George Müller of Bristol: A Hendrickson Classic Biography
466
George Müller of Bristol: A Hendrickson Classic Biography
466Overview
When Müller felt called by God to care for orphans, he had only a few cents in his pocket. Without ever asking anyone other than God, he received over $7,200,000 dollars (in 1800s money) through prayer alone. Müller established orphanages in Bristol, England, and founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad, the object of which was to aid Christian day-schools, to assist missionaries, and to circulate the Scriptures. His life was characterized by prayer, faith, and self-denial in the cause of Christ. During his lifetime, he established 117 schools, which educated more than 120,000 young persons, including orphans.
From the age of seventy until ninety, Mr. Müller began to make great evangelistic tours. He traveled 200,000 miles, going around the world and preaching in many lands and in several different languages.
This classic biography of George Müller tells of his dependence on prayer and his compassionate concern for orphans in Bristol, England. George Müller (1805-1898) was well-known for his constant faith in God and for providing an education to the children under his care, to the point where he was accused of raising the poor above their natural station in life. Müller left a charitable legacy that continues to this day.
George Müller of Bristol was written the year after Müller’s death by his close friend, Arthur T. Pierson, an American preacher and evangelist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781598565898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hendrickson Publishers, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2022 |
| Series: | Hendrickson Classic Biographies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 466 |
| File size: | 608 KB |
About the Author
Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837–1911), was an American Presbyterian pastor with a wide and varied transatlantic ministry that made him famous in Scotland and England. This pioneer of fundamentalism preached over 13,000 sermons in his lifetime, delivered Bible lectures in venues like Moody Bible Institute, and penned over fifty books. He served as a consulting editor for the original Scofield Reference Bible (1909) for his friend, C. I. Scofield and counted as friends such men as D. L. Moody, George Müller, Adoniram Judson Gordon, and C. H. Spurgeon (whom he succeeded in the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London).
Read an Excerpt
George Müller of Bristol
By Arthur T. Pierson
Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC
Copyright © 2013 Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLCAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59856-589-8
CHAPTER 1
In Mr. Müller's Words
November 1821. I then went, without money, to another hotel, in a village near Brunswick, where I spent another week in an expensive way of living. At last, the owner of the hotel, suspecting that I had no money, asked for payment, and I was obliged to leave my best clothes as a security, and could scarcely thus escape from being arrested. I then walked about six miles, to Wolfenbüttel, went to an inn, and began again to live as if I had plenty of money.
Here I stayed two days, looking out for an opportunity to run away; for I had now nothing remaining to leave as a pledge. But the window of my room was too high to allow of my escaping, by getting down at night. On the second or third morning, I went quietly out of the yard, and then ran off; but being suspected and observed, and therefore seen to go off, I was immediately called after, and so had to return.
I now confessed my case, but found no mercy. I was arrested, and taken between two soldiers to a police officer. Being suspected by him to be a vagabond or thief, I was examined for about three hours, and then sent to gaol [jail]. I now found myself, at the age of sixteen, an inmate of the same dwelling with thieves and murderers, and treated accordingly. My superior manners profited nothing. For though, as a particular favor, I received the first evening some meat with my bread, I had the next day the common allowance of the prisoners, very coarse bread and water, and for dinner vegetables, but no meat. My situation was most wretched. I was locked up in this place day and night, without permission to leave my cell. The dinner was such that on the first day I completely loathed it, and left it untouched. The second day I took a little, the third day all, and the fourth and following days I would fain have had more. On the second day I asked the keeper for a Bible, not to consider its blessed contents, but to pass away the time. However, I received none. Here then I was: no creature with me, no book, no work in my hands, and large iron rails before my narrow window.
... After a few days I found out that a thief was imprisoned next to me, and, as far as a thick wooden partition would allow of it, I conversed with him; and shortly after the governor of the prison allowed him, as a favor to me, to share my cell. We now passed away our time in relating our adventures, and I was by this time so wicked, that I was not satisfied with relating things of which I had been really guilty, but I even invented stories to show what a famous fellow I was.
From His Birth to His New Birth
A human life, filled with the presence and power of God, is one of God's choicest gifts to his church and to the world.
Things which are unseen and eternal seem, to the carnal man, distant and indistinct, while what is seen and temporal is vivid and real. Practically any object in nature that can be seen or felt is thus more real and actual to most men than the Living God. Every man who walks with God, and finds him a present help in every time of need; who puts his promises to the practical proof and verifies them in actual experience; every believer who with the key of faith unlocks God's mysteries, and with the key of prayer unlocks God's treasuries, thus furnishes to the race a demonstration and an illustration of the fact that "he is, and is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek him."
George Müller was such an argument and example incarnated in human flesh. Here was a man of like passions as we are and tempted in all points like as we are, but who believed God and was established by believing; who prayed earnestly that he might live a life and do a work which should be a convincing proof that God hears prayer and that it is safe to trust him at all times; and who has furnished just such a witness as he desired. Like Enoch, he truly walked with God, and had abundant testimony borne to him that he pleased God. And when on the tenth day of March, 1898, it was told us of George Müller that "he was not," we knew that "God had taken him": it seemed more like a translation than like death.
