Matthew Henry Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Matthew Henry was born in 1662 at Broad Oak, a border hamlet between Flintshire and Shropshire. He grew up in a household shaped by the upheavals of the English Restoration. His father, Philip Henry, had been among the ministers ejected in 1662 by the Act of Uniformity, and the family practiced their faith outside the structures of the established church. From childhood Matthew absorbed Scripture, catechism, and the habits of family devotion his father diligently maintained. The home at Broad Oak doubled as a small academy where Latin, Greek, and theology were taught alongside a rigorous piety that would mark Matthew's entire career.

Education and Formation
Henry's earliest teachers were his parents, with Philip Henry providing a model of careful exegesis, pastoral steadiness, and principled nonconformity. As a young man he studied at dissenting academies, notably under Thomas Doolittle at Islington, which offered classical and theological training to those barred from the universities. For a time he was at Grays Inn in London to read law, a path that sharpened his habits of orderly argument and close reading. Yet the ministry proved the stronger call. He came to view the pulpit and the pastoral round as the most fitting arena for the gifts and convictions he had inherited, shaped by the Puritan tradition of practical divinity associated with figures like Richard Baxter. He also learned from the scholarly labors of Matthew Poole, whose biblical work would later inform Henry's own approach to exposition.

Ministry at Chester
By the late 1680s Henry had begun preaching regularly and accepted a call to shepherd a Presbyterian congregation in the city of Chester. The Toleration Act of 1689 permitted dissenting worship under certain conditions, and in that space Henry and his people established a stable meeting and a demanding routine of congregational life. He preached sequentially through books of the Bible, explained doctrine at midweek lectures, catechized the young, and urged heads of households to maintain daily prayer and instruction at home. His style combined careful exposition with warm application, the sermon moving naturally from the text to conscience, family, and community. Known for pastoral visiting and practical counsel, he also kept open, civil relations with clergy and laity of the established church in the city, convinced that Christian unity could be pursued without surrendering principle. Chester became, over a quarter century, the scene of his most sustained labor and of a growing reputation for steadiness and clarity.

Author and Expositor
While resident in Chester, Henry emerged as a writer. He published devotional and pastoral works that circulated widely among English-speaking Protestants. The Life of Philip Henry offered more than filial tribute; it provided a window into the spirituality and discipline of the ejected ministers and became a classic of nonconformist piety. A Method for Prayer, arranged around the language of Scripture, taught ordinary Christians to pray with breadth, reverence, and confidence in the promises of God. But his most enduring undertaking was his Exposition of the Old and New Testament, an ambitious, multi-volume commentary begun in the early eighteenth century. Written for ministers and lay readers alike, the Exposition avoided scholastic technicalities while drawing on the learning of earlier commentators and on Henry's own pastoral experience. Its pages move from explanation to reflection to pointed, memorable application. He progressed steadily, publishing volumes as they were completed, and lived to cover the entire Old Testament and through the Acts of the Apostles. After his death, fellow ministers completed the remaining New Testament portions using his notes, preserving the tone and method he had established.

London Years
Late in life Henry accepted a call to a congregation near London, at Hackney, seeking both a broader sphere and relief from the strain of long travel to preach in outlying districts. The move in 1712 placed him among leading dissenting ministers of the metropolis. He participated in lectureships and ministerial meetings, moving in circles that included figures such as Edmund Calamy. London readership increased the reach of his printed works, and the pace of his Exposition remained remarkably steady for a man balancing a new pastorate with ongoing publication. Even in the capital, he retained the habits formed in Chester: structured preaching through books, attentive pastoral care, and advocacy of family religion.

Final Journey and Death
In June 1714, returning from visiting friends and former congregants in the northwest, Henry fell ill on the road and died at Nantwich in Cheshire. The news spread rapidly through nonconformist communities. He was mourned as a pastor of unusual balance and as a writer who had managed to bring the breadth of Scripture into the ordinary rooms of English devotion. His unfinished commentary was quickly gathered and continued by a circle of ministers who aimed to transmit his voice intact to future readers.

Theology and Ministry Style
Henry stood in the Reformed, nonconformist stream, but he expressed that inheritance with an irenic temper and pastoral tact. He held together doctrines of divine sovereignty and human responsibility, and he prosecuted doctrinal controversy sparingly, preferring to persuade through explanation and example. His preaching and writing were anything but bare exegesis: he lingered over the moral affections, the duties of the household, the claims of conscience in business and community, and the comfort that believers draw from the promises of God. He was convinced that Scripture interprets Scripture, populated his sermons with cross-references, and wrote in a style clear enough for the family table and shapely enough for the pulpit. The influence of Philip Henry's discipline is evident on every page, as is the imprint of the Puritan divines from whom he learned to join doctrine, worship, and life.

Family and Personal Life
Henry married and kept a household in which family worship served as the daily frame for life. He valued hospitality, welcomed young people preparing for ministry into his study, and encouraged reading as a habit of devotion. His correspondence reveals a pastor who listened as much as he counseled and who measured success less by numbers than by evident growth in grace among the people under his care.

Legacy
The authority of Matthew Henry's Exposition did not rest on novel hypotheses or literary show, but on an unflagging confidence that Scripture, read thoroughly and prayed through, yields wisdom for every station of life. Subsequent generations of ministers, missionaries, and lay readers across denominations continued to draw from it. In the nineteenth century Charles Spurgeon singled out Henry's commentary as a book pastors should read through, testifying to its ongoing utility. Henry's Life of Philip Henry ensured that the memory of the ejected ministers remained a living resource rather than a relic, and his A Method for Prayer has repeatedly been rediscovered by Christians seeking scriptural breadth and order in devotion. In city and countryside alike he labored as a plain preacher and careful expositor, a son of the ejection who turned the liabilities of exclusion into a lifetime of patient service to the churches. His standing among English-speaking Protestants has endured because the virtues he embodied, clarity, warmth, fidelity to the text, and pastoral realism, do not wear out.

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