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Cleland Boyd McAfee (1866-1944) was a Presbyterian minister who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, was known for his famous hymn “Near to the Heart of God,” and has left his mark on history as the originator of the acrostic “TULIP.”
In the biographical sketch of him, written by his daughter, Katherine McAfee Parker, Near to the Heart of God (1954), she made reference to the first book which he ever published, Where He Is (1899), a book about “immortality,” and its connection to her mother, Harriet, a Canadian-born fellow-graduate of Chicago’s Park College. They were married in 1892. It was a deep and abiding love that they shared, as evidenced by a poem that he wrote to her.
For more than sixty years since my mother took my father for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, she has held to the conviction that he was one of the best things the Lord ever made. He felt exactly the same way about her. He gave her the first copy of his first book and wrote on the flyleaf:
Harriet:
E’en heaven of Christ would lose
for me its joy,
Did I not know that “Where He Is”
there thou shalt be;
And this I know since where
thou art here in the earth
I catch the clearest vision
of the Christ of Galilee.
C.B.M.
5 Nov. 1899
They spent fifty-two years together on earth, companions of each other’s hearts and minds.
This poignant love poem is a reminder that a godly man’s greatest support, apart from Christ himself, is his wife. And that husband and wife ought to point each other to Christ, that they may both be where He is.
