Biographies
Free Church Ministers and Others
N – Z
Pitcairn, Thomas
Rainy, Robert
Robertson, William
Rose, William, Aultbea
Sage, Donald
Shepherd, George
Simpson, James
Speirs, Graham
Stewart, Alexander
Stuart, A. Moody
Swanson, John
Thomson, Alexander
Thomson, Charles
Thorburn, J. Hay
Topp, Alexander
Tweedie, William King
Waters, David
Watson, Angus J.
Welsh, David
Wilson, John
Wilson, William
Robert Paul
Author: David Maclagan, Esq., C.A., Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 429
Robert Paul was born at Edinburgh on 15th May 1788. His father, the Rev. William Paul, was Colleague of Sir Henry Moncreiff in the pastorate of the West Kirk, and in 1780 married Miss Susan Moncreiff, Sir Henry’s sister. His ministry was brief, but in a marked degree useful; his views of Divine truth being evangelical, and his preaching, in these dark times, attractive to a very large and earnest congregation. At the time of his father’s death, Robert was only fourteen years of age; and although he dated the commencement of his religious life somewhat later than this, he was even then singularly thoughtful and mature, taking his part in the direction of household affairs, guiding the studies of the younger children, conducting family worship, and engaging at his spare moments in works of benevolence.
Having completed his High School and University curriculum, he commenced business life, and entered the Commercial Bank in one of its subordinate appointments, from which, by rapid strides, he rose to be its Manager, which office he held until 1853, when he retired from the arduous position, but became one of the Bank Directors. He married, in 1814, Miss Charlotte Erskine of Aberdona—a union which endured, and was characterised by a very tender affection, until 1847, when he was left a widower.
In a letter addressed to a friend in 1862, Mr Paul said: “It is the very busy men who find time for everything, not your leisurely men who sit with their feet on the fender and read newspapers.” This remark found a striking illustration in himself. Placed at the head of a great public Company whose interests required constant thought and watchfulness, and whose demands upon his time were incessant, he found, or made, leisure for added work of the most multifarious kinds.
His experience, sagacity, and readiness to help, led to his being appealed to for counsel and for aid in connection with matters political, benevolent, and religious.
Never a keen party man in State politics, he threw himself into such movements as those connected with Slavery and the Test and Corporation Acts, his sympathies with everything that advanced the cause of freedom leading him to associate himself in these and other questions with the Liberal party. But his available leisure and strength were reserved for Church matters. Hereditarily attached to evangelical opinion as regarded both doctrine and discipline, he had carefully formed his own judgments regarding these matters; and then with characteristic energy he threw himself into the current of affairs which deepened in interest and importance until the Church threw off its State connection in 1843. Along with the wonderful roll of men who clung to her in her day of trouble, he became one of the Disruption Worthies.
He had a striking and memorable way of expressing himself in connection with matters in which his affections were deeply engaged. It was in the view of the Disruption that, in speaking at a congregational meeting of the necessary breaking up of a Missionary Association which had done good service, he said, “I consent to its dissolution very much as I consent to my own—in the hope of a better resurrection.”
His mental and physical activities were at their best in these memorable times. He had no misgivings as to the course pursued by the Church, or as to her future. He was emphatically a man of faith and prayer, and, as those who knew him best will remember, used to accept the promises of Scripture with a singularly natural and childlike trust. On 3d June 1843, writing to a distance of the great events of the past weeks, he says, “God will overrule all for His own glory in the advancement of His spiritual church and kingdom.”
Mr Paul was ordained an Elder of the West Kirk by Sir Henry Moncreiff in 1816; and it was not until after the Disruption that he became an Elder of St George’s. His admiration of the unrivalled preaching of Dr Candlish, between whom and himself a very true and tender friendship existed, was great. To a friend he wrote in 1864, when Dr Candlish preached the last of his sermons on the First Epistle of John, “A magnificent sermon as he closed his long series of discourses on First John, the text being, ‘ This is the true God, and (the) eternal life.’ I wish I could give you a notion of its aim and scope, and some of its noble passages.” His discharge of all his congregational duties in the midst of his burdened life throughout the week, are examples and encouragements to the hardest worked men of business to give some of their time and strength to the service of the Lord.
While interesting himself in all the needful administrative arrangements consequent on the Church’s new condition, he specially identified himself with matters affecting the Theological College and Library and the Educational Schemes of the Free Church generally, associated in these great questions with his much-loved friend Dr David Welsh.
The General Assembly of each year brought round a time which he much enjoyed. His wide acquaintance with Ministers and Elders in all parts of Scotland led him to open his house, with even more than its wonted hospitality, to the members who came up to this great annual gathering.
In Assembly business he was constantly consulted, his judgment being felt to be of the highest value in delicate and difficult questions. His bright cheerfulness of spirit, his ready sympathy with those in doubt, and his pleasant jest as things seemed to be taking a warm or excited turn, were of the utmost service in the Church’s Business Committee. And in the Assembly itself, although—owing to a somewhat feeble voice —not a powerful speaker, his presence on the platform elicited an immediate call for silence; and his words, always delivered with clearness of expression and earnestness of purpose, were listened to with marked respect.
In his latest days the work in which he was most deeply interested was the formation of a Society for aiding the education and business training of the sons and daughters of Ministers and Missionaries of the Free Church; in the originating of which the writer of this notice had the happiness of being associated with him. It was a movement much after his own heart, and he worked at it with marvellous energy.
Among the many benevolent institutions in whose welfare he was interested, and in the management of which he took part, was the Orphan Hospital. From a very early period of life he was one of its Managers, and contributed by his wise and practical help to lay the foundations of the admirable system under which it has become a model institution.
Mr Paul was a man of quite unique character. Having received a liberal education, he followed it up by varied reading and careful reflection. His constant use of his Bible made him one of the most completely furnished of Scripture students. It was an exercise at once intellectually and spiritually refreshing to hear him expound the Word, and illustrate it by comparisons of passages and texts. He was singularly thoughtful, with perhaps an over-fastidious taste, and with a tendency —sometimes too pronounced—to dwell upon fine distinctions. These features of mind revealed themselves not only in conversation, but in his writings, which were the product of an original and cultivated mind, and were marked by great elegance and grace of diction. His Memoir of the Rev. James Martin, who succeeded Dr Andrew Thomson as Minister of St George’s, and his many contributions to the periodical publications of the day, abundantly illustrate his literary power. As a letter writer he was quite remarkable, having a singular gift of selecting topics congenial to his correspondent, and communicating them with the most graphic description and with exquisite touches of humour or pathos, as the subject demanded.
In social intercourse he was a charming companion. Full of anecdote of the best kind, told in the best way, he at once instructed and amused. From the seniors of the party with whom he was holding grave discussions of Church questions and principles, he turned with perfect naturalness to the more youthful, and with some kindly jest drew them into conversation; they in their turn easily attracting him to join in their games, or to tell them once again some familiar story associated in their minds with former visits from their old friend.
His villa of Kirkland Lodge, near Edinburgh, was the rendezvous of the choicest men, clerical and lay, of his acquaintance; and there on the bowling-green, with its grand view of the Pentlands and the intervening valley, he presided over hard-contested games; and with alternating conversation on high themes, or ready quotation applicable to some passing incident, or boy-like rush after the ball that threatened to dispute his own or his partner’s claim to be victor, he kept the scene full of the purest and most joyous life. The happy party around his table afterwards, and the closing “worship” ere the guests dispersed, are memories that refuse to leave us.
But the outward man began to perish. Early in 1865 he wrote to a friend: “The springs of life are gradually weakening, I am very conscious; … yet the remembering and thinking powers are in great, I had almost said in terrible, force, concentrated on fewer subjects, but on these intensely.” In April 1866 the process of physical decline was accelerated, but the mind and heart were as fresh as ever. ‘”Though grave and more silent than formerly, I am not downhearted, and very far from joyless. Indeed I have sometimes wonderful gleams. Conflicts, no doubt often betwixt flesh and spirit, yet I do feel that the blessed hope is burning brighter every day.”
And yet again on 22d May, within two months of his death: “This day the General Assembly meets, and it does seem a strange thing, that instead of being there in the thick of it, I should be here reposing in quiet and comparative solitude.”
Still he carried on his reading and writing, received his friends, and continued to hold his Sabbath evening meetings in the carpenter’s shop at the gate, or under his own roof, at Kirkland, and with rare taste and spiritual fervour “opened the Scriptures” to the gathered cottars and servants.
To his greatly loved friend Lord Cowan, who saw him a few days before his death as he sat on the lawn in the bright sunshine, and who asked him as to his feelings in view of his approaching departure, he replied, looking up into the blue sky, “I feel, my dear friend, as if my true life were just about to begin.”
On the night before he passed away—a calm and quiet Sabbath evening—he was carried in his chair to be present at the meeting, which was that night held under Kirkland roof, and the services of which were conducted by his friend the Rev. J. H. Wilson of the Barclay Church. When Mr Wilson reminded him of the Saviour’s legacy, he replied, “Yes! I have no terror, but a solid, substantial, abiding peace.” The service was closed by singing the twenty-third Psalm.
And cheering smiles of peace,
He hasted through the shadow dark
Unto the bright release!”
Within a few hours—in the early morning of 16th July 1866—he had “departed out of this world unto the Father,”—which he was wont to call “the grandest definition of the death of a believer.”
Thomas Pitcairn
Author: Rev. Andrew A. Bonar, D.D., Glasgow
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 435
Thomas Pitcairn
In reading the proceedings of the famous Westminster Assembly, there is one of the scribes (or clerks as we would call them), Adoniram Byfield, to whom our eye turns from time to time, amid all the discussions. His services are much in request, and he has evidently great sagacity and skill in his department of work. Such another clerk was Thomas Pitcairn, in the Convocation and in the early days of our Free Church General Assembly.
He, was born at Edinburgh, 6th February 1800. His father, Mr Alexander Pitcairn, was a merchant in Leith and Edinburgh, and was well-known as an elder in Lady Glenorchy’s Chapel, where the venerable Dr Jones ministered as pastor for more than fifty years. It was while under the ministrations of Dr Jones that Mr Pitcairn was led to the truth; and often in after days did he relate incidents connected with the preaching and labours of that man of God, who so long and so faithfully witnessed for evangelical truth in Edinburgh, in the Moderate era that preceded the times of Dr Andrew Thomson.
After finishing the usual literary curriculum at College, he gave himself for a time to business, with considerable prospects of success in that department opening up to him. But as the work of grace in his soul deepened, his thoughts turned to the ministry, and he abandoned without regret all hopes of worldly advancement. Having passed through the Edinburgh Divinity Hall he was licensed by the Presbytery to preach in 1828. While still a probationer, he assisted successively Dr Stewart of Erskine, and Dr William Thomson of Perth; and thereafter was ordained assistant and successsor to Dr Grierson of Cockpen.
Cockpen is in the Presbytery of Dalkeith—its name chiefly known by the old ballad song. Here Mr Pitcairn found work to do for his Master, among a population partly rural and partly connected with the collieries of the neighbourhood. His preaching was solid and scriptural; he handled the truths of the Atonement and divine grace with deep earnestness and power from the pulpit, and in his visitings enforced what he preached. His consistent life and godly sincerity gave weight to all he taught; while his pleasant, kindly manner, ensured him access to the people, and won their affection as well as respect. Nor was his labour in vain. The writer of this notice was one day, in Glasgow, visiting at the house of an intelligent ship-carpenter, whose wife manifested much interest in the conversation. He at length asked her if she had long known the Saviour as her Saviour. She replied, “Many years ago—more than thirty —I was brought to Christ on a Communion Sabbath, when I was in the parish of Cockpen. Mr Pitcairn preached on ‘The Rock that is higher than I,’ and that day my heart was opened to receive Christ.” And to this hour often does she speak with grateful delight of that sermon, and of Mr Pitcairn.
An incident like this gives a glimpse of the blessing that attends on the work of a true pastor. And Mr Pitcairn was such, during the twenty-two years he laboured there, animated by zeal for his Master’s glory, and by the desire to win souls. But his former years of business-life were not without use to him. A man little knows what he may be preparing for by what he passes through in early days. Divine wisdom has a special view to the future in the secular training of one who is to be a vessel to carry the name of Christ. Mr Pitcairn’s experience in business fitted him to be specially useful in after years, and was soon recognised by his brethren. In 1837, he was chosen to be Clerk to the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale. Then came on the days of trial to the Church of Scotland, when the Government refused to acknowledge her right to spiritual independence. When matters had come to a point, the memorable Convocation was held at Edinburgh, 17th November 1842, at which were present, from all quarters of Scotland, those ministers who saw that now they must look forward to a Disruption, since their liberties were invaded. Above four hundred and fifty were present; they met in Roxburgh Church. Dr Chalmers was called to preside, and after the proceedings had been opened by prayer, the first step was to choose a clerk. Unanimously, Mr Pitcairn was fixed upon. When, next year, the Disruption did take place, with the same unanimity Mr Pitcairn was chosen, along with Dr Clason of Edinburgh, to the Clerkship of the Free Church General Assembly. And all the brethren who remember him will testify to the fidelity, sagacity, and skill, which characterised his discharge of duty. Unobtrusive, yet ready to act, with a remarkable command of temper, always courteous and obliging, he evidently had special qualities for that office. Methodical and correct, possessed of firmness, with great equanimity of spirit, he was able to go through perplexing business unruffled; and often did his brethren remark to each other the masterly manner in which he was able to minute the proceedings of the Assembly. He was thus able to render invaluable service to the Church at that important juncture.
In the year of the Disruption, those of the people of Cockpen who left the Established Church with him built for him a church at Bonnyrig, in the same parish. There he ministered to the day of his death. He was conscientiously regular in his visits to his flock; took much interest in the young; and was ever ready to attend a call of sickness or distress. At the same time, he gave his labours cheerfully to several stations in the neighbourhood, then in their infancy, and held most brotherly intercourse with his co-presbyters. They used to speak of his coming in among them at a meeting as bringing sunshine, there was so much of radiant benevolence in his broad countenance.
In 1854, near the beginning of the year, he was suddenly seized with what proved a fatal illness. It lasted many months. He had been a man of robust health, accustomed to the activities of life; yet when laid on his sickbed, and called to endure a long and painful illness, upheld in patience and cheerfulness. Even then he undertook a public duty; for the General Assembly having agreed to send a Pastoral Letter to their people in regard to the calamities of pestilence and war, at that time visiting the nations of Europe, he drew up the letter on his sickbed.
“From week to week,” says his brother, “I found him enjoying that true rest that can come only from the Blood of the Cross.” One day his friend, Mr James Crawford, had come to see him. Mr Crawford in conversing with him had said that there was a grace of the Spirit which he would be enabled to manifest now in a new manner, viz., that of being “patient in tribulation” (Rom. 12:12.) Mr Pitcairn very pleasantly replied, “But see, Crawford, what is on each side of the ‘patience.’ On the one side is, ‘rejoicing in hope,’ and on the other, ‘continuing instant in prayer.’ I must have these also, for ‘patience’ is between them.”
He fell asleep on 21st December 1854. When the Commission of the Free Church Assembly met in March following, in referring to the great loss they had sustained by his death, they record “the affectionate respect entertained for their departed brother;” and they add their conviction, “that, in no small measure, the Free Church has been indebted to him for much of what is good in the tone and character of the proceedings of her supreme court, and in the general conduct of her ecclesiastical affairs.”
In 1836, he was married to Miss Trotter of Broomhouse, Berwickshire. She died in 1862. He left an only son, Alexander Young Pitcairn, W.S., Edinburgh. He is buried in the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh, in hope of the Resurrection of the Just and the Crown of Life.
Robert Rainy
Author: Alexander Taylor Innes, Esq., Advocate, Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 439
Robert Rainy
Robert Rainy, D.D., Principal and Professor of Church History in the New College, Edinburgh, was born in Glasgow, on 1st January 1826. His father, Dr Harry Rainy, for many years Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in the Glasgow University, was the son of Mr Rainy, minister of the parish of Creich, in Sutherlandshire; while Principal Rainy is also connected with the North Highlands through his mother, a daughter of Captain Gordon, Invercarron. He had, of course, no active part in the Disruption, being then only seventeen years old, and was, indeed, at the time studying in preparation for his father’s profession of medicine. But in that year (1843), Dr Harry Rainy was surprised by an intimation from his eldest son that he wished to change the destination of his studies, and to cast in his lot with the outed ministers of the Free Church. The father’s whole heart was with the same cause, but he promptly replied that it should never be said that a son of his had changed his profession in a fit of enthusiasm. “Go back to your studies,” he added, “and if you have anything to say to me a year after this, I shall be willing to hear it.” His son quietly went back to his medical studies, and a year after returned to his father with an unchanged resolve, now gladly sanctioned. After a distinguished course at the Glasgow University and at the Edinburgh New College, Mr Robert Rainy became minister of the Free Church at Huntly in 1851, of the Free High Church, Edinburgh, in 1854, Professor of Church History in the New College in 1862, and Principal of the same institution in 1874. He was appointed to this last office in succession to Dr Candlish, and that at a time when men like Dr Duff and Dr Robert Buchanan, the veterans of a former generation, yet survived. But Dr. Duff, in a letter so honourable to himself that it should not be forgotten, wrote immediately as to the vacancy, “I never had but one thought as to who ought to be appointed, and that is Dr Rainy—as in every respect, from age, experience, services, &c. &c, the best fitted for the office.” And on receipt of this letter, Dr Buchanan himself proposed in his Presbytery what afterwards became, on the motion of Henry Moncreiff, the finding of the General Assembly.
During the later years of his course, Principal Rainy has become, more perhaps than any single man in the Free Church, the trusted counsellor of his brethren in the General Assemblies, and the accepted representative of the body with those outside. Such a position, even under the free Presbyterian constitution, is seldom so early conceded to mere eminence in personal gifts. In the present case it has been also a visible inheritance from not a few of the great men who founded and built up the Free Church of Scotland.
Dr Harry Rainy was an elder of Dr Chalmers in St John’s, and his son shared in early years the friendship which Dr Chalmers cherished for the father and a large family connection. The power over him of the highest and most attractive things in the character of Dr Chalmers is testified to in a remarkably beautiful passage of the third lecture on the Church of Scotland, delivered in answer to Dean Stanley. But these and other early external influences were no doubt merged in that exercised upon the subject of our notice by his own father—a man of great originality of mind, fervour of heart, and nobility of character. Dr Chalmers, too, died so early as 1847; but another leader of the Free Church who was a friend both of Principal Rainy and of his father—viz., Dr Robert Buchanan—survived almost all his contemporaries, and saw the boy whose career he had long affectionately watched established in a succession of the highest usefulness. During the interval between Dr Candlish’s death in 1873, and his own, Dr Buchanan, one of the wisest administrators that Scotland has ever seen, was also the most trusted guide whom the Free Church possessed. But those who watched him narrowly knew that his physical strength was failing, and it was touching to see how now, even more than in previous years, he took every opportunity of devolving upon the Edinburgh Professor of Church History the harder questions with regard to which the General Assembly looked to himself for counsel.
The man, however, whose influence has been most visibly traceable in Dr Rainy’s work hitherto is Dr William Cunningham. Rainy is said to have been declared by him his favourite pupil; and on the death of Dr Robert Gordon, while the three New College professors who sat in that session, Dr Cunningham, Dr James Buchanan, and Dr Bannerman, united in ardently recommending the minister of Huntly as the best successor, Dr Cunningham took the leading part in the transaction. Hence a renewal of the old connection between them, confirmed by association in public matters, for it was in support of Mr Rainy’s motion on the Victoria Union that Dr Cunningham made his last, and as Dr Candlish used always to declare, his greatest speech. The relation lasted until the young minister was called to warn the out-wearied master of theology that he had but a few hours to live, and to receive and record his latest expressions of personal trust in Christ. Nor was even this the close of the connection between them. Dr Rainy was at once elected Dr Cunningham’s successor in the Chair of Church History, and in the year 1871 he completed and published the life of his illustrious predecessor. This work, from the eighteenth chapter on “The Church and Public Questions” onwards, is an analysis and record of the new problems into which the Disestablished Church necessarily drifted, and a powerful vindication of Dr Cunningham’s application of the old principles to the new facts. It will be invaluable in future as a piece of philosophical history, written almost contemporaneously, and although the exposition of the line taken by the Free Church under Dr Cunningham’s guidance is strictly confined to the questions which emerged before his death, it is evident that, in the view of his biographer, its history, since that date, amid still newer facts, has been a prolongation of the same course under the same principles. But Dr Cunningham’s principles are not the only things which Dr Rainy is alleged to have inherited. A good deal in his mental habit and manner, especially as these come out in debate, are plainly derived from the same source. There are in his speaking a curtness and dryness, a love of abstract statement, and an abstinence from popular illustration, all of which seem to be the fruit of admiring imitation. And there are some results more advantageous. An English Quarterly traces, in part at least, to the same source, “the somewhat scornful candour with which Dr Rainy declines to snatch a cheap or premature victory, and among a nation of ‘dogmatical word-warriors,’ tosses aside even legitimate advantages in debate. You are pretty sure to hear him state the case for the men on the opposite side more powerfully and persuasively than they themselves will do it; and if he chooses to attempt an answer he is quite certain to give one, not barely conclusive, but with a broad margin of reason over what is technically necessary.” This is Dr Cunningham all over; but the same paper goes on to state a contrast in one point between the mental tendencies of the two men. “Cunningham’s mind was logical and doctrinal, and loved to deal simply with the status quaestionis. Rainy’s is historical and formative, and moves in the region of dynamics. The latter is of course the proper temperament for a statesman. Hence, however, a mental circumspection and roundaboutness, as of one instinctively providing for future developments and possibilities, which spread a haze and film over his speeches. But hence, also, a most instructive originality, partly impressing you in the uncommon use of common words, which so used become loaded with meaning, and partly in the careless rough-hewing of the whole idea as the speech goes on. And beneath both there is a certain moral thoughtfulness and conscientiousness even of the intellect, which makes each exposition rich and strengthening, even to those who care nothing for the subject. All this, under a youthful appearance and a statuesque coolness and self-repression, against which the Celtic fire within heaves in vain.” [20]
But the Disruption Father whose connection with Principal Rainy became most intimate and affectionate was unquestionably Dr Candlish. On two most important occasions in the later history of the Church, Dr Candlish, after giving notice to the Assembly of the motion he was to propose, devolved it at the shortest notice upon his young brother. The first of these was the Glasgow Students’ case in 1859, when a maiden Assembly speech of extraordinary power from Mr Rainy practically settled that grave and difficult question. The second was in 1867, when, after the Union question had gone on for five years, Dr Rainy, “speaking for the first time in any Church Court on this subject,” accepted and enforced the view which Dr Candlish had from 1863 expounded and urged. Henceforth the two men, the older and younger, were associated on this subject as on others till its close. It was Dr Robert Buchanan and Dr Robert Rainy (as the former of the two told the writer), who, on the afternoon of 28th May, 1873, went down from the Assembly to Dr Robert Candlish’s house, and finding that the latter had gone to bed, after having that forenoon tabled what he intended as an ultimatum on the Mutual Eligibility question, wakened him, and suggested to him yet another modification. Dr. Candlish, not without difficulty, consented to propose this in the evening, and the instantaneous acceptance of it is understood to have prevented a secession which would otherwise that night have taken place. Next day Dr Candlish took leave of this great question by placing on the records of the Assembly his view of the duty of the Free Church to it; and henceforth he took no more to do with general Church matters. But from this till his death, the relation of Dr Rainy to him and his congregation, as “a son with him in the Gospel,” was closer than before— a relation only closed by his receiving from Dr Candlish on his death-bed a last legacy of counsel and confidence.
