Robert Murray M’Cheyne: A Brother Who Cannot Die

In the summer of 1831, in a tall stone house in Edinburgh, a young man in his twenties lay dying of a fever. His name was David M’Cheyne. In the same house lived his youngest brother, Robert, who had turned eighteen that May.

Robert was the kind of student other students noticed. He was quick with words and quick on his feet. He wrote poetry, sketched, sang, and was good at the gymnastic exercises that were fashionable among young men of his day. He went to parties and to dances. He was well liked, good-looking, and comfortable in Edinburgh society. Religion, for him, meant going to church on Sunday with his respectable family and thinking no more about it.

David was different. He was the eldest, a lawyer like their father, and he was a serious Christian. For some time he had been praying for Robert and talking to him, gently and persistently, about his soul. Robert had listened the way younger brothers often listen to older ones: politely, and without much effect.

Then, on 8 July 1831, David died.

We do not have a record of what Robert said or did that day. We do not know whether he cried at the bedside or walked out into the streets. What we do know is what the death did to him over the following months and years, because he wrote about it himself, and because his closest friend, Andrew Bonar, later collected his diaries and letters and published them. Bonar, who knew the family, put it simply: the death of his brother was the event God used to wake Robert up.

Eleven years later, on the anniversary of that day, Robert wrote a single line in his diary that tells the whole story in miniature. He wrote: “This day eleven years ago, I lost my loved and loving brother, and began to seek a Brother who cannot die.”

This is the story of how a clever, popular, careless teenager became that seeker, and what he found.

The Brightest Boy in Edinburgh

Robert Murray M’Cheyne (the name is pronounced “mac-SHAY-nee”) was born in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, on 21 May 1813. He was the youngest of five children. His father, Adam M’Cheyne, was a Writer to the Signet, a senior kind of Scottish lawyer, and the family lived in the elegant “New Town,” the district of wide streets and grand terraces that had been built a generation before.

Edinburgh in those days liked to call itself “the Athens of the North.” It was a city of universities, publishers, poets and philosophers, and a clever boy could not have been born into a more stimulating place. Robert was a clever boy. Bonar records that when he was about four years old, recovering from an illness, he amused himself by learning the Greek alphabet. Whether or not every detail of that family story is exact, it fits everything else we know about him: he loved learning, and he loved it early.

He went to the High School of Edinburgh, one of the oldest schools in Scotland, and in November 1827, at the age of fourteen, he entered the University of Edinburgh. That sounds startlingly young now, but in Scotland at the time it was normal for boys to begin university at fourteen or fifteen. He did well. He won prizes, and he was especially known for his poetry; Bonar mentions a prize poem he wrote on the Covenanters, the Scottish Christians of the 1600s who had suffered for their faith. There is something a little ironic in that. He could write movingly about people who had died for their beliefs while having no very strong beliefs of his own.

He was not a bookworm who hid from people. He was athletic and threw himself into gymnastics. He drew well and was musical. He enjoyed company, and company enjoyed him. In a city full of evening parties, card games and dances, he was a natural guest.

None of this was wicked in the way the word is usually meant. He did not run wild. He did not get into trouble with the police or bring disgrace on his parents. From the outside, he looked like a model young man: bright, cheerful, well-mannered, respectable, and in church on Sundays.

But years later, when he looked back on these teenage years, he did not describe them as innocent. He described himself as having been careless about God, living for his own pleasure and for the good opinion of others. In a hymn he wrote when he was twenty-one, he put it this way:

“I once was a stranger to grace and to God, / I knew not my danger, and felt not my load.”

That was the problem. Not that he was a notorious sinner, but that he did not think he needed anything. He was doing fine. The religion he had was a matter of habit and family custom, and it never reached the centre of his life, because he did not see that there was any gap at the centre to fill.

The Brother Who Prayed

It is worth pausing on David, because without him there is no story.

David M’Cheyne was several years older than Robert. He had followed their father into the law, and he was by all accounts a gentle, thoughtful, devout man. He took his faith seriously in a way the rest of the household, decent as they were, did not quite match. And he was worried about his youngest brother.

We do not have David’s words to Robert. Bonar tells us only that David had been anxious for his brother’s soul and had spoken to him and prayed for him. It is easy to imagine how that might have felt to a brilliant eighteen-year-old: a bit embarrassing, perhaps, a bit much. Robert later admitted that he had not taken it to heart.

In the last part of his life, David passed through a long, dark season of spiritual distress, anxious and low about his own standing before God. Then, according to Bonar, peace came back to him near the end. He fell ill with a fever in the summer of 1831 and died on 8 July, still a young man.

