George Matheson Books: A Guide to All 15 and Where to Start
DevotionalPrayerBible StudyBiography
George Matheson (1842–1906) was the blind Scottish minister who wrote the hymn "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go." He also wrote many books, and two kinds have lasted best: short devotional meditations, each on one verse, and studies of the people of the Bible. TheWay Library has fifteen of his books, all free to read. Seven are books of devotional meditations, three study the life of Christ, three are portrait galleries of Bible characters, and two look at Paul and at the Book of Revelation. For his life story, see who was George Matheson.
Where to start
If you're new to Matheson, start with Moments on the Mount. It's his best-known devotional book, about a hundred meditations of a page or two, and almost every one ends in a prayer. Read one a day.
After that, choose by what you need:
- In grief or a dark season: Searchings in the Silence.
- For short daily readings on everyday faith: Times of Retirement, Rests by the River, Leaves for Quiet Hours or his late sermonettes (below).
- On the Holy Spirit: Voices of the Spirit.
- For the life of Jesus: Studies of the Portrait of Christ, in two volumes.
- For Bible characters: The Representative Men of the Bible, then its New Testament companion and The Representative Women of the Bible.
- For a longer study: The Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Every quotation below is checked against the book it comes from. For many more, see our collection of George Matheson quotes.
Devotional meditations
All seven of these books work the same way. Each piece takes a single verse, often one you'd skim past, turns it in a direction you didn't expect, and usually closes with a short prayer. Matheson said one of his meditations could be read in three minutes. You can open any of these books anywhere.
Moments on the Mount
About a hundred meditations written at his manse in Innellan, seeking those moments of vision, like the disciples on the mount, when the soul sees God clearly. They cover quiet moments, the bright light in the clouds, the mystery of God's leading, the wilderness after Jordan, heaven without a temple and rest in Christ's yoke. In the preface he says he wrote for family and private devotion, and also to give young preachers something to think about.
The only ocean in which a man loses himself is self-love; God's love gives him back his life that he may keep it unto life eternal.
Moments on the Mount, The Preservation of Personality in the Christian Life
Searchings in the Silence
Ninety-five meditations, many of them on the hard places of faith: death and grief, the silence of God, why God hides Himself, doubt, and the cross in daily life. There's also great warmth here about joy, prayer and Christ's sympathy. This is the one to give a friend who is grieving or struggling to believe.
Thou hast required the prayer of faith because faith is joy, and joy alone can pray.
Searchings in the Silence, The Accompaniment of Prayer
Read Searchings in the Silence.
Times of Retirement
About eighty-five meditations first written for Saint Andrew, a Church of Scotland paper, and gathered at readers' request. They touch the attractiveness of Christ, prayer and its answer, adversity, temptation, love, hope and comfort for the bereaved. The preface explains his belief that real devotion rests on real thought: the heart, he says, "must have a theory for its own music."
The advantage of the fires of sorrow does not lie in the things which they consume, but in the things which they cannot consume.
Times of Retirement, God's Place for Adversity
Rests by the River
One hundred meditations, published the year he died. They find Christ in the common life, look at sin and prayer from fresh angles, and write about the silence of God and the joy at the root of Christian sacrifice. Some of his sharpest single lines are in this book.
God sends a cloud, not to arrest, but to stimulate, my progress.
Rests by the River, The Comfort of Religious Depression
Leaves for Quiet Hours
Ninety-four pieces gathered in 1904 from The Christian World. Each pairs a fresh thought on a Bible verse with a closing prayer, so that, as Matheson put it, the thinker's insight is married to the worshipper's fervor. They range over forgiveness, Easter, Christ's breadth and comfort in trouble.
Christ's is the only religion that spreads a table in the presence of its enemies.
Leaves for Quiet Hours, The Breadth of Christ's Religion
Late sermonettes (1908)
Eighty-six short "sermonettes" from the same paper, collected after his death under the title in the source line below. Each takes one verse and turns it in a direction you don't see coming: God's call, pardon, joy before suffering, providence in the commonplace, hope, affliction and the victory over sorrow.
God never keeps the best wine to Himself; He makes His people drink from the river of His own pleasures.
Thoughts for Life's Journey, God's Promise of Happiness
You'll find it on the George Matheson author page.
Voices of the Spirit
Ninety-five meditations from 1888 on what the Bible says about the Spirit of God, in order from Genesis 1, where the Spirit moved on the waters, to John on Patmos. Each brief reflection ends with a prayer to the Holy Spirit. It makes a good devotional companion to a study of the Spirit's work.
It is no use to bring the light until you have brought the Spirit.
Voices of the Spirit, The Precedence of the Spirit
Studies of Christ
Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 1
Matheson draws on all four Gospels to trace how Christ's work unfolded as a human life. This first volume runs from the world's expectation of His coming through the temptations, Samaria and the calling of the disciples to the feeding of the multitude. Each chapter ends with a prayer.
