Who Was Andrew Bonar? M'Cheyne's Friend and Biographer
Andrew Alexander Bonar was a Scottish minister who lived from 1810 to 1892. He was the closest friend of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, the young Dundee pastor whose holy life and early death moved all of Scotland, and he wrote the book that made M'Cheyne known around the world. He was also the younger brother of the hymn writer Horatius Bonar. For more than half a century Andrew Bonar was a country and then a city pastor, a man of prayer and Bible study, and a warm friend of revival wherever it came.
Here's a look at his life, his books, and where to start reading him.
Edinburgh
Bonar was born in Edinburgh on May 29, 1810, one of a large family. His father, a lawyer, died when Andrew was a boy, and his mother raised the children. The Bonars came from a long line of Church of Scotland ministers, and three of the brothers, John, Horatius and Andrew, became ministers themselves.
Andrew studied at the Edinburgh High School and the university. But by his own account he was not truly converted until he was about twenty, after a long season of searching. He went on to study divinity at Edinburgh in the years when Thomas Chalmers was teaching there. Among his fellow students was a quick, earnest young man named Robert Murray M'Cheyne. They became friends for life.
Collace and the mission to the Jews
After some years as an assistant minister, Bonar was ordained in 1838 to the parish of Collace, a quiet farming district in Perthshire. He stayed there eighteen years.
In 1839 the Church of Scotland chose Bonar and M'Cheyne, with two older ministers, to travel to Palestine and Europe and report on the condition of the Jewish people. The trip took most of a year. They crossed the desert from Egypt, stayed in Jerusalem, rode through Galilee, and came home through the Jewish communities of eastern Europe. M'Cheyne nearly died of fever on the way. The two young men wrote up the trip together as the Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews, and the book led to the start of the Church's mission to the Jews. Bonar loved the Jewish people for the rest of his life.
While they were gone, revival broke out in M'Cheyne's church in Dundee, and it spread to other parishes.
The memoir of M'Cheyne
M'Cheyne died in March 1843, not yet thirty. Within weeks, Scotland's national church split in the Disruption, and Bonar left the established church with hundreds of other ministers to form the Free Church of Scotland. He kept his congregation at Collace.
Then he gathered his friend's diaries, letters and sermons and wrote his life. The Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M'Cheyne came out the next year and became one of the most read Christian biographies ever written. It is mostly M'Cheyne in his own words, but Bonar's narration carries it, and he writes as a man who saw it all. He explains, for instance, how M'Cheyne kept his soul fresh in his early days in Dundee:
During his first years in Dundee, he often rode out in an afternoon to the ruined church of Invergowrie, to enjoy an hour's perfect solitude; for he felt meditation and prayer to be the very sinews of his work.
The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, First Years of Labor in Dundee
In 1848 Bonar married Isabella Dickson. They had several children. Isabella died in 1864, and he never remarried.
Finnieston, Glasgow
In 1856 Bonar was called to a new Free Church in Finnieston, a working district of Glasgow. He stayed there until he died, thirty-six years later. He was a faithful visitor, a careful Bible teacher and a man who prayed for hours. He kept a diary for most of his life, and after his death his daughter Marjory edited it. Many readers think that diary is one of the great spiritual records of the century.
When the American evangelist D. L. Moody came to Scotland in 1874, some Scottish ministers were wary of him. Bonar welcomed him warmly and stood by him, and the two became friends. He was made a Doctor of Divinity by Edinburgh University in 1874, and in 1878 he was Moderator of the Free Church's General Assembly.
He died at his home in Glasgow on December 30, 1892, at eighty-two.
What he taught
Bonar's great subject was Christ, and he found Christ on every page of the Bible. His Commentary on the Book of Leviticus reads the offerings, the priesthood and the feasts as pictures of the Saviour. He wrote it, he said, from notes made in his daily Bible reading, and he believed Christians needed to study every part of Scripture:
The Holy Spirit surely wishes us to inquire into what he has written; and the unhealthy tone of many true Christians may be accounted for by the too plain fact that they do not meditate much on the whole counsel of God.
A Commentary on the Book of Leviticus, Preface
His Christ and His Church in the Book of Psalms does the same for the Psalter. It hears in each psalm the voice of Christ, of His church, or of the believer walking with Him.
He also loved souls. In his memoir of M'Cheyne, writing of the first time his friend saw someone awakened under his preaching, Bonar said:
All who find Christ for themselves are impelled, by the holy necessity of constraining love, to seek the salvation of others.
The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, His Youth, and Preparation for the Ministry
He held that conviction to the end. He wrote a second missionary life, the Memoir of David Sandeman, about a young Scot who died in China after only a few years' work.
Why he's still read
Bonar is read today mainly because of M'Cheyne. His memoir has shaped generations of pastors, and it remains a standard book for anyone who wants to see what a devoted ministry looks like. But his commentaries are worth reading too. They are warm, simple and full of Christ, written for people who want to pray their way through the Bible, not just study it.
Where to start
TheWay Library has five of his books, all free to read. Start with The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne. If you want to follow the two friends across the Holy Land, read the Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews. For devotional Bible study, try Christ and His Church in the Book of Psalms.
Our guide to Andrew Bonar's books explains each one, and our collection of Andrew Bonar quotes gathers his best lines. All his books are on the Andrew A. Bonar author page. To read about his brother, see who was Horatius Bonar, and for the American evangelist he befriended, see who was D. L. Moody.