Horatius Bonar
The second of the three Bonar brothers
For almost thirty years – from November 1837 till June 1866 – Horatius Bonar was a minister in the Scottish border town of Kelso. Communion times were especially precious. Looking back at them, one of the older members particularly remembers the short meeting for prayer after the evening service, ‘when our own Dr. Bonar and the other two Drs. Bonar, sometimes all three together in the pulpit, asked for a special blessing, concluding with the verse –
‘O may we stand before the Lamb,
When earth and seas are fled,
And hear the Judge pronounce our name,
With blessing on our head!’
I used to wish that we did not need to go down to the world again, but that we might go straight up into heaven, which seemed so near’. The ‘other two Drs. Bonar’ were Horatius’s brothers, his older brother John and his younger brother Andrew, both of them ministers like himself. In a previous article (the blog post for November 2024) we looked at John, the oldest of the three; in this we turn to Horatius, the second of the three.
Horatius Bonar was born in Edinburgh on the 19th of December 1808. His future brother-in-law, Robert Lundie, in a sermon preached after Horatius’s death, says that ‘those who knew him best and longest scarcely remember a time when he did not appear to be under the influence of divine things’. He goes on to speak about how indebted Horatius felt to his godly parents and then quotes some lines by Horatius himself in which he gives expression to this:
‘I thank Thee for a holy ancestry;
I bless Thee for a godly parentage;
For seeds of truth and light and purity,
Sown in the heart from childhood’s earliest age’.
If he was blessed in his parents he was no less so in the men under whom he trained for gospel ministry, especially Dr. Thomas Chalmers whom he always considered ‘the greatest man he had ever met’. In a sketch of Horatius’s life in Disruption Worthies, William Cousin, a fellow minister, tells us that ‘by his magnificent exposition of the Evangelic system, and his own intense spiritual life’, Dr. Chalmers had, under God, rendered the Divinity Hall ‘a grand Missionary Institute and centre of spiritual power, from which our students went forth to their work as preachers of the Gospel, inflamed with a zeal that shrank from no labour, and strong in a faith that knew no doubt’.
Leith
After being licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in April 1833 Horatius became an assistant to James Lewis, minister of St. John’s Church in Leith, Edinburgh’s port. His task was to engage in mission work. From a fragment of autobiography written towards the end of his life we learn the following: ‘The district which [Mr. Lewis] allotted to me had a population of more than 3000, – its streets and lanes were amongst the very worst in the town. But the work soon became pleasant, and we were welcomed even by the worst and wickedest. My commencement was of a peculiar kind. Mr. Lewis had secured a hall, which held about 200, in one of those lanes; and I was to occupy it every Sabbath, forenoon and afternoon, with the Sabbath school in the evening. It had hitherto been used by a small body of Roman Catholics. I had scarcely begun the forenoon service when the door was thrown open, and a furious woman walked in, shouting, “My curse and the curse of God be upon you.” But there was no disturbance, and the curse did not come; but in many ways, both among young and old, the blessing followed us. That was the starting-point of my work in Leith’.
Something else started in Leith – the writing of those hymns with which the name of Horatius Bonar is inseparably connected. Among the boys and girls who began to attend his Sabbath school there was little enthusiasm for the singing of God’s praise. What could be done to help them? ‘They were fond of music’, writes his son, ‘and on week-days could sing songs heartily enough’. That gave Bonar the clue he needed. He would choose some of the tunes that the children liked to sing and put words to them. And it worked! The first hymn to be written, I lay my sins on Jesus, is sung in our churches to this day. (It may interest readers to know that Bonar was surprised at how popular it became. It ‘might be good gospel’, he used to say, ‘but was not good poetry’!). Another hymn written for the children, I was a wandering sheep, was long popular too. So too a third hymn dating from his Leith days: ‘It was probably in the year 1836’, says his son, ‘that my father first wrote a hymn not primarily intended for the young. To encourage his faithful fellow workers in his mission district, he wrote (to the tune of the Old Hundredth) the now familiar hymn, Go, labour on’.
The details just given are from an essay prefacing a collection of Bonar’s hymns published in 1904. It is full of interesting facts. One is that he had little ear for music. Another is that a number of his best-known hymns were to be found in Roman Catholic hymnals. His son remembers the answer he gave to someone who strongly advised him to refuse to allow this: ‘Would you think it right if I were to decline an invitation to preach to a willing audience merely because they were Roman Catholics?’ We learn, again, that it was generally when he was away from his ordinary work that he wrote poetry. ‘[T]o write verses was one of his holiday recreations…Often at the sea-shore as a boy, after our swim, I used to withdraw and sit aloof and watch my father pacing up and down some level beach or stretch of turf, writing, sometimes repeating a line or two aloud to try how it sounded to the ear, ere he committed it to paper’. Reference is also made to his strong sense of humour, a ‘side of his character…scarcely suspected by those who did not know him in private’. It came to expression in poems and rhymes written for a little holiday magazine that was circulated among the wider Bonar family. They show him, writes his son, ‘in a light which would astonish many of those who only knew him through his published writings’. ‘[F]rom first to last’, he says, ‘…there have been published over 600 hymns and poems by Horatius Bonar’, that figure including a number of translations from Latin and Greek.
