his study.” I had lived long enough to know it was true.
The afternoon was given to visiting, regularly from one o’clock until nearly five. Every evening was filled with a meeting of some kind — a Bible class, a prayer meeting, a workers’ gathering, a committee of the congregation or the Presbytery or the Assembly. Friday and Saturday were kept as days of preparation for the Sabbath, and no visitor was admitted to the study on Saturday unless his errand was of great importance. One who came on a Friday afternoon to consult me about some piece of work found me in the study apparently absorbed — he said afterward that I appeared like one lost to himself in communion with God. He left without disturbing me, feeling overawed. Like John Bunyan’s pilgrim, he had seen a man with his eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth written upon his lips, and the world behind his back.
I spoke often of the necessity of first receiving a blessing oneself from the subject to be spoken of, before giving it out to others. “Use for yourself first what the Lord teaches you,” I used to say, “and if He spare you, use it for others.” And again: “When you have got a blessing, take time to let it sink into your own heart before you tell it out.” This is a discipline that goes against the temptation of the active ministry, which is always to spend the blessing before it has finished doing its work in the one who received it. The preacher who pours out to his congregation more than he has taken in will find, in time, that he is pouring from an empty vessel.
(Psalm 23:5 KJV)
“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
MODERATOR OF THE FREE CHURCH ASSEMBLY: 1878
In 1878 I was, with some reluctance, elected to the Moderatorship of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. The Assembly that year was held in Glasgow. In nominating me to the office, the retiring Moderator, Dr. Goold, made a happy allusion to the similarity of the circumstances to those of the first General Assembly of the Kirk, which had met in Glasgow in 1638, at which Alexander Henderson was unanimously nominated as Moderator by the votes of his brethren — none being contrary except his own. I found that comparison both encouraging and humbling. Henderson was one of the great men of Scottish Church history. I was a Finnieston minister who had spent his life in small things.
The Moderatorship was not a position I had sought or desired. I was not by nature a churchman in the administrative or political sense. I loved the work of the congregation, the work of the study and the pulpit and the pastoral round. The larger machinery of church government interested me less, though I served it faithfully when I was called to do so. But the Assembly of 1878 was an opportunity to say from the highest platform of the Free Church something that I hoped might penetrate further than a Finnieston Sunday evening.
My closing address as Moderator included, as such addresses always should, a reference to the coming of the Lord. I had spoken to the students who were present — the young men just entering the ministry — about the tendency of each generation to question the conclusions of the one before. I drew a comparison with the sons of the prophets in Elisha’s day, who would not believe the old prophet when he told them Elijah had been taken up, and insisted on sending fifty men to search the hills. When they came back empty-handed, the old prophet said quietly: “Did I not say unto you, Go not?” I told the Assembly I hoped the young men of that generation would find, in time, that the old prophet was right again.
The degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred on me by the University of Edinburgh in 1874. I received it with gratitude, though not without the characteristic unease that any public recognition produced in me. I was always more comfortable being unknown than honoured. The best work of a ministry, as I had often said, is the part that only God sees. Degrees and platforms and celebrations are the world’s way of taking notice. God’s way of taking notice is different, quieter, and infinitely more satisfying.
I should mention one of my favourite activities in those years: the writing of letters in the voices of the sainted dead. This was a private amusement that sometimes became a public one when I shared the results with friends. When my brother Horatius celebrated his jubilee at Greenock in 1885, I could not be present in body, and so I sent a letter. But the letter was not from me. It was written, I claimed, from “Paradise, the Third Heavens,” in the voice of Samuel Rutherford:
“Dear and Honoured Brother, I cannot be present in body at your jubilee next week, being detained a willing prisoner in the King’s Palace here; but I send my loving salutations, and hope you are in good case, albeit ye be sometimes wechted with your fourscore and two years. I know ye handle the pen of a ready writer, but, for all that, it may be weel for you to look into ye buik I send you, to wit, some old sermons of mine, which ye may preach when ye run dry. Hoping to meet you in Immanuel’s Land when the great jubilee trumpet shall be blown — Misspend not your short sandglass, which runneth very fast. Your very loving brother, Samuel Rutherford.”
