Roger Steer

Matthew Henry

On October 18, 1662, in Broad Oak, a Welsh farmhouse at Iscoid, Flintshire, Matthew Henry was born. His father, Philip Henry, a well-known clergyman, was one of two thousand who resigned or were ejected from their livings because they ‘dissented’ to the conditions laid down in the 1662 Act of Uniformity which enforced the use of the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of England. It required all clergy and government officials to conform to the rites and ceremonies of the Anglican Church, or face penalties such as deprivation of office or imprisonment.

Because Philip Henry’s wife had a modest inheritance, the Henrys were able to carry on living at Broad Oak and Philip could carry on his ministry to the people of the area. Matthew was their second son – so frail at birth that he was baptised when he was only a day old in case he died within a week. But as a boy, though physically weak, he was highly intelligent and was said to have read aloud a chapter of the Bible when he was only three years old.

At Broad Oak, Philip Henry used to offer accommodation and training to candidates for ministry in the church. They repaid him by acting as tutor to his children. One of these students, William Turner, gave Matthew his first love of Latin. In 1680 Philip sent Matthew to the Academy at Islington, London. Philip thought that Oxford and Cambridge were ‘too lax’ for his son. At Islington, Matthew was taught by Thomas Doolittle MA (previously at Pembroke College, Cambridge) and Thomas Vincent MA (previously at Christ Church, Oxford). Matthew later said that Thomas Doolittle was ‘studious and diligent’ though he did observe that his own rooms were ‘very straight and little’.

With his Islington studies completed, and after a short break back at Broad Oak, Matthew returned to Gray’s Inn, London, to study law. Here he came under the influence of Edward Stillingfleet, rector of St Andrew’s, Holborn, who had made his name as a preacher and was later to become Bishop of Worcester, and John Tillotson who later become Archbishop of Canterbury. He gathered some of his friends in a small group which met for prayer and Bible study and later he became a Presbyterian pastor in Chester from 1687 to 1712.

In public services he usually prayed for half an hour and preached for an hour. His sermons expounded passages of Scripture but were said to be always practical in their application to the problems of ordinary life. On Saturday afternoons he held catechism classes for children to prepare them before they attended the Lord’s Supper which he said were a fulfilment of their baptismal covenant. Almost certainly, his sermons formed the basis of his massive commentary on the whole Bible which was first published in 1710 after six years work.

One interesting feature of Matthew Henry’s commentary is the wide appeal which it has right across the church spectrum. For example, Alec Vidler, the longest serving editor of Theology and who taught at the University of Cambridge, would by many perhaps be regarded as ‘liberal’ in this theology. But in his little book on the Gospel of Mark, Read, Mark, Learn, Vidler wrote that ‘while I hold that the fruits of modern scholarship nourish rather than inhibit faith, I have always drawn on the work of older, pre-critical expositors where they have in my view enlightened the meaning of the text or made noteworthy reflections upon it. I often refer to Matthew Henry’s invaluable commentary on the whole Bible, which was produced in the seventeenth century. I was fortunate enough during the Second World War to buy for twelve shillings and sixpence a six-volume eighteenth-century folio edition of this work: the best bargain I have ever acquired’. On page 23 of the same book, Vidler describes Matthew Henry as ‘the prince of biblical expositors’.

For me, two charms of Matthew Henry’s commentary are these: first, although he is expounding Scripture, he adopts a story-telling technique, making the memorable scenes of the Bible come alive in the process. And second, though the custom of the times was to use long sentences, and although he used semi-colons where we would use full stops, Henry often used short sentences adding to the drama of the scenes he commented on. Today, the complete edition of Matthew Henry’s commentary is 7,100 pages long in six volumes. My own one volume edition runs to 784 pages and I treasure every one of them.