These fishermen of Galilee were originally united not by a creed but by an ideal — a standard of imitation.
Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 1, chapter XI, The League of Pity
Read Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 1.
Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 2
The second volume picks up after the feeding of the multitude and follows the transfiguration, the Jerusalem ministry, Lazarus, Bethany, Judas, the Last Supper, Gethsemane and the cross. It ends with Easter and the question whether the crown has replaced the cross.
We want to see Him glorified, not by His exaltation above the cross, but by His exaltation on the cross.
Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 2, chapter XXIV, Has the Crown Superseded the Cross?
Read Studies of the Portrait of Christ, Volume 2.
St. John's Portrait of Christ
A short study in two parts, published after his death, defending the Gospel of John from its spiritual side. Matheson argues that John's picture of Christ supplies what the other Gospels leave out, agrees closely with Paul's early letters, and follows a plan in which Christ shows Himself to a widening circle: the individual, the family, the city, the nation and the Gentiles.
The Fourth is the record of a spiritual experience.
St. John's Portrait of Christ, Part II
Read St. John's Portrait of Christ.
Bible character studies
The Representative Men of the Bible, First Series
Portraits of sixteen Old Testament figures, each taken as a type of human nature: Adam the child, Abel the undeveloped, Enoch the immortal, Noah the renewer, Abraham the cosmopolitan, Isaac the domesticated, Jacob the aspiring, Joseph the optimist, Moses the practical, Joshua the prosaic, Samuel the seer, David the many-sided, Solomon the wise, Elijah the impulsive, Elisha the imitative and Job the patient. He reads the Bible as a portrait gallery, and each chapter asks what kind of person this is and what God made of him.
There is only one sign of the acceptance of a sacrifice; it is the inward joy of the offerer.
The Representative Men of the Bible, First Series, Abel the Undeveloped
Read The Representative Men of the Bible.
The Representative Men of the New Testament
The companion volume, with fifteen New Testament figures, each named for the change Christ made in him: John the Baptist expanded, John self-surrendered, Nathanael invigorated, Peter emboldened, Nicodemus instructed, Thomas convinced, Philip disillusioned, Matthew exalted, Zacchaeus conscience-struck, and on to Barnabas, Mark, Cornelius, Timothy and Paul. Its theme is that Christ redeems every kind of person, but never two in the same way.
Christ produces a revolution in every soul with which He comes into contact; and yet in no two cases is the revolution precisely the same.
The Representative Men of the New Testament, Matthew the Exalted
Read The Representative Men of the New Testament.
The Representative Women of the Bible
Studies of ten women, from Eve to Mary of Bethany, each named for one trait: Eve the Unfolded, Sarah the Steadfast, Rebekah, Rachel the Placid, Miriam the Gifted, Deborah the Drastic, Ruth the Decided, Hannah the Pious, Mary the Guiding and Mary the Thought-Reading, with a short appendix on Mary Magdalene. The scan has some defects: the Deborah chapter begins mid-sentence and two chapter titles are garbled.
The Bible never comments; it paints; it leaves the comment to you and me.
The Representative Women of the Bible, chapter V, Rachel the Placid
Read The Representative Women of the Bible.
Paul and Revelation
The Spiritual Development of St. Paul
Matheson's attempt to write Paul's inner biography. Reading the letters in order, he traces how Paul's faith grew: his conversion, his time in Arabia, a series of spiritual struggles, and a widening vision of Christ as all in all. The last chapters show how that vision shaped Paul's thinking about the universe, the family and social rank. It's one of his most demanding books, and one of the most rewarding if you love Paul's letters.
His earliest meeting with Christianity was a meeting not with its cross but with its crown.
The Spiritual Development of St. Paul, Arabia: Autobiographical Reminiscences (Concluded)
Read The Spiritual Development of St. Paul.
Sidelights from Patmos
Twenty-one studies on single verses from Revelation, first written for a journal and published after his death. Matheson says they are not an exposition of the book but "flashes of modern suggestion" from it, and he asks whether John's picture of the good time coming is still our hope. He writes on the cross, pain, providence and heaven.
Man's paradise is not the place to which he is going, but the state to which he is going.
Sidelights from Patmos, Relation of Christianity to Pain
A note on these editions
These books were restored from scans of the original printings. Rests by the River has several meditations that lost their opening line, so they begin mid-sentence. Times of Retirement has occasional misread words, mostly in the Bible verses at the head of each piece. The Representative Women of the Bible has the defects noted above. The rest read cleanly for the most part.
Why read Matheson today
Matheson wrote for people with little time and heavy hearts. He is honest about pain, doubt and loneliness, and he always looks for the light inside them rather than around them. Begin with Moments on the Mount, keep Searchings in the Silence for the hard days, and find all fifteen books on the George Matheson author page. For more books like these, see our list of the best Christian devotional classics.