That last line — Misspend not your short sandglass, which runneth very fast — was authentically Rutherford’s. I had read him often enough to hear his voice in my sleep. The whole letter was, in its way, a love-letter to my brother and to the tradition of Scottish piety that had shaped us both — shot through with the Covenanting spirit, the tenderness, the urgency, the unself-conscious joy of men who lived with eternity very close to the surface of their daily thoughts.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
NORTHFIELD, 1881: AMERICA AND THE HEAT OF AUGUST
In 1881, when I was seventy-one years old, I accepted an urgent invitation from Mr. Moody to visit America and be present at the Northfield Conference in Massachusetts, held in the month of August. The sea voyage was not easy for a man of my years, and the heat of an American August was something I had not expected and could not have fully prepared for. But I went, accompanied by my eldest daughter Isabella, and the two months spent on the other side of the Atlantic proved to be among the most enriching of my later life.
I astonished my American friends, I was told, by my vigour. Sometimes walking two or three miles a day in the excessive heat, besides giving addresses and spending hours in conversation with the students and younger ministers who gathered at Northfield to be taught and encouraged. They listened, Moody told me, eagerly for the weighty words that fell from my lips. I was not sure the words were so weighty as he said. But I know that at Northfield I was among people who were hungry for the things of God, and when a man is hungry, even plain bread tastes remarkable.
I wrote to my youngest daughter Mary from Northfield with a father’s characteristic mixture of theological observation and domestic commentary: “What a country this is! They give us curry and beefsteaks to breakfast, and potatoes and squash and doughnuts! At dinner we often get succotash, a mixture of Indian corn and beans. A large bird — more than twice the size of our red robin — comes morning by morning to the field before my window to get worms, and it is the American robin-redbreast. We have pine-trees instead of fir-trees.”
But she would not have been surprised to read, a few sentences later, what I did not quite like about America. The roads were not kept in good repair. The people did not bring their Bibles to church. They did not sing the Psalms. And the Sabbath-school children did not learn a catechism lesson. “They are far behind us in all these things,” I wrote, “so that I like our own land after all, and shall be glad to return.” A man can be enriched by what he finds abroad and still come home grateful for what he left behind.
The visit to Northampton, to the elm-trees under which Jonathan Edwards and his wife had sat, and to the grove of pines where Edwards had prayed — I have described this in an earlier chapter. But I must add here what I wrote in my diary the day after that visit, because it captures the spirit of the whole American journey. I wrote: “Much stirred up by yesterday’s visit to Northampton, and the train of thought and prayer it led to. Lord, give me fully what is meant by ‘that Christ may dwell in your heart,’ and by ‘Christ liveth in me.’” That prayer — not for new doctrine, not for more knowledge, but for Christ to dwell more fully in the heart — was the prayer of my later years in the form that all the learning and all the experience had distilled it into.
I returned from America with my heart glowing, Moody’s daughter Emma wrote, and leaving behind a fragrant memory. If that is true, the fragrance was not mine. It was the fragrance of the things I had been talking about for fifty years — the mercy of God, the blood of Christ, the indwelling of the Spirit, the hope of the Coming King. Those things carry their own fragrance. The vessel that holds them is of no account.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE SEMI-JUBILEE AND THE JUBILEE: FIFTY YEARS OF MINISTRY
In 1881 the congregation of Finnieston celebrated my semi-jubilee as their pastor — twenty-five years since my induction on that dreary December day in 1856. In 1888 a remarkable gathering was held to celebrate fifty years of my work as a minister of Christ, counting from my ordination at Collace in 1838. Representatives of the Church of God from all parts of Scotland, from England, from America, came to give their testimony to the influence of those years.
When an old friend from Collace remarked to me after the 1888 meeting that it had been a grand gathering, I replied: “Yes, but I think there was too much praise of man, and too little to God. I never thought I did more than draw the water and let the flock drink.” That was the image I had carried for the whole of my ministry: the minister is not the spring. He is the channel through which the water flows from the spring to those who are thirsty. The glory belongs to the One who provides the water. The channel contributes only the privilege of being used.