But Principal Rainy has already had great tasks laid upon him other than those which he wrought out in the General Assembly and in conjunction with older men. We cannot pass over his pulpit work. He never was a popular preacher, so as to attract Edinburgh men generally to his High Church congregation; yet some who were members of it, looking back, hold that all his subsequent public and Assembly work has not as yet fulfilled the promise of a preaching in which great masses of truth were made one by being viewed from the centre of things. For them at least his future holds more than his past, while even of his past public work, that part appears to them highest which appeals most directly to conscience and faith, dealing with great principles of Church life rather than with its details. Three important publications may be mentioned as falling under this description. The first and most massive was the Cunningham Lectures for 1873, which, under the indistinct title of the “Delivery and Development of Doctrine,” treat, with extraordinary power, of the two great subjects of Divine Revelation (the “delivery” of doctrine to men in Scripture), and human Theology or creed (the “development” of doctrine by men from Scripture). The volume has been described as a magazine of important principles to which churchmen in Scotland will have occasion to recur every six months for a generation. This gift of opportune wisdom shown by Principal Rainy in laying down in the present the general principles which have to be applied to the most difficult questions in the immediate future, even while he postpones applying them as long as possible, came out still more clearly in another publication. In the spring of 1878, he was engaged to deliver four lectures in London, on a subject not yet fixed, while at the same time his individual course at the approaching General Assembly, on the case of Professor Robertson Smith, was looked forward to with great interest and doubt. He at once chose as his subject what is expressed in the title, “The Bible and Criticism,” and before the meeting of Assembly he had published a small volume, in which he faced the whole general question of the necessity and legitimacy of criticism in reference to Scripture and the books of Scripture. But perhaps his most public and conspicuous service hitherto was his answer to Dean Stanley. In January, 1872, the Dean of Westminster came down to Scotland, and in four charming lectures, ostensibly devoted to the history and defence of our Established Church, attacked most skilfully the deeper doctrinal and historical principles of Presbyterianism. Scarcely had his challenging voice died away when the trumpet of an opponent sounded in the lists. In three lectures in the same Music Hall, Dr Rainy passed over the same ground, and by the time the last was delivered, the immediate influence of Dean Stanley’s bold move was far more than neutralised. But Principal Rainy’s three lectures will be often re-read and republished in Scotland; occasional as they were, they are already recognised as the best defence of the Presbyterian and Scottish system which this century has produced. “Yes,” he exclaims, “Presbyterianism is a system for a free people that love a regulated, a self-regulating freedom; a people independent, yet patient, considerate, trusting much to the processes of discussion and consultation, and more to the promised aid of a much-forgiving and a watchful Lord. It is a system for strong Churches—Churches that are not afraid to let their matters see the light of day—to let their weakest parts and their worst defects be canvassed before all men that they may be mended. It is a system for believing Churches, that are not ashamed or afraid to cherish a high ideal, and to speak of lofty aims, and to work for long and far results, amid all the discouragements arising from sin and folly in their own ranks and around them. It is a system for catholic Christians, who wish not merely to cherish private idiosyncrasies, but to feel themselves identified with the common cause, while they cleave directly to Him whose cause it is.” And in a concluding and very characteristic passage he indicates that the same principles which strove and conquered in the past must work among us still. “We have to deal with the present, not according to past convictions, but according to present convictions; not according to the beliefs of our fathers, but according to our own; we have to convey, in so far as we represent the Church, the message and the influence which Christ’s Church ought to convey to the men of our time, who inherit the past and are looking forward to the future. For that we would be free of every bond except the regard we owe to Christ’s word, and the regard which He has appointed us to have to one another’s convictions in shaping our message and our action. That has never been an easy task at any time. It is not likely to be an easy task in our time.”
William Robertson, M.A., Kinloss
Author: Patrick W. Robertson, M.A., Portobello
Source: Our Church Fathers: being Biographical Sketches of Disruption Fathers in and around the Presbytery of Elgin, page 60
The Rev. William Robertson, Minister of the Parish of Kinloss, in the Presbytery of Forres, was born at Farr, in Sutherlandshire, on the 16th May, 1787, exactly 111 years ago. He was thus 56 years of age at the Disruption.
He was the eldest son of the Rev. John Robertson of Rothesay, and of Kingussie. The name and fame of “John Robertson Mohr” still survive in the Highlands. In an age when the great majority of the Ministers of the Church of Scotland taught the people doctrines, entirely destitute of any reference to the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ, John Robertson was honourably associated with Dr. Love of Glasgow, Bayne of Greenock, MacBryde of Arran, and a few others, in proclaiming a full and free Gospel. The Evangelical Doctrine was new to that generation of Scotsmen; and the people heard the few faithful Ministers gladly. In Rothesay, the Chapel where John Robertson preached was always crowded; and the windows were frequently left open so that those outside might hear.
The subject of this sketch was a son worthy of such a father. He was a distinguished Student and Prize-man, specially excelling in Classics, and in English Literature. He graduated at the University of Glasgow, in 1807. Afterwards, when a Minister, he was noted for his chaste and elegant style of composition. Colonel Grant-Peterkin, one of his Elders, and the principal Heritor in the Parish of Kinloss, used to say that his words were so well chosen, that his sermons might have been sent to the Press from the pulpit, without any alteration. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh, and preached his first sermon in St. George’s Church, for the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. On that occasion, to the surprise and dismay of the young preacher, Dr. Thomson was one of the hearers. But consternation gave way to comfort on second thoughts. Shy of his powers, the young man consoled himself with the assurance, that if he should stick his sermon, the renowned Doctor would be equal to the occasion; and would supply his deficiency. Mr. Robertson was in 1813 ordained to the Chapel of Ease in Fort William. He was the first Minister of the Church of Scotland there; and, among other works of usefulness, he established the first Sabbath School in the place.
From Fort William he was transferred to the Parish of Laggan; and then in 1818 to Kinloss. In 1817 when at Laggan, he married his cousin, the eldest daughter of James Robertson, W.S., and sister to the well-known Advocate Patrick Robertson. In Kinloss, a few of the parishioners had for years been praying that an Evangelical Pastor might be sent to them. When the Patron presented Mr. Robertson to the Parish, he was received with cordial gratitude as in answer to prayer. Soon after his induction to Kinloss, there was a marked change in the Presbytery, nearly all the Ministers being pronounced Evangelicals. Mr. Robertson was particularly distinguished as a preacher. He did not read his discourses, but they were carefully studied. He was greatly respected and beloved by his own people; and in the pulpits of his brethren in Morayshire, his appearance was always hailed with lively satisfaction. The Brother, Mr. Davidson of Dallas, who preached his funeral sermon, thus remarked: “If there was anything that peculiarly distinguished Mr. Robertson from other faithful Ministers of the Gospel, it was his manner of delivery. In this he had few superiors. With his mind full of good and well-digested matter, he was never at a loss for suitable and pertinent expression; and then his utterance in liveliness and earnestness, amounting even to vehemence, was accompanied with the lightning flash of his eye, as if he would burn into his hearers’ hearts the mighty truths, which proceeded from his lips.”
At the Disruption, Mr. Robertson underwent trials unusually severe. He had a family of five daughters and two sons, nearly all of them at an age when the expense of education is the heaviest. His wife’s relatives, and particularly her brother, Lord Robertson, were bitterly opposed to his secession from the Established Church. A letter, written by the witty judge, expostulating with him on what he considered his proposed act of madness and folly, is full of indignant upbraiding and of bitter reproach. The heritors clung to the Established Church, though they parted from their minister with sad hearts. Some of them contributed to his stipend in the Free Church, as long as he lived. Nearly all the people in the village of Findhorn joined the Free Church, and the new place of worship was built close to the village. There was, however, no house available; and Mr. Robertson was obliged to take a fisherman’s cottage. Here, his youngest daughter succumbed to hardships to which she had been unused. She died of consumption. The Manse of Findhorn was the first manse built in connection with the Free Church. Impressed with the urgency of the case, Dr. Guthrie handed to Mr. Robertson the first £50 he received for his Manse Scheme.
In 1852 Mr. Robertson’s health became seriously impaired; and in 1852 he retired to Forres. The last time he was from home was on the occasion of the ordination of his son Patrick to the ministry of the Free Church, in Leslie, Fife-shire, in 1852.
From 1855 till 1860, he was a confirmed invalid. In November, 1860, he quietly fell asleep in Jesus.
His eldest son Lewis had died in Ceylon in 1848. His widow died in August 1862. Four daughters and a son survived their parents. Mr. Robertson’s only grandson is now minister of St. Thomas’ Free Church, Greenock.
On the memorable day of the disruption, Mr. Robertson, his brother-in-law, the Rev. Geo. Shepherd of Kingussie, and his nephew, the Rev. John Robertson Glass of Bracadale were companions in the march from St. Andrew’s Church to Tanfield Hall, at Canonmills. Sadly, but with unhesitating faith, the three signed for conscience’ sake the Deed, which deprived them of all their means of support. Years afterwards, Mr. Robertson touchingly described his feeling of relief on the evening of the 18th of May. His struggle, on the night previous, was one of agony; but when the crisis was past, and when he had experienced the grace to be faithful, he found no words so expressive as those of the Psalmist.
“Ev’n as a bird out of the fowler’s snare
Escapes away, so is our soul set free:
Broke are their nets, and thus escaped we.
Therefore our help is in the Lord’s great name,
Who heav’n and earth by his great pow’r did frame.”
Some Northern Fathers
II William Rose of Aultbea
Author: J. M. [perhaps Principal John Macleod]
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, March, 1929, page 60
Time goes on its way, and the memory of our worthies tends to fade and become dim. A generation or two have arisen since 1875, and they know not William Rose, yet there were few of his generation among the ministers of the North as worthy as he. Mr Rose was a native of the parish of Kingussie, where his father, Donald Rose, was one of the three eminent Donalds who were elders in Mr Shepherd‘s congregation. The names of the other two were well known throughout the Northern Highlands; but in their own parish none of them stood higher in the esteem of the godly than did Donald Rose. Donald Duff was one of the others, while the third was Donald Cattanach, The evangelical ministry of John Robertson, who died in 1825, was not without fruit in Badenoch. It refreshed the few survivors of a generation that saw in those parts the light of Bean Torra-dhamh. There grew up also as the result of it a generation that was seasoned by the godly influence and example of those who were Mr Robertson’s children in the Faith. It was in the bosom of this generation that William Rose was nurtured. Alexander Urquhart of Tarbat and Hope Street, Glasgow, was another that was brought up in the same circle. His father, George Urquhart, was in those days the Catechist of the parish; and he was not only a teacher of the people but a terror to evil-doers. John Gray was another of the elders of that time. He was less gifted but not less godly than his age-fellows already named. It would ill become Badenoch to forget that generation of manly Christian witnesses.
I
From early life William Rose showed how he profited by his advantages. When he went forward to study for the ministry he was already no novice. He had spent some years as Free Church teacher in Lochgilphead during the post-Disruption ministry of John Mackenzie. Favoured as Lochgilphead Free Church has been with a succession of earnest evangelical preachers, it used to be said that quite as much of the grit and the grasp of the Truth that was found among its people was due to Mr Rose’s work in his office of schoolmaster as could be traced even to the lively Gospel preached from the pulpit. He made the scholars think. Religious instruction in school was not relegated by him to a subordinate place, and he engaged in the work of imparting it in no perfunctory spirit. He not only drilled his pupils pupils in the knowledge of the letter of the Shorter Catechism, he trained them in acquaintance with its doctrinal contents. The stamp of this training they bore with them in after life. When he had given some years to teaching, Mr Rose resumed his studies; and, having married in his teacher days, he had a house of his own in Edinburgh. There, during his student days his wife died, and she was buried in the Grange Cemetery where, in due course, his own dust was laid. His house became a radiating centre of influence that told on the students of those days; and in after years one of its inmates paid a tribute to the character of that influence as he told of how William Rose was a tower of strength among the generation of candidates for the ministry, in whose midst the first beginnings showed themselves of those tendencies that have issued in the religious revolution which has overtaken evangelical Scotland. This old friend saw to it, almost forty years after Mr Rose’s death, that the lettering on his monument in the Grange should be freshened and restored.
On completing his theological course Mr Rose was soon called to be the first minister of the Lochfyneside Free Church. To this day that congregation exists as a monument to the work of worthies in bygone days, and not least to the labours of its first minister. His successor, the late Rev. John Clarke, who died some years ago as senior minister of Minard, was a great admirer of his predecessor. The traditions of attachment to Old School Presbyterianism as the result of the work of a succession of ministers are still unbroken. In this, his first charge, however, he was not left to labour long.
The large and important congregation of Poolewe and Aultbea, which included within its bounds half of the population of the wide parish of Gairloch, turned their eyes to him, and set their heart on having Mr Rose as their minister. He accepted their Call, and his main ministerial work was done among them.
In earlier days when the parish of Gairloch was but one charge its manse was at Poolewe, which might thus be looked upon as the centre of the parish; but years before the Disruption the northern half of the parish was made a parish quoad sacra, and Poolewe became the centre of this district, with manse and church.
When the Disruption took place the minister, Mr Donald Macrae, stood with his people by the Free Church. He was a native of Lochcarron, and his brother, Finlay Macrae of North Uist, was a very definite Moderate. Mr Macrae of Poolewe was married to a daughter of Mr Russell, the Moderate minister of Gairloch. With these ministerial connections, it said much for the strength of his convictions that he took the side of the defenders of the old constitution of the Reformed Church of Scotland. His wife’s brother, Alexander Fraser Russell, shared these convictions, and cast in his lot with the Free Church also. His congregation was in Cowal, and throughout his life he was a steadfast upholder of the old Gospel. Mr Donald Macrae did not long remain in Poolewe after the Disruption. He was called to Tarbert, Lochfyne, and then to Kilmory in Arran, where he laboured for more than a score of years.
II
Mr Macrae’s successor in Aultbea, which now became the centre of the congregation of Poolewe and Aultbea, was Rev. James Noble, who came to the charge from the Free Gaelic congregation in Edinburgh which, in his days, had not learned the saintly affectation which in Dr McLauchlan‘s time changed its old name. Mr Noble was an Evangelical of the Disruption brand, and did good work in Wester Ross. He was son-in-law to Rev. Dr Thomas Ross of Lochbroom, and so was closely related to the West Coast alike on the side of its Church and on the side of its Landed Interest.
In those days Northern Gairloch enjoyed the labours of an excellent Gaelic teacher, who was a Mackay from the Reay country, and the work of William Urquhart of Little Lochbroom was still a recent memory. His son was afterwards to be the highly esteemed Catechist of the Aultbea congregation. These men, even more than the ministry, had put their stamp on the religious character of the population of Loch Ewe-side, while, on the south side of the Loch, Angus Munro, the veteran Catechist of Gairloch, was a host in himself. William Urquhart, a native of Assynt, was removed from Lochbroom and Gairloch to Shieldaig, to keep the door open in a churchless congregation, for Shieldaig was for over thirty years after the Disruption without a church building. Its minister in 1843, Rev. Colin Mackenzie, had accepted a Call from Arrochar, so the Free Church sent men like William Urquhart to hold the fort in the vacancy. In 1852 this great Christian man died, at the age of sixty-six, and he lies buried in Culaneilein at Kinlochewe.
The congregation, then, that called Mr Rose, was one that was accustomed to sound instruction in the Faith and they found in their new minister one that did not fall behind the very chiefest of the men that they had known before. Indeed, when in the height of power and usefulness he was cut off at a stroke, Dr Kennedy of Dingwall spoke of Mr Rose as being of the first three of the Highlands in his day. As a preacher he was profound and accurate and earnest. His delivery was some-what quick and free, so that it did not do full justice to the remarkably weighty character of his teaching. The unthinking crowd might thus fail to give him his place as he deserved. Yet though he had as his neighbours, to the north George Macleod of Lochbroom, and to the south Duncan Matheson of Gairloch, he fully held his own in the loving esteem of the exercised Christians of Wester Ross as the peer and fellow of these Disruption champions.
In the Church Courts Mr Rose took his full share of work and responsibility. Indeed he was almost the only one from the Northern Highlands that used to rise to speak on the floor of the General Assembly. From the outset of his ministry his Church had been divided over proposed changes which, he felt convinced, did not conserve her witness untarnished. He was set for the defence of the Gospel. So he stood up for the unambiguous profession that the evangelical Church in Scotland maintained from the epoch of the Reformation. He was an Old School Presbyterian out and out. An uncompromising stand such as he took marked him out for the opposition of the party of movement and change. In this connection when he had been heartily elected to a charge in Lewis, he was jockeyed out of a Call to it by the manœuvres of the ecclesiastical managers. Such was the things they could and would do. But Mr Rose did not flinch or waver.
III
A more genial, kindly, hearty man than he was not to be found in his generation. Many of his congregation were poor, and when he went out to visit among them he was not wont to go empty-handed. His sister, who kept house for him in his widowhood, used to find that his meal barrel went down very quickly, and, keeping pace with the disappearance of its contents, was the rate at which his pillow-slips were vanishing. A pillow-slip was a convenient bag for taking his oatmeal to the poor and needy.
Among his people, Mr Rose was very much attached to John Maclennan of Mellon Charles. John was mighty in the Scriptures, and a wrestler in prayer. At one of his prayer meetings he called on John to lead in prayer. This John did with remarkable unction and nearness to the Throne. As Mr Rose went home with a friend he remarked, “I do not know a professor in our Church that can pray as little John does.” One of the mothers in Israel in the congregation was old Lizzie, who lived quite near the manse. She was long in her last illness; and before he left her for the last time, he said: “I shall be over Jordan before you yet.” To all appearance he was in his usual health. He went off to Glasgow to attend the marriage of his old friend Mr Angus MacIver in the Macdonald Church there. He gave to the bride a favour and it was marked: “In Memoriam”. On the Sabbath after the marriage he was taking the service in his friend’s place. His text was in Psalm 68: “The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels”. As he was going on in the sermon, he said of the angels: “My friends, this house is filled with them. The hand of the Lord is upon me.” So saying, he fell down in the pulpit and breathed his last. “A prince and a great man” fell that day.
Rev. Donald Sage
Author: Rev. John Kennedy, D.D., Dingwall
Source: Disruption Worthies of the Highlands , page 43
Donald Sage
Mr Sage left behind him, in manuscript, an extensive record of Memorabilia Domestica, containing an account of his ancestry and of his own life up to Disruption times, with descriptions of the places in which he was successively resident, and vivid sketches of many of his contemporaries. A most interesting volume could be culled out of the materials thus supplied. But as to the design of his work he says in a preface: “I write these family reminiscences, not to tell the public what I and mine were, but to tell it to myself. There is something peculiarly solemn and edifying – something which betters a man’s spirit – in the truly believing consciousness, not only that we ourselves are but ‘pilgrims on earth,’ but that we are so in this connection, even as ‘all our fathers also have been.’ Their race is run. Their course, involving the every-day duties, occurrences, joys and sorrows, in short, all the ‘lights’ and all the ‘shadows’ of an earthly existence, is finished, never again to be begun. They are gone, never again to return. And where am I? Unceasingly following them; like them, now conscious of things earthly; like them, at last, to know eternity! To look back on the years they spent on earth, to recount the incidents of their humble, but I trust in some measure, useful lives, to connect these with my own, and to view the whole in the spirit of a pilgrim, are to me sufficiently good reasons why I should write these memoirs.”
Mr Sage, of Resolis, was the third minister in lineal succession of that name in the Highlands. His grandfather, Æneas Sage, almost gigantic in stature and strength, with a vigorous intellect, a warm temper and a still warmer heart, early taught to “know the grace of God in truth,” possessed of the average clerical learning of his time, and ardently zealous but prudent withal, was the first minister of Lochcarron after the Revolution.
Alexander Sage, of Kildonan, inherited his father’s bone and muscle, and all his hastiness of temper, but had less than his sire of godliness, of intellect, and of kindliness of manner. Far less distinguished as a Christian and as a minister, he was yet a pious man, a sound preacher, a careful pastor, a dutiful husband and father, and a fast and prudent friend.
Donald Sage, the third in succession both in name and office, was born in the manse of Kildonan, 20th October 1789, a day, as he himself remarked, made memorable in the Highland strath by a tragic event, and a year made marked in history by the French Revolution. Two young men were drowned in the river quite near to the manse on the very hour of his birth, and on the streets of Paris there were then streams of blood. His earliest recollection was of his mother’s death. ‘I was then,” he writes, “three years, a month and seven days old. I recollect entering in, little knowing or even caring whither I was going, the room where my mother but a few hours before had breathed her last. A bed stood at the north-east corner of the room, near the chimney, its dark curtains folded up in front. On the bed, with a stillness which both surprised and terrified me, lay one whom I at once knew to be my mother. I was sure it was she, for she lay on my father’s bed; but why so still and silent I could not tell. At the opposite corner of the room sat my widowed father. My sudden and heedless entrance seemed to have opened up afresh the floodgates of his grief. I was the favourite child of her who now lay stretched in death before him. It was too much for him. He sobbed aloud, the tears rolled down his cheeks, his whole frame shook, and he clasped me in his large embrace in the agony of a husband’s sorrow. That scene, like a framed picture, retains its place in my memory detached from everything else.”
His early education was conducted at home, his father being his tutor, “to whom,” he writes, “I was indebted for any real progress I ever made.” From his earliest years he was an enthusiastic student. To the Latin and Greek classics he devoted his attention with great and growing ardour. In his sixteenth year he entered Marischal College, and when he was writing in 1840, his recollections of his college life seem to have been as vivid as if his college studies had been over but a year before. His theological course, begun in Aberdeen, was concluded in Edinburgh. In 1815 he was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of Lochcarron, while residing as tutor in the family of Mr Matheson of Attadale.
