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Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry (18 October 1662 – 22 June 1714) was a prominent British Presbyterian minister and Nonconformist theologian. He is immortalised in Christian history for writing the Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, a monumental devotional commentary that remains a staple in biblical study more than three centuries later.

Early Life & Persecution
Henry was born prematurely at Broad Oak, a farmhouse on the border of Wales and England. He arrived during a time of intense religious upheaval - just two months after the Great Ejection of 1662, in which his father, the godly Puritan minister Philip Henry, was stripped of his pastorate for refusing to conform to the Church of England's strict state mandates. Though Matthew was a physically frail and sickly child, he possessed a brilliant mind. Educated entirely at home by his father, he could read the Bible fluently by age three, and by age nine, he was writing in Latin and reading the Greek New Testament. He experienced a profound Christian conversion at age 10 while listening to one of his father’s household sermons.

Pastoral Ministry
Though Henry initially moved to London to study law at Gray's Inn in 1685, his heart was relentlessly drawn toward full-time ministry. He abandoned his legal track, was privately ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and in 1687 accepted a call to pastor a small home church in Chester, England.
  • The Chester Years (1687–1712): Henry spent 25 years building this congregation from a handful of believers into a thriving church of over 350 communicants. He was a tireless worker, routinely waking at 4:00 AM to study for up to eight hours a day, preaching multiple times a week, lecturing in surrounding villages, and ministering to local prison inmates.
  • The London Move (1712–1714): In 1712, he relocated to pastoring a congregation at Mare Street in Hackney, London, a move that provided him with better access to printers for his rapidly growing literary works.
Personal Life & Suffering
Henry's life was marked by deep personal grief:
  • His first wife, Katherine Hardware, died of smallpox in 1689 just 18 months into their marriage, shortly after giving birth to their first daughter (who tragically passed away 15 months later).
  • He later married Mary Warburton, with whom he had nine children. However, the couple endured the heartbreaking loss of three more children in infancy.

Published works

  • Matthew Henry - Complete Commentary
    Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible is one of the most famous, enduring, and widely used Christian devotional commentaries ever written. First published in 1706 as a six-volume set, it provides an exhaustive, verse-by-verse (or section-by-section) study of the Old and New Testaments.