Who Was George Matheson? The Blind Scottish Preacher and Hymn Writer
George Matheson was a Scottish minister who lived from 1842 to 1906. He lost almost all his sight as a young man, yet he became one of the best-known preachers in Scotland, wrote more than a dozen books, and gave the church the hymn "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go." He served eighteen years in the small seaside parish of Innellan and then thirteen years at St. Bernard's Church in Edinburgh. Today he's read mostly for his short devotional meditations, which take one verse of the Bible and turn it so you see it in a new light.
Here is his story, what he taught, and where to start with his books.
A bright boy losing his sight
Matheson was born in Glasgow on March 27, 1842, the oldest of eight children in a comfortable merchant family. His eyes were weak from childhood, and they grew worse as he grew up. By his late teens he could hardly see at all. Accounts of his life differ on the exact year, but by about twenty he was, for practical purposes, blind.
He didn't give up his studies. He went to the Glasgow Academy and then to the University of Glasgow, where he took first place in classics, logic and philosophy. His family, and especially his sisters, read to him and wrote for him. He trained a remarkable memory. Later in life he could preach a long sermon, read the Scripture lessons and lead the prayers without notes, and many in his congregations didn't know he couldn't see them.
Innellan
Matheson was licensed to preach in 1866 and served for a short time as an assistant at Sandyford Church in Glasgow. In 1868 he became minister of Innellan, a village on the Firth of Clyde, where he stayed for eighteen years.
Those were his great writing years. He wrote books on theology and on the growth of the Christian faith, and he was chosen to give the Baird Lecture in 1881. The University of Edinburgh gave him a doctor of divinity degree in 1879. Queen Victoria asked him to preach at Balmoral, and she had his sermon on Job printed.
It was also at Innellan that he wrote his hymn. He said he wrote "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" in a few minutes on the evening of his sister's wedding, in 1882, at a time of deep pain that he never fully explained. Many stories have grown up about that pain, most often that a young woman broke off their engagement when she learned he was going blind. Whatever the cause, the hymn speaks of a love that holds on when everything else lets go, and it is still sung around the world.
Matheson's devotional book Moments on the Mount comes from the Innellan manse. In its preface he says he wanted to help families and individuals in their devotions, and also to give young preachers something to think about. He saw no conflict between the two:
Devotion is not the absence of thought, and thought is not necessarily the absence of devotion.
Moments on the Mount, Preface
St. Bernard's, Edinburgh
In 1886 Matheson was called to St. Bernard's Church in the Stockbridge district of Edinburgh. Crowds came to hear him, and he became one of the best-known ministers in the Church of Scotland. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1890. He gave up his active charge in 1899 because of his health, but he kept writing almost to the end. He died suddenly at North Berwick on August 28, 1906, at sixty-four, and he was buried in the Glasgow Necropolis.
What he taught
Matheson is easy to recognize. He takes a verse, often one most readers pass over, and asks a question nobody else would think to ask. Why does the light come in the cloud? Why did God lead Israel the long way? What did Abraham find "behind him" on the mount? Then he answers in a few paragraphs, and most of the meditations end in a prayer.
Three things come up again and again.
Pain has a purpose. A blind man who wrote about light, Matheson believed God does His best work in the dark places of life. He wrote:
Thy cloud is thy fire-chariot; thy trial is thy triumph.
Moments on the Mount, The Bright Light in the Clouds
And in another book:
What He searches for in thy heart is not the pain, but the pearl.
Times of Retirement, God's Place for Adversity
God belongs in ordinary life. He had no time for a faith kept for Sunday. Work itself should be worship, and Christ is found in the busy street as much as in the quiet place:
Say not, I must cease betimes from work that I may worship; thy work must itself be a worship, a rest in God.
Moments on the Mount, Heaven Without a Temple
Prayer comes from need, not show. He wrote often about prayer, and he cared more for the heart behind it than the words:
Not the word but the wish, not the sound but the sympathy, not the kneeling but the need, makes mine a prayer.
Rests by the River, The Abuse of Religious Faith
He also wrote about doubt with real tenderness. He knew what it was to search in the dark, and he believed God hears the person who can only ask for faith. Writing on Mary at the empty tomb, he says of a seeker's cry:
It is not yet the prayer of faith, but it is the prayer for faith.
Searchings in the Silence, Doubt
Bible portraits
Matheson also wrote longer books about the people of the Bible. In his two volumes of Representative Men he treats each figure as a type of human nature: Jacob the aspiring, Joseph the optimist, Job the patient, Peter the emboldened, Thomas the convinced. In The Spiritual Development of St. Paul he tries to write the inner story of the apostle, tracing how Paul's vision of Christ grew from his conversion and his time in Arabia to the letters he wrote from prison.
These books show the same gift as his devotional writing: he looks at a familiar figure from an angle you didn't expect. On Jacob he says, in one line:
He never would have wrestled at Peniel if he had not dreamed at Bethel.
The Representative Men of the Bible, First Series, Jacob the Aspiring
Why he's still read
Matheson wrote for people who are tired, grieving, doubting or just busy. His meditations are short. He said himself that one of them can be read in three minutes, and he believed three minutes could change a whole day. He's honest about the dark, but he always finds light in it. And he writes as a man who had lost a great deal and still found God's love holding on to him.
Where to start
TheWay Library has fifteen of his books, all free to read. Start with Moments on the Mount, about a hundred short meditations that make a good morning or evening reading. If you're grieving or in a hard season, try Searchings in the Silence, which has some of his best pages on death, God's silence and doubt. For Bible characters, begin with The Representative Men of the Bible. For the life of Jesus, read his two volumes of Studies of the Portrait of Christ.
Our guide to George Matheson's books describes all fifteen, and our collection of George Matheson quotes gathers his best lines with their sources. You'll find all his books on the George Matheson author page. For more books like his, see our list of the best Christian books on suffering and comfort.