Of his first attempts to preach he gives the following account: “My first attempt to address a public audience from the pulpit was made at Lochalsh, and in the pulpit of Dr Downie, the parish minister; the next in that of the venerable Lauchlan Mackenzie, minister of Lochcarron. My exhibitions in both places before men were almost complete failures, before God they were sinful.” His third attempt was still less successful, on the evening of the communion Sabbath at Kildonan. “I selected for my text,” he writes, “the same passage I preached from at Lochcarron. I uttered a few preliminary sentences with considerable boldness and facility. But all at once my memory failed me, and I made a dead pause. My father sat behind me in the tent, and groaned aloud for very anxiety. The congregation, too, among whom were a number of my future flock at Achness, all on the very tiptoe of curiosity and attention, as this was my first appearance before them, were agitated like the surface of one of their mountain lochs when suddenly visited by a hurricane. Some held down their heads, others looked any way or every way but towards the unfortunate and suddenly-silenced preacher. After a pause of some minutes, however, and during which I felt myself pretty similarly circumstanced as when I was carried away by the river Carron, I pulled out my manuscript, and stammered out the rest of the sermon with much trepidation in the best way I could. I think,” he adds, “that I was no loser by this severe trial. It read to me a most humiliating lesson respecting myself, and it struck a blow at the root of self-confidence, then my easily besetting sin.”
Immediately after being licensed he was appointed missionary minister of Achness, in Sutherlandshire. There, notwithstanding of his breakdown at Kildonan, he soon attained, in the consciences of all the people, and in the hearts of not a few among them who feared the Lord, the place of an able minister of the New Testament. After labouring for three years among his interesting and attached flock at Achness, he and all his people were summarily removed to clear the ground they occupied for sheep. His account of that eviction is a stirring story of wrong and cruelty on the one side, and of suffering and patience on the other. He thus describes his last Sabbath service at Achness: “In Strathnaver we assembled together for the last time at Langdale, where I had frequently preached before, on a beautiful green sward, overhung by Robert Gordon’s antique romantic little cottage on the eminence close beside us. The still waters of the Naver flowed past us a few yards to the east. The Sabbath morning was unusually fine, and mountain, hill, and dale, water and woodland, among which we had dwelt so long, and with which all our associations of ‘home’ and ‘native land’ were so fondly linked, appeared to unite their attractions in order to bid us all ‘a long farewell.’ My preparations for the pulpit had always cost me much anxiety on the previous Saturday; but in view of this sad scene of parting they were almost beyond endurance. I selected a text which had a pointed reference to the peculiarity of our circumstances; but my great difficulty was how to restrain my feelings till I had illustrated and enforced the great truth which it involved with reference to eternity. The service began. The very aspect of the congregation was itself a sermon – a most impressive one. Old Achool sat right opposite to me, and around him his junior fellow-travellers Zionwards. As my eye alighted on his venerable countenance, bearing the impress of eighty-seven winters, I was deeply affected, and could scarcely articulate the words of the psalm which I read. I went on to the services of the day. I preached, and the people listened; but every sentence uttered and heard was in opposition to both the ‘wind and tide’ of our natural feelings, which set in directly against us, and which at every step of our progress were rising higher and higher. At last all restraints were compelled to give way. The poor preacher ceased to speak, the poor people ceased to listen. Both lifted up their voices and wept they mingled their tears together. It was indeed ‘the place of parting and the hour;’ the greater number parted then and there never again, either there or anywhere else, to behold each other in ‘the land of the living’.”
In 1819 he went to Aberdeen, and was minister of the Gaelic chapel there for two years and nine months. In his Memorabilia he gives the history of that congregation, from its first formation by Dr Bayne to the date of his own settlement; a description of the most remarkable of his hearers; an account of his mode of conducting his work; and his estimate of each of the ministers and leading men in the granite city during the time of his residence there. Most graphic are his descriptions of the religion, morals, language, and habits of the Aberdonians; and the portraits he draws are, at any rate, not deficient in strength. His Memorabilia of Aberdeen would form a very interesting volume. It was during his residence there his first marriage took place.
In 1822 he was translated to Resolis. His immediate predecessor was Mr Arthur, whose incumbency extended from 1774 to 1821, and of whose life and ministry he gives a vivid sketch, in which appears no trait of a true Christian, of an evangelical preacher, or of a faithful pastor. Mr Arthur was preceded by a minister who, in respect of godliness and usefulness, was a very contrast – the eminent Mr Hector McPhail. The character and labours of the latter are fully described by Mr Sage in the history of Resolis, which he gives in the work repeatedly referred to. The parish which Mr Arthur found as “a garden of the Lord,” had lapsed into a waste before the days of his successor. The people were scattered; there was no session, and all had to be done in the way of organisation as if there never had been a minister in the parish before. Mr Sage was then comparatively young, with Ferintosh and its Macdonald on the one hand, and Cromarty with its Stewart on the other; but he found his place at the outset as a man of God and a preacher of power in the regards of his people, and this he retained and established to the close of his active ministry. In his Memorabilia he gives an account of his work in Resolis, and of the people whom he found there at the time of his induction, with vivid sketches of the heritors, of his co-presbyters, and of the ministers and “men” of mark around him.
The great affliction of his life followed immediately after his induction at Resolis – the early death of his first wife. Most affecting is his account of his suffering during the first dark days of widowhood. His soul was bowed to the dust by the burden of his sorrow, and both gladness and hope were pressed out of his heart. He was unable for a time to take part in the services of the sanctuary. But the Lord visited him in the season of his sore distress, and brought to him an enriching blessing; and with a heart cheered and fervent, and “in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ,” he resumed his work. Many of his hearers since that time shared with him the blessing which then reached him from on high.
His second marriage took place in 1826. He was spared the pain of a second widowhood. It would be well if his own interesting account of his ministry at Resolis, and of his labours in the North, were given to the public. The Disruption was to him a time of sifting trial; not because he knew not what he ought to do, and not because knowing this he hesitated to act according to his sense of duty, but because while Providence sorely tried him, the tempter fiercely assailed him in that crisis. Anxious as to the future of his wife and large young family, he failed to find within all his parish a roof to cover them when, in view of the Disruption, he was searching for a home. After repeated refusals, and with the future all dark before him, he was seated in his study, when, looking through the window, he observed a neighbouring proprietor walking on one of his many fields. “See how he prospers though he was unkind to you,” the tempter suggested, “and how it fares with you.” It was with him then as with the psalmist of old, when he saw the wicked prosper, and the righteous oppressed. But seasonably and with power came the words to his mind, “Wait on the Lord and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to inherit the land. When the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it.” His fears were dispelled, the tempter foiled, and his very first attempt thereafter to procure a house succeeded. “I may truly say,” he writes, near the close of his life, “that, in joining the Free Church, I exchanged debt and poverty for a competency, not only sufficient for the supply of daily wants, but such as to enable me to pay all my debts, and to lay by something in view of old age; and I do not know a more remarkable or obvious proof that our Free Church is of God, and is countenanced by Him.”
Referring to annoyances to which he was subjected by the reluctance of the heritors to pay his stipend during all the period of his ministry at Resolis, he adds: “I hasten to conclude this detestable part of my reminiscences, by expressing my thankfulness to God for having guided me to shake myself free from all the vile appendages of the Establishment – heritors, lawyers, ministers, patrons, and all – and to join a church whose profession, even if it should be nothing more, is, that she is under the exclusive government of Him whom men crucified, but whom His heavenly Father hath made Lord and Christ.”
The waning of his strength was very gradual during the closing years of his life; but the time during which he was quite unable to preach was short. Memory failed, and the keen edge of his intellect was blunted, and the voice was very feeble, and the limbs were bent. But his habit of meditation continued, and sparks of the old fire sometimes gleamed in his conversation, reminding one of the brightness of earlier days. Shortly before his death he said to his faithful friend, Mr Aird, who visited him, and who told him a deathbed saying of one of the Ross-shire worthies, “You have cheered me by telling me of these three wonders which he expected to see in heaven. I too expect to see them – my nature in the person of the Son of God, the first indeed, and the greatest; myself among the glorified saints, the second; and some there whom, while on earth, I never expected to be there, the third.” Passing through death as one passes into sleep, he entered on the vision of the wonders which he so longed to see. He died in March 1869, in the eightieth year of his age.
In stature Mr Sage was rather above the average, in form not ungainly, yellow-haired, and with a fair complexion, his brow broad and high and prominent, his eyes deep-set, blue, and dreamy, his face rather expressionless, his gait without agility, and his manner, though lacking all demonstrative courtesy, never rude nor uneasy. His conversational power was great. His remarks on men and things were always memorable when he was earnest enough to use his power. His natural feelings were more excitable than enduring. Often powerful enough to sway his judgment were his first impressions of men and of events. His intellect was rarely vigorous, and capable of immense research. Accustomed to elaborate his thinking, he had also acquired the power of clear expression. His words were always apt, and were none of them superfluous. His power of illustration was remarkable, but never used redundantly. He cared to use it only to make a statement more intelligible. As a preacher his manner was extremely quiet and ineffective. His tones were never harsh, but he never tried to modulate them so as to make his words impressive. His voice was never strong, but, up to the measure of its force, distinct. It would be difficult to determine whether he excelled more as a lecturer or as a preacher – in expounding a passage, or in discoursing from a text. In each capacity he was by few excelled. Always careful to trace from its starting-point the train of thought throughout the preceding paragraph on to his text, he usually gave, in the introduction of his sermon, a most instructive exposition. When the text was reached it was opened up with marvellous skill, and its several parts were logically arranged. Entering into it he carried his hearers with him so gradually, and kept, as he went before them, so clear a light shining on their path, that without a sense of difficulty they found themselves in the deep places of the subject, marvelling that they had not seen before what was now so clearly discovered to them. An attentive hearer he always kept engrossed with the subject of his sermon. Few preachers have ever laboured more to exalt their theme and to abase themselves. His applications of doctrine to the consciousness and practice of Christians were minute and skilful. His preaching was rarely fitted to be edifying to the church of God. His addresses to the unconverted never passed into mere declamation. He never sought to reach their conscience but through their understanding. In calm solemnity he presented to their minds the awful truth – he never brandished it before their eyes to scare them into blind alarm. Each sermon he delivered left abundant materials for future meditation in the minds of all earnest hearers; and never could they, in course of reading, meet a text on which they heard him preach, but the light of his sermon still hovered over it, and made them fain to linger on it.
George Shepherd
Author: P. W. Robertson, M.A., Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies of the Highlands , page 204; Our Church Fathers: being Biographical Sketches of Disruption Fathers in and around the Presbytery of Elgin, page 45
The subject of this sketch, the Rev. George Shepherd, was honoured to do a great work for the cause of evangelical truth in connection with the Free Church in the district of Badenoch. He was born in the parish of Fordyce, Banffshire, in April 1793, and received his early education at Fordyce School. Not much is known of his school-days, though his intimate friends at college believed that he had feared God from his youth. A certificate from his master, William Cruickshank, dated Fordyce, 25th day of October 1808, bears witness to his propriety of conduct for the previous four years, and attests him to be a young man very worthy of encouragement. He passed through the usual curriculum at Marischal College and University, Aberdeen, taking the degree of A.M. in 1812. He subsequently attended the Theological Halls of Aberdeen and Glasgow, and was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of Abernethy, at Aviemore, July 1816. While prosecuting his studies for the ministry he resided for some time at Kingussie, where he was engaged in teaching the parish school, and thus came under the influence of the Rev. John Robertson. In after life Mr Shepherd often referred to this important period of his history, as being a time of great privilege and blessing to him. In the early years of this century, a cold Moderatism brooded over many a pulpit in the land, and it was no small gain to reside in a parish where the blessed evangel was preached with more than ordinary power.
The Rev. John Robertson was in his day one of the best known and most powerful preachers in the North of Scotland, and his faithful and stirring ministry proved a great blessing wherever he went. In the “Life of John Macdonald,” by Dr Kennedy, the preaching of the Rev John Robertson, of Achrenny Mission, afterwards of Rothesay and Kingussie, is one of the means specified as being used by the Spirit of God to bring the future Apostle of the North to a saving knowledge of the truth. John Macdonald cherished the warmest affection for Mr Robertson, and after his death gave fervent expression to it in a Gaelic elegy. It pleased God to bestow on this eminent minister both a door of utterance and a door of entrance. His popularity was very great, and only this last summer an aged elder of the Free Church in Inverness, and father of one of the missionaries to China, told the writer of this sketch that he well remembers the crowds who went to hear John Robertson wherever he was preaching; and that when he was a boy, he walked with his mother several miles to hear him. The impression of that sermon, and even the words of one thrilling appeal to the unconverted, remain with this venerable man to this day. Mr Shepherd caught something of the force and fervour, as well as the evangelical unction, which are even yet matter of tradition in the districts which were privileged to enjoy Mr Robertson’s ministry.
While teaching at Kingussie, Mr Shepherd studied and mastered the Gaelic language, with the view of fitting himself for a Highland charge if such should offer. It may be mentioned, as a singular fact, that John Robertson also acquired his knowledge of Gaelic after he had grown up. Mr Shepherd was ordained in 1817 to the Mission Church at Fort William, there succeeding his future brother-in-law, the Rev. William Robertson of Laggan, and afterwards of Kinloss. At Fort William he remained but a short time, having been translated to the parish of Laggan in 1818. In 1819 he was united in marriage to Catherine, the youngest daughter of Mr Robertson of Kingussie; and in 1825 was appointed to the united parishes of Kingussie and Insch, on the death of his revered father-in-law. In an appreciative and affectionate sketch of Mr Shepherd, written by the Rev.
Nothing worthy of public notice characterised the eighteen years between 1825 and 1843. Like many other Scottish manses, that of Kingussie was remarkable for the hospitality, intelligence, and Christian worth which added such pleasantness to the peculiar grace and beauty of Mr Shepherd’s amiable wife. In the fine valley, traversed by the rapid river Spey, the wildest and most capricious of our large rivers, Mr and Mrs Shepherd dwelt among their own people, feeding the flock committed to the minister’s charge with wisdom and good understanding. In 1841 Mr Shepherd received, but declined, a call to Elgin; and when the Disruption took place, he was rewarded by finding that almost the whole people of the parish and surrounding district clung to his ministry, and cast in their lot with the Free Church. The present excellent minister of Kingussie has sent me the following extract from the Session Record in December 1844:-
“The Moderator expressed his regret to the meeting, that owing to his numerous engagements since the Disruption, having been obliged to superintend the neighbouring parishes of Badenoch, he had been unable to take minutes of their frequent meetings since that memorable period. He was sure the Session would concur with him in thinking that they had to acknowledge the marvellous goodness of God to their church, and to this parish in particular, since they left the Establishment. They have now got a most comfortable church built, free of debt, and which will contain from 1000 to 1200 sitters. The whole of the people of the parish, with a few exceptions, and also the bulk of the community in all the neighbouring parishes, have adhered to the Free Church as the church of the Bible and the Constitution, and continue to avow their attachment to those principles, in the maintenance of which we were driven from the Establishment.”
A similar minute is on record of date April 1846, recognising the stedfastness of the people amid many trials, and thanking God for tokens of spiritual good among the flock, as a sign that the Lord had not forsaken the Church which the wrath of man had driven to the wilderness. These minutes incontestably prove that during the ten years’ conflict the pastor had not left his people in ignorance of the reasons which had led him to side with the Evangelical party during the Church’s struggle. Mr Shepherd was no fanatic. He was most unwilling to cast away the material advantages he enjoyed as parish minister, and was not insensible to the prestige and influence connected with his position. “The alienation of friends,” says Mr Mackay, “and their misrepresentations were felt severely by Mr Shepherd, and yet he did not allow anything of that kind to produce asperity, or permit any false delicacy to damp his ardour, or restrain his activity in the execution of the duties devolved upon him.” The father of the writer of this sketch described to him many years after the Disruption, with much emotion, the mental struggle he had undergone before he could bring himself to sign away, in obedience to the call of conscience, the cherished home and the means of livelihood for his wife and seven children. His brother-in-law, Mr Shepherd, was in full sympathy with him in these struggles; and though the latter had not the anxieties of a family to complicate his decision, it is certain that nothing but the profoundest sense of duty would have induced him to break his connection with the Established Church. On the memorable 18th of May, Mr Shepherd, Mr Robertson of Kinloss, and Mr John Glass of Musselburgh, took breakfast with their relative, the late Lord Robertson, at his house in Drummond Place. Actuated by the best of motives, from his standpoint, the witty judge had exhausted every argument and entreaty to arrest the folly, as he considered it, of his three rash friends. Lord Robertson’s affection for his sister, wife of the Rev. William Robertson, gave unusual force and earnestness to his arguments. His advocacy was in this case in vain, and in despair he is said to have exclaimed, “I question if three will come out!” “Yes three will come out, for we three will come out;” and the three, closely allied by nature and brethren in the ministry, walked arm in arm from St Andrew’s Church to the first Free Church Assembly in Canonmill’s Hall. When the die was cast, when the “hour of temptation” had come and gone, and the Lord had kept his servants faithful, their hearts were lightened, and they were ready to sing for joy. “Our soul escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the Lord who made heaven and earth.” Thus did the Rev. William Robertson describe, in 1855, his recollection of the experience of the Disruption day.
Mr Shepherd returned to Kingussie no longer entitled to the status and emoluments of the parish minister, but to his joy he found himself still the minister of the parishioners. The duties which now devolved upon him were such as few men could have sustained. Mr Dewar writes:- “Mr Shepherd was the only Free Church minister between Fort William and Strathavon, or, taking the churches of Laggan and Grantown as the limits, you have a stretch of close upon forty miles which he had to superintend, the congregations in which were without any organisation, except Kingussie. Within these extensive districts he was ‘in journeyings often’, going to preach, and to attend frequent meetings of Presbytery, exposed to all sorts of weather, and incurring no small amount of expense, for there were no railways in those days. In Strathspey it was a good many years after the Disruption before sites could be got for churches, the Earl of Seafield, instigated by factors, obstinately refusing to grant sites. I have turned over the Presbytery Record, and find that Mr Shepherd seems to have been perpetual moderator, and that no end of things, preaching in certain parishes, looking out for supplies, corresponding with committees and deputies, &c., &c., are constantly left with the moderator to do.” Mr Mackay writes:- “By the help of deputations, probationers, and intelligent catechists, Mr Shepherd at their head directing their movements, the great bulk of the population joined the Free Church, and they have ever since been stedfast in adherence to her principles. It must be observed that the journeyings to be performed, the stormy climate of Badenoch, and the multiplicity of pastoral services rendered the labour of one man prodigious for a time. The exciting scenes also, when publicly expounding the principles of the Free Church, and exposing the fallacies and sophistries of her enemies, were not favourable to the health, peace, and comfort of any man, and much less to a mind constituted like his, that hated strife, and was remarkable for kindliness, openness, and good feeling.”
Some allusion has already been made to the difficulty of obtaining sites for the Free Churches in Badenoch and Strathspey. Mr Mackay gives a graphic description of a sacrament Sabbath in the open air at Duthil in August 1846:- “The Sabbath turned out a most boisterous day. I met an English gentleman, who was at Carr-Bridge during the shooting season, and he accosted me with the abrupt expression (seeing the fury of the storm), ‘I was against you, but I have changed my opinion by reading the evidence before the Sites Committee; and even if that were not the case, this day would change it. It is impossible that Lord Seafield can stand out against this. My friend officiated in some wretched barn where those who preferred the English attended, and then came to my aid shaking with cold, taking part in the table services. Never will I forget the events of that day, the hurricane, the floods, the trembling limbs and chattering teeth of ministers and people. The people sat quietly for hours; and nothing but the ministrations of the gospel could command such a stillness and solemnity in the midst of such raging elements.” This is but a solitary instance of what minister and people had to endure from the contempt of the proud and the scorning of those that were at ease. In April 1847, Mr Shepherd was summoned to London to give evidence before the Sites Committee. His evidence, though extremely interesting, is too lengthy to quote. His answers to the questions have an indescribable pathos at times. For instance, when asked to describe the circumstances under which his congregation met at Duthil:- “I think I preached there on the 22d of November last, and it was incessant rain during the whole service. I preached again about two months after, and there was rain without intermission and high wind. And I preached there on the 14th of February; there was deep snow, and it was very stormy. I had great difficulty in getting from my own house to the place of worship, a distance of twenty miles. The first thing I requested them to do when I arrived was to clear the snow away from the box, the precentor’s desk, and the seats on which they required to sit. There were about two hundred present. Formerly I had five hundred or six hundred.” And then again, his reference to the infants brought to be baptised at these open-air gatherings brings vividly before us the scenes of covenanting times depicted by Sir George Harvey. In after days Mr Shepherd used to look at the commodious churches erected in Strathspey, in a great measure, by his influence and exertions, and thank God for his goodness after such a struggle. In his own parish of Kingussie he was uniformly treated by the proprietor , Mr H. Evan Baillie, with kindness and generosity. His prompt reply to the memorial petitioning for a site for a Free Church reflects credit alike on his head and on his heart. While deeply lamenting “the calamitous divisions” in the Scotch Church, Mr Baillie did not see it to be his duty to override the conscientious convictions of his dependents. And he took occasion to express his “exceeding joy that so many of the inhabitants of Kingussie were still to have the benefit of the instruction and guidance of their able, pious, and excellent minister Mr Shepherd.” Mr Shepherd took a special interest in the education of the young, and many able young men were trained under his care as teachers and as ministers. “His house was the constant abode of young men and a regular succession of ministers who came on deputations; and never did a brother enter a more hospitable dwelling ” Messrs Urquhart and Gordon of Glasgow, Mr Cameron of Brodick , and the late Mr Rose of Poolewe were all brought forward for the ministry through his care and encouragement.
In 1845 Mr Shepherd had nine schools under his charge in his own and neighbouring parishes. In October of that year he went to Glasgow to raise a little money for the support of these schools. A circular, drawn up and signed by Dr Roxburgh, the late Dr R. Buchanan, and Dr Smyth, concludes in these terms: “We feel ourselves called upon to state that there is no minister in the Free Church who has made larger sacrifices or who has undertaken more arduous labours for our Church than Mr Shepherd. We account it a duty and a privilege to do anything in our power to strengthen his hands and to encourage his heart.”
