A mission of inquiry among the Jews throughout Europe and in Palestine, and a religious revival at his church in Dundee, made him feel that he was being called to evangelistic rather than to pastoral work, but before he could carry out his plans he died, on 25 March 1843.

He entered the high school in his eighth year, and matriculated in November 1827 at University of Edinburgh, where he showed very versatile powers, and distinguished himself especially in poetical exercises, being awarded a special prize by Professor Wilson for a poem on ‘The Covenanters.’ In the winter of 1831 he commenced his studies in the Divinity Hall, under Thomas Chalmers and David Welsh; and he was licensed as a preacher by the Annan presbytery on 1 July 1835.

On 24 November 1836 he was ordained to the pastorate of St. Peter's Church, Dundee, which had been erected into a quoad sacra parish in the preceding May.

The congregation numbered eleven hundred hearers, and M'Cheyne addressed himself to the work of the ministry with so much ardour that his health again gave way, and in December 1838 he was compelled to desist from all public duty.

In the autumn of 1842 he visited the north of England on an evangelical mission, and made similar journeys to London and Aberdeenshire.

His parents agreed to the wish of his congregation that McCheyne be buried in the graveyard beside St Peter's Church in Dundee, rather than in the family's own burial-ground in Edinburgh.

Bonar records, "And when, on 7 March of the following year (i.e. 1843), the cause of the Church was finally to be pleaded at the bar of the House of Commons, I find him writing: 'Eventful night this in the British Parliament!

Although widely believed to have been engaged to be married to Jessie Thain at the time of his death (and once, some ten years earlier, to Margaret Maxwell), largely owing to Smellie's popular biography, recent scholarship has disproved both of these claims.

[10] Perhaps no minister in the Church of Scotland is better remembered for the saintliness of his character, the anxious devotion which influenced the whole of his short ministry, and the success which everywhere accompanied his efforts as a preacher of the Gospel.

[4] Not long after his death, his friend Andrew Alexander Bonar edited his biography which was published with some of his manuscripts as The Memoir and Remains of the Rev.