MANNAFEST

The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century

Robert Murray M'Cheyne

1813–1843 · Scottish

Dead at twenty-nine, and Scotland has not stopped reading him since.

The life

Robert Murray M'Cheyne took the new parish of St Peter's in Dundee at twenty-three and worked it like a man who knew he had little time — visiting the poor of a mill town street by street, preaching to crowds that filled a building meant for eleven hundred. In 1839 the church sent him with three others to Palestine to report on the condition of the Jews, a journey that nearly killed him with fever.

While he was away, the young preacher left in his place saw revival break out in the parish; M'Cheyne came home to find his people awakened without him and threw himself into it. He drew up a calendar for reading the whole Bible in a year, which is still printed and still used. Typhus caught from his parishioners killed him in March 1843, aged twenty-nine. Andrew Bonar gathered his sermons and letters into a memoir that has never gone out of print.