Christ Is All: The Piety of Horatius Bonar (Chapters 1-2)

HORATIUS BONAR
December 19, 1808 – July 31, 1889

Following are quotes from the Scotish theologian and hymn-writer, Horatius Bonar, as presented in the anthologized biography Christ Is All: The Piety of Horatius Bonar (Haykin & Brooker, Reformation Heritage Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2007)

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Chapter 1: No Ordinary Work

The power of the pulpit is said to lie on the wane. Yet learning and eloquence are admitted be in full play. All kinds of artificial appliances — music, ornament, humour, style, rhetoric, architecture — have been called in to prop up the pulpit and neutralise, or at least minimise, its supposed failure. (p. 45)

The work among the lapsed is not ordinary work…It is a work that tries a minister’s faith and strength; and it is not to be done by fits and starts, nor lightly entered on, as if any one could undertake it. It is the roughest, sorest work to which we are called, and it needs hardy men, men of no common faith and love. (p. 46)

Chapter 2: God’s Trees Grow Slowly

[God's] trees grow slowly…God can afford to take His time. Man cannot. [Man] is hasty and impatient…He insists that, because it is God’s purpose that His saints should be holy, therefore they ought to be holy at once. (p. 48 )

But the question is, “Has God in Scripture anywhere led us to expect the rapidity, of growth, the quick development of perfection in which some glory, and because of the confessed lack of which in others they look down on these others as babes or loiterers?” (p. 49)

Yet we are called with a holy calling (2 Timothy 1:9); and as so called, are bound to take the highest standard for our model of life. The slowness or swiftness of the progress does not alter the standard, nor affect our aiming at conformity to it. (p. 49)