Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry (1662-1714) was born into a model Christian home. When Philip Henry was courting Miss Matthews of Worthenbury, her family objected to the engagement because they did not know much about his background. When told that they hardly knew where Philip was from, she replied, “Yes, that is more or less true; but I do know where he is going and I want to go with him.”

On August 24, 1662, a new law, called the Act of Uniformity, took effect. It stated that a revised prayer book had to be used and that all ministers not ordained by the English Church should be defrocked. Philip Henry, with 2,000 other ministers, withstood this act. The result? Branded a “dissenter,” he was shut out of the state church as well as the building in which he had been preaching. Philip noted the date as “being the day of the year on which I was born…and also the day of the year on which by law I died.”

Quietly, the Henry family moved to a property that they had inherited at Iscoid, in Flintshire, Wales. Matthew was born there that October at a place they called Broad Oak. It was a harsh time of intermittent persecutions, but among those Welsh hills they were insulated from many tragedies. London was decimated by the Plague, was leveled to ashes by the Great Fire, and terrified by the Dutch fleets, but the people of Broad Oak carried on, oblivious of the turmoil.

The Henry home was a peaceful place. Matthew said that he never experienced any rift with his younger sisters, Sarah, Katharine, Eleanor, and Anne. His only brother, John, died at the age of six so that Matthew took on the place of the only son.

Young students came there to learn from Philip and for that privilege they tutored Philip’s children. About an aspiring preacher, Philip said he made an arrangement, “I to help him, and he to help the children: the Lord be our speed.” While Katy learned to read English, Sarah worked on her Hebrew. A sickly young Matthew was particularly drawn to language study. At three years of age, he could read from the English Bible. At the tender age of nine, he was studying Greek.

In 1675, the thirteen-year-old wrote, “I think it was three years ago I began to feel concerned, hearing a sermon by my father on Psalm 51:17, ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.’ This I think it was that melted me: afterwards I began to enquire after Christ.” About that time he took a walk with his father, opened up to him about his anxiety, and there trusted the Lord Jesus Christ to save him.

Educated at home under his father’s tutoring until age eighteen, Matthew then went to a newly established “dissenting academy” at Islington where he continued his studies in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French.

In 1685, he went to Gray’s Inn to study law. His orderly mind liked the schoolwork but he could not see himself as a lawyer. At this time the young student looked for counsel on at least two occasions from the legendary Richard Baxter (1615-1691). Baxter was under a kind of house arrest at the time and was about to spend a torturous 21 months in the Tower of London. This came from the hands of Judge Jeffries, notorious for his part in “the Bloody Assize.” Baxter had been found guilty of preaching sedition, was fined #400, and his possessions were confiscated. Until the fine was paid, he was to lie in prison. A last minute clemency saved the 70-year-old from being tied to a cart’s tail and whipped through the streets of London.

Matthew was not only influenced by great men, but conspicuously by godly women. Some have belittled him as being a “momma’s boy,” but I think there is more jealousy than reality to that accusation. We can all wish for the influence and care of a woman like Matthew’s mother, as one brief letter shows. “Dear Child, It is much my comfort and rejoicing to hear so often from you, and though I have little to send you but love and my blessing (your father being absent), I write a line or two to mind you to keep close with God as I hope you do in solemn, secret, daily prayer…not forgetting what you have been taught…to walk circumspectly in your whole conversation, watching against youthful lusts and evil company, sins and snares from the world and the devil. This is from your affectionate mother.”

In 1687, Matthew took a solemn step. “I think I can say with confidence that I do not design to take up the ministry as a trade to live by…no, I hope I aim at nothing but souls, and if I gain those, though at the loss of all mere worldly comforts, I shall reckon myself to have made a good bargain.

“I think also I can say with as much assurance that my design is not to get myself a name amongst men or to be talked of in the world. No, that is a poor business.

“I can appeal to God that I have no design in the least to maintain a party or to keep up any schismatical faction. My heart rises against the thoughts of it. I hate dividing principles and practices, and whatever others are, I am for peace and healing. If my life-blood would be a sufficient balsam, I would gladly part with the last drop of it for the closing up of the bleeding wounds of differences among true Christians.”

In 1687, he was speaking to a gathering of believers in a home in Chester; the people begged him to stay and tell them more. In May of that year, he gave his full time to preaching and teaching the Word in the style of the Presbyterian Nonconformists of that time. He began there by preaching from 1 Corinthians 2:2 and they received him as an angel of God.

In August of that year, he married Katharine Hardware. It was a happy, though brief, marriage. She died of smallpox after the birth of their first child, a daughter, in February of 1689. He married again in July of 1690 to Mary Warburton. Besides their own children, they would later adopt six of Matthew’s nephews and nieces, after his sister and brother-in-law passed away.

Though he sustained shocks and tumult, his life was a study in consistency. The Bible teacher rose each morning at 4 a.m. and after personal devotions he had a time of Bible reading and instruction with family and neighbors. A second family devotional time came each night. His commentary sprang out of these morning and evening fireside expositions.

He labored from cottage to manor house to the wretched inmates in the nearby jail, nurturing a congregation of 350. After one Tuesday night lecture, Matthew was mugged. When he reached home he wrote in his diary, “8 March, 1713. As I came home, was robbed by four men. The thieves took from me ten or eleven shillings. Have reason to be thankful, First, I who have travelled so much was never robbed before; Second, because, although they took my purse, they did not take my life; Third, although they took my all, it was not much; And fourthly, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”

Henry’s thirty books and booklets include: The Life and Memoirs of Philip Henry; and Directions for Daily Communion with God. His six-volume commentary he titled, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, now commonly called Matthew Henry’s Commentary, is the most famous Bible commentary ever written, a kind of “Authorized Version” of commentaries. Henry called them “methodized and practical expositions…in plain and homely dress.” The commentary owes its fame to its orderly thoughts and devotional emphasis. John Wesley said he often heard George Whitefield preach messages that followed Matthew Henry almost word for word. Whitefield read Matthew Henry’s commentary through four times! William Cowper was reading Henry when the poem came to him, “O, for a closer walk with God.” Charles Haddon Spurgeon endorsed the classic, “Every minister ought to read it entirely and carefully through once at least.” Actually, Matthew Henry never lived to complete it. He died two months after finishing the fifth volume, covering the Gospels and the book of Acts, but he did leave behind his notes, so that a group of thirteen fellow Nonconformists completed the last volume from his manuscripts.

His epitaph reads, “The mysteries contained in the Apostolic Epistles and Book of the Revelation he went to gaze into more closely in heaven.”

Materials for this article were taken from:

Leslie F. Church, According to Matthew Henry, Marshall, Morgan & Scott
Alex H. Drysdale, Religious Reformers
D. M. Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans, Banner of Truth
William Tong, The Life of Matthew Henry