Andrew A. Bonar        

  The youngest of the three Bonar brothers

In the introduction to her Reminiscences of Andrew A. Bonar, Marjory Bonar writes, “Our father’s name can hardly be dissociated from the names of his two older brothers, John and Horatius. Both of them were in the ministry before him, Horatius only a year earlier, and John some years before. Through a long life of service, they followed the same course, preaching the same truths, bearing the same testimony’. Andrew Bonar has a diary entry to the same effect. On April 6^th 1888 he writes, ‘Last night was my brother Horace’s Jubilee…The Lord helped me to say a few words about the very uncommon fact that three brothers of us had each for about fifty years preached the same Gospel, etc. O what a privilege! What an honour to each of us!’ He then adds, with characteristic humility, ‘But O that we had always been full of the Holy Ghost!’ In previous posts we have looked at John, the oldest of the three brothers, and at Horatius, the second; in this we turn to Andrew, the youngest of the three.

Andrew Alexander Bonar was born in Edinburgh on the 29^th of May 1810. From the age of eleven he attended Edinburgh High School; afterwards, in 1825, he became a student at Edinburgh University. In both he excelled in Latin. The Rector of the High School, Dr. Carson, is reported to have said that ‘without doubt Andrew Bonar was the best Latin scholar who had ever passed through his hands’; in his Latin class in 1827 he was awarded the Gold Medal given by the Society of Writers to the Signet.

Reminiscences is one of the two primary sources for our knowledge of Andrew Bonar. The other is his Diary and Letters. It was published in 1893, the year after his death, and edited by his daughter Marjory. The diary ‘is the revelation’, she writes, ‘of the life of one who prayed always, who prayed everywhere, who, the nearer he came to the other world, was every day enjoying closer intercourse with it’. She acknowledges that it ‘does not reveal much of the bright, joyous, happy spirit which was so characteristic of him’, but adds, ‘his letters are pervaded by it, as was his whole life and conversation’.

Conversion  

 The first diary entry is for August 21^st 1828 and begins as follows: ‘About this time I thought of marking occasionally my thoughts and God’s dealings. It was this week that I resolved to enter upon the study of divinity’. By his own decision, however, his formal training for gospel ministry did not begin till three years later. A few of the early entries put us in the picture. May 3^rd 1829: ‘Great sorrow because I am still out of Christ’. May 31^st 1829: ‘My birthday is past, and I am not born again’. November 8^th 1829: ‘Still am not in Christ’. December 4^th 1829: ‘Thoughts of delaying my going to the Divinity Hall for another year, because I feel still so far from Christ’. But the change soon came. Writing in 1892 to his son James he says, ‘[I]t was in the year 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather that He found me and “laid me on His shoulders rejoicing”, and I have never parted company with Him all these sixty-two years’. The diary entry for October 17^th 1830 tells the story: ‘In reading Guthrie’s Saving Interest I have been led to hope that I may be in Christ though I have never yet known it. All the marks of faith in a man which he gives are to be found in me, I think, although very feeble. This is the first beam of joy, perhaps, that I have yet found in regard to my state’. Two weeks later he writes, ‘ever since I read a passage in Guthrie’s Saving Interest, I have had a secret joyful hope that I really have believed on the Lord Jesus’. His daughter Marjory assures us that ‘no doubt of his acceptance in Christ ever again dimmed the clearness of his faith’.

After finishing his studies at the Divinity Hall in 1835 Bonar had two brief periods of ministry – the first in the town of Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders as an assistant to the Rev. John Purves, the second in Edinburgh as an assistant to the Rev. Robert S. Candlish. There then followed an eighteen year ministry in the Perthshire village of Collace, first of all as assistant and successor to the parish minister and then, after the Disruption of 1843, as minister of the Free Church congregation. When Bonar went to Collace in 1838 the ‘old minister’ (as he is frequently referred to) had been there for nearly fifty years. He is described as belonging ‘to the extreme moderate school’ and was no friend to the fervent evangelical preaching that the people heard from the new assistant. Nor, sadly, did that change. In early 1842 Bonar did a four-week exchange with his friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne of Dundee. When someone asked the old minister how he was getting on with ‘that wild man from Dundee’, his reply was, ‘Mr Bonar is bad enough, but that man is ten times waur [worse]’. There are some moving references in Bonar’s diary to his concerns for the old minister’s soul as he drew near to death.

Ministry in Collace 

1839, the year after Bonar’s arrival in Collace, brought a long and unexpected break. There was a growing burden in the Church of Scotland in those days for the conversion of the Jews. It resulted in a deputation being sent to Israel to explore the possibilities of establishing a mission station there. Both Bonar and M’Cheyne were asked to form part of the deputation. ‘It is a very solemn matter to me’, Bonar writes. ‘How strange is the doing of God sending me here for a short time, then away to another part of the earth!’ In his Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839, jointly authored with M’Cheyne, Bonar records that ‘those of us who had Parishes to leave behind, felt that, in a case like this, we might act as did the shepherds at Bethlehem, leaving our flocks for a season under the care of the Shepherd of Israel, whose long lost sheep we were now going to seek’. He adds, ‘Nor have we had any cause to regret our confidence, and one at least of our number found this anticipation of the Good Shepherd’s care more than realised on his return’.