To those who are familiar with his long life-story, and, most of all, to those who intimately knew him and felt the power of personal contact with him, he was one of God's ripest saints and himself a living proof that a life of faith is possible; that God may be known, communed with, found, and may become a conscious companion in the daily life. George Müller proved for himself and for all others who will receive his witness that, to those who are willing to take God at his word and to yield self to his will, he is "the same yesterday and today and forever": that the days of divine intervention and deliverance are past only to those with whom the days of faith and obedience are past—in a word, that believing prayer works still the wonders which our fathers told of in the days of old.
The life of this man may best be studied, perhaps, by dividing it into certain marked periods, into which it naturally falls, when we look at those leading events and experiences which are like punctuation-marks or paragraph divisions—as, for example:
1. From his birth to his new birth or conversion: 1805–1825.
2. From his conversion to full entrance on his life-work: 1825–1835.
3. From this point to the period of his mission tours: 1835–1875.
4. From the beginning to the close of these tours: 1875–1892.
5. From the close of his tours to his death: 1892–1898.
Thus the first period would cover twenty years; the second, ten; the third, forty; the fourth, seventeen; and the last, six. However thus unequal in length, each formed a sort of epoch, marked by certain conspicuous and characteristic features which serve to distinguish it and make its lessons peculiarly important and memorable.
For example, the first period is that of the lost days of sin, in which the great lesson taught is the bitterness and worthlessness of a disobedient life. In the second period may be traced the remarkable steps of preparation for the great work of his life. The third period embraces the actual working out of the divine mission committed to him. Then for seventeen or eighteen years we find him bearing in all parts of the earth his world-wide witness to God; and the last six years were used of God in mellowing and maturing his Christian character. During these years he was left in peculiar loneliness, yet this only made him lean more on the divine companionship, and it was noticeable with those who were brought into most intimate contact with him that he was more than ever before heavenly minded, and the beauty of the Lord his God was upon him.
The first period may be passed rapidly by, for it covers only the wasted years of a sinful and profligate youth and early manhood. It is of interest mainly as illustrating the sovereignty of that grace which abounds even to the chief of sinners. Who can read the story of that score of years and yet talk of piety as the product of evolution? In his case, instead of evolution, there was rather a revolution, as marked and complete as ever was found, perhaps, in the annals of salvation. If Lord George Lyttelton could account for the conversion of Saul of Tarsus only by supernatural power, what would he have thought of George Müller's transformation? Saul had in his favor a conscience, however misguided, and a morality, however pharisaic. George Müller was a flagrant sinner against common honesty and decency, and his whole early career was a revolt, not against God only, but against his own moral sense. If Saul was a hardened transgressor, how callous must have been George Müller!
He was a native of Prussia, born at Kroppenstaedt, near Halberstadt, September 27, 1805. Less than five years later his parents removed to Heimersleben, some four miles off, where his father was made collector of the excise, again removing about eleven years later to Schoenebeck, near Magdeburg, where he had obtained another appointment.
George Müller had no proper parental training. His father's favoritism toward him was harmful both to himself and to his brother, as in the family of Jacob, tending to jealousy and estrangement. Money was put too freely into the hands of these boys, hoping that they might learn how to use it and save it; but the result was, rather, careless and vicious waste, for it became the source of many childish sins of indulgence. Worse still, when called upon to render any account of their stewardship, sins of lying and deception were used to cloak wasteful spending. Young George systematically deceived his father, either by false entries of what he had received, or by false statements of what he had spent or had on hand. When his tricks were found out, the punishment which followed led to no reformation, the only effect being more ingenious devices of trickery and fraud. Like the Spartan lad, George Müller reckoned it no fault to steal, but only to have his theft found out.
His own brief account of his boyhood shows a very bad boy and he attempts no disguise. Before he was ten years old, he was a habitual thief and an expert at cheating; even government funds, entrusted to his father, were not safe from his hands. Suspicion led to the laying of a snare into which he fell: a sum of money was carefully counted and put where he would find it and have a chance to steal it. He took it and hid it under his foot in his shoe, but he being searched and the money being found, it became clear to whom the various sums previously missing might be traced.
His father wished him educated for a clergyman, and before he was eleven he was sent to the cathedral classical school at Halberstadt to be fitted for the university. That such a lad should be deliberately set apart for such a sacred office and calling, by a father who knew his moral obliquities and offenses, seems incredible; but, where a state church exists, the ministry of the gospel is apt to be treated as a human profession rather than as a divine vocation, and so the standards of fitness often sink to the low secular level, and the main object in view becomes the so-called "living," which is, alas, too frequently independent of holy living.
From this time the lad's studies were mixed up with novel-reading and various vicious indulgences. Card-playing and even strong drink got hold of him. The night when his mother lay dying, her boy of fourteen was reeling through the streets, drunk; and even her death failed to arrest his wicked course or to arouse his sleeping conscience. And—as must always be the case when such solemn reminders make one no better—he only grew worse.