Grief does strange things to people. Sometimes it closes a heart; sometimes it opens one. For Robert, the loss of his brother broke open something that all of David’s arguments had not. Suddenly the questions David had kept asking were not abstract any more. Where was David now? What happens when a person dies? What would happen to Robert if he died? Was the faith David had held on to, through his own dark season, real?

At eighteen, Robert found that his wit, his poems, his popularity and his prizes had nothing to say about any of that.

A Slow Dawn

If you are expecting a dramatic conversion scene, with a single night when everything changed, Robert’s story will disappoint you. He did not have one. Bonar, who knew him as well as anyone, described the change as a dawn rather than a lightning flash: light came slowly, and it is hard to say exactly when night ended and day began.

What we can see, through the diary Robert started keeping in this period, is a young man struggling. He began to read the Bible seriously. He began to pray. He started to notice things in his own life that he had never noticed before, and he did not like them.

Some of his early diary entries are about the very things that had made him popular. He wrote about stepping back from the card parties and the dancing that had filled his evenings. He was not saying that every game of cards was evil. He was saying that, for him, those evenings had become a way of not thinking about God, and he needed to stop running. It cost him. One entry records that his absence from a dance brought teasing and disapproval from people he knew, and he resolved that he must try to please God rather than people. If you have ever felt your friends’ eyebrows go up because you said no to something, you know exactly how that felt.

He also found out how hard it is to change yourself. His diaries in these years go up and down. He makes resolutions; he breaks them. He feels near to God one week and cold the next. He is honest about his vanity, his love of praise, and his tendency to think well of himself. Reading them now, you see a teenager discovering that trying harder does not fix a heart.

That discovery turned out to be the key. Bonar says that one of the books that helped Robert most in this period was an old Scottish summary of the Christian faith called The Sum of Saving Knowledge, often bound in the back of the Westminster Confession. Through it, and through the Bible, Robert began to understand something he had heard all his life without grasping: that a person is not made right with God by being good, or by trying to be good, but by trusting in what Jesus Christ has done.

He wrote about it in that hymn of 1834, which he titled “Jehovah Tsidkenu.” That is the Hebrew name in Jeremiah 23:6 which means “The LORD Our Righteousness.” In the prophecy, God promises a coming King from David’s line and says:

“And this is His name by which He will be called: The LORD Our Righteousness.”

For Robert, this was the whole gospel in a phrase. He had been trying to build up a righteousness of his own, whether through being respectable or, later, through being religious and strict with himself. Neither worked. What he needed was not his own goodness but Christ’s: Jesus’ perfect life and his death for sinners, counted to the one who trusts him. In the hymn he describes how he had once read about the cross unmoved, and how later, when he saw his own guilt, he fled to Christ, and found that this name, Jehovah Tsidkenu, was “all things to me.”

Notice what had happened. David had died, and Robert had lost the best brother he had. But in the grief, he had found Jesus, the elder Brother who had died and risen and could never die again, and who would never stop caring for him. That is why the anniversary of 8 July mattered so much to him for the rest of his life. It was both the worst day he had known and the day his real life began. Year after year, he marked it in his diary.

Under Chalmers

In November 1831, a few months after David’s death, Robert entered the Divinity Hall at the University of Edinburgh to train for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. He was eighteen.

It is fair to wonder about his motives at that point. He was still young in faith, unsettled, finding his way. But the decision held, and in the next four years he grew enormously.

He had an extraordinary teacher. The professor of divinity was Thomas Chalmers, the most famous preacher and churchman in Scotland. Chalmers was a large-hearted, energetic man who believed that Christians, and especially ministers, had to care for the whole of people’s lives. He had seen the misery of the industrial slums in Glasgow and was convinced the church must go to the poor, not wait for the poor to come to it.

Robert took this seriously. With other students he went into some of the poorest streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the narrow, crowded, often filthy lanes behind the grand buildings, to visit families, read the Bible with them, and pray with the sick. For a boy from the polished New Town, it was an education of a different kind. He saw hunger, drink, disease and despair at close range, and he began learning to speak about Christ to people who had no patience for clever talk.

He also found friends who shared his new direction. Among them were two brothers, Andrew and Horatius Bonar. Horatius would become a famous hymn-writer. Andrew would become Robert’s closest friend and, eventually, his biographer. These friendships mattered. The teenager who had once moved in a crowd that did not care about God now had companions who would pray with him, argue theology with him, and hold him to account.

He was licensed to preach on 1 July 1835, at the age of twenty-two. That autumn he became an assistant minister in the country parishes of Larbert and Dunipace, near Stirling, where there were many scattered families and growing industrial villages to visit. He threw himself into it, walking or riding miles to see people in their homes. It was hard work, and already his health, never strong, showed signs of strain.