The multiplied and incessant labours, the hardships and the mental anxiety to which he was subjected for ten years after the Disruption, eventually affected even his vigorous constitution. Feeling that he required a station the duties of which would be less laborious and exhausting, he accepted the cordial and harmonious call given him in October 1852 by the congregation of the South Free Church of Elgin. Bitter was the pang it cost him to leave his beloved flock at Kingussie; though there were not wanting grounds for encouragement during his brief ministry in Elgin. But the great Head of the Church saw meet to call his servant, in a sudden and solemn manner, home to his rest. Having been ailing for some time in spring, early in June, by medical advice, he procured a short respite from ministerial duties, and went south to spend a few weeks at the Bridge of Allan. Here he daily improved in health, and in July went on a fortnight’s visit to his nephew, the Rev. P. W. Robertson, then recently ordained minister of the Free Church in Leslie, Fifeshire. He was able to take part in the communion services on the 10th, and his address at the table was marked by his usual unction and fervour of spirit. Little did those privileged to hear him for the first time suspect that this was to be his last public service to the Church he loved so well. After consulting an eminent physician in Edinburgh, he proceeded with his wife and nephew to Aberdeen, to the house of his old college friend, Rev. Mr Simpson of Free Trinity Church, intending to go on to Ballater the next day. His friends in Elgin received on Wednesday morning the 20th, information that he was about to set forward in invigorated health and cheerful spirits; and the next post brought the tidings of his death. When called upon to preach the funeral sermon of his friend on the 31st July, Mr Simpson said:- “He had been complaining of pain in the region of the heart, yet he soon obtained relief, and his wonted cheerfulness returned. In the evening he prayed in the family with great copiousness, unction, and fervour, and after spending some time in interesting conversation, he retired to rest, intending to rise early on the following morning to proceed to the place where he was to remain for another fortnight, before returning to resume his labours among his beloved flock. But two hours only after we parted for the night I was alarmed by the cry that he had become exceedingly ill; and having as speedily as possible rushed to his bed-room, ah, what an awfully solemn and affecting spectacle there presented itself to my view! My beloved friend and brother, with whom I had so lately been enjoying the most pleasing intercourse, in the agonies of the mortal struggle, the last enemy having almost accomplished his work; and in a few minutes more he ceased to breathe, and all was over. In season and out of season, in weariness and painfulness did your departed pastor perform the office of an evangelist in various places, the inhabitants of which were as sheep without a shepherd.” It is not to be wondered at that his strength gave way prematurely under labours of such multiplicity and magnitude, and which may be justly styled apostolical. On examination, the cause of death was found to be “angina pectoris.” Thus passed away this well-beloved minister, having diffused around his life the savour of deep and unaffected piety, and having been deservedly regarded with the profoundest esteem and veneration by those favoured with his ministrations. “We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their days in the times of old.” “Thou art our King, O Gcd, command deliverances for Jacob.”
Sir James Simpson
Author: The Editor
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, June, 1934, page 124
Sir James Simpson, of the firm of Messrs Simpson & Marwick, W.S., Law Agents of the Free Church, passed from this earthly scene on the morning of Thursday, 10th May last. His death is mourned throughout the whole Church, not only for the professional capacity which rendered him a sagacious and trusted adviser, but for the personal qualities which endeared him to a wide circle of friends.
Born at Largs in 1858, Sir James received his early education in his native town and in Edinburgh, and afterwards proceeded to Glasgow University, where he had a distinguished career. Among a band of contemporaries which included several men of outstanding ability he occupied a foremost position, securing pride of place in several of his classes. On finishing his Law apprenticeship he removed to Edinburgh, and in 1886 entered into partnership with his friend, Mr D. W. Marwick. The firm of Simpson & Marwick soon gained a high reputation for business efficiency, and eventually inscribed its name in enduring characters on the legal and ecclesiastical history
of Scotland. Sir James’s association with the fortunes of the Free Church is a matter of common knowledge. It would be too much to say that, were it not for his efforts on her behalf throughout the critical years which followed the Union of 1900, she would by this time have ceased to exist – the Free Church would have held on her way though a Law case had never heen begun in her defence or ended in her favour – but it is only the bare truth to say that apart from his championship of her civil rights she would have been crippled to an extent that would have seriously affected her development and her usefulness. The present writer has elsewhere paid tribute to the part which Sir James Simpson played in the proceedings which culminated in the victory of 1904, and it may be pardonable to introduce a few sentences from that acknowledgement in the circumstances of the present hour.
Never were clients better served by their legal advisers than were the Free Church by this eminent firm. From the beginning, Mr Simpson took a grasp of the situation which never was relaxed throughout the varied fortunes of the case. … He understood the various questions involved in the case with a thoroughness which was the outcome of close and extensive study and from the outset he gauged the legal position with a prescience whose main conclusions never required to be modified. It was Mr Simpson who first of all took the responsibility of advising the Minority that their case was good and could be made effective. He recommended the Counsel who were afterwards employed and guided the course of action generally. It lay on him also to see that the plan of campagn as laid down was duly executed from point to point. The difficulties of the situation were enormous and presented a task far beyond the ordinary duties of a law agent. On Mr Simpson, of course, fell the burden of seeing the case through; and, realising the historic importance of the occasion, he threw himself into the work with all his might. The result was a presentation of the facts which, for fulness of knowledge, for dignity and precision of statement, and for strength of argumentative appeal, was acknowledged on all hands to bear the palm against the best efforts of the other side. It need only be added that, during the entire length of a keen and bitter dispute, Mr Simpson’s controversial method maintained a uniformly high level of dignity and courtesy, and that his enthusiasm on behalf of the cause of his clients appeared to flow from a deeper spring than mere professional interest.
Author: Assembly Tribute by Mr W. Rounsfell Brown
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, June, 1934, page 124
When seconding the adoption of the Report of the Law and Advisory Committee Mr Rounsfell Brown, General Treasurer of the Church, apologised for the absence of Mr Donald M. Smith, and then proceeded to pay the following tribute to Sir James Simpson:
If Mr Smith had been present he would have paid the tribute which I am now to pay to the memory of his fellow-practitioner. I have this advantage in attempting to do what otherwise would have been better done by Mr Smith, that is, I knew Sir James in his student days. I do not claim that he was a personal comrade of mine at College in Glasgow, for I was only among the ordinary students, whereas James Simpson moved on a different plane. He was among the brilliant students. We were not always in the same class; but our curricula sometimes overlapped, notably so in the Logic Class where he tied with Francis Ashcroft for first place, James Denney being their runner-up. The distinction which Simpson gained in Arts he repeated in Law, and all we young lawyers recognised that when, in company with the son of the Town Clerk of Glasgow, he passed to Edinburgh, there was being laid the foundation of what was to be a successful business as Parliament House correspondents of provincial lawyers. That expectation was fulfilled, and in a short time Simpson & Marwick took rank among the leading firms in Edinburgh. They were not, however, correspondents of my firm in Glasgow, and I did not resume intercourse with our friend until the beginning of the Free Church Litigation. Simpson & Marwick began, as I understand, their connection with the Free Church entirely in a professional spirit which was, for them, an advantage. I had been for a long time involved in it as a Churchman, whereas they approached the issues with fresh minds and undivided interests. It is a mistake to suppose that cases are won only through the skill of lawyers: cases are decided according to the rightness or wrongness of the claims put forward. But one is bound to acknowledge the courage of a lawyer who sees to the roots of his client’s case with clear vision. Sir James did this and maintained his point with a persistent courage right up to the ultimate Court, where there was an atmosphere free from the subconscious and unconscious influences which, because of the magnitude of the issue and the numerical littleness of one of the parties to it, had somehow influenced the result in the Courts below. But if the lawyer is not a decisive factor in the issue of a litigation, he may be, and in this instance he undoubtedly was, a dominating influence in subsequent negotiations. Through the intricacies of the two Commissions which followed upon the House of Lords’ judgment, Sir James Simpson steered his way with unshaken calmness, and it is in no small measure due to his ability that the Free Church emerged from the tangle not wholly despoiled of that which was her own. Sir James had a clear mind, a calm judgment in business. The end of the famous case is a tribute to his worth.
Apart from this particular litigation Sir James was a good man; he was a fair man. I have said that at the outset his connection with the Free Church was purely professional but he came to know the Free Church; became a member of it, attached to it, and holding in high esteem the principles for which the Free Church exists. He recognised, something not infrequently said in public, that the successful attitude of the Free Church had killed militant Voluntaryism in Scotland, had clarified the Establishment principle, and had made possible the present consolidated position of the Church of Scotland.
The legal profession has its pitfalls, and Sir James was not without friends who stumbled. He himself was a man of honour, careful of the good name of his friends, for some of whom he shouldered burdens not his own.
He has passed from us, leaving behind him a name cherished and honoured by many in his profession, revered and respected by many who knew him personally within the four corners of this Church, and justly and warrantably esteemed by every one of us because of the notable advantages which we received through the fact that we had him at the ear of our Law Committee.
Author: W. R. B. [Walter Rounsfell Brown]
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, December, 1932, page 298
In public acknowledgment of the signal help given to the Free Church of Scotland in the trying days of 1900-10 by Sir James Simpson, S.S.C..Law Agent of the Church, his Portrait has been added to the gallery of honoured men on the walls of the Presbytery Hall, Edinburgh.
A meeting for this purpose, quite filling the Presbytery Hall, was held there on the evening of Tuesday, 13th November, the Moderator Rev. Peter Clarkson, presiding; Professor Kennedy Cameron, as Convener of the Committee which had been in charge of arrangements for having the Portrait prepared, explained that the picture was the gift of Sir James’ friends throughout the breadth of the Church. He asked Lady Simpson to unveil the Portrait, which being done, satisfaction was freely expressed at the excellent rendering given by the artist, whereof readers may judge from the reproduction here given.
In asking the Moderator to accept custody of the Portrait on behalf of the Church, Professor Cameron, as one of the twenty-six ministers of October 1900, and as indeed the one of all those most frequently in business contact with Sir James, stated how steadily had grown his admiration for Sir James as a man, as a lawyer, as a Churchman, and as a Christian. He told how, when the many friends who had opposed the Union of 1900, were winnowed like Gideon’s army and but a handful remained to take the field, these latter were guided to seek the professional aid of Mr James Simpson. To him the Free Church owes more than she can adequately express. Out of this sense of indebtedness had sprung the desire (put into execution through the Portrait Committee) to have his personal appearance preserved on canvas that future generations visiting the Church buildings might know the manner of him who had had no small part in the occupancy thereof being conserved to the Church. Professor Cameron mentioned many of the hard-ships which befell the Church after, as well as before, the House of Lords judgment, many of them fitted to dismay an adviser less self-possessed, and less courageous, than was Mr Simpson.
Rev. Professor Maclean asked Lady Simpson to accept from the subscribers a Replica of the Portrait with the assurance that the gift typified the gratitude, not merely of those already known to her husband and herself, but of many humble folk in remote places. The gift was meant to tell Lady Simpson that these ardent lovers of their Church saw, in the man who had helped their Church, one who was great. Dr Maclean joined in that estimate of admiration for one who had shown his greatness of intellect and of heart throughout the unflinching execution of a great task. Some of these qualities were shown in the Portrait before them. Even the hidden man of the heart might be seen peering through the unruffled calm on the benign face.
Sir James replied on behalf of Lady Simpson and himself by protesting his inability to give due expression of thanks for the honour paid him. Instead of comment on the quality, or otherwise, of what had been done for the Church, and with scarce reference to and never a reflection on the obstacle set up by opponents, he gave rather a biographical sketch of himself. From dux of a school in Largs (Ayrshire), he passed to Craigmount School, Edinburgh, and back to Glasgow University, in each place justifying the anticipations of his parents and his teachers. Eventually he, along with Mr Marwick, had embarked on practice in the Court of Session; and he counted himself fortunate in being introduced, by the late Mr Hay Thorburn, to the Free Church Defence Association, and afterwards to the Free Church, as clients whom it had been his great pleasure to serve. Sir James made interesting reference to some of the more pleasing aspects of the Law Case, and of the proceedings before Lord Elgin’s Commission and he read significant letters of appreciation received from Lord Johnston, Lord Salvesen and (most notable of all) from Lord Elgin. The meeting did not fail to receive with appropriate great feeling Sir James’ acknowledgement of the magnificent part borne throughout by Mr Robertson Christie, K.C., but lately deceased. After tributes to Sir James had been paid by Rev. Finlay Macrae, Rev. John Macleod, O.Β.Ε., and Mr John Fraser, Inverness, a vote of thanks was awarded to the artist, Mr Henry W. Kerr, R.S.A., whose absence on account of illness was the subject of regret. The meeting concluded by the singing of the opening stanzas of Psalm 103.
Graham Speirs
Author: Lord Cowan, Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 447
The subject of this memoir died in December 1847. Few are now left who enjoyed his friendship, and knew his many admirable qualities and lofty character, or were personally cognisant of the great services which he rendered to the Free Church. A fitting opportunity is presented, by this publication, to preserve a record of those services, and to recall the memory of one who pre-eminently deserves to be kept in grateful remembrance.
Graham Speirs was born in June 1797, and was thus cut off in the prime of his manhood. He was the second son of Mr Peter Speirs of Culcreuch, brother to Mr Speirs of Elderslie; and his mother was of the family of Gartmore. His early education was conducted partly at the High School of Edinburgh, and partly at a school in Warwickshire, where he remained till December 1811. He then entered the Royal Navy, and continued in the Naval Service for five years, when, directing his attention to the study of law, he was called to the Bar of Scotland in 1820. His professional career was distinguished by steady but not rapid progress; no one, however, brought into contact with him in professional matters, even at an early period, could doubt that he must ultimately attain the highest eminence. He was throughout of liberal politics, and on the occasion of the party attaining to power in 1830, Lord Advocate Jeffrey—who fully estimated his talents and character—appointed him one of his Advocates-Depute, and soon afterwards he was appointed Sheriff of Elgin and Nairn. Subsequently, in 1840, on a vacancy occurring in the Metropolitan Sheriffdom, he was offered and accepted the office of Sheriff of Edinburgh, which he held until his death. He was thus, for a time at least, removed from practice at the bar, to the regret of his more intimate friends, who looked to him as, in certain probabilities, sure to be called to fill a still more distinguished position of public usefulness.
At the time of his decease, there appeared in the Witness newspaper, from the pen of its distinguished editor, Hugh Miller, a notice, from which we cannot do better than make one or two quotations:—
To this truthful portrait of the man, there is little to add, but we cannot refrain from adverting to similar testimony to be found in the recently published (1874) Journal of Lord Cockburn. Amid the graphic and racy descriptions of events and delineations of character with which these volumes, like their predecessor (“Memorials of his Times”), abound, there is none so life-like as the following, written in 1843:—
Afterwards, at the time of his death, Lord Cockburn says:—
Just as this observation is, we would rather say that the Rev. Dr Gordon, of whose kirk-session, when translated to the High Church, Speirs was for many years a member, had fully more influence in moulding his character and views, as he certainly had with others of the same class and standing. Between them, indeed, there was a remarkable similarity—the same gravity of manner; the same wisdom and sagacity in counsel; and the same reticent demeanour,—but not the less prompt and decided in action in matters of conscience and of duty. No one who knew that truly excellent and admirable divine, can wonder at the power and influence which he exercised for good in this city, from the time when he first came, comparatively a young man, but in the full vigour of his powerful intellect and impressive eloquence, to fill the pulpit of Buccleuch Chapel.
But however this might be in Speirs’ case, it is certain that the divine and the layman acted in entire concert in the eventful struggles for the independence of the Church and the rights of the people in the election of their ministers, which occurred in the ten years which preceded 1843. And that Speirs did so from deep religious conviction of the truth of the principles contended for, is undeniable. His was not a character to be swayed by any other motives in such a matter. To be convinced of the rectitude of any particular course of conduct, was for him to be followed as its sure sequence by active co-operation.
Sheriff Speirs was no mere Churchman; he interested himself in whatever tended to the wellbeing of society. In connection, for instance, with Prison reformation and discipline, he was an active member of the society formed in 1835 on that subject, which by its efforts so materially contributed to the enactment of 1839, by which the jails of Scotland, once described as “nurseries of vice and crime,” have been placed in their present satisfactory condition. In this work his associates were men of all classes and denominations—the accomplished Dr Kaye Greville, the benevolent John Wigham junior, Dr David Maclagan, Mr George Forbes, and other like-minded citizens. Afterwards under the Statute as chairman of the Edinburgh Prison Board, and as member of the General Board of Prisons in Scotland, Speirs was in a position to give his valuable aid in carrying through this national reform. In defence of the observance of the Sabbath, the establishment of Ragged Schools, and in the cause generally of education, he was no less zealous and useful.
Our purpose, however, is to record his connection with the struggles which preceded and followed the formation of the Free Church. His support, based as it was on conscientious principle, was felt to be all-important, and his advice of the greatest moment in the organisation of the Church. Nevertheless it is true, but quite consistent with what we have said of him, that his name does not occur as taking a leading part in the discussions, whether in or out of the Assembly, until about the time of the Disruption. We shall refer, however, to two occasions, as illustrative of the leading position which he then assumed, and energetically maintained.
The one was at the time of the Convocation of ministers which preceded the Assembly of 1843, when it was thought right that the laymen attached to the principles then upheld by the majority of the Assembly, and especially the eldership, should come forward and at once strengthen the hands of the ministers, and provide means for their sustentation on the Disruption taking place. The meeting of the eldership occurred on the 1st February 1843. It was mentioned at the time in the Witness newspaper. Speirs proposed the first resolution, and in doing so he is reported to have represented the Church of Scotland “as she has existed since the Reformation, as by far, he would venture to say, without any comparison whatever, the cheapest institution for good government that ever any nation had to boast of;” and to have been affected even to tears when he uttered the words, “I cannot look forward without dismay to the prospect of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland,” which he so characterised and loved. The Committee formed at this meeting was united to another appointed by the Convocation, under the auspices of Dr Chalmers. This most effective body, organised under the title of the “Provisional Committee,” held its first meeting the following day; and to its labours the Free Church mainly owes that state of orderly preparation, and absence of all division and confusion, by which the days of the Disruption were so signally characterised. This is fully explained in Dr Chalmers’ Life and Correspondence by Dr Hanna.
The other occasion when Speirs was of the utmost service to the Church, was in relation to sites for Churches and Manses, in those districts where hostile proprietors had refused the applications made to them in that matter. It is known that, for some years after the Disruption, great inconvenience and much discomfort and suffering was experienced by ministers and their congregations who adhered to the Free Church in those districts. For a time the Assembly were unwilling to take any steps, in the expectation that the first feelings excited by the Disruption might pass away. But this expectation not being realised, a special Committee was appointed in May 1845 by the General Assembly; and that Committee having reported to the Assembly, which met at Inverness in August thereafter, the appointment of the Committee was renewed, with special instructions; and of this Committee Mr Speirs was appointed Convener.
It was in a verbal Report to the Commission, held in Edinburgh 19th November 1845, that, as Convener, Speirs made one of the most effective and practical speeches ever delivered in the General Assembly. In this he developed the principles on which the Committee had acted, and detailed the proceedings in such a way as to command the “profound admiration,” and “the warmest and most unqualified approbation,” of all who listened to his stirring statement. Can anything, indeed, be better expressed than the following reference to the abortiveness of the first application to Parliament by the Assembly of 1845:—
For, as he justly reasoned—
A renewed application to Parliament was made in the spring of 1847, and a select Committee was then appointed to inquire in what parts of Scotland, and under what circumstances, sites had been refused. A great deal of evidence was laid before the Committee, and, amongst others, Dr Chalmers, and Mr Speirs, as Convener of the Sites Committee, were especially under examination. The evidence of the former, as regards the cross-examination by Sir James Graham and others, is very happily explained by himself in letters written by him at the time, minutely referred to by Dr Hanna. The evidence of the Convener of the Sites Committee cannot be read without exciting the utmost admiration, for the calm, full, and satisfactory way in which he explains the course taken by the Committee, and meets the objections with which their proceedings were met. It is impossible here to go into the details of that evidence. One great object of the hostile examiners was to make out that there was so little difference between the two Churches, as to justify the site-refusing proprietors in their refusal. We shall confine ourselves to his answers on this point, as illustrating the principles on which he had throughout acted, and the fearless avowal of them he was ever prepared to make:—
In the same pamphlet which contains his speech before the General Assembly in 1845, to which we have referred, is given the correspondence which, as Convener of the Sites Committee, he maintained with the proprietors and their agents. The calm and dispassionate, but decided terms in which, throughout that correspondence, he contended for the constitutional principle of toleration, and stated the hardships to which its refusal had subjected the people, had much practical effect in obviating the objections in some quarters, even before the result of the Parliamentary inquiry and publication of the evidence. That result, as reported to the House of Commons, was that the Committee held it to be proved that there were a number of Christian congregations in Scotland who have no place of worship within a reasonable distance of their home, where they can unite in the public service of Almighty God, according to their conscientious convictions of religious duty, under convenient shelter from the severity of a northern climate. And the Committee farther reported to the House that they had heard with pleasure, in course of the evidence, that concessions had been made and sites granted; and they expressed an earnest hope that those which have hitherto been refused may no longer be withheld. Such has happily been the case, and no farther proceedings were taken. We cannot doubt that for this the Church was mainly indebted to Graham Speirs.
Our space will not permit of the insertion of some interesting details connected with his death, which occurred so soon afterwards. During his illness, and when he was suffering much, on the name of Dr Candlish being mentioned by his medical attendant, Professor Miller, he said with animation, “Give him my love, and tell him that I am quite happy. I know in whom I have believed, and if He has more work for me to do, He can raise me up for a year or two.” On seeing his brother-in-law, Mr Grant (of Kilgraston), who came up to him from the country on hearing of his danger, he said with deep emotion, “I have suffered much—very much —but all is right.” In his anticipation of death he was singularly resigned and peaceful. Surely of such a man it may be truly said, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.”
On the 30th December his remains were laid in the Grange cemetery, near the grave of Dr Chalmers, in accordance, it is understood, with his own request.
At the meeting of the General Assembly held in May 1848, a resolution was engrossed in the minutes, expressing in very strong terms their sense of the loss which the Church had sustained in Mr Speirs’ death, and the high and affectionate regard which they entertained for his memory.
Alexander Stewart
Author: Rev. Alexander Beith, D.D., Stirling
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 455
Alexander Stewart was born in the Manse of Moulin, Perthshire, of which parish his father, the late Dr Alexander Stewart, was then minister, as he afterwards was of the parish of Dingwall, Ross-shire, and ultimately of the parish of Canongate, Edinburgh. His family were from Argyleshire—of the Stewarts of Appin—one of the oldest houses of that county. Dr Stewart was eminent in his day as a minister whom God greatly honoured, after he had himself become a living witness to the power of divine truth, by making him the instrument of an extensive awakening in the district of country in which his lot was then cast. He was distinguished, also, in the world of literature—his grammar of the Gaelic language giving evidence of his scholarly attainments, and indicating the eminence to which he might have risen had he given himself to literary pursuits.
The subject of our memoir was, in the first instance, educated in the Moulin Parish School, and thereafter at the Tain Academy. Subsequently he became a student of King’s College, Old Aberdeen, where he continued for two sessions. Then, being considered sufficiently educated for entering on the business of life in the line chosen for him, he first became a clerk in a house at Perth, and thereafter in a house in London. Whilst resident in the metropolis, he attended the ministry of Mr George Clayton, the word preached by whom God was pleased to make effectual for his spiritual illumination and saving conversion. When it pleased God thus to call him by His grace—the way for the change in his prospects for life which he desired having been wondrously opened to him—he resolved, with the consent of his father and other relations, to resume his university studies, now with a view to the ministry. His paternal aunt being resident in Glasgow, he came there, and was enrolled a student of the college of that city. During his course there, he sought no distinction, but shrank instinctively, with provoking sensitiveness from any notice of a public kind which at any time was taken of him. Yet he did not escape observation, as the suffrages of his fellow-students on more than one occasion, in awarding him prizes, gave evidence. In the Divinity Hall, as a student with Dr McGill, he was more especially noticed, where he raised expectations in the minds of those who knew him well, which were more than realized in after life.