When he came to the age for confirmation he had to attend the class for preparatory religious teaching; but this being to him a mere form, and met in a careless spirit, another false step was taken: sacred things were treated as common, and so conscience became the more callous. On the very eve of confirmation and of his first approach to the Lord's Table he was guilty of gross sins; and on the day previous, when he met the clergyman for the customary "confession of sin," he planned and practiced another shameless fraud, withholding from him eleven-twelfths of the confirmation fee entrusted to him by his father!
In such frames of mind and with such habits of life, George Müller, in the Easter season of 1820, was confirmed and became a communicant. Confirmed, indeed! but in sin, not only immoral and unregenerate, but so ignorant of the very rudiments of the gospel of Christ that he could not have stated to an inquiring soul the simple terms of the plan of salvation. There was, it is true about such serious and sacred transactions, a vague solemnity which left a transient impression and led to shallow resolves to live a better life; but there was no real sense of sin or of repentance toward God, nor was there any dependence upon a higher strength; and, without these, efforts at self-amendment never prove of value or work lasting results.
The story of this wicked boyhood presents but little variety, except that of sin and crime. It is one long tale of evil-doing and of the sorrow which it brings. Once, when his money was all recklessly wasted, hunger drove him to steal a bit of coarse bread from a soldier who was a fellow lodger; and looking back, long afterward, to that hour of extremity, he exclaimed, "What a bitter thing is the service of Satan, even in this world!"
On his father's removal to Schoenebeck in 1821 he asked to be sent to the cathedral school at Magdeburg, inwardly hoping thus to break away from his sinful snares and vicious companions, and, amid new scenes, find help in self-reform. He was not, therefore, without at least occasional aspirations after moral improvement; but again he made the common and fatal mistake of overlooking the Source of all true betterment. "God was not in all his thoughts." He found that to leave one place for another was not to leave his sin behind, for he took himself along.
His father, with a strange fatuity, left him to superintend sundry alterations in his house at Heimersleben, arranging for him meanwhile to read classics with the resident clergyman, Rev. Dr. Nagel. Being thus for a time his own master, temptation opened wide doors before him. He was allowed to collect dues from his father's debtors, and again he resorted to fraud, spending large sums of this money and concealing the fact that it had been paid.
In November 1821, he went to Magdeburg and to Brunswick, to which latter place he was drawn by his passion for a young Roman Catholic girl whom he had met there soon after confirmation. In this absence from home he took one step after another in the path of wicked indulgence. First of all, by lying to his tutor he got his consent to his going; then came a week of sin at Magdeburg and a wasting of his father's means at a costly hotel in Brunswick. His money being gone, he went to the house of an uncle until he was sent away; then, at another expensive hotel, he ran up bills until, payment being demanded, he had to leave his best clothes as a security, barely escaping arrest. Then, at Wolfenbüttel, he tried the same bold scheme again, until, having nothing for deposit, he ran off, but this time was caught and sent to jail. This boy of sixteen was already a liar and thief, swindler and drunkard, accomplished only in crime, companion of convicted felons and himself in a felon's cell. This cell, a few days later, a thief shared: and these two held converse as fellow thieves, relating their adventures to one another, and young Müller, that he might not be outdone, invented lying tales of villainy to make himself out the more famous fellow of the two!
Ten or twelve days passed in this wretched fellowship, until disagreement led to a sullen silence between them. And so passed away twenty-four dark days, from December 18, 1821, until the 12th of January ensuing, during all of which George Müller was shut up in prison and during part of which he sought as a favor the company of a thief.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from George Müller of Bristol by Arthur T. Pierson. Copyright © 2013 Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC. Excerpted by permission of Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Copyright,Introduction,
A Prefatory Word,
Chapter 1 From His Birth to His New Birth,
Chapter 2 The New Birth and the New Life,
Chapter 3 Making Ready the Chosen Vessel,
Chapter 4 New Steps and Stages of Preparation,
Chapter 5 The Pulpit and the Pastorate,
Chapter 6 "The Narrative of the Lord's Dealings",
Chapter 7 Led of God into a New Sphere,
Chapter 8 A Tree of God's Own Planting,
Chapter 9 The Growth of God's Own Plant,
Chapter 10 The Word of God and Prayer,
Chapter 11 Trials of Faith and Helpers to Faith,
Chapter 12 New Lessons in God's School of Prayer,
Chapter 13 Following the Pillar of Cloud and Fire,
Chapter 14 God's Building: The New Orphan Houses,
Chapter 15 The Manifold Grace of God,
Chapter 16 The Shadow of a Great Sorrow,
Chapter 17 The Period of World-Wide Witness,
Chapter 18 Faith and Patience in Serving,
Chapter 19 At Evening Time—Light,
Chapter 20 The Summary of the Life-Work,
Chapter 21 The Church Life and Growth,
Chapter 22 A Glance at the Gifts and the Givers,
Chapter 23 God's Witness to the Work,
Chapter 24 Last Looks, Backward and Forward,
Appendix A,
Appendix B,
Appendix C,
Appendix D,
Appendix E,
Appendix F,
Appendix G,
Appendix H,
Appendix I,
Appendix J,
Appendix K,
Appendix L,
Müller Info,