Then, in 1836, a congregation in Dundee called him to be its minister.

St Peter’s, Dundee

Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland, was a fast-growing mill town. Its factories spun flax and linen, and its streets were packed with workers, many of them poor, many of them children who worked long shifts. St Peter’s was a new church, built for a new parish carved out of this crowded district. On 24 November 1836 Robert was ordained as its minister. He was twenty-three.

It would be easy to tell the rest of his life as a list of achievements, but that would miss the thing people who knew him remembered most. They remembered his face and his manner. He seemed, they said, to have come from being with God. He preached plainly, without showing off. He visited constantly, especially the sick and the dying. He wrote letters to young people in his congregation, and to children, encouraging them to come to Christ. He was strict with himself and tender with others.

He believed that the most important thing he could give his people was not his talent but his own closeness to Jesus. He once wrote that it is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. He meant it as a warning to himself. The clever boy had learned that cleverness is not the point.

What Came After

The years that followed were short and full.

His health kept failing, and at the end of 1838 he was sent away from Dundee to rest. While he was recovering, the Church of Scotland asked him to join a small party travelling to Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean, on what was called a “mission of inquiry” into the condition of the Jewish people and how the church might share the gospel with them. In April 1839 he set off with Andrew Bonar and two older ministers, Alexander Black and Alexander Keith. The journey took them through Egypt, across the desert, into the Holy Land, and home through what is now Turkey and central Europe. At Smyrna, on the way back, Robert fell dangerously ill with fever and nearly died. The book he and Bonar later wrote about the journey helped launch the Scottish church’s mission to Jewish communities in Europe.

Meanwhile something remarkable happened at home. Robert had prayed for years that God would awaken his people in Dundee, and had seen little. While he was away, his pulpit was filled by a young preacher named William Chalmers Burns. In the summer of 1839, first in Burns’s home town of Kilsyth and then, in August, at St Peter’s in Dundee, a revival broke out. Crowds gathered night after night; many people, young and old, came to faith in Christ. When Robert returned in November, he found the parish he had prayed for transformed, and the harvest gathered under someone else’s preaching. By every account, he was simply glad.

In 1842 he drew up something for his congregation that has outlived almost everything else he did: a calendar for reading the whole Bible in a year. It set four short passages for each day, two for family reading and two for private reading, so that in a year a household would read the Old Testament once and the New Testament and Psalms twice. He wanted his people, as he put it in the preface, to be “feeding in the same portion of the green pasture at the same time.” He had it printed, ready for the new year of 1843. Nearly two centuries later, people all over the world still read the Bible using M’Cheyne’s plan. It is a strange thought that a teenager who once spent his evenings at card parties ended up shaping the daily Bible reading of millions.

In early 1843 typhus, a fever spread in crowded, dirty housing, swept through Dundee. Robert would not keep away from the sick. In March he caught the disease himself, and on 25 March 1843 he died. He was twenty-nine. Thousands of people lined the streets for his funeral, and he was buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s.

The next year, Andrew Bonar published the Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, made largely of Robert’s own diaries, letters and sermons. It became one of the most widely read Christian books of the nineteenth century. Through it, a man whose ministry lasted barely seven years still speaks.

And at the very beginning of that whole short, bright life stands a summer day in 1831, when a clever eighteen-year-old lost his brother and began, slowly and painfully, to seek a Brother who cannot die.

In Their Own Words

“For every look at self, take ten looks at Christ.”

— Robert Murray M’Cheyne, in a letter (1840), from Andrew Bonar’s Memoir and Remains (1844)

Think It Through

1. Before David died, Robert’s life looked fine from the outside. What do you think he meant when he later said he “felt not my load”? Can a person be respectable and still be a “stranger to grace”?
2. Robert’s turning to God took months and years, not one night. Does that encourage you or frustrate you? Why might God sometimes work slowly?
3. Robert saw that he could not fix himself by trying harder, and found his hope in “The LORD Our Righteousness.” What is the difference between trying to be good enough for God and trusting in Christ’s goodness?
4. M’Cheyne made a plan so that his whole church would read the same part of the Bible each day. What would change if you and your friends did something like that?

Read More on Ochorus

You can read Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s own sermons in the library: A Castaway, Electing Love, Our Duty to Israel, The Good Way of Coming Before the Lord, The Impressions of Natural Men, What Have I to Do Any More with Idols? and Why Is God a Stranger in the Land? His author page also carries a full biography of his life, from Edinburgh to Dundee.