VII.

MATTHEW HENRY, AND HIS PRESBYTERIAL POSITION. MATTHEW HENRY, the worthy son of a no less worthy father, was born at Broad Oak in the township of Iscoed, Flintshire, October 18, 1662: the year of "Black Bartholomew." The honourable distinction, as he esteemed it, of being a child of the ejectment was often present to Matthew Henry's young mind, and was frequently adverted to in his home circle. Consciously and unconsciously the coincidence exercised its mystic and subtle influence, giving tone and colour as well as direction to his future life. It seemed to entail on him the duty of a ministerial career; at least to involve a special responsibility which he never allowed himself to forget or disown.

HIS EARLY LIFE.

He was the second child of his parents; but as his elder brother John, a most promising boy, was cut off in his sixth year, Matthew Henry grew up like an only son among sisters. The four girls, Sarah, Katharine, Eleanor, and Anne, who in due time graced the Broad Oak home, were his early and happy companions. Only a very little younger than himself, he and they being all born within six years, 1662–1668, there was no such disparity as to prevent them being play and schoolfellows in their pleasant abode. They were educated together under the care of their parents, with occasional help from resident tutors. The sweet and tender ties between brother and sisters thus genially formed in childhood were only strengthened with the growth of time, and continued unbroken save by death.1

1 Their lives were closely and curiously bound up with one another from first to last. All the five of them were married within two years of each other. They all settled within easy distance of the parental roof, and in homes that reflected in every case, as it is pleasant to think, the gracious influences of their early training. Nor

Filial as well as fraternal piety shone with conspicuous brightness in Matthew Henry. Deep at the root of his being lay reverence for his parents. From each of them he derived some distinguishing characteristics. He inherited from his reverend father a judicial and studious cast of mind, with a certain natural gravity, not however incompatible with bonhomie and good-humour. From his beloved mother came that calm equanimity and cheerful patience, with that vivacious energy of manner and mild persistence in duty, which he displayed through life. Being by no means of a hardy physical nature, and in later life of a heavy and plethoric habit of body, Matthew Henry was the object of much solicitude in his early years.

As he grew to boyhood, however, his constitution acquired vigour, and his education went forward apace. He early displayed a passion for books and learning. So earnest became his application that his careful mother had often, from regard to his health, to drive him from the study into the open air. In 1671, when only nine years old, writing what seems to be a first letter to his father, who was on a visit to London, he can tell that, "every day since you went, I have done my lesson, a side of Latin or Latin verses, with two verses in the Greek Testament;" a fair accomplishment surely for a boy of nine. Matthew Henry was a child of many prayers, and of the most constant and careful Christian nurture in the well-ordered and genial home. His parents, by their consistent and attractive example, as well as by firm yet gentle discipline, made piety to their children, not a mere duty, but a delight. With Matthew it grew into a simple habit and second nature, giving him a first conscious spiritual experience at the early age of ten.1

was it one of the least felicities of Matthew Henry's lot, that the three youngest became, with their husbands, members and ornaments of his Church in Chester, the eldest also, to whom he seems to have felt specially drawn, being wife of the Godfearing and prosperous farmer of Wrenbury Wood, in an adjoining neighbourhood. Never in the life-long intercourse of this attached family circle was there known an instance of alienation or suspicion, neither an unkindly feeling nor a divided interest.

It is interesting to notice the providence which made the year 1672 peculiarly memorable to him. Father and son had just escaped serious danger from fever, and were both in an unusually tender and susceptible religious condition. Now

Up to his eighteenth year, Matthew Henry enjoyed the full benefit of his father's immediate supervision and personal help in all his studies. Philip Henry, with his vigorous intellect and thorough scholarship, was in every way pre-eminently qualified to quicken and direct his son's growing intelligence, setting before him a high standard, and imbuing him with his own taste for clear thinking and pointed accuracy of expression. We picture them at work together in that snug study, with its well-appointed library, the lad poring over his lessons, and preparing translations or versions for his father's eye, while the kindly grave divine himself is seated at his writing-table, transcribing into the big folio commonplace book before him some choice extract from a favourite author, or compacting his own sermonic thoughts into those memorable and expressive phrases that are afterwards to do such service when shot as winged arrows from the bow.

But the time came when it was necessary to take further steps for completing young Matthew Henry's education.