From the date of his first appearance in the pulpit, he became eminent as a preacher. The attention of the first ministers of his time was attracted to him. It is well known by his contemporaries that Dr Chalmers, after hearing him, was so impressed with his pulpit powers, that he used every influence with him to gain his consent to be nominated as his successor in the great church and parish of St John’s, Glasgow, from which he was about, himself, to be removed to the Moral Philosophy Chair, St Andrews. In this Dr Chalmers was unquestionably right, though it may seem to be a bold thing to say so, considering only Mr Stewart’s high talents and attainments, whilst not taking into account his bodily constitution and mental temperament. These made the proposal one not to be entertained. That the proposal should have been made was, perhaps, the most marked testimony, in evidence of the appreciation of Mr Stewart’s qualifications as a young minister of the gospel, which he could have received. His natural diffidence and self-distrust made him shrink from contemplating the proposal, or allowing it to become with him a matter of serious consideration at all; the friends who knew him best, whilst they regretted the occasion, approved of the course which he adopted in so acting.
Mr Stewart was licensed to preach the gospel early in 1823 by the Presbytery of Lorn, Argyleshire. His preliminary trials, with a view to license, were taken by the Presbytery of Glasgow. He passed the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, in accordance with the law of the Church in such cases, and thereafter obtained a transference of the remaining portion of his trials to the Presbytery of Lorn. He was a Gaelic-speaking student, and desired to devote himself to the Highlands, as well became the son of a father eminent alike for piety and for critical knowledge of the mountain tongue. Buried in the seclusion of a remote Highland glen, selected by him as a district where the sound of no English word was ever heard, he devoted himself, with his usual ardent student habits, to acquire a knowledge of the idioms of the Gaelic, and the power of familiar, ready expression therein. His success was what might be expected; and at the end of his year of hermit life, he came forth from his seclusion thoroughly versed in all that he had sought to acquire.
He was soon summoned to stated occupation in his holy calling. In November 1823 he was chosen to be the minister of the Chapel of Ease, Rothesay, where the Sabbath services were half in Gaelic and half in English. His period here was, however, short, as was also the use of his acquired tongue. A presentation to the parish of Cromarty, in course of the year in which he was ordained at Rothesay, which he saw it his duty to accept, changed, after a short but highly valued ministry in the West Highlands, the sphere of his labours. At Cromarty he was not required to preach in Gaelic, but as the town is situated in a Highland district, and as he was there in charge of a large Highland population, his knowledge of the language was of much value. From Cromarty he never removed. The seclusion which he enjoyed, or which he fancied he enjoyed, in that ancient burgh, was to his mind very congenial. He used to hug himself in the thought that he had got hid from the great world.
It was a vain fancy. “I have got into the toe of the hose,” he used to say with much glee, referring to the Black Isle, from its shape, as the hose,—and to Cromarty, lying at the extreme point of that bleak wilderness track of cheerless moorland, as the toe. Abundant testimony has been borne, though the half may not have been told, to his course there; to his “work of faith and labour of love;” his most painstaking study of the word of God; his success, numbering such men as Hugh Miller among his converts; his attractiveness in drawing many warm hearts to him, and in making himself to be beloved by all to whom he ministered, all the days of his life, till the end came. Of him Miller has written:—
Of this magnificent preacher’s manner in his public appearances, another friend, for quoting at large from whom we make no apology, writes;—
“Well, he enters the pulpit, and after a moment’s pause rises to read the psalm. It is not a female voice, and yet it is not the rough voice of a man of his size and form. It is deep, clear, solemn, sweet, flexible, and of great compass. Every word is uttered as if the speaker felt himself standing in the presence of God, and in sight of the throne, and as if he desired all should feel the same. The emphasis is so laid in reading the psalm, as to bring out a meaning I had never discovered. His prayer is simplicity itself; a child can comprehend every word, yet his thoughts are of the richest; whilst Scripture phraseology, employed and applied as I never heard it in another, clothes them all. By the time the prayer is ended, I have been instructed and edified. I have received views of truth I had not possessed before, and have had awakened feelings which have set me on edge for the sermon, and which I desire to cherish for ever. The sermon comes. It seems to be a most deeply interesting and animated conversation on a common topic. ‘We ought to think like great men, and speak like the common people,’ appears to be the maxim which regulates the style. The manner is that of one who converses with a friend, and who has chosen a subject by the discussion of which he desires, from his inmost soul, to do him good. Illustration follows illustration in rapid succession, shedding light on his doctrine, and confirming it. Sometimes the illustrations seem puerile, scarcely dignified enough for the pulpit, but that impression lasts only for a moment. Some Scripture allusion, or Scripture quotation, reveals the source from which they have been drawn; and I am filled with admiration of the genius which has discovered what I never discovered, and has made a use of the discovery, which I think I and every man should have made, but which I never did. Scarcely any gesture is employed. One hand rests usually on the open Bible. The other is sometimes quietly raised, and its impressive, short motion gives emphasis to the earnest words which are being spoken. The earnestness seems under severe control. It looks as if the speaker desired to conceal the emotion of his heart in speaking for Christ to sinners—as if he thought noise and gesticulation unbecoming. The eyelids grow red, the tears apparently struggle to escape, but no tear comes. A pink spot, almost a hectic flush—but it is not so—appears like the reflection of an evening sunbeam on the cheek. Some burning words clothe some fine thought, which seems to come fresh from heaven; and the speaker, as I think, half ashamed of the emotion which he has manifested, and which he has sensibly communicated to his hearers, returns to the calm manner from which he had for an instant departed, only, however, to be enticed from it again and again, yielding as if by compulsion to the inspiration which ever revisits him. So he proceeds, until, to my deep regret, he closes his wonderful discourse, which has extended long beyond the hour.”
Mr Stewart continued minister of Cromarty till his death. At the Disruption he, of course, joined his brethren and abandoned his connection with the State, abjuring the new ecclesiastical Establishment. He never made himself prominent in the discussions which, in his time filled the land. His local influence was great. Speeches by him in his Presbytery and Synod were described by those who heard them as something unlike any that other men had ever spoken. But on no occasion during his ministry did he open his mouth in the General Assembly of the Church. He did not feel it to be required. He did not think it would have been useful. All that he could say he heard spoken by others, and, as he thought, better spoken than it could have been by him, and therefore he did not speak. This is not to be justified. Could he have overcome, as he might have done, his native timidity and want of self-possession; could he have roused himself to the effort, or had conscience impelled him to put himself forward as a public speaker, he would not have stood second to any in the ranks of those wonderful men whom God raised up for His work in Scotland in his time. He believed that he could be useful in the provinces; he believed that he was required to take part in the discussions there—that the great cause might suffer if he declined to do so; and, therefore, on wisely selected occasions, he delivered speeches that were admitted to be of the very highest order of oratory, for wisdom, beauty, and power.
It would have been in vain, every one knew, to propose to Mr Stewart a change in his field of labour, at any time during his life at Cromarty, in anything like ordinary circumstances. But when, in 1847, the lamented death of Dr Chalmers, and the advancement, consequent on that event, of Dr Candlish to a chair in the New College, created a vacancy in St George’s, the minds of all friends of the Church turned to the distinguished subject of this memoir, as the man who should succeed the great preacher of the day in that pulpit. It need hardly be narrated that this proposal was not welcome to Mr Stewart. It created an excitement calculated to affect injuriously a mind sensitive and shrinking to a fault, inhabiting a body which took its character but too much from his natural temperament. Earnest representations and urgent solicitations at length appeared to prevail with him. The late Dr Robert Buchanan, of Glasgow, was one of the Commissioners sent to the north to prosecute the call by the congregation of St George’s. When the business in the Presbytery of Chanonry in this matter was ended, as the two friends walked along the street, perceiving the downcast appearance of his companion, and expressing regret, Dr Buchanan said, “You look as if you were carrying a millstone on your back.” “No, Dr Buchanan,” was the reply, “I am not carrying a millstone, but I am carrying my gravestone on my back.” His words proved but too true. An attack of fever came, and ran its course. His time had come, and he knew it. To his physician inquiring as to his feelings, he said, “I am going to die. It is a solemn thing, doctor, to die, and to meet God in judgment!” To Christian friends he declared his abiding confidence in the everlasting God, his Saviour; and in this state he quietly fell asleep in Jesus, on the 5th November 1847, in the fifty-third year of his age. “He got faith,” said a friend who was with him at the close, referring to the case of the St George’s call, “to lay his Isaac bound upon the altar; his hand, in humble submission, took the knife; he was prepared to do his Lord’s will; he did it; and the Lord then relieved him for ever from all his cares, all his anxieties, and all his pains.”
Mr Stewart was never married. A maternal aunt, the widow of a minister, became, after the death of her husband, an inmate, put in charge of the domestic affairs of the manse of Cromarty. She formed a precious gift from his heavenly Father, for a great part of the closing portion of her nephew’s ministry—the cause of much solicitude, too, in anticipation of the effect which her removal might have upon him and his usefulness— a solicitude quite as great on her side. He was spared the trial, to meet which he ever sought to fortify himself. His aunt survived him for a little; but his death was never revealed to her, the infirm condition of her body and mind both making it at once advisable and kind that the departure of her “dear boy” should be concealed. So they were exempted from sorrow to which they had each, respectively, looked forward with solemn thought,—sorrow which came not. “So He giveth His beloved sleep.”
Mr Stewart never indulged in authorship. Nothing from his pen passed through the press at any time. The volume of posthumous lectures on Leviticus, entitled, “The Tree of Promise,” compiled from the skeleton outlines from which he had discoursed, give but a faint impression of what he was as a preacher. The work, nevertheless, is of great value, especially to the student—original, suggestive, and unique. No minister, who deals with Scripture typology can want it without loss or employ it without profit .
A. Moody Stuart, D.D.
Author: Rev. J. G. Cunningham, Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 463
Alexander Moody Stuart
As Dr Moody Stuart is happily still spared to the Church—serus in coelum redeat—it does not lie within our province to record any estimate of his gifts and character; our endeavour shall be merely to present a brief outline of the distinguished career of public usefulness which entitles him to honourable recognition in this volume.
Alexander Moody was born in Paisley 15th June 1809, the sixth son of the late Mr Andrew Moody, who was for some years chief magistrate of the burgh. The esteem in which his father was held by all classes was memorably illustrated on one occasion by the fact that, when an excited political mob was proceeding with a universal demolition of windows, the rioters paused abruptly in their work of destruction and permitted his dwelling to remain uninjured, obeying at once the command of their leaders, “Let Mr Moody’s house alone —he is a good man.” Having availed himself of the best educational advantages of his native town, and having subsequently attended the Rector’s class in the Glasgow Grammar School, Alexander early laid the foundations of exact and varied attainments in scholarship, and in his fourteenth year he passed to the University of Glasgow, in which, after the usual curriculum in the arts classes, he took the degree of M.A. in 1826. The holidays of his boyhood were almost all spent in the parish of Lochwinnoch, on his father’s property of Muirsheil, an estate embracing the upper part of Calder Glen and a wide expanse of solitary moorland from the heather-clad heights of which magnificent views are commanded on every side. When we had the pleasure of accompanying Dr Moody Stuart a short time ago on a visit to this home of his early days, and of observing how many associations with it still linger vividly in memory after an absence of fifty years, we could not help feeling that the romantic scenery of the Renfrewshire hills was no unimportant factor in the education of one whose character and writings have ever been conspicuous for an intensely appreciative love of nature.
In his eighteenth year (1826), Mr Moody entered the Theological Hall, and attended the classes in Divinity for two sessions in Glasgow. The two last sessions were spent in Edinburgh, where he attended the lectures of Dr Chalmers and shared with many who afterwards became much beloved fellow-labourers, the mighty impulse which that master in Israel communicated to the cause of evangelical religion.
After receiving license as a probationer from the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1831, Mr Moody was, towards the end of the following year, requested by Mr Buchan of Kelloe (of whom a notice has been given in an earlier sketch), to go as a missionary to Holy Island, [21] off the coast of Northumberland. The whole extent of the island is about 3000 acres, and the population, mostly dependent on fishing, was then about 500. Mr Moody’s labours were continued for more than two years, and were graciously owned of God. This was more especially the case in the autumn of 1834, when, although the mainland was exempted at that time from the calamity, the island was afflicted with a terrible visitation of cholera. Many of the inhabitants died, and lest the plague should spread, all communication with the shore, except of an occasional character, ceased for six or seven weeks. Mr Moody at once accepted it as his duty to remain where he was, that he might minister to the plague-stricken and the bereaved, and in the incessant and trying labours of that time, he was not only sustained in health, but also mercifully exempted from even a passing shadow of solicitude as to the preservation of his own life in the midst of danger. It may well be believed that “the Word of the Lord was precious in those days;” many listened anxiously to the demands of the Divine law and the consolations of the Gospel, when these were daily proclaimed, both publicly and from house to house, under the solemnising shadow of the wing of the angel of death. A few of the more remarkable incidents of these eventful weeks were afterwards communicated to the Scottish Christian Herald, and appeared under the title of “Death-bed Scenes” in the first volume of that magazine.
Within a short time after the induction of Dr Candlish into the pastoral charge of St George’s, Edinburgh, an invitation was given to Mr Moody to become his territorial assistant, and in compliance with this call he came from Holy Island to Edinburgh early in 1835. The text of his first sermon in Edinburgh was Luke 20:17, 18; and in the words of one who was present on the occasion—the late devout and accomplished Rev. John Mackenzie of Ratho—the discourse was remarkable for “the unction and evangelical fervour and high mental culture which have ever since so eminently characterised Dr Moody Stuart’s ministrations.” After officiating for a few months on the Sabbath evenings in St. George’s Church for Dr Candlish, Mr Moody was appointed by the Session of St George’s to labour in the district which was afterwards, under the name of St. Luke’s, disjoined quoad sacra from St George’s parish. In a short time the power of an earnest and faithful ministry was felt throughout the district, and the congregation became almost immediately too numerous to be accommodated in the original chapel (purchased from the Unitarian body), in Young Street. Upon the site of this chapel the large church now in Young Street was built, and was opened for public worship in May 1837. [22]
In the following month, Mr Moody was ordained by the Presbytery of Edinburgh, as the minister of St Luke’s quoad sacra parish. In 1839 he married Miss Stuart, daughter of Kenneth Bruce Stuart, Esq. of Annat, Perthshire, and thenceforward added to his own the name of the family with which he had become allied. [23]
After seven years of abundant and successful labour in St Luke’s parish, Mr Moody’s health broke down, and at a time when his counsel and service were apparently most required, both by his congregation and by the Church at large, he was called by the Lord to “come apart and rest awhile.” In the autumn of 1841, he complied with the urgent recommendation of his medical advisers and left this country for Madeira. After spending two winters in that island, he took a voyage to Brazil, and sailing thence in early summer, arrived in this country in the end of July, and was enabled to begin his work again with restored health and hope.
During the months of his absence from St Luke’s, Mr William C. Burns, the apostolic evangelist and missionary, and afterwards his brother Mr Islay Burns, had occupied his pulpit, and the Lord had given to them many seals of their ministry. The Session also had maintained their practice, as the minute-book testifies, of meeting every week for prayer and for the transaction of all business relating to the spiritual interests of the flock, “over which the Holy Ghost had made them overseers.” It was accordingly, in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ, that Mr Moody Stuart was brought back to those from whom he had been separated unwillingly for a season. We have been told by one of those who worshipped in St Luke’s on the first Sabbath after his return, of the profound impression made on the congregation which crowded the church, and of the emotion, never forgotten, which thrilled the whole assemblage when the preacher opened the services with the appropriate lines:—
The works of God discover.
The Lord hath me chastised sore,
But not to death given over.”—Ps. 118:17, 18.
Meanwhile the Disruption of the Church of Scotland had taken place. There had never been any uncertainty in Mr Moody Stuart’s own mind as to the necessity of maintaining at all hazards the principles of Non-intrusion and Spiritual Independence, and the Church at large had received full proof of the thoroughness of his sympathy with the party by which these principles were maintained, for St Luke’s was conspicuously honoured in some of the most momentous events of these stirring times. [24] As to the congregation, there was, so far as we have been able to learn, little difference of opinion amongst the members regarding the duty of the church; as to the Session, all the twelve elders [25] signed the Act of Separation and Deed of Demission at a meeting of which the Minute-book preserves a touching record, on 19th June 1843, and Mr Moody Stuart took an early opportunity of adhibiting his signature to the same testimony after he returned. [26]
That the congregation which so unanimously left the Establishment was morally bound at the same time to quit the building in which they had hitherto worshipped, no one ever presumed to affirm. The Established Church for which the quoad sacra chapel in Young Street was built, was the Church by which, on 31st May 1834, the “Declaratory Enactment as to Chapels of ease” was passed, and by which the promises encouraging the erection of such chapels had been faithfully implemented. Those who built St Luke’s, including all the trustees, were for the most part still living, and had given, by their adherence to the Free Church, the clearest proof that they never intended it to be connected with an Establishment which repudiated the Chapel Enactment, or else confessed that the fulfilment of its provisions lay beyond the constitutional functions of the Church: for of the Kirk-Session of St George’s, who bought the original site for £655, the smaller proportion had remained in the Established Church; and of the sum of £4445 spent in the erection of the Church, less than £70 was contributed by parties who remained in the Establishment after the Disruption. For nearly six years no attempt was made to disturb the congregation’s possession and use of the building,—but at length after the decision of other cases had established precedents enough to show that the question of ownership would be decided by an appeal to the terms of the trust-deed, without equitable and honourable consideration of the intention of the parties who prepared it, the Kirk-Session of St. George’s (Established Church), sent notice to the Session of Free St. Luke’s on 1st March 1849, requiring the congregation to quit the church in order that “the chapel might be applied strictly to the purposes of the trust” (!), but offering respite until Martinmas, so that time might be given for necessary arrangements as to another place for worship. The Session of Free St Luke’s declined “to accept a small kindness in palliation of a great wrong,” and the congregation held the last meetings for public worship within the walls of the church in Young Street on the following Sabbath, 4th March 1849. For more than three years they met in the Hall, 5 Queen Street, until 27th June 1852, when their large new church in 43 Queen Street was ready for occupation. For a season, doubtless, many looked back with lingering regret to the place in which their altar had been at the first, but the blessing of God was given very abundantly in the new church. Mr Moody Stuart’s own ministry continued to be honoured as before with the success which attends clear, full, and experimental preaching of the Gospel of Christ, and this, together with the labours of Brownlow North and others, whose help was heartily welcomed, made St Luke’s, for many years, widely known as a centre of evangelistic life and effort. In 1874, Mr Moody Stuart, with the concurrence of the office-bearers and congregation of St Luke’s, requested the General Assembly to sanction the appointment of a colleague ard successor, as the burden of the undivided pastorate had been for some time felt by him to be beyond his strength. The request was granted, and the congregation having addressed a unanimous call to the writer of this notice, he left Lochwinnoch, after a ministry of sixteen and a-half years in that place, and was inducted in Free St Luke’s on 22nd June 1876.
In 1875, Mr Moody Stuart had received from the University of Glasgow the degree of D.D., and had been invited by the Free Church to be Moderator of the General Assembly held at Edinburgh in that year. His claim to both of these honours was universally and cordially conceded. In acknowledging the merit of the contributions by which he had added to the literary wealth of the country, his Alma Mater endorsed what had been already certified by a large measure of popular acceptance. These writings claimed esteem, not only by their intrinsic value, but also by the charm of a unique and attractive style. [27] And in promoting him to the Moderator’s Chair, the Free Church willingly acknowledged, not merely forty years of faithful effective service in one of her most conspicuous congregations, but also the prompt and influential counsel with which he had always aided the discussion of subjects engrossing public attention, and above all, his unwearied fidelity in the office of convener of her Mission to the Jews, a cause which has for a whole generation owed a great measure of its success to the unshaken confidence in the promises of God, and the burning enthusiasm for Israel’s welfare, which have given eloquence and power to the appeals made from year to year by Dr Moody Stuart on its behalf.
Dr Moody Stuart continues to preach, as an ordinary rule, alternately with his colleague. His voice was never strong, and by reason of years the limits within which he can be distinctly heard by his audience are now more circumscribed, but he has retained in a rare degree freshness of style and warmth of interest in proclaiming the glorious Gospel. With a brief sketch of our impressions of his ordinary pulpit work we shall close this notice.
In his public prayers, the confession of sin is not a mere repetition of formal phrases of self-humiliation, but a reverent and careful acknowledgment of felt transgression; the mercies of redemption are spoken of with unfeigned thanksgiving, according to the measure of recent personal experience; the various ranks, conditions, and circumstances of men are remembered with considerable variety of detail; any outstanding public calamity or deliverance is made the subject of allusion maturely considered and felicitously expressed; the salvation of the heathen, the gathering in of the lost sheep of the house of Israel, the interests of the kingdom of Christ at home, and the peace of all nations are remembered in definite and urgent intercession, while, perhaps above everything else, the hearts of the worshippers are drawn out in fervent supplication for the present gracious working of the Holy Spirit, without whom prayer obtains no blessing, and preaching has no power.
The sermon is not read, but spoken from notes on the pages of an interleaved Bible. The gestures, including occasional transitions from one side of the pulpit to the other, suggest rather the unconscious action of a thinker absorbed in the excogitation of his theme, than of an orator bespeaking the attention of his hearers. The text (or texts, for the discourse is often based upon several cognate or contrasted passages), having been announced, a brief introduction presents, in short, almost epigrammatic sentences, some striking thought, after which the leading divisions of the sermon are intimated, so as to indicate at a glance the region to be traversed. The discussion of these topics in succession seldom occupies less than three-quarters of an hour. The preacher has not proceeded far before the interest of the devout listener is enchained by the luminous fulness with which some verse hitherto almost unnoticed flashes out from its neglected place in Scripture; or two texts, both familiar but seldom considered before as bearing upon each other, are suddenly brought together, so as to yield a spark which kindles thought and feeling with strange power. Often the imagination is quickened to vigorous and delighted exercise by some bold stroke of fancy or unexpected poetical conception. Presently there is an appeal to the conscience; sin is not spared, while a vivid presentation of the actions and feelings of yesterday in the searching light of God’s law, or a description of some phase of religious experience lays bare the heart’s inmost thoughts. In every discourse a place is found for the Cross of Christ and for a loving declaration of the glorious largeness of that Divine mercy, which is high as heaven and greater far than the cloud of sin which hangs portentous between any sinner and God; and the word of reconciliation is pressed home by the direct question and personal entreaty, well fitted to win the ear and subdue the heart. That this kind of preaching has been highly appreciated by earnest Christians is not strange, and we have reason to know that it has been largely honoured with the blessing of God—how largely shall be known in the day when “they that have turned many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever.”