Kelso
On the 30th of November 1837 Horatius Bonar was ordained minister of the new North Church in Kelso. ‘It was’, writes William Cousin, ‘a blessed time for any man to enter on his ministry…The very air seemed charged with hope and expectancy’. ‘I found there plenty of work’, – this is Bonar’s own reminiscence, – ‘plenty of workmen, and plenty of sympathy, – zealous elders, zealous teachers, and zealous friends. The keynote that I struck was, “Ye must be born again”; and that message found its way into many hearts. It repelled some, but it drew many together, in what I may call the bond of regeneration’.
The disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, in which Bonar sided with those who left to form the Free Church of Scotland, brought an expansion of the work. ‘Until the Disruption came’, he says, ‘I had no access to the neighbouring parishes, but after that I found open doors and open ears in that populous district among all ranks of people’. The work so grew that it was necessary to employ first one and then another evangelist, a Mr. Stoddart and a Mr. Murray. These two men ‘traversed the counties of Roxburgh, Berwick, and Northumberland, with blessed success…whole villages being awakened, besides many stray souls, both young and old, gathered into the Church of God from various quarters’.
Bonar did more than just preach. He also wrote tracts, the first of which, The Well of Living Water, dates from 1838. Many more followed and in 1846 they were gathered together and published in book form as the Kelso Tracts. The circulation of some of these tracts is astonishing, a million copies being sold of one of them, Believe and Live. In a chapter on Horatius Bonar in his A Scottish Christian Heritage, Iain Murray writes that ‘the freeness with which Bonar pressed an acceptance of the gospel upon sinners was startling to some, and offensive to others, but the message was the power of God unto salvation. “I am truly delighted with your tract, Believe and Live”, Dr. Chalmers wrote to him. “I hold by that theology”’.
A steady stream of books came from his pen as well, both in Kelso and later in Edinburgh. Among them were Words to Winners of Souls, The Night of Weeping, Truth and Error, God’s Way of Peace, a biography of his friend and fellow minster John Milne, another of his son-in-law, George Theophilus Dodds, two books about his own Eastern travels – The Desert of Sinai and The Land of Promise – a book of short sermons for family reading, and a five-volume work entitled, Light and Truth: Bible Thoughts and Themes. He also edited for many years the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy and the Christian Treasury. His son comments, ‘When I look back on the way in which his day was filled with the affairs of his own ministerial work, I wonder how he could possibly make room in his life for anything else. Yet he edited a magazine (for a considerable time, two of them), and was, in addition, perpetually publishing prose works. In fact, one special table in his study was entirely devoted to proof-sheets, and he used to say that for a period of thirty years he had been continually in the hands of three separate printers, for his editorial, his prose and his poetical work’. Robert Lundie sums it up well: ‘Vigorous alike in body and mind, he was gifted with a singular tolerance of toil’.
Edinburgh
In 1866, after almost thirty years in Kelso, Bonar moved to Edinburgh to pastor a new Free Church congregation in the Grange area of the city, the Chalmers’ Memorial Church. ‘Here’, he writes in 1888, ‘I have spent twenty-two chequered years of my ministerial life’. And they were chequered years. On the one hand the new work grew considerably. By 1886 the communion roll had risen to 800. His books and hymns, too, gave him a world-wide audience. But there were shadows as well as lights. A controversy with Dr. John Kennedy of Dingwall arose over D.L. Moody, of whom Bonar was a strong supporter. There were stresses and strains in the Free Church as a whole, first because of a major difference of opinion over union with the United Presbyterian Church and then afterwards with the rise of Higher Criticism. In the early 1880s there was also a division in Bonar’s own congregation over the introduction of hymns into public worship.
He had his personal sorrows as well. In October 1882 his son-in-law George Dodds died; two years later, in December 1884, his wife Jane died. Then came increasingly fragile health and the close of his public work. In September 1887 he preached what proved to be his final sermon, at his Jubilee celebration the following April he was unable to speak, and for the final months of his life he was confined to bed – weak, in much pain, and troubled at times with feelings of uselessness. In his last hymn, Abiding Peace, written for New Year’s Day 1886 he had looked forward to the bright eternity ahead and wondered when it would begin for him:
Long years of peace:
I see afar in front of me
A heaven made up of years like yours,
A whole, a bright eternity.
Long years of peace:
I think of you as yet to come,
And wonder when Time’s last New Year
Shall gladly bid me welcome Home.
It would be fully three and a half years before his wondering would be over and his longing fulfilled. On the 31st of July 1889 he at last entered his rest.
The following words were written with reference to his Edinburgh years but they equally apply to the Kelso and Leith years that preceded them: ‘God has been gracious, and has not disowned the work and the message. Righteousness without works to the sinner, simply on his acceptance of the divine message concerning Jesus and His sufficiency, – this has been the burden of our good news. “Through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and by Him all that believe are justified from all things”. It is one message, one gospel, one cross, one sacrifice, from which nothing can be taken, and to which nothing can be added. This is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of our ministry’.