It was however a serious and difficult question-the way to the national seats of learning being barred by those recent statutes, oaths, and tests which had been directed against exactly such cases and families as his; and the idea of sending Matthew abroad to study being also hard to entertain. But at this moment the door into a third course seemed providentially to open. A remarkable man in his way, though his name may not look the most promising, was the Rev. Thomas Doolittel, or Doelittle, M.A., formerly of Pembroke College, and afterwards Rector of the parish of St. Alphage in London. Belonging to Kidderminster, and owing much of his spiritual zeal and vigour to Richard Baxter, this worthy minister is known as the courageous founder of the very first meetinghouse in London after the Act of Uniformity, and also as the this was the year when Charles II. was pleased to issue preaching licences to certain classes of Nonconformists. They were of two kinds, for persons and for places. Philip Henry's friends procured one for himself, and another for Broad Oak as a licensed place. Fitting up the "meeting" room was a great event for the young people, as well as an epoch for the neighbourhood. No one took more interest in this than young Matthew Henry; and once especially, we are told, after listening to a sermon on the grain of mustard-seed as illustrative of true grace in its germination and growth, he opened his mind in an interesting way to his relatives.

last survivor of all his London fellow-ejected brethren, living on as he did till 1707. Quietly ignoring the severely persecuting statutes, he had first opened a worship-room at Bunhill Fields, and then actually proceeded to build the large and stately meeting-house which stood in Monkwell Street, Cripplegate. He was the first also to venture on opening an academy at Islington, in 1672, for training young divines, so as to perpetuate a Presbyterian ministry outside the pale of the National Church.2 Such an attempt could hardly be expected to go on long in the face of the violent spirit then unhappily prevailing; but till the authorities should crush it, Philip Henry resolved to support the effort. When Matthew entered, in 1680, there were twenty-eight students; but it was closed by force a few months later.

Amid the scattering that followed, Matthew Henry went back to Broad Oak; and it is not till April, 1685, when he was in his twenty-third year, we find him in London again, entering himself this time a law student at Gray's Inn, Holborn. Not that he had by any means abandoned the purpose. Deem

1 This earliest of the meeting-houses was the scene of many curious incidents. On one occasion, for example, a company of soldiers threatened to shoot the minister if he persisted in the service. His undaunted bearing and courage saved him. At another time it was invaded by the justices, who tore down the pulpit; and closing the doors, they marked them with the broad arrow, and seized the building as Crown property. It became the Lord Mayor's chapel for a time. On a later occasion we are told that Mr. Doolittel, when giving out his text one morning, was disturbed by a young man making frantic efforts to escape from a crowded pew. Pausing for a moment, and in an easy and friendly yet serious tone addressing by name an aged member in the gallery, he inquired, "Do you repent of having come to Christ?" The old member rose and said, "No, sir: I only repent that I did not come to Him sooner." Then turning, in the face of the astonished and breathless congregation to the place whence the disturbance rose, he said solemnly, "Are you willing, young man, to come to Christ?" Arrested by the question, and naturally much embarrassed by the strangeness of his position, he was silent for a little; and then, as if prompted by those around him, he said, "Yes, Sir." Ay, but when?" was the next question from the pulpit. What else could he answer but, "Just now, sir "? "Then stay, dear friend, and hear God's word to you in my text; 'Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.'" The remarkable part of the story is, that on learning from the young man how much he stood in terror of his father's displeasure, should he ever come to know of his having worshipped there, Mr. Doolittel went to intercede on the young man's behalf; and the interview happily resulted in both father and son being savingly converted and "added to the Church."

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2 According to Tong's Life of Shower (p. 7), the really first in the country to do this, were the learned and venerable WARREN of Taunton (who declined a bishopric at the Restoration), and the noble FRANKLAND, in the North of England.

ing the law an honourable and for himself perhaps a possible profession, or at least a means of protection, should the open adoption of a Nonconforming ministry be absolutely prohibited, he prosecuted legal studies meantime for their valuable mental discipline, while, as his letters show, he pursued in private his theological course. Among other means of selfimprovement, he acquired fair facility in French.

HIS ORDINATION, MINISTRY, AND CHURCH PRINCIPLES.

It was in the midsummer of 1686, when at home for a holiday, after fourteen months' work at Gray's Inn, that Matthew Henry began to preach. Invited over to Nantwich by his dear and life-long friend, Mr. George Illidge, he conducted service for him several evenings-secretly, of course, because of the law, yet to considerable congregations-with conspicuous promise and marked effect on the hearers. He had occasion to do the same when on a visit to friends in Chester, with yet more memorable results.

By birth and training, as well as by conviction, Matthew Henry was a Presbyterian Puritan. His father's Church views and principles commanded his sympathy and approval. But being, like his father, a singularly Catholic-spirited Evangelical Christian, with nothing whatever in him of the ecclesiastical bigot or partisan, when some friends urged that he might find it advisable to be ordained in the Episcopal way, especially if a Bishop could be had who might not rigorously insist on the more objectionable of the prescribed oaths and forms, he carefully re-considered the whole question of ordination, as set forth in Scripture and practised in the early Church. But finding himself by the process confirmed and strengthened in his original judgment, he applied without delay to some of the best-known Presbyterian divines in London; and by them, after all due probation and examination, he was solemnly but secretly ordained by laying on of hands, with prayer and fasting, 9th of May, 1687.

Matthew Henry was urgently pressed to settle in the metropolis, but he yielded rather to the importunate calls from Chester. In a paper carefully prepared at this time, he says:

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