The reference is to a revival that had begun in M’Cheyne’s church in Dundee under the preaching of William Chalmers Burns. Collace was blessed as well. ‘When Mr. Bonar came to Collace’ – this is from Marjory Bonar’s Reminiscences – ‘there were perhaps not more than half a dozen living Christians in the place. From those days of revival the parish began to assume a different aspect even outwardly. Few, if any, idlers were to be seen outside the cottage-doors on a Sabbath day, and family worship was conducted morning and evening in nearly every household’. It greatly pained Bonar that there weren’t more conversions. Again and again he mourns over it in his diary – and over himself. ‘I feel altogether sinful, worthless, something very small and insignificant’, is a typical entry. On his final Sunday, October 19^th 1856, he writes, ‘O what these eighteen years might have been had I only lived nearer Christ!’ But the changes wrought were deep and lasting. More than thirty years later, on the occasion of his Jubilee in 1888, representatives of his old congregation spoke as follows: ‘When you came among us in 1839 Collace, as regards spiritual life, was comparatively a desert. When you left it, 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’.

Two further matters before we leave Collace for Glasgow, one sorrowful, the other joyful. The diary entry for March 25^th 1843 records the death of his beloved friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne: ‘This afternoon about five o’clock, a message has just come to tell me of Robert M’Cheyne’s death. Never, never yet in all my life have I felt anything like this. It is a blow to myself, to his people, to the Church of Christ in Scotland…My heart is sore…Life has lost half its joys, were it not for the hope of saving souls. There was no friend whom I loved like him’. Later that same year Bonar would write his Memoir of M’Cheyne. It was destined to become a spiritual classic. Over the course of the next almost fifty years Bonar heard constantly of blessing attending the reading of it. And nor has the blessing ceased. There are references to M’Cheyne throughout the Diary. Bonar often reflected on his life, his preaching, his passion for souls, his holiness, and his early death. ‘In him’, he could say, ‘have we been taught how much one man may do who will only press farther into the presence of his God, and handle more skilfully the unsearchable riches of Christ, and speak more boldly for his God’. Many other books came from Bonar’s pen as the years went by. Reference is made in the Diary to biographies of David Sandeman, James Allan, and James Scott; commentaries on Leviticus and the Book of Psalms; an edition of Samuel Rutherford’s Letters; another of Scots Worthies; and books such as Redemption Drawing Nigh, The Old Gospel Way, and The Visitor’s Book of Texts.

If the Collace years were darkened by the loss of M’Cheyne they were brightened by his marriage to Isabella Dickson in April 1848. She had come to Christ during times of revival in Edinburgh in 1842. ‘[S]he attended a prayer-meeting for the Jews, held in St. Andrew’s church’, her daughter tells us. ‘Mr. M’Cheyne spoke at this meeting, and what he said interested her, but it was the impression of his personal holiness, rather than his words, that most deeply affected her. “There was something singularly attractive about Mr. M’Cheyne’s holiness”, she told her husband afterwards. “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”’. ‘[T]here could not be a happier home than she made mine to be’, he wrote, after Isabella’s death in October 1864.

The Glasgow years   

In 1856 Bonar accepted an invitation to move to Glasgow. A new church was to be planted in the Finnieston area of the city. It was poor and densely populated. ‘Ten or twelve people’, we are told, ‘formed the nucleus of the congregation’, but by the end of 1857 there were one hundred and thirty –six communicant members and an attendance of between four and five hundred. The church continued to grow and knew times of remarkable blessing – especially in the revival of 1859-60 and the later ones associated with the American evangelist D.L. Moody. A new church was opened in 1878. The opening services, he records, were ‘conducted by Dr. Somerville and Dr. Robert Macdonald; old friends. Together we have preached Christ for forty years, the same Gospel of the grace of God. Great attendance’. By the time of Bonar’s death in 1892 the church had over a thousand member

Andrew Bonar was blessed with remarkable health. Of Sunday July 13^th 1856, for example, he says, ‘the first time, so far as I can remember, during eighteen years in which I have been prevented from preaching by sickness’.  On Sunday December 7^th 1873 he could write, ‘This day seventeen years ago I began my ministry in Glasgow. I have never been even once kept from preaching by sickness’. James Stalker, in the course of a sermon preached after his death, recalls the following: ‘A few years ago  he said to me laughingly, when I was perhaps advising him to spare himself – “The young men nowadays cannot preach more than twice; it needs an old minister to preach three times”. And he did it many a Sunday when he was nearly four score’.

He continued to the end to write the severest things about himself. Here, for example, is the entry for August 20^th 1885:  ‘It is this day exactly forty-seven years since I was ordained. My ministry has appeared to me to be wanting in so many ways, that I can only say of it, indescribably inadequate’ [emphasis his]. But if the humility and self-reproach continued so did his joy in the Lord. In the tributes paid to him after his death on the last day of December 1892 it is a recurring note. ‘[H]is religion’, says one, ‘was free from gloom. He was pre-eminently a happy Christian; the joy of the Lord was his strength’. Another speaks of how ‘his words, his looks, his magnetic influence were a perpetual sermon’. A third relates how ‘he seemed to live in a perpetual sunshine, and to spread not gloom but brightness and good-nature wherever he appeared’. And as was his life so was his preaching: ‘full of peace, full of comfort, full of joy, full of the living sympathy and love of Jesus Christ’.