THEY WERE PILGRIMS
By Marcus L. Loane
Banner of Truth. 250 pages. £15.00
ISBN 0 85151 928 8
If you were told of a book with the biographies of four young men who were talented but ended their days in their early 30s, dying in uncomfortable circumstances from diseases caught and intensified by those circumstances, I guess you would not be queuing at your nearest Christian bookshop to acquire such a book. Tad gloomy? Not a bit!
The media has been trying to understand suicide bombers and why young, often talented people kill themselves and many others along with them. Revenge? Hate? Promise of an alluring paradise? So what about the four young men in these four biographies: David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Ion Keith-Falconer?
What strikes you most about each of them is their passion for Christ. One of them wrote: ‘I long for love without any coldness, light without dimness, and purity without spot or wrinkle. I long to lie at Jesus’s feet, and tell him I am all his, and ever will be.’ As a consequence each of them had a passion for the lost, which took Brainerd to the Red Indians in Delaware, Henry Martyn and Ion Keith-Falconer to the Muslim world in Persia and Arabia, and Robert Murray M’Cheyne to the Jews.
These biographies in one volume by Marcus L. Loane make these men come alive as you read, and challenge our de-votion and commitment to making Christ known. Maybe you should form a queue at the bookshop after all.