The story with which I closed my address that evening was one I had told many times before, and which I found as searching at eighty as I had found it at thirty. A Grecian painter had executed a remarkable painting of a boy carrying on his head a basket of grapes. So exquisitely were the grapes painted that when the picture was displayed in the Forum, birds came and pecked at them, thinking they were real. The painter’s friends congratulated him, but he was not satisfied. When they asked why, he replied: “I should have done a great deal more. I should have painted the boy so true to life that the birds would not have dared to come near.”
The application was plain. In my preaching and writing about Christ, I had sometimes succeeded in making the Gospel attractive — the birds came to peck the grapes. But how often had I painted the Boy — the living Christ Himself, in the full weight and authority of His person — so truly that those who saw the painting were overwhelmed by His presence? That was the standard I had always fallen short of. Not a beautiful depiction of grace, but such a living presentation of the Person of the Saviour that those who heard it felt they were in His actual company. That is what I still wanted, in the fiftieth year of my ministry, as much as I had wanted it in the first.
What moved me most at the Jubilee gathering in 1888 was not the speeches, though they were generous, but the faces. The faces of people who had been converted during the Finnieston ministry, now grown older. The face of a man who had come to me as a young inquirer thirty years before with his soul in darkness, and who now sat among the elders with a settled peace that the years had only deepened. The face of a woman who had carried her doubts to my study and left with the words “But Thou remainest” taking root in her heart. These were the real account of fifty years. Not the books published, not the sermons preached, not the organisations built or the congregations counted. The faces of the living souls in whom something of Christ had taken hold and refused to let go.
The people of Collace sent their own testimony to that jubilee gathering. They said: “When you came among us in 1838, 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. The effects of your faithful testimony remain to this day, both in living souls and in the social and religious habits of the people.” Those words meant more to me than any university degree or any ecclesiastical honour. They were the testimony of the people God had entrusted to me, saying that the seed had not all fallen on stony ground.
(Isaiah 58:11 KJV)
“And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE STUDY AT INDIA STREET: A ROOM AND WHAT IT CONTAINED
Those who visited me at home in my later years always spoke of the study at India Street with a particular warmth. It was a room in perfect order — not a book or paper ever out of its place. Untidiness, I used to say, is unchristian. Not because neatness is a virtue in itself, but because disorder in the outward arrangements of a life tends to reflect and to produce disorder in the inward ones, and the inward ones are what matter.
My Bible always lay on the table, where I could reach it instantly. My Hebrew Bible and little Greek Testament were on a small table by the fireplace. Until my eyesight began to fail slightly, I used a very old Bible of my father’s which I valued much. On its blank pages are written shorthand notes of my conversations with my old minister, Dr. Jones, when I joined the church in 1830, and other jottings from sermons that had impressed me. On another page I had written these lines in shorthand:
“Behold the book whose leaves display Jesus the Life, the Truth, the Way; Read it with diligence and care, Search it, for thou shalt find Him there.”
The text But Thou remainest hung on the wall, framed, where I could see it from my desk. A piece of Samuel Rutherford’s pulpit lay on the mantelpiece. A panel of Lady Kenmure’s pew from the church at Anwoth — where Rutherford had preached his heart out in the 1630s before exile silenced him — was another prized possession. My reverence for everything connected with the saints of former times was well known to those around me and was sometimes the occasion of good-humoured teasing. I did not mind. The communion of saints is not merely a doctrine about the future. It is a present reality for those who inhabit it, and those physical relics were not objects of veneration so much as touchstones — things to lay a hand on and remember that you stand in a long line of those who have believed the same Gospel and served the same Christ.
I was also, in the study, a man who knew how to laugh. My humour was well known among those who knew me, though it surprised those who met me only in formal settings. I wrote letters in the voices of historical figures — as William Grimshaw writing to my brother John from Haworth, or as Samuel Rutherford writing to Horatius from Paradise, “being detained a willing prisoner in the King’s Palace here.” I composed comic verse. I sent my son a playful critique of his book on economic theory. I told the woman who said “I’m a quarter of a century old today” that she had reached half her jubilee.