Rev. John Swanson
Author: Rev. Alexander Cameron, Ardersier
Source: Disruption Worthies of the Highlands , page 127
John Swanson
Mr Swanson was by birth an Englishman, but in all other respects a thorough Scotchman. His worthy parents were both natives of the North. Their first place of residence after their marriage was Gravesend, in Kent, where John was born on the 10th of May 1804. His father, when young (though against the wishes of his parents), would be a sailor. The resolute youth, however, so far justified his choice of a profession by becoming master of a small vessel when only twenty years of age. He never relinquished his seafaring life, being at the time of his death captain of the Hero, plying between London and the North.
The family removed to Cromarty in 1809. It was in the parish school of that well-known quaint old town that Mr Swanson received the rudiments of his education, where he became dux of the school, and was acknowledged to be, in every sense, “a model boy,” even by those who were somewhat jealous of his pre-eminence – a position, whether as to scholarship or character, he seems never to have lost during his whole educational course. Among his schoolfellows in Cromarty, the best known was Hugh Miller, who afterwards became so famous as a literary and scientific man. Miller was taller, stronger, and older by two years than Swanson. In many respects these two boys were very unlike, yet they were greatly drawn together, and became life-long friends. Even at that early period each exercised a wholesome influence over the other; for while Hugh became the leader in all their rambles and rural expeditions, the more staid John helped to curb these, and keep them within sober limits. Miller himself, in referring to those days, writes of his friend Swanson: “There was one little fellow who sat at the Latin form – the member of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one – who differed in this respect from all the others. Though he was my junior, and shorter by about half-a-head, he was a diligent boy in the grammar school, and, for his years, a thoroughly sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly, I daresay – on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his younger – because he believed in me.” But on one of these expeditions, availing themselves of a low neap tide, the pair ventured too far into a dangerous place which they called “the Doocot Cave”, where they were helplessly benighted. They managed, however, by their non-appearance, to alarm the whole town, until they were extricated by two boats, fully manned, that went in search of them. Little did these roving little fellows think at the time that an unseen Guardian in his kind providence was in this way training them to endure future hardships in their respective callings – the one by roughing it in the bothies as a journeyman mason, and the other to brave the wild waves of the Atlantic in the Betsy, as the outed minister of Small Isles. Miller himself, in after years, takes notice of this circumstance.
Having availed himself of all the educational advantages that could be had in Cromarty, Mr Swanson enjoyed the additional benefit of attending the Tain Academy. After leaving school, Mr Swanson was sent to London to serve a short apprenticeship in the grocery business, with a view to set up for himself in Cromarty. This purpose he carried out, and accordingly he conducted business in that town with growing success for two years. Doubtless his residence in England in infancy and youth helped to give him a good accent, free from all provincialism, while he owed to his business training that exactness and accuracy in everything for which he was so remarkable. But shopkeeping was not to be the lifelong work of John Swanson. The Lord was preparing him for a higher sphere of usefulness. He had now for years been attending the ministry of (according to Hugh Miller’s judgment) “one of at once the most original thinkers and profound theologians I ever knew,” viz., the late Mr Stewart of Cromarty. The seed sown in childhood appears to have developed into fruit under the ministry of that remarkable man; and now Mr Swanson deliberately resolved to give himself up to the Lord, with the view of serving him in the ministry of the gospel. “Assuredly” (writes his friend Miller) “never did man determine on entering the ministry with views more thoroughly disinterested than his.”
Accordingly, he at once relinquished a thriving business, and, in 1824, when twenty years of age, set out for King’s College, Aberdeen, where he afterwards greatly distinguished himself, especially in philosophical and scientific subjects, carrying off the first mathematical prize of his year, and the second in natural philosophy. These, along with chemistry, electricity, and geology, were his favourite studies. He became besides a most acute metaphysician. But while pursuing these studies with intense earnestness, he was making corresponding progress in divine things. At that time, and throughout his whole subsequent life, his diary (written for his own eye only), is full of short and beautiful prayers – earnest pleadings with God as with a Father. These prayers are found on the same page, mingled with remarks on scientific and all sorts of subjects. As appears from these private exercises, he was in the habit of bringing himself daily to task, lest he should be found tolerating any fault. It was while spending his first college vacation at home with his widowed mother that he and Miller renewed their old friendship. Of their meetings on that occasion and subsequently, Miller himself thus writes:
“We had parted boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock of each other’s acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each other’s calibre, with some little curiosity. I found him greatly improved in all respects, and that he had attained a strength and niceness of edge which I had not before found equalled. I found my friend to be one of the few persons who become wise in proportion as they grow learned. After parting with him for the evening, my spirits were so exhilarated that I felt as if intoxicated, and for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when living in the neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes.”
Nothing could more strikingly evidence the strong affection of Swanson for his gifted friend, and the unspeakable importance he attached to divine things, than the letters which he afterwards addressed to Miller from college about his personal salvation, as described at large in the Life of the latter. Only the briefest quotations can be given here. In July and September 1825, he concludes his letters by such searching and startling questions as the following: “Is your life and conversation corresponding to this belief (that Jesus is the Christ)? Do you pray? read the Scriptures? obey the injunctions of Christ?” Feeling disappointed with Miller’s reply, he asks him point blank, “Have you made your peace with God?” Miller is thus obliged to give a candid account of his state of mind, which induces his friend to write him in this encouraging strain: “Go on, my dear Hugh, and the Lord himself bless you. If you are not under the teaching of the Spirit of God, I am deceived; and if I do not find you soon established in the way of happiness, peace, and life, I shall be miserably disappointed.” “How (answers Miller) can I repay you for that deep and generous interest which you take in my spiritual concerns? How can I make a suitable return for a friendship which, unlike the cold, selfish attachments of earth, approaches in its nature and affectionate disinterestedness to the love of heaven? Perhaps I say too much – I am certain you will think so – but with a heart so full, a wiser man could hardly say less.” In this strain the correspondence goes on, which must here be closed by a few more quotations from Swanson, regulated evidently by the various moods of Miller’s answers:
“29th August 1826. I have experienced here great kindness among my Christian friends. Oh! that I could with confidence rank you among the number. I cannot think that you are aware how near you are to my heart. Blessed be God that Christ is still nearer! I pray and hope that you will one day be one with me in Him. I wait but for your confession to recognise you as a brother. My dear Hugh, my metaphysical speculations are entirely exploded (oh! let me never cease to pray that I may be preserved from again setting up blind reason as a god to worship – thousands have perished at his shrine, why was I not left?), and since exploded, I have learned to take the Word of God simply as I find it, and the consequence is peace and joy.”
“5th September.–Pardon me, my dear friend, when I say that I fear you have religious opinions not derived from the Bible. Read it as if you never heard a word concerning it before.”
“9th October. You have now closed with Christ, and closing with Him, I trust closed more fully (if that were possible, and it was) with me. Oh! it is sweet to join heart and hand, and put them thus joined into the hand of Christ. O Hugh, I have not a single complaint to make my cup is running over. With regard to the manner in which God will dispose of me, I am at present quite ignorant. I have no prospect, and no earthly friend who, while he would wish to do anything for me, has it in his power. Before the end of the session I believe I shall be without a shilling, and I have no hand to look to. No hand, did I say? Nay, I have the hand of Omnipotence to look to, and He will aid me. Oh! it is sweet to depend on Him for everything coming directly from Him.”
Miller himself was alarmed on being recognised by his friend “as a Christian brother,” for he would be the last to profess anything of which he was not fully persuaded. But notwithstanding his sensitiveness on this vital point, there is little doubt but Swanson’s loving, searching, solemn, and persevering dealing proved ultimately, under God, to be the great turning-point of Miller’s life. With all his caution, even he himself virtually acknowledges as much, when at this time he says, “Your letters and conversations have had an effect – I wish I could add the desired one.” And writing of his own case elsewhere, Miller still more expressly observes: “There need be less delicacy in speaking of one’s beliefs than of one’s feelings, and I trust I need not hesitate to say that I was led to see at this time, through the instrumentality of my friend, that my theologic system had previously wanted a central object, to which the heart, as certainly as the intellect, could attach itself; and that the true centre of an efficient Christianity is, as the name ought of itself to indicate, ‘the Word made flesh’. I at least owe much to these hours (spent with Swanson); among other things, views of theologic truth that determined the side I have taken in our ecclesiastical controversy. I feel grateful to this friend for having convinced one, who possibly might have done some mischief as an infidel, that the religion of the Bible is not ‘a cunningly devised fable.”
After finally leaving college, Mr Swanson acted for a year as tutor in the family of Mr Mackintosh, Brightmony, Nairnshire, a work for which he was peculiarly well qualified, considering his high Christian character and solid acquirements. For some time afterwards he filled the office of schoolmaster of the parish of Nigg, which was ultimately to be the chief sphere of his ministerial labours. In 1833, probably about the time he was licensed by the Presbytery of Tain, Mr Swanson prays: “O, let me preach Thy gospel while I live; knowing the power of Thy word on my own heart, let me declare it to others. Let me not preach myself, but Christ.”
Mr Swanson’s first ministerial charge was Fort William, a royal bounty chapel, in the parish of Kilmallie, Lochaber, to which he was appointed in 1835. This he found a hard field, the people being nearly equally divided into Papists, Scotch Episcopalians, and Presbyterians. Another difficulty which he had to encounter at the very outset of his ministerial career was Gaelic preaching, that being an acquired language with him. But although he was never a very fluent speaker in Gaelic, yet he mastered the language grammatically, and was able not only to speak it well, but also to write it most correctly, including the spelling, which is more than can be said of many Gaelic ministers whose native tongue it is. The godly people of that place greatly appreciated his earnest, evangelical, and solid preaching. He was also highly respected by such of the local gentry as could appreciate his worth. Mr Swanson was in 1840 presented by the Crown to the parish of Small Isles, in the Inner Hebrides, embracing the islands of Eigg, Rum, Muck, and Canna, a peculiar looking group, like so many men-of-war anchored in the Atlantic, beyond the Point of Ardnamurchan, all within sight, but not within hail of one another. His predecessor had just been deposed for immorality, so that he found this new and strange diocese in a half-heathen state, composed of a mixed population of Papists and nominal Protestants, full of all kinds of superstition and ignorance. This sad state of things greatly stirred up the spirit of the new evangelical minister, so that he set himself with all his might to labour for the spiritual welfare of his poor people, by incessant preaching in all the islands, week-day lectures, prayer-meetings, catechising, and schools; and when he wished to get them thoroughly indoctrinated on any important subject, he published a brief tract upon it, which he printed with his own hands in his little printing press, the gift of that well-known friend of the Highlands, the late Mrs Mackay of Rockfield. The difficulty of working the parish of Small Isles would be incredible to landsmen who had not read his private journals. From the very outset, he was obliged to be constantly at sea in all kinds of weather, while in Eigg, where he resided, the only harbour was a most perilous place. The hardships of a Colonial or Indian missionary are not to be compared to those endured by Mr Swanson, even before the Disruption. Gradually, however, his labours of love began to tell, for the Lord was graciously pleased to visit these islands with an extensive revival of religion, which greatly refreshed the spirit of his servant. We quote the following from his journal, as a specimen of one of those blessed days: “On Sabbath, 14th August (text, Acts. 17:3, ‘Christ must needs have suffered’), the whole congregation was moved, the house was a place of weeping, as if the promise was literally fulfilled, ‘They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and mourn.’ It was an outburst of the whole, so that no mouth was silent, and no eye dry; old and young mourned together, and the blooming and withered cheeks were all wet with tears. The scene was indescribable, and I sat down mayhap to weep too.” Blessed day, indeed! Blessed gospel! Changed days for poor Eigg, from the time when all its inhabitants were cruelly massacred in their own famous cave by the fierce clan McLeod!
The Papists were furious against the revival. As there was no medical man in the parish, the minister, being a merciful man, had to act in this capacity too, and the Papists gladly availed themselves of his services. Instead, however, of shewing their gratitude, they, under covert of night, placed large stones on the road leading to the meeting-house, by which they succeeded in breaking the limbs of some of their Protestant neighbours! But while this faithful servant of Christ was labouring most devotedly and successfully to evangelise his outlandish parish, all Scotland was now in a blaze with the great ecclesiastical conflict which ended in the disruption of the Church of Scotland. Quiet and peaceable as Mr Swanson was, his Christian character and principles were far too decided to leave room for any hesitation as to the path of duty; and so, when the day of trial came, he deliberately sacrificed all his earthly possessions, and cast in his lot with his suffering brethren. His own view of this trying ordeal is recorded in the following words: “I thought to have lived and died in that house (the manse), and found a quiet grave in the burying-ground yonder; but my path was clear, though a rugged one, and from almost the moment that it opened up to me, I saw what I had to expect. It has been said that I might have lain by here in this out-of-the-way corner, and suffered the Church question to run its course, without quitting my hold of the Establishment. It is easy securing one’s own safety, in even the worst times, if one look no higher. But the principles of the evangelical party were my principles, and it would have been consistent with neither honour nor religion to have hung back in the day of battle, and suffered the men, with whom in heart I was at one, to pay the whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I attended the Convocation, and pledged myself to stand or fall with my brethren.” This important step left him absolutely without a home within reach of his parish, the proprietor being an intolerant site-refuser. Meantime Mr Swanson was obliged to transport his family to Isle Oronsay, in Skye, where temporary shelter was secured for them through the kindness of the late Mr Colin Elder, Knock. It was then his little boy, scarcely five years old, while being carried away, sea-sick and sleepy, cried out bitterly, “Home, home, home!” “Alas! my boy, you have no home,” said his father; and when relating this incident, added, “I never on any other occasion so felt the desolation of my condition as when the cry of my boy, ‘Home, home, home!’ was ringing in my ears.” He himself for years, for the most part, had to make his home on the face of the deep, in his little yacht, the Betsy exposed to all the perils of the great Atlantic ocean, so as to minister to his poor people, who followed him in a body to the Free Church, and, as may be well supposed, became devotedly attached to their beloved pastor, that had thus sacrificed his all, and put his life in jeopardy for their sake and a good conscience. Mr Swanson seems to have been pre-eminently the living martyr of the Disruption, the history of whose sufferings, so far, are graphically described by his friend Hugh Miller in The Cruise of the Betsy. But the half can never be told. Mr Swanson had gradually become a masterly sailor, and yet it was with difficulty on one occasion he and his little crew and passengers, including Miller himself, escaped a watery grave. But the time had come at last when he and his interesting maritime charge must bid each other farewell. Nothing but absolute necessity, arising from failing health, and other trying circumstances, could have induced him, in the exercise of Christian prudence, to consent to this painful change, as may be learned from his own words: “I continued my connection with the parish in which the Disruption found me, refusing offered calls to other places, till I had almost literally nothing better than a rotten plank to float on in a stormy ocean. I was called to Nigg, and refused the call while the smallest prospect of retaining my connection with my old parish remained. At last the connection could no longer be possibly maintained, and then, but not till then, I accepted a second call to Nigg.”
Accordingly, in 1847, Mr Swanson was settled in Nigg, where he had formerly laboured as a parish schoolmaster. How affecting his own feelings on this occasion, as expressed in the following words:
“My wanderings are now over. I have suffered much as a sailor minister, though I fear without much good result to others; cold, and wet, and pained, I have often been at sea, often storm-bound, in unfavourable circumstances, and sometimes in manifest danger. But I have often thought as I suffered that I might well endure in the cause of religion what a poor sailor suffers for his daily pay. But yet few sailors would work with such a pain-enduring head as mine. Few sailors would be fit for work, if they were forced like me to take to their hammocks with a wet towel rolled about their head. Well! all the past may lead me to think of the promised rest, and to give all diligence in preparing for it. So be it!”
The remaining twenty-seven years of his life were spent as a Ross-shire minister in this quiet parish, preaching that gospel which he so much loved, and going out and in among his people, whom he fed with the finest of the wheat. His sermons were the result of much study and prayer-like beaten oil often containing striking and beautiful illustrations, and calmly and solemnly delivered. It need scarcely be said that he was greatly esteemed and beloved by his own people, and respected by the whole community. His mind to the last retained its scientific bent. He followed with keen interest the progress of modern thought and discovery, while he would remark during his last illness that he was daily more reconciled to enter the kingdom of God as a little child. It is plain from his private writings that he lived very near God, for he constantly abounded in prayer. Mr Swanson was greatly tried all his days. But the rest came at last. For nearly two years he suffered more or less, and then gently fell asleep in Jesus on 14th January 1874, in the seventieth year of his age. As was well observed at the time, “a prince and a great man fell in Israel.” His widow still survives, with one son, a widowed daughter, and two grandsons.
Walter Ross Taylor, D.D.
Author: Rev. James Iverach, M.A., Aberdeen
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 535
Walter Ross Taylor
Dr Walter Ross Taylor was born at Tain on the 11th November 1805. The home of the family was Cromarty. His father was Sheriff-Clerk of Cromarty, and, in addition to his official duties as Sheriff-Clerk, had a good deal of local business in his hands. He was a man of weight and character, and did the work of his generation in a highly efficient manner. The maiden name of Dr Taylor’s mother was Flora Ross, sister of Colonel Walter Ross, of Nigg. At the death of Colonel Ross, Mrs Taylor became head of the family, and the estate of Nigg passed into her hands, and would, in course of time, have descended to Dr Taylor, but it was sold during the lifetime of his mother. From his mother Dr Taylor seems to have inherited the benign and gentle expression of face, which must attract the notice of all who come into contact with him. Her grandson, the Rev. Walter Ross Taylor, of Kelvinside Free Church, Glasgow, thus describes her, “a singularly estimable lady, notably placid in disposition and expression of face.”
Into the particulars of his early training we need not enter; for at the early age of thirteen he was sent to Aberdeen College. It was no unusual occurrence in those days. We find, indeed, in reading the biographies of distinguished Scotchmen who began their student life about half-a-century ago, that a good number of them began their university curriculum at quite as early an age. Having entered College, Dr Taylor studied with zeal, energy, and success. So earnest was he in his study, that his health failed, and after his first session was completed, he had to intermit attendance for a year. Resuming attendance and pursuing his course without further break, he took the degree of M.A. He had given special attention to mathematical studies, and had attained to high eminence in them. He carried off a number of prizes. In his last session he won the Huttonian Prize, which marked him out as one of the most distinguished graduates of his year.
The year during which he was laid aside from work was not lost. It may be looked on as the decisive time of his life. As he wandered alone over the lovely slopes of Strathpeffer,—whither he had gone for health,—his heart turned to God, and he was able to rejoice in Christ and His salvation. It was to him a time of high spiritual enjoyment, and of baptism from on high; and probably from that season may be dated his call and consecration to the work of the ministry. He made up his mind to study for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. He set himself to prepare, with all his strength, for this great work. He studied in the Divinity Halls of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. We are continually reminded of the lapse of time, and of the many changes which have taken place since the days when Dr Taylor was a Student of Divinity. We are reminded that the West End of Glasgow did not reach beyond George’s Square. In the house of an uncle in George’s Square, Dr Taylor resided for two years, attending classes and diligently reading with a view to his future work. Thus trained in literature and theology, having used all the means and appliances within his reach, he was duly licensed to preach the Gospel. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Chanonry.
Nor had he to wait long for an opportunity of exercising his gifts. Many of his contemporaries had experience of the hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. To Dr Taylor there came an early call to work. He had won the friendship and esteem of Professor Tulloch, of Aberdeen. The congregation of Chadwell Street, London, on the recommendation of Professor Tulloch, invited the young probationer to preach before them. He accepted the invitation, and, after a few months’ work among them, was called to be their pastor, and was ordained in October 1829, now fifty-five years ago.
The congregation of Chadwell Street, now that of Islington, was a new one. Many of the members of it had been connected with Regent Square Church, and had been somewhat startled and surprised at the new departure in doctrine and practice instituted by Edward Irving, the pastor of the congregation. Partly on that account, and partly for the sake of Church extension, they had set up the new charge over which Dr Taylor was ordained in 1829. Edward Irving was present on the occasion, and took part in the ordination services, delivering one of the charges. When Edward Irving was introduced to the young man about to be ordained, then only twenty-three years of age, and even more youthful in appearance, he asked, “What can this stripling do?” The stripling had begun his work in the Master’s strength; he bore himself wisely, prudently, and courageously, and was successful and blessed in his work. He preached the Gospel with simplicity and with power, and calmly, amid the growing excitement of the time, delivered the eternal message of the Gospel of Christ. Then, as always, Dr Taylor made it his first business to do his own proper work; and during the two years of his London ministry he had the gladness of seeing the grace of God amid his people.
But his life-work lay elsewhere than in London. From the extreme south to the extreme north of our island he must go, and he went to a sphere and a work for which he was singularly fitted. The North of Scotland needed him at the time, and Caithness in particular had need of him. A fresh new voice was required in order to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ. There had been faithful ministers in Caithness, men of prayer, and of strength, who had kept the torch of truth aflame through a darkened time; there were also ministers who were not faithful, men who had no Gospel for sinners, and no word of consolation for the wretched. The wave of reaction which in Scotland has been known as Moderatism, in Ireland as Arianism, in England as Deism or Unitarianism, and in Germany as Rationalism, had reached Caithness also. In many parts there were coldness and indifference, but in some parishes religious life was warm and intense. The light shone brightly from some pulpits; and many godly people travelled from afar to attend such a ministry as that exercised by the late Mr Gunn of Watten. By the time when Dr Taylor was settled in Thurso, the Evangelical revival was extensive throughout the country. Even in parishes where the ministry was not effective or evangelical, there was a number of men who both by life and speech bore witness to the truth as it is in Jesus. Things were becoming ripe for the appearance of a ministry of the type exercised by Dr Taylor.
In 1831, Dr Taylor received and accepted a presentation to Thurso. Having preached with great acceptance, he received a unanimous call from the people, and was settled among them as their pastor, and has continued to labour among them until the present hour. Though minister of the same people he has occupied no less than four separate churches: three of these were built for himself as the minister of the congregation of Thurso. The old picturesque church, which had served the town and parish for many generations, had become too small, and also ruinous. Situated in the oldest and most densely populated part of the town, near the river, and on the triangle formed by the river and the sea, the dismantled walls still stand, surrounded by the graves of many generations. For two years Dr Taylor preached in the old building, and then removed to the spacious church erected by the heritors in the west end of the town. One of the few sermons which Dr Taylor has published during his busy life, was preached when for the last time the people worshipped in the old church.
