An All-Surpassing Fellowship, Learning from Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Communion with God, by David P Beaty, published by Reformation Heritage Books, paperback, 172 pages, £9.99 from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom.
Here is another book about M’Cheyne, the faithful minister of St Peter’s Church, Dundee, from 1836 till his death in 1843 at the age of only 29. About a third of the book is occupied with a brief account of M’Cheyne’s life.
A second section discusses “M’Cheyne’s communion with God”. It is based on a wide variety of sources, including his sermons and letters. “It is prayer”, M’Cheyne noted, “that gives preaching all its power.” A chapter entitled, “Eternal Perspective”, notes that “he saw life, with its choices, challenges, pleasures, and opportunities, in the light of eternity”. This “helped him to hold this world loosely and to pursue God’s kingdom with zealous determination. . . . He often said to friends, ‘Live and labour now, so that, when you die, you may be missed by man and accepted by God’.” A quotation from another chapter solemnly illustrates this same perspective: “Life is like a stream made up of human beings, pouring on, and rushing over the brink into eternity”.
“Learning from M’Cheyne” is the third and final section. Chapter titles include: “Really Understanding the Gospel” and “The Purposeful Pursuit of Holiness”. Each chapter ends with a series of bullet points, giving advice to readers. Most of these are appropriate, but the counsel to “thank the Lord often for His presence in your life” assumes that every reader is converted, an assumption which may be dangerous. But there is indeed much to learn from M’Cheyne; for instance: “There is nothing more deceitful than your estimate of your own strength”.
On the basis of a recent biography of W C Burns, Dr Beaty claims that Burns “was not yet fully licensed” when he deputised for M’Cheyne in Dundee while the latter travelled, with three colleagues, as far as Palestine to investigate opportunities for missionary work among the Jews. This is inaccurate: Islay Burns’ biography of his brother states that W C Burns was licensed on 27 March 1839 and began his labours in Dundee on the first Sabbath of the following month. And quotations from the NKJV are incongruous in the midst of a multitude of quotes from M’Cheyne.
It is unlikely that anything can ever be produced on M’Cheyne that will prove superior to Andrew Bonar’s Memoir; C H Spurgeon called it “one of the best and most profitable volumes ever published”. Yet An All-Surpassing Fellowship is a helpful book. May its reflections about M’Cheyne encourage many readers to seek greater holiness!
Protestant ViewPriests, Nuns and Death
A recent article in the Daily Mail (27 January 2015) by a medical doctor sheds light on the horrors of conscience which many Roman Catholic priests and nuns experience on their deathbeds. Dr Martin Scurr, a GP of 40 years’ experience, with no religious affiliation of his own, was entrusted with caring for a convent in central London, for the priests associated with Westminster Cathedral and for the Jesuits at their headquarters in Mayfair – as well as looking after Pope John Paul II while in London in 1982.
His account is sobering, recalling that “priests are the most anxious, most hysterical and hardest to control”. Again he states, “I found that the nuns could be very spiteful, competitive and hysterical. When I started looking after them I found that they were all on Valium, which the previous GP had used to keep them under control. . . . In my experience only the nuns with dementia died well.”
These words clearly demonstrate how false and empty is the comfort which the rituals of the Roman Church afford on the brink of eternity, even to the souls of its most devoted members. The awful prediction of 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 seems very applicable to the final experiences of these poor and pitiable men and women: “And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
AWM