“I HEARD THE VOICE OF JESUS SAY.”
Few if any Christian writers of his generation have possessed tuneful gifts in greater opulence or produced more vital and lasting treasures of spiritual verse than Horatius Bonar of Scotland. He inherited some of his poetic faculty from his grandfather, a clergyman who wrote several hymns, and it is told of Horatius that hymns used to “come to” him while riding on railroad trains. He was educated in the Edinburgh University and studied theology with Dr. Chalmers, and his 270 / 226 life was greatly influenced by Dr. Guthrie, whom he followed in the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland.
Born in 1808 in Edinburgh, he was about forty years old when he came back from a successful pastorate at Kelso to the city of his home and Alma Mater, and became virtually Chalmers' successor as minister of the Chalmers Memorial Church.
The peculiar richness of Bonar's sacred songs very early created for them a warm welcome in the religious world, and any devout lyric or poem with his name attached to it is sure to be read.
Dr. Bonar died in Edinburgh, July 31, 1889. Writing of the hymn, “I heard the voice,” etc., Dr. David Breed calls it “one of the most ingenious hymns in the language,” referring to the fact that the invitation and response exactly halve each stanza between them—song followed by countersong. “Ingenious” seems hardly the right word for a division so obviously natural and almost automatic. It is a simple art beauty that a poet of culture makes by instinct. Bowring's “Watchman, tell us of the night,” is not the only other instance of similar countersong structure, and the regularity in Thomas Scott's little hymn, “Hasten, sinner, to be wise,” is only a simpler case of the way a poem plans itself by the compulsion of its subject.
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest,
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon My breast:
I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary and worn and sad,
I found in Him a resting-place,
And He has made me glad.