Andrew Murray (1828–1917) was a South African pastor, teacher, and devotional writer of the Dutch Reformed Church, and one of the most widely read Christian authors of his generation. Born in Graaff-Reinet, Cape Colony, the son of a Scottish missionary father and a mother of French Huguenot descent, he was sent as a boy to Aberdeen, Scotland, for his early education, and went on to study theology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Ordained in 1848, Murray returned to South Africa and spent his long ministry serving congregations at Bloemfontein, Worcester, Cape Town, and finally Wellington, where he settled for the last decades of his life. He was a leader in the great South African revivals of the 1860s, a founder of missionary and educational institutions, and a president of the Cape General Mission (later the South Africa General Mission). Across a ministry of more than sixty years he became known throughout the English-speaking world as a teacher of the deeper Christian life.
Murray wrote more than 240 books and pamphlets, most of them short devotional works meditating on a single aspect of the Christian life — prayer, surrender, abiding in Christ, and, above all, humility. Among his best known titles, alongside Humility, are Abide in Christ, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Absolute Surrender, The Spirit of Christ, and The True Vine. His writing is marked by simplicity, warmth, and an insistence that doctrine must be lived, not merely believed — nowhere more so than in Humility, first published in 1895, which he regarded as foundational to the whole of the spiritual life.
Andrew Murray died at Wellington, Cape Colony, on 18 January 1917, at the age of eighty-eight. His books remain in print and continue to be read around the world more than a century later.
Compiled by UECF.NET from standard public-domain biographical sources for the Andrew Murray Web Book collection.