MATTHEW HENRY.

One of the greatest joys, surely, that Christian parents can be afforded is to learn that thy have been instruments that God has chosen to use in the conversion of their very own children. On the 7th December 1678 this joy was realised in the heart of Philip Henry, Minister of the gospel, and one of the 2,000 Puritan band of preachers that had earlier been ejected from their churches for their non-conformity in 1662. It was a Sabbath afternoon, a time when the hearts of the Lord's people should be very near to heaven, that young Matthew Henry approached his faithful father to be "examined", as he puts it, as to whether or not he had "the marks of true grace" within his heart. " I told my father my evidences," he says, "he liked them, and told me, if those evidences were true (as I think they were), I had true grace."

A few years earlier, Matthew Henry, still only a boy of thirteen, had begun to draw up "A Catalogue of God's Mercies" towards him. In that Catalogue of Mercies, he looked back three years, to a time when he was only ten years old, and traced the day that he first began to feel that God was stretching out His hand in fervour towards him. "I think it was three years ago," he say, "that I began to be convinced, hearing a sermon by my father of Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite hear, O God, thou wilt not despise." That text smouldered and burned within the young boy's heart until that day, some five or six years late, it burst into flames by the fanning of God's Holy Spirit when the rejoicing father was taken up to glorify God even in the life of his own flesh and blood.

Matthew Henry was, of course, what was said of Murray McCheyne: "Nae ordinary man". Nor was he an "ordinary" child; or did he have an "ordinary" father, or spring from an "ordinary" family. He was reared up in the ways of Godliness, so common within the homes of these islands in that memorable age, and at three years of age, we are told of him, he could read the Bible clearly and distinctly. He soon set his heart upon the work of the Ministry of God's Word, for, having been called out of darkness into God's marvellous light by the faithful preaching of his own father, he had a desire to "do good unto others also." But these were unsettled and unsettling times for any who possessed the true spirit of Biblical non-conformity, and Matthew Henry's course of studies was often interrupted and changed.

In 1687, however, the severe strictures against the non-conformists were relaxed and Matthew Henry realised his heart's desire when he was ordained to the ministry and inducted to the charge of the flock of God at Chester. Over the next twenty-five years he expounded the Word of God to his beloved congregation from week to week. It was this weekly exposition of god's truth that was to lay the foundation stone for Matthew Henry's most famed contribution to the church of Christ that would follow him: his Commentary on the Old and New Testament. "This night," he records in his diary for the 12th November 1704, "after many thoughts of heart, and many prayers concerning it, I began my Notes on the Old Testament. It is not likely that I shall live to finish it."

He did, in fact, live to finish his Old Testament Commentary, but God saw fit to take him to be with Himself just as the fifth volume, ending at the Acts of the Apostles was completed. "Others took up the fallen pen," says one writer, "they completed a sixth volume, but did not continue Matthew Henry." "Sell your boots and buy Matthew Henry," was the rustic advice that Charles Haddon Spurgeon often gave to his aspiring preachers at the Pastor's College: "It will supply a vast store of sermons," he told them, "and as for thoughts, they will swarm like twittering swallows around an old gable at the close of Autumn."

Matthew Henry had only reached his fifty-second year when he received a fatal injury through a fall from his horse. He had been travelling to a preaching engagement, and although he went on to fulfil the engagement, died early the next morning. The spirit that had been broken through seeing the sinfulness of sin, and the heart that had been contrite on that day when God's Word come to it while still in tender years, would soon rejoice in God's eternal home. "A broken and a contrite heart," will never be "despised" by the Lord. Matthew Henry's was never despised in the years of life that God gave to him on this earth to do His will; nor would it be despised when it winged its way into the realms of everlasting day.