In Depth:  Don Stephens

It was the advice of the Rev. Samuel Clarke and other friends which encouraged Matthew Henry to begin writing a commentary on the whole Bible.

The following entry in his journal announced the commencement of the work:

Mitsuo Fuchida's story illustrates the sovereignty of God's grace. To tell it,

I will have to take you back to the real life events of the Japanese attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbor 60 years ago, dramatised in the film commemorating it.

With a marvellous conversion out of sexual immorality, Augustine became one of the church's greatest theologians, profoundly influencing both Luther and Calvin.

Augustine was born in what we now call eastern Algeria. The town was 60 miles inland and the Romans named it Tagaste.

Alexander Mackay was a pioneer missionary to Uganda. He was born in 1849 in Rhyme, a village not far from Aberdeen. His father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, so it is no surprise to learn that the Bible and the Westminster Catechism were the two most important books in the house.

Until he was 14 he was home-schooled and during that time he came to love and trust Christ.

I am told that Fanny Crosby is in the Guinness Book of Records for writing the largest number of hymns - nearly 9,000.

This remarkable lady was born in New England in 1820 and lived to one month short of her 95th birthday in 1915. When she was six weeks old, the doctor was called to attend to an eye infection. He arranged for hot poultices to be put on both eyes. These burnt the corneas, scar tissue formed, and as a result, she was blinded. Yet at no point in her life did she ever complain or hold a grudge. In fact, she saw it as the means God used to make her life's work possible.

First, let's see the 28-year-old John Elias fighting one of his greatest battles. It is the Battle of Rhuddlan.

It is the late summer of 1802. Unlike South Wales, North Wales is still largely a mission field, and Rhuddlan is playing host to a fair on a Sunday. There are men and women dancing, drinking and revelling. Musicians and singers are everywhere. People have come to Rhuddlan from miles around in the hope of being hired to work in the harvest fields.

This remarkable woman was born in Aberdeen in 1848, but, when she was ten, her parents moved to Dundee, looking for work as weavers.

Her father was an alcoholic and died young, but her mother was a Christian in the United Presbyterian Church. This church had started a pioneer mission work in Calabar, now part of Eastern Nigeria, and the stories from Calabar were studied in the Slessor house.

An old Russian proverb says: 'He who lives in the past loses one eye; but he who forgets the past loses both eyes'. This is the first of a regular column over the next few months giving short biographies of some great evangelical leaders of the past.

Henry Venn is little-known nowadays. His story is not dramatic, but in his time he was much used by Christ and he has some useful lessons for us in 1997.