The Ten Years’ Conflict had now fairly begun, and in Caithness, as elsewhere in Scotland, the attention of the people was aroused. And as the conflict deepened, the heart of the people took fire. It is a remarkable fact, that a religious revival kept pace with the keenness of the conflict; for the controversy concerned the interests of vital religion and the people of Scotland felt it to be so. Quietly and effectively Dr Taylor took his share in the great work. If to his mind and heart the conflict took the deeper form of a controversy with sin and evil in all their forms, and if in his ministry the freedom he most frequently commended was freedom from sin, freedom to serve Christ, yet the public controversy in which his Church was engaged, was to him one form of the great war with the bondage which sin brings on man. So he lived and preached, in his own and neighbouring pulpits, with such power, that when the Disruption came, he and his people came forth together, a united flock, with hardly a hoof left behind. Like so many of his brethren, Dr Taylor left behind him manse and glebe and church building, and went forth trusting in the Head of the Church, and to the love of Christ’s people.
A new church was speedily built, one of those which seems to have been modelled after the pattern of Tanficld Hall. But few of them now remain in the land. Low in the wall, and with the roof in three separate compartments, a depression in the centre, and the side seats rising in tiers on every side, and capable of containing some twelve hundred people; such was the building in which Dr Taylor ministered for some thirty years after the Disruption. Steps were then taken to build a new church, and in due time the present handsome and commodious church was built, the fourth which Dr Taylor has occupied during his lengthened ministry in Thurso.
In May 1833, Dr Taylor was married to Miss Isabella Murray, a daughter of William Murray, Esq. of Pitculzean and Geanies. He was singularly happy in his marriage relationship; his wife was a help-meet for him in every way. Calm, wise, and hopeful, she was able to relieve his hands from many cares, and enabled him to give his undivided attention to the work of the ministry. They had a family of one son and five daughters, and the family circle continued unbroken until the death of Mrs Taylor, on the 11th March 1884.
For a long time Dr Taylor did his work in his own quiet effective way, without any marked recognition of his merit from his country, or from the Church at large. He was content to do the work which was laid to his hand; finding that true earnest work was its own reward. At length his Alma Mater recognised his worth, and conferred on him the degree of D.D., an honour too long deferred. The jubilee services in 1879, when he was presented with his portrait painted by Norman Macbeth, R.S.A., called public attention to the lengthened and effective service Dr Taylor had given to the Church. Many began to speak and to think of him as a man who deserved well of his country, and of his Church. The sense of his claims grew as time passed on, and it was felt that the recognition of them ought to be no longer deferred. He was appointed Moderator of the General Assembly of 1884, and over the deliberations of that Assembly, he presided with grace and dignity, and to the great satisfaction of all the members of Assembly. His friends from the North rejoiced at the honour done to him and to them; and the Church at large became acquainted with the benign countenance and pleasant manner of one of her veteran workers, who had manfully and well borne the burden and heat of the day.
Dr Taylor is averse to controversy. He has seldom taken a prominent part in public questions. He has, however, definite convictions on most questions, and has never hesitated to speak his mind, and take his part when duty calls. He has not shrunk from decided action in all the controversies which have agitated our Church in our time. He has so borne himself as never to give needless offence, and those who were constrained to take the opposite side, could not help admiring the firmness and courtesy of his demeanour in controversy.
The great work of Dr Taylor has been in the pulpit, and in the pastorate. It says much for the strength and resources of a man that, unaided, he should have sustained the burden of ministry to a congregation of twelve hundred people for more than half-a-century. His is a ministry which still maintains its freshness. He has always been assiduous in pastoral work. For many years he catechised his people, as is still the custom in many parishes in Caithness, and when he saw that that mode was no longer expedient, he devised other ways of having intercourse with his people. He has given great attention to education, both under the old denominational system, and also under the new Act. He has been Chairman of the School Board. In his hale old age he continues to maintain an interest in all that affects the good of the community, and the work of the Church. Every sermon he preaches is fully written out and committed to memory. He has been so long in the habit of writing his sermons that it is now second nature with him. His greatest delight is in the study of the Scriptures, and pen in hand, to write down his thoughts on the passage he is studying. The sustained freshness of his prolonged ministry has arisen from his persistent study of the Scriptures, and his lively interest in them. The present writer can testify to the power of Dr Taylor’s ministrations. He was often struck with the delicacy and ability of the spiritual analysis conducted by Dr Taylor. But what was most striking, was the organic movement of Dr Taylor’s mind. The logical connection between the thoughts was often not obvious, and the points of transition often not plain, but on reflection when the whole service came up before the memory, it was found that a great and living unity pervaded it. One central theme was in it all through. The time of Dr Taylor’s greatest strength seemed to us to be at some communion service in his own or in a neighbouring congregation. To these services the people were wont to gather in their thousands, and most of them came with ardent expectations thirsting for the Word of life. Both ministers and people were in an exalted frame of mind. On such times we have often heard Dr Taylor. Then his usually measured utterance becomes intense and rapid, his thoughts attain to greater vividness, his voice becomes urgent and penetrating, and his face beams with love, and with a passionate desire to save and bless men. His spirit seems to have gleams of piercing insight into the immeasurable love of God; he is able to give expression to the visions of the majesty and loveliness of Christ which his eyes have seen in quieter hours; and he evidently feels himself at such moments filled with the spirit of his office. Such times we have seen; and we are told his ordinary ministry is one of sustained excellence. He has for these fifty years and more filled a high place in the Church; he has seen many changes; he has trained many in the way of life; and now in a good old age he is still in the midst of us, trusted and beloved and revered.
Alexander Thomson of Banchory
Author: Robert Lumsden, Esq., Banker, Aberdeen
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 473
A note appended to Dr McCrie’s “Life of John Knox ” contains the following pedigree of Mr Thomson:—
By the death of his father, Mr Thomson was left at the early age of eight under the care of his mother, a superior and pious woman. Young Thomson studied at the Grammar School and at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and early shewed that fondness for study, and those habits of application, which remained with him through life. As a youth he was cheerful, playful, and kind; and, at the same time, methodical and conscientious in the disposal of his time. Having completed the arts curriculum, he graduated in 1816. Besides acquiring an intimate acquaintance with the Latin and Greek classics, and attaining considerable proficiency in mathematics, he obtained an introduction to several of those branches of Natural Science, the prosecution of which in after life afforded him much pleasure. His intercourse with his learned grandfather and his friends fostered those academic tastes and that love of general culture which afterwards marked out Alexander Thomson as the most accomplished country gentleman in the north of Scotland. In order to study law he went to Edinburgh at the beginning of session 1816-17. He joined the Speculative Society, and took a share in the debates. He passed Advocate in 1820, but never practised at the bar. Besides assiduously prosecuting his legal and cognate studies, Mr Thomson, whilst in Edinburgh, began the study of Italian. To the close of his life he retained a fondness for that language and for Italian literature. He also formed friendships which were lasting, with, among others of note, Alexander Dunlop, Sir William Hamilton, and John Hamilton. On attaining majority, Mr Thomson was appointed a Deputy-Lieutenant for Aberdeenshire and Kincardineshire; he was elected Dean of Marischal College; and he began to devote attention to the improvement of his estates, and to county business. His private life was exemplary.
In 1825 Mr Thomson was married to Jessy, daughter of Alexander Fraser, Esq., an ex-Lord Provost of Aberdeen. The following year Mr and Mrs Thomson visited Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. During the journey, Mr Thomson made copious notes of his observations on the state of education in these countries, and their social and moral condition. They spent about three years in Florence, Rome, and Naples. Antiquities, the geology and vegetation of the country, and more particularly its social and religious state, engaged his attention; and he carefully studied the doctrines and practices of popery at its headquarters. He had much pleasant intercourse with Christian men then resident in Italy; among others, General Macaulay, Chevalier Bunsen, Professor Tholuck, and the Rev. Mr Burgess; and that visit to Italy gave Mr Thomson an abiding interest in the fate and fortunes of that classic land.
Mr and Mrs Thomson returned to Banchory in 1829. Besides models of ancient temples, Mr Thomson brought six copies of the medal struck to commemorate the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. Papists sometimes deny that such a medal was struck, and Mr Thomson was careful to distribute his specimens. One of these, and the models, are now in the museum of the Free Church College at Aberdeen. Resuming his public duties and literary and scientific pursuits, Mr Thomson shewed a deepened seriousness and increased interest in religious objects. He withdrew from attendance on the ministrations of the parish clergyman, a Moderate, and availed himself of the Evangelical preaching of ministers in Aberdeen. In 1833 Mr Thomson spent a few months in Edinburgh, and having heard the discussions about patronage, as a Conservative, his fears were aroused “lest anything rash should be done.” He came within the influence of the Church Extension movement, became an enthusiastic supporter, and on his return home, got an auxiliary society formed in Aberdeen, and secured the erection of a church in a destitute part of his own district. In 1834 he published “Facts from Rome;” and contributed a sketch of Dr Hamilton to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1835 he visited Belgium; and brought before the Highland Society the plan followed in that country for reclaiming waste land, and for cultivating flax and chicory. He originated schemes for organising a county police force, and for improving prison discipline; and his labours for these two objects were crowned with success. During the first half of the ten years’ conflict Mr Thomson took no share in the discussions and deliberations which engrossed some of the leading minds of the Church of Scotland. In December 1839 his friend, John Hamilton, advocate, sent to him his pamphlet, “Our Present Position;” and from the time he perused that pamphlet Mr Thomson became deeply interested in the question. The great spiritual issues involved had awakened that interest; for with many of his friend’s views he did not concur, nor was the course of action to be taken at all clear to him. It was after much earnest thought and many discussions that he became thoroughly satisfied that the Church had taken up a right position. As a leading Aberdeenshire Conservative, and an intimate friend of Lord Aberdeen, Mr Thomson was the medium of conveying to his lordship a copy of that publication, and of others issued by the Evangelical party in the Church. He also corresponded frankly with his lordship on the vexed question. The most valuable part of Professor Smeaton’s admirable memoir of Mr Thomson is probably the ninety pages of correspondence between Mr Thomson and John Hamilton, Lord Aberdeen, Sir Robert Peel, and other statesmen and persons of influence. There is no better confutation of the insidious attempts now made in certain quarters to falsify the history of the struggle which preceded the Disruption, than what is contained in those pages. They are also interesting as exhibiting the progress of a candid mind alive to spiritual things, grappling with the great question at issue between the Church and the State, and arriving at a settled conviction that the Church was right. In his earliest letter to Mr Hamilton (6th January 1840) Mr Thomson writes:—
In striking contrast is his letter to Sir Robert Peel, of 27th May 1842:—
At county meetings and on the public platform, Mr Thomson maintained and vindicated the views of the Church; and in December 1842 he suggested that a meeting of Scottish Lairds should be held, “as the Barones Minores of Scotland had much to do with the former Reformation.” He issued a circular calling a meeting, to hold at Edinburgh on 24th January 1843,
Forty-nine lairds attended, and nearly as many sent apologies for being unavoidably absent. The resolutions of the meeting were transmitted to Sir Robert Peel. The third was—
Thursday the 18th May 1843 arrived, and Mr Thomson was relieved of negotiations with politicians and prelates. His diary and letters vividly bring before readers the Disruption day. He was present at the levee in the morning, and saw the portrait of William III fall, and heard the remark made by a spectator, “There goes the Revolution Settlement!” He joined the solemn procession to Canonmills Hall. He was incessantly occupied during the next ten days with General Assembly and Committee duties; and reached home, “after a most delightful, and exciting, and I hope profitable fortnight.” On the 1st of June, Mr Thomson laid the foundation of a Free Church at New Machar, on his estate of Rainineshill. In his own parish he assisted in forming a congregation and procuring a minister (the Rev. D. F. Arthur, highly esteemed by Mr Thomson); he gave sites for church and manse, and largely contributed to the erection of both. In September 1843 Dr Chalmers spent a week at Banchory House, and Mr Thomson often referred to that visit, and always looked back to it with pleasure. On Sabbath the 10th, Dr Chalmers preached to an immense congregation assembled on the lawn.
The refusal of sites by certain landowners occasioned much suffering to members of the Church. Mr Thomson took an active share in the endeavour to have this cowardly form of persecution removed. In concert with the Marquis of Breadalbane, Mr Thomson arranged that a meeting of landowners should hold at Glasgow at the close of the General Assembly in October 1843 to consider the subject. The meeting agreed to address the noblemen and gentlemen who had refused sites; and an able, respectful, and earnest address was agreed on.
Mr Thomson proposed to the General Assembly in 1844 a plan for providing manses, and when, in a subsequent year, the manse scheme was sanctioned, it met with Mr Thomson’s warmest support. Nor was he unmindful of the wants of the Church in foreign lands. Having learned that “Dr Duff mourned the loss of his fine library and apparatus, locked up in the unused buildings now belonging to the Established Church,” he assisted in procuring subscriptions to provide library and apparatus; and in a short time the required sum was raised and remitted to Calcutta, and the great missionary’s heart was glad.
Mr Thomson regarded the institution of a theological hall in Aberdeen as of great importance to the Church. It was opposed, and a controversy arose, painful at the time, now uninteresting, and hardly intelligible to those who were not engaged in it. In conjunction with Mr F. Edmond of Kingswells, Mr Thomson persevered in urging his views upon the Church; and the Aberdeen Theological Hall was established. In its extension and permanence Mr Thomson took a lasting interest.
Concurrently with his efforts, general and local, on behalf of the Free Church of Scotland, Mr Thomson laboured to promote Sabbath observance by Railways. He had co-operated with Sheriff Watson in planting in Aberdeen the first “Ragged School” attempted in Scotland; and he continued to aid the learned Sheriff in extending the experiment. It was not till 1854 that he had the satisfaction of finding his views embodied in statute.
In consequence of impaired health, he spent half of 1847 and the following year in England. He occupied himself with antiquarian and geological investigations, and still more with inquiry into the social condition of the people. Stimulated by his observations during this visit, he published in 1852, “Social Evils: their Cause and their Cure.” In 1857 appeared “Punishment and Prevention;” [28] and in papers read before the Social Science Association or published, he advocated stopping juvenile offenders on the road to crime; treated the game laws as fertile sources of crime and misery; sought to have vagrancy repressed; opposed the bothy system and feeing markets; and urged the abolition of tolls.
In 1857 Mr Thomson was chosen Convener of the County of Aberdeen. In the following year he saw carried out, though in a mutilated form, a scheme which he had tried to promote during thirty years, viz., the amalgamation of King’s and Marischal Colleges.
In 1859 the British Association met in Aberdeen. H. R. H. Prince Albert, the President of the year, did Mr Thomson the honour to be his guest; and Mr Thomson took an active part in all arrangements for the promotion of the objects of the association as well as in the discussions.
In consequence of attempts by the Scottish Episcopal Church to obtain some recognition by Parliament, such as would identify it with the Church of England, Mr Thomson engaged in a vigorous correspondence on the subject; and published an able pamphlet— “Scottish Episcopacy: Past and Present”—in order to disseminate correct views as to the aggressive practices and dangerous tenets of that sect.
Symptoms of failing health appeared in 1859, and weakness of the eyes compelled Mr Thomson to discontinue these investigations by the microscope in which he delighted. Succeeding years found Mr Thomson with diminished vigour, pursuing literary and scientific studies, publishing on various subjects, and interested in all that concerned the social, moral, and religious wellbeing of those around him. He had for two or three years contemplated the great change as approaching, and early in 1868 increasing weakness warned the relatives that it was near. On 18th May 1868 Mr Thomson sent a message to Dr Candlish, expressing a hope that God would be with the General Assembly. His dying utterances were, “Bought with a price,” “Swallowed up in victory;” on Wednesday night, the 20th May 1868, his spirit departed.
Mr Thomson bequeathed his valuable museum and extensive library, and about £16,000 in money to the Free Church College in Aberdeen. The money was apportioned for bursaries, maintenance of museum and library, a lecturer on natural science and theology, and “to increase the too small salaries of the Professors.”
The large collection of journals, letters, and other MSS. was placed in the hands of the Rev. Professor Smeaton, who had kindly agreed to prepare a memoir of his departed friend. The work was faithfully performed; and a most interesting volume was published in 1869. Of the Professor’s labours the writer of this notice has freely availed himself.
At the close of the “Funeral Sermon,” the late Principal Lumsden said:—
Charles Thomson
Author: Rev. William Nixon, Montrose
Source: Disruption Worthies of the Highlands , page 137
John Swanson
The late Mr Thomson of Wick, born at Calnor, parish of Dalserf, in the year 1795, was ordained to the ministry of the Scotch Church at North Shields in 1823. Of a commanding presence, endowed with a powerful mind, which he had stored with all kinds of knowledge, possessed of great and ready powers of utterance, combining uncommon force of character with an equally uncommon generosity of nature, and having his various gifts and acquirements sanctified by divine grace, he proved all through his public life a valuable leader on all questions that ought to interest a Christian minister and a Christian patriot. He was at the same time one of the most loving and loveable of men in all the more private relations of life. His time and energies were chiefly devoted to the preaching of the everlasting gospel, and to the discharge of his various duties as a pastor to the successive congregations over which he was placed. For them he laboured in season and out of season, preaching for many years before his strength began to fail, three times every Sabbath, while his private visitations were equally abundant and persevering. He spent himself in the service of his Master, and for the salvation of his people. During the larger part of the last, and the earlier part of this century, although the Presbyterianism that still prevailed in Northumberland and some adjacent parts of the north of England continued professedly to hold the Westminster Standards, vital religion in connection with it was in a very depressed condition. But things had begun to look up before the settlement of Mr Thomson.
The ministry of Dr Paterson of Sunderland, of Mr Murray of Gateshead, and of other evangelical and earnest men, who were, one after another, sent upon that field of labour, had begun to prove instrumental in reviving or helping forward greater soundness and seriousness in divine things. And Mr Thomson, when settled at North Shields, proved a seasonable and successful help in the same direction. Earnest workers who, in increasing numbers, have succeeded them and entered into their labours, often little imagine what they owe to the efforts and struggles of these devoted ministers of a former generation.
From the outset of his ministerial life Mr Thomson was full of a public spirit. This, as a general rule, is strong in the best Scotch Presbyterian ministers, and has decided influence in shaping their life, letting itself out in their laying themselves alongside of the great public questions that affect the general moral interests of society, and in their striving to keep the public mind imbued and social institutions moulded and governed by the knowledge and the fear of God. One of the earliest of Mr Thomson’s controversies was with Popery. In a village adjoining North Shields he held a series of stated meetings for a considerable time. These meetings were crowded with audiences that eagerly listened to his addresses on the Romish controversy. In conducting them he not only exposed himself to much odium, but to personal danger, from which however he was protected by a body-guard of faithful friends who accompanied him on these occasions. Another series of his contendings, in conjunction with other brethren in the north of England, had for their object to reclaim Lady Hewley’s Fund (fifty years ago said to be worth £4000 per annum) from the scandalous malappropriation to which, like so many other munificent benefactions in England, it had for a long time been subjected. One of the many sad results of the lapse of descendants of the godly Puritans into Unitarianism was, that this bequest, like others, fell into the hands of those who adopted and propagated the deadliest errors, in opposition to the grand and vital doctrines to the maintenance of which the bequest had been consecrated by its noble donor. Such a wrong was not likely to be borne in silence by a man like Mr Thomson. And he and others took an active part in securing such interference of the civil courts as ended, not indeed in getting all that they claimed and were entitled to, but in obtaining fresh rules for the distribution of the fund, by which a portion of it was restored to its primitive and proper object.
Another great cause on which Mr Thomson expended much of his time, thoughts, and efforts, was the Apocryphal controversy, raised chiefly by Scotch ministers and laymen, led by Dr Andrew Thomson and Mr Robert Haldane, against the practice of the British and Foreign Bible Society in circulating all over the Continent Bibles containing the Apocrypha as the Word of God. No one more earnestly exposed in pamphlets and speeches that practice than did Mr Thomson; and, besides putting an end to it, at least in its worst and most glaring forms, the defenders of the purity and sole authority of the canonical Scriptures otherwise did a seasonable service to the truth. For the controversy brought out the fact that the loosest and most erroneous opinions had crept into various churches, especially in England, on the subject of the inspiration of the Scriptures; and it became, happily, under the over-ruling wisdom and mercy of God, the means, for the time-being, of raising up in the minds of men the holy Scriptures to their proper position as the divine and only authoritative standard. The unspeakable importance of this is seen, when it is considered that almost no end of controversies subsequently arose on almost all conceivable points of Christian doctrine, worship, government, and discipline; and that the parties engaged in them made good their ground only in proportion to their conclusive appeals to the divine Word.
Mr Thomson came to Wick in 1840, and at once threw himself into his work as minister of the parish with all the ardour of his nature. Without affecting to be a deep, speculative theologian, he was a great practical divine, who had so effectually mastered all the leading truths of Scripture as to be a clear and consistent expounder of them. With a ready and powerful utterance he preached the gospel in season and out of season; and, with a soul on fire with love of the truth, his utterances came from the heart of the speaker, and went to the hearts of his hearers. He soon reached and always retained his proper place in their esteem; and the large congregation that waited on his ministry to the very end of it testified to the thorough hold which he had of their best affections. In helping forward the general interests of a sound popular education, in battling with local authorities for the education of the poorest children at the public expense, in exposing the evils of the bothy system, and in furthering every social, moral, and spiritual interest of the community, he took a leading part. And he was peculiarly qualified to do so. His extensive knowledge and practical turn of mind made him always ready to speak and act on the spur of the moment; and alike his regard to what was true and right, and his commanding force of character, never failed to render him the adversary of selfishness and injustice, and the unwearied advocate and promoter of every arrangement for the wellbeing of society, and especially of its more exposed and helpless classes. The weight of such a man in the place where his lot was cast and his field of labour found was universally and permanently felt. And the greatness of the loss experienced by his decease was correspondingly shewn in the impressive tribute of regard paid to his memory when he was taken away. Mr Thomson was a minister and an ardent supporter of the Established Church of Scotland so long and so far as it asserted and maintained its spiritual freedom. During his ministry at North Shields, when the late able and straightforward Mr Renton of Kelso came to that town, and held a public meeting in favour of the anti-Establishment movement of that day, Mr Thomson got up a meeting in support of what he deemed the scriptural principle of Church Establishments, and made a vigorous and effective defence of it. Not the less but all the more resolute did he prove in contending for the Church’s freedom from all State interference with her in spiritual things. Coming to Caithness three years before the Disruption, he proved a powerful supporter of the Non-intrusion cause, in the contest that was then raging and approaching its crisis. When at last the convocation of ministers on the side of the Church’s liberties took place in Edinburgh in November 1842, two great resolutions were proposed – one to the effect, that those adhering to it would never consent to any arrangement that sacrificed the liberties of the Church for which they contended; and the other to the effect, that if their claims were, on application to the Legislature, refused recognition, they would hold the refusal a sufficient reason for abandoning their endowments and terminating the Church’s alliance with the State. Many who at once adhered to the first resolution hesitated for a time in adhering to the second, not from any inclination to stick to endowments at the sacrifice of principle, but from a persuasion which had spread abroad that a number of the leaders were determined to be out of their position even before a sufficiently conclusive refusal had been given to their claims. Mr Thomson was one of those who adhered to the first resolution, but did not adhibit his name to the second. The report consequently got abroad and reached high quarters that he was hesitating, and it proved the importance attached to the possible securing of such a man for the residuary body, that Sir James Graham actually corresponded with him on the subject. His reply, that no man was more determined to abide by the principle of fullest liberty to the Church, put an end to the expectation regarding him for a time entertained by men in power. And his steady adherence to that doctrine in his conduct was the best reply to the popular rumour and public charge, from which for the time he suffered a measure of injustice and injury.