The humour was not a separate compartment of the personality, sealed off from the serious business of ministry. It was part of the same life. A man who does not laugh does not fully inhabit the world God made. Laughter is one of the ways we acknowledge that the world is not as grim as sin has made it appear, that there is lightness and joy woven into the fabric of creation by a God whose purposes are ultimately comic in the deepest sense — not farcical, but ending in the triumph of life over death, of joy over grief, of the redeemed creation over the fallen one.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE CHILDREN AND THE FAMILY: A KINGDOM HOUSEHOLD
After Isabella’s death in 1864, the household at India Street continued under my care, with the five children growing up around me. I was not a domestic man in the way that a mother is domestic. The rhythms of the house were managed by others more capably than I could have managed them. But I tried to be present to my children in the ways that I could be — in the morning prayers, in the letters I wrote when I was away, in the birthday acknowledgments and the small verses and the wordplay that they remembered long afterward.
My letters to the children were brimming, those who read them said, with fun intermingled with the most serious and loving words. As birthdays came round I always made reference to them at family worship: “Bless the one of our number whose birthday this is. May this be a day for heavenly favours and heavenly gifts.” When one of my daughters said one morning with a sigh that she was a quarter of a century old today, I said immediately: “You have reached half your jubilee!” The laugh that followed was, I think, as much a gift to her as any sermon.
I believed in the conversion of children with a steadfastness that some of my colleagues found almost extreme. I used to say: “We ask Thee, Lord, to raise up a generation of believing children. We do not ask Thee for a generation of believers, but of believing children. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Faith is a gift, and a gift that a child can take.” I also said: “A young hand may be placed on the head of the scapegoat as well as an old hand.” The access to Christ, the laying of personal sin on the personal Saviour, is not an adult privilege. It is for the youngest and the simplest who will come.
After my death, a little child in the neighbourhood was heard praying: “O God, bless Mr. M’Intyre, and send back Dr. Bonar, for we’re wearying to see him!” I have been told that story more than once. I do not know what to make of it theologically. But I know that if the children wearied to see me, it was because I had always been glad to see them. The children in Collace used to gather round me as I rode about on my pony. They lingered in the church after services in hope of having my hand laid on their head and hearing me call them by name. One of them called me “the minister with the laughing face.” That description, I confess, pleased me greatly.
(Mark 10:14 KJV)
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE GIFT OF VISITING: WHAT THE CONGREGATION TAUGHT THE MINISTER
I once wrote to a friend: “I think I have got more good from visiting my people than from any book of practical theology I ever read.” I meant it then and I mean it still. The great textbooks of pastoral theology are useful in their place. But no textbook can teach what is learned by sitting beside a woman at a washing-tub, or standing at the bedside of a dying man, or talking with a young woman who has been taught more of the Law than of the Gospel and cannot find her way to peace.
The congregation taught me, across forty years in Glasgow, things about the human soul in its dealings with God that I could not have learned any other way. I learned that the most apparently careless people often have a secret anxiety about eternity that they conceal beneath a manner of indifference. I learned that the most apparently assured believers sometimes have a private desolation that they have never found the courage to name. I learned that the simplest words — “your Elder Brother is with you” — can do more in a moment than an hour of careful theological exposition.
I wrote to Dr. Somerville from Collace as early as 1850: “There is a blessing resting on visiting. What else is fitted to make us know the state of our flocks? 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.” That humbling and pain never left me in over fifty years of pastoral work. Every visit was, in some measure, a reminder of how much was still undone, how many were still outside the Kingdom, how thin the true spiritual life was even in a congregation full of regular worshippers. That reminder was not discouraging. It was clarifying. It kept the urgency alive.
My method of finding out the state of my people’s minds during visiting was a simple one that I recommended to other ministers. I would ask, when I came into a home: “What was your chapter at family worship this morning?” In that one question I could find out three things at once: whether they had family worship, whether they had paid attention to it, and what the Lord had been saying to them through it. The question never failed to open a conversation. Sometimes it opened a confession. Sometimes it opened an unexpected window into the spiritual life of the household that no other approach would have reached.
The young men who gathered in Finnieston in those middle years of the ministry — the students I entertained in the house, the Bible class members, the mission workers — were scattered eventually all over the world. I used to close our gatherings with a prayer: “And when we all meet together again, may it be with our bosoms filled with sheaves!” I meant it as both a challenge and a promise. The challenge was the sheaves — the souls won, the work done, the service rendered wherever they were sent. The promise was in the “meeting again” — the certainty that the scattered company of Christ’s servants would one day be gathered, and that the gathering would be worth every mile of the scattering.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