Introducing Robert Murray M'Cheyne

A few quotes from Andrew Bonar's 1845 biography of the Scottish minister Robert Murray M'Cheyne.  M'Cheyne died at the age of 29.  He's best known today for the M'Cheyne Bible reading plan. 

Here's M'Cheyne reflecting on the death of his brother, whom he grieved for the rest of his life:

Pray for me, that I may be made holier and wiser--less like myself, and more like my heavenly Master; that I may not regard my life, if so be I may finish my course with joy.  This day eleven years ago, I lost my loved and loving brother, and began to seek a Brother who cannot die.

On his personal reading:

Read part of the Life of Jonathan Edwards.  How feeble does my spark of Christianity appear beside such a sun!  But even his was a borrowed light, and the same source is still open to me.

And now on his Bible reading at one stage of his life:

How formally and unheedingly the Bible was read,--how little was read--so little that even now I have not read it all!

And finally one more:

Had this evening a more complete understanding of that self-emptying and abasement with which it is necessary to come to Christ--a denying of self, trampling it under foot--a recognizing of the complete righteousness and justice of God, that could do nothing else with us but condemn us utterly, and thrust us down to lowest hell--a feeling that, even in hell, we should rejoice in his sovereignty, and say that all was rightly done.

More quotes might be forthcoming.  One thing that strikes me from such a young man was his intensity.  Perhaps he's too intense at times, but his quest for personal holiness (and doesn't the Bible require such a quest?) seems foreign in a time when the church seems to give more attention to other matters.