The Disruption found him ready for it. Although he had not taken formal steps to ascertain his people’s views, the best proof of how he had taught and guided and inspired them was, that they came out with him almost in a body. He preached to them in the open air in the summer of 1843, in the Temperance Hall during the subsequent winter, and again in the open air during the summer of 1844, and entered his first place of worship in connection with the Free Church in November of that year. His second and more suitable one was erected and taken possession of by him and his people twenty-two years afterwards, viz., in 1866. At every meeting held on the Church question he was invariably asked to take a part in its proceedings, and proved eminently fitted for and useful in his place, by reason of his coolness, common sense, and great ability. When difficulties or differences arose in neighbouring congregations he was generally asked to help in solving or removing them. And his wisdom, integrity, and tact seldom failed to accomplish his object.
In proportion to his determined stand for a rightly-constituted Established Church before the Disruption, was his not less determined opposition to the ecclesiastical body constituted and invested with its privileges in 1843. His feeling against the position taken up by it was very strong. No native, even of the northern counties, was more zealous in shewing what a nullity it had become in the Highlands. With the help of his eldest son (afterwards cut off in the flower of his promising youth), at a great expense of labour, he carefully collected the statistics of church attendance in the three northern counties, and proved that if all the adherents of the Established Church were brought together, they could be accommodated in the parish church of Wick. The communication of these and other facts to the Duke of Sutherland contributed to secure at length from him for Church, ministers, and people, the adoption of a juster and wiser policy, and one much more congenial to his own nature than that hitherto pursued by his agents in his name – a policy of kind consideration and respect for the religious convictions and interests of the population on his extensive territories. As one of the results of the position taken up by the ecclesiastical Establishment of Scotland, and of the little hope with which he regarded it, Mr Thomson turned with eagerness to the proposed union of the great leading Churches outside of it, in the hope that the essential principles of his Church would continue to be preserved in that union, though the accidental outward national accompaniments were separated from it.
His labours onwards to old age, the anxieties and trials of which he had his share, and the failing strength of his advancing years, at length began to bring down his manly frame, and to chasten his ardent spirit into a readiness for the final earthly issue. More than one breakdown in health subsequent to the Disruption was followed by one in 1869, when in the act of serving at the communion table in the midst of his flock. That, with the exception of a prayer-meeting address, terminated his public duty. Some time afterwards, under an alarming attack which he expected would finish his course, speaking with great difficulty, he asked Mr Fraser of Halkirk, whom he greatly loved, and who had come to preach for him, to tell his people of his hope in God. The end however did not come then, but in two years afterwards. And on the sound principle embodied in the saying, “Tell me not how he died, but how he lived,” we only add, that on the 26th April 1871, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, he departed to the blessedness of those who die in the Lord, and who rest from their labours, their works following them.
Before concluding, we advert to the somewhat common but ground-less idea that a life spent in publicly doing battle for the truth is fatal to a devout and holy temper. Mr Thomson was a man of God, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. He sympathised with true godliness wherever found, and he abounded in every good word and work. In his public relations he shewed himself alive to whatever concerned the divine glory, the Redeemer’s kingdom, and the salvation of souls. When the sister island was visited with that “year of grace” of which the late gracious Dr William Gibson of Belfast so appropriately wrote, Mr Thomson went to Ireland to see the work, and took part in the services in various places; and returning home in the full conviction that the divine presence and power were being specially manifested, he associated himself with others of his brethren in prayer-meetings for a like blessing, that were continued for months, and not without evidence of gracious results. Further, the mind that was in him, the truth he taught, and the character of his preaching are illustrated by the fact, that so early as 1825 he edited a carefully-corrected edition of the Letters of Samuel Rutherford, with an Introduction which breathed their spirit and enforced their high and heavenly aims. Finally, the same evangelical temper appeared in the pastoral letters which for a series of years, in the later stages of his ministry, he annually addressed to his congregation. The mingled wisdom and force, faithfulness and love of these letters, their discriminating power, their telling appeals, and the desire breathed in them for the salvation of those addressed, furnish additional evidence, were it required, to shew what a devout as well as able minister he was, and to account for his having been so emphatically “a man greatly beloved.”
J. Hay Thorburn
Author: The Editor
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church, April, 1931, page 77
As we were going to press last month the death occurred of Mr J. Hay Thorburn, formerly General Secretary of the Free Church, and it would not be fitting that the event should be allowed to pass without some notice in The Monthly Record.
During the stirring years which followed the Union of 1900 Mr Thorburn was in charge of affairs at the Free Church Offices, and devoted himself unsparingly to the furtherance of the Church’s interests in the directions in which he conceived these to lie. In particular he took a prominent part in connection with the work involved in the legal proceedings which resulted in the vindication of the Church’s rights through the decision of the House of Lords in 1904.
Mr Thorburn was a man of strong convictions and of unswerving pertinacity in carrying them into effect. This very forcefulness of opinion and activity proved his undoing, so far as his influence in the Free Church was concerned. His policy with reference to the lines along which the development of the Church should be pursued did not commend themselves to his colleagues, and so it became necessary for him to withdraw from the controlling position which he occupied in the councils of the Church. It is pleasant, however, to recall at this hour that he was a man of great charm of personality, of gentlemanly courtesy, and of no small ability, and that, according to his lights, he devoted his strength unsparingly to the work of the Church.
ALEXANDER TOPP, D.D.
Author: Rev. R. Cowan, Elgin
Source: Our Church Fathers: being Biographical Sketches of Disruption Fathers in and around the Presbytery of Elgin, page 9
The Presbytery have thought it good to have a few sketches of pre-disruption Ministers in the Supplement for this year. Old people will like them, and in the case of the young how desirable “to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers.” It is fitting to begin the list with the name that stands at the head of this sketch. Mr. Robert Young, in his Annals of Elgin, has several references to Dr. Topp, and concludes them with the words: “Dr. Topp is a native of Elgin, and a credit to the place of his birth.” His father had been some time in the West Indies, but returning took a farm at Sheriffmill, and Alexander was born there, on 1st April, 1814. He was the second son in a family of three sons and two daughters. The sons all proved superior men. William, the eldest, who died at Elgin in 1877, was Secretary to Mr. Maclean (husband of “L. E. L.”), governor of the Gold Coast territory in West Africa, and was subsequently offered the governorship himself. The youngest, a chemist, went also to Africa, and died there.
Alexander was educated at Elgin Academy and Aberdeen University, and took a high place at both. At the age of twenty-one he was licensed to preach, but thereafter was for some time tutor in the family of Mr Gordon of Cairnfield. He became Assistant to one of the Ministers of Elgin – the Rev. W. Gordon – in 1837, and on Mr. Gordon’s death the Town Council petitioned for Mr. Topp to succeed him. It is curious at this date to read in the old Council Minutes: “It was resolved to recommend to Her Majesty, the patron of the parish, the Rev. Alexander Topp, preacher of the Gospel, and Assistant to the late Mr. Gordon, to fill the charge,” and again: “The Provost laid before the Council a letter intimating that Lord John Russell, in compliance with the wishes of the inhabitants of Elgin, so unanimously expressed, had recommended the Rev. Alexander Topp to the charge rendered vacant, &c.” Then were the days of patronage – although, alas, not always falling in with the wishes of the people unanimously expressed. Mr. Topp was ordained on 25th January, 1838, and there had been no previous ordination to the church at Elgin since 1774; ministers had been translated from other charges, but none ordained at Elgin. The “church was crowded to excess,” a Courant of that date says, and the Rev. George Gordon of Birnie (afterwards the well known Dr. Gordon) presided, and “preached a most appropriate and excellent discourse from Acts 16: 17.” A carrier who died lately used to tell how he laboured from Banff through snow-wreaths to get home in time for the ordination.
From the first Mr. Topp was extremely popular as a minister. His evangelical doctrine and youthful fervour, combined with marked ability and manliness, commended him to all, and his preaching came as a breath of Spring over the souls of the people, while his diligence and kindliness in visiting won their hearts. His senior colleague having removed in 1841 to another parish, Mr. Topp found himself at the age of twenty-six senior minister of Elgin. He had started Sabbath School work, in spite of opposition, at the beginning of his ministry, and he always took a special interest in the lambs of the flock. A goodly volume might be made of the New Year’s Addresses he annually printed for them, as such a volume has been made of those of a later date at Toronto. He was correspondingly beloved by them. An old member tells how, on his return from a much-needed holiday in Italy in 1847, they crowded about the coach to welcome him, and he had to escape by closes and byways to his own house. Among young and old, among lads who came to tend his pony and servants in his house, as well as in the general congregation, there was good spiritual fruit of his example and labours.
The “Ten Years’ Conflict” was in progress when he began his ministry, and without hesitation he ranged himself on the side of Dr Chalmers and those who stood for the freedom and independence of the Church in her spiritual affairs. The work which he and Mr. Gentle of Alves, the only two parish ministers on that side in the Presbytery, did in disseminating information and stirring up the people, was enormous and often exhausting, but it was fruitful in enlightenment and in zeal awakened for the truth.
la 1843 Mr. Topp with the bulk of his congregation separated from State connection, although it meant for him, and for many of the 474 ministers, their shillings becoming sixpences, and even the sixpences not certain at that date. They did not regard themselves as forming a new Church; it was the State that had changed the terms of Establishment, not they that had diverged from the old Scriptural principles of the Church of Scotland. They stood by the principles for which Knox and Henderson contended, and the fathers of Covenanting times laid down their lives. The names of the elders entered in the first Kirk Session Minutes of the Free Church of Elgin may be interesting to some. They are these: Provost Wilson, ex-Provost McKimmie, Wm. Stephen, Alex. Stephen, Isaac Forsyth, Alex. Forsyth, Alex. Skene, John Torrie, John Mortimer, Jas. Burgess, Wm. Gordon, Geo. Reid, Geo. Findlay, and Andrew Geddes.
The new church, now the Free High, was opened on December 3,1843: “a large church capable of holding 1200 sitters, and it was crowded to the doors” (Annals). The cry very soon arose: “The place is too strait for me, give place that I may dwell”, and this led in 1852 to the formation of a second congregation, which was done in a most friendly manner, the minister himself being a prime mover in the business. It is impossible to dwell on Mr. Topp’s further labours both in Elgin and throughout Moray; ministers such as he had a large diocese in those days to superintend and organise. He was married while at Elgin to Jane Mortimer, widow of his early friend, John Clark, of Aberdeen. Their one son died in early boyhood, and lies in Elgin Cathedral. Of the four daughters two are married in Toronto, and two in this country; one of the two latter, and one in Toronto, to young men who learned their business in Elgin.
It was a great grief to Elgin and to the minister himself when he had to think of removing. But strength was not equal to the task at Elgin, and in 1852 he accepted a call to Roxburgh Church, Edinburgh. At his farewell there was not enough standing room in the church, and the pang of parting was for very many, one that remained unhealed; good ministers might come and go, there was only one Mr. Topp. In Edinburgh he revived a languishing Church. Morayshire people are great wanderers; they are also clannish, and they gathered numerously about him there, as they did later in Toronto. But to those who had no such personal ties his ministry proved attractive. As a public man also, in the business of the Church, in connection with students’ examinations, and in matters of general benevolence, he was much relied on and esteemed. An enlarged or new church for his congregation was in view when the call again came to move.
Knox Church, Toronto, was then the leading Presbyterian Church of the city and of Canada generally. Mr. Topp was twice called to it, and it was only after a good part of a night spent in prayer with his brother William, who met him at Aberdeen to consult, that light arose. The previous minister was Dr. Robert Burns, who had gone out from Paisley, and was called from Knox’s to a Divinity chair. Mr. Topp was settled as pastor in 1858. He speedily raised the membership from 300 to 700, and Knox’s continued to prosper, although detaching again and again healthy daughters to do virtuously in various parts of the city. His name is fragrant in Toronto and throughout Canada to-day. His abilities and experience thrust him forward into the position of a Church leader, and no man did more for the advancement of the Church, and especially for the union of its three branches in Canada than he. In many cases his gentleness and amiability won, where argument might have failed. He was twice Moderator of Assembly, once before and once after the completed union.
He made several visits home, and on occasion of one of these – in 1870 – his old University of Aberdeen conferred on him, purely of its own motion, the degree of D.D. His old fellow-citizens of Elgin also entertained him to a public breakfast in the Assembly Rooms, Mr. Grigor of the Haugh presiding. His last visit to the old country was in 1879, when he spent a week at his former manse, and preached in the Free High Church on 20th July. His preaching had nearly all its old vigour, and it was a great joy to many to hear him again; but the sermon was his last, and it is to be feared the strain of preaching it hastened the end. Symptoms of heart-disease had before shown, and they became aggravated. He returned to Canada, and, although he did not preach, he made the speech to Princess Louise (Marchioness of Lorne) on the occasion of her laying the foundation stone of a Home for Incurables at Toronto, the first of its kind in Canada, and in which he had taken a deep interest. Some days after, on October 5th, along with Mrs. Topp, he was calling upon one of the principal families of his congregation where a daughter was sick. He felt faint and lay down on a couch, and a few minutes after had passed away. The last thing he did before leaving the house that day was to draft a minute with reference to the death of an office-bearer, and it ends with the words: “if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” The text of his last sermon at Elgin, and which is inscribed on the tablet erected to his memory in the Free High Church, was a fitting one to crown a ministry and life devoted to the honour of Christ. It is Psalm 72: 17: “His name shall endure for ever; His name shall be continued as long as the sun; and men shall be blessed in Him, all nations shall Him call blessed.”
William King Tweedie, D.D.
Author: William Brown, Esq., F.R.C.S.E., Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 481
William King Tweedie
William King Tweedie, son of John Tweedie and Janet King, was born at Ayr, 8th May 1803. The family removed very early to South America, where the father became intendant of the public gardens at Buenos Ayres. William was left under the care of a kind relative at Maybole, where he spent his boyhood, and received his early education. His parents did not return to this country, and he never saw them again. His friend and guardian made him his heir, and hence he was enabled to enter upon his studies with great advantage.
He spent his first and second sessions at the University, Glasgow. He afterwards passed one or two sessions in Edinburgh. His University education was completed at St Andrews, [29] to which his chief attraction was Dr Chalmers, then Professor of Moral Philosophy, and whose rare and commanding genius entranced the minds of many other aspiring young men. Here also he obtained the friendship of Professor Ferrie, minister of Kilconquhar,—a friendship which continued even after they were separated ecclesiastically. While there, he became tutor to the son of Mr Mudie of Pitmuis, and in this character travelled about fifteen months on the Continent. The young tutor and young pupil visited France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Both had their minds enlarged by this lengthened sojourn, and the former obtained those stores of knowledge which he turned to such important uses in his subsequent life. Pitmuis is in the parish of Guthrie, of which the gifted Dr John Bruce [30] was then the minister. He was thus brought into close contact with a man who was the means of conveying to him those clear views and deep impressions of divine truth which he ever after retained. Some of his first earnings as a young man were expended in the purchase of a copy of Calvin’s voluminous writings; and although he called no man his master on earth, he considered that the great French Reformer expressed the mind of God more correctly than most of the divines of that period.
His veneration for Calvin himself was affectionately profound, and he wished much that there should be a more adequate memoir of his life and doctrines than was then to be found. He diligently sought for information on this subject, and had collected documents which he hoped to bring before the public. It illustrates his own noble character, that while thus employed, he learned that the biographer of Knox was engaged on a biography of Calvin, and he did not hesitate to relinquish his own purpose, and transferred to Dr McCrie the information he had obtained. At a later period, in 1846, he published a translation from the French of M. Rilliet, entitled, “Calvin and Servetus: The Reformer’s Share in the Trial of Michael Servetus, historically ascertained.”
He received licence to preach the gospel from the Presbytery of Arbroath on 2d December 1828, and on 26th July 1832 he was ordained as minister of the Scots Church, London Wall. Here he had a small congregation, but the connection was a happy one: there was mutual regard between pastor and people, and good was done in the highest sense.
When in London, he married Miss Margaret Bell, and thus secured the blessings of a happy domestic life. In London, also, he acquired the friendship of Mr John Macdonald, who was minister of the Presbyterian Church at River Terrace. This friendship did not terminate after both had left London, but continued unbroken till the death of the missionary minister of Calcutta. In 1849 he published an interesting memoir of his beloved friend.
The reputation for intellectual power and ministerial faithfulness which he had now acquired, led to his appointment as minister of the South Parish of Aberdeen. His induction took place on 1st September 1837, and on the following Sabbath Dr Duff introduced the young minister to the congregation. Dr Duff had been the first choice of the congregation, but he refused the call, because he considered India as still his mission field. The sermon was printed, and in it Dr Duff refers to Mr Tweedie’s “gifts and graces, whether in the pulpit or in the closet, at the family altar or at the weary pilgrim’s death-bed, his walk and conversation, his outgoings and incomings.” In this charge he occupied a position of great influence; his labours were very abundant, and his high powers were appreciated by all who knew him.
In September 1841 the congregation of the Tolbooth Parish, Edinburgh, sustained a heavy affliction by the secession, into the Episcopal communion, of their beloved minister. They desired to have as his successor one who should combine pulpit talent with vigorous intellect and parochial activity. When Mr Tweedie’s name was suggested to them, scarcely any of them had heard him preach; but there was so unvarying a report of his character from all quarters, that they applied in his favour to the Town Council, then patrons of the city churches. Their application was successful; he accepted the call, and was inducted on 10th March 1842, leaving in Aberdeen a much attached congregation.
From this date till his death in 1863, he was the loved and honoured minister of the Tolbooth Church. On 18th May 1843 he ceased to be minister of the parish, as he, with the entire kirk-session, and nearly all the congregation, withdrew from the Establishment, and joined the Free Church; but they retained the name, and with it the religious and ecclesiastical principles which had characterised the Tolbooth Church for a long series of years. They continued their schools and their other parochial labours. During the brief period that Mr Tweedie occupied the place of a parochial minister in Edinburgh, he pursued with much zeal his parochial duties. Among other things, he printed a tract addressed to the parishioners, which was intended to be the first of a series.
Mr Tweedie took an active part in the proceedings which led to the Disruption, and for many years subsequent to this, his high business talents enabled him to promote the success of the Church in every one of its departments.
For a short time he was convener of the Sustentation Committee. He was also Convener of the Committee on Popery, and for fifteen years he was Convener of the Committee on Foreign Missions. This last office he would not have resigned, had he not felt that, with his impaired health, he could not fulfil, to his own satisfaction, the duties of it and of his pastoral office at the same time. His close relations with Duff, Anderson, Wilson, Mackay, Ewart, Johnston, Maccallum, Smith, Mitchell, besides Macdonald and other honoured names, gave him a weight and influence which no one else could have. His letters to the missionaries during the long period of his convenership were greatly valued. Indeed, wherever there was need for work in the service of the Master, there he was a willing, untiring, disinterested worker.
To his own congregation, and the varied interests connected with it, he gave his heart and all his powers. There was much difficulty in obtaining a suitable place of worship. On the first Sabbaths after the Disruption he conducted public worship in Freemasons’ Hall, Niddry Street, but the accommodation was quite inadequate for the hearers. An ineffectual attempt was made to induce an existing congregation to alter somewhat their hours of worship; and at length the church in Infirmary Street, where Mr Paxton had been minister, was purchased, and there the congregation assembled till 1853, when the Music Hall in George Street was obtained. This was in many respects a comfortable place of meeting; but it was not suitable as a “Sabbath Home,” and efforts were made to obtain a site for a permanent structure. Of course, nearness to the former parish was felt to be the first requisite; but at least five or six situations on the High Street, or on the northern slope of the Old Town, were successively selected, examined by an architect, and abandoned. With great reluctance, one in St Andrew Square was finally adopted, and it was occupied by the congregation on 16th May 1858. Considering the difficulties of the site, Mr Bryce, the architect, might be said to be successful; but many ol the congregation were much inconvenienced.
The style of Dr Tweedie’s discourses could not be called flowing oratory, but he stated the truths which he himself believed with clearness and force. Every hearer knew that the preacher was in earnest, and that it behoved him to be in earnest as well. He rarely addressed the congregation without having written what he said. He never preached a sermon to his people a second time; although the sermon may have been the same, he invariably re-wrote it, assigning as his reason for this, that his people ought to have his freshest thoughts, and that in writing again he thus gave any new views, or even new expressions, which had occurred to him. His sermons were clear expositions of Scripture, searching delineations of character, and telling addresses to the consciences of his hearers. The illustrations drawn from natural objects and from books gave force to his doctrinal statements.
He had classes for the instruction of the young, and his conversations with intending communicants, while tender and skilful, were unusually faithful and searching, and were specially owned of God in preparing for the solemn step in life which they contemplated. For several years he held a meeting in his house for students every Saturday evening, which was largely attended, and was greatly valued by many who now occupy important positions in the ministry, both at home and abroad. In the Kirk-session and Deacons’ Court, his clear and large views of the business transacted at the meetings promoted the success of every undertaking and the solution of every difficulty. His frank address and his friendly consideration of those with whom he came into contact, tempered the differences of opinion which are so ready to occur in the intercourse of life.
Dr Tweedie’s writings form an important part of his life-work. He had the love of writing, and the power of writing. His works were numerous, and, if not profound or exhaustive, led on the reader from one step to another in the path of truth and righteousness. Many were especially written for the young, and not a few young men and young women were guided upward in the Christian life by the perusal of these varied volumes. His aim in all his writings was to promote the cause of Christ and the good of souls, and in doing so, he never shrunk from declaring the truth, even although it might be unpalatable.
His correspondence was very extensive. Indeed he delighted to address his friends in this way, and the letters were of a valuable character. They were representative of himself as a Christian friend and instructor, and they supplied the counsel, or comfort, or expostulation that might be respectively suitable. Some people resented this, but many more relished it, and felt grateful. One replied to him, “Write a common-sense letter. When I wish a sermon, I can get one on the other side of the street.” But the same individual, at a later period said, “He was right, and I was wrong.”
Dr Tweedie used conversation for the same purpose for which he made such large and effective use of correspondence. He often spoke a word in the ordinary intercourse of life which arