"May 9.—How kindly has God thwarted me in every instance where I sought to en lave myself! I will learn at least to glory in disappointments."
"May 10.—At the Communion. Felt less use for the minister than ever. Let the Master of the feast alone speak to my heart." He felt at such times, as many of the Lord's people have always done, that it is not the addresses of the ministers in serving the table, but the Supper itself, that ought to "satiate their souls with fatness."
May 21.—It is affecting to us to read the following entry:—"This day I attained my twenty-first year. Oh! how long and how worthlessly I have lived, Thou only knowest. Neff died in his thirty-first year; when shall I?"[[3]]
May 29.—He this day wrote very faithfully, yet very kindly, to one who seemed to him not a believer, and who nevertheless appropriated to herself the promises of God. "If you are wholly unassured of your being a believer, is it not a contradiction in terms to say, that you are sure the believers' promises belong to you? Are you an assured believer? If so, rejoice in your heirship; and yet rejoice with trembling; for that is the very character of God's heirs. But are you unassured—nay, wholly unassured? then what mad presumption to say to your soul, that these promises, being in the Bible, must belong indiscriminately to all! It is too gross a contradiction for you to compass, except in word." He then shows that Christ's free offer must be accepted by the sinner, and so the promises become his. "This sinner complies with the call or offer, 'Come unto me;' and thereafter, but not before, can claim the annexed promise as his: 'I will give thee rest.'"
"Aug. 14.—Partial fast, and seeking God's face by prayer. This day thirty years, my late dear brother was born. Oh for more love, and then will come more peace!" That same evening he wrote the hymn, "The Barren Fig-tree."
"Oct. 17.—Private meditation exchanged for conversation. Here is the root of the evil,—forsake God, and He forsakes us."
Some evening this month he had been reading Baxter's Call to the Unconverted. Deeply impressed with the affectionate and awfully solemn urgency of the man of God, he wrote—
Though Baxter's lips have long in silence hung,
And death long hush'd that sinner-wakening tongue,
Yet still, though dead, he speaks aloud to all,
And from the grave still issues forth his "Call:"
Like some loud angel-voice from Zion hill,
The mighty echo rolls and rumbles still.
Oh grant that we, when sleeping in the dust,
May thus speak forth the wisdom of the just!
Mr. M'Cheyne was peculiarly subject to attacks of fever, and by one of these was he laid down on a sick-bed on November 15th. However, this attack was of short duration. On the 21st he writes: "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Learned more and more of the value of Jehovah Tzidkenu." He had, three days before, written his well-known hymn, "I once was a stranger," etc., entitled Jehovah Tzidkenu, the Watchword of the Reformers. It was the fruit of a slight illness which had tried his soul, by setting it more immediately in view of the judgment-seat of Christ; and the hymn which he so sweetly sung reveals the sure and solid confidence of his soul. In reference to that same illness, he seems to have penned the following lines. November 24th:—
He tenderly binds up the broken in heart,
The soul bowed down He will raise:
For mourning, the ointment of joy will impart:
For heaviness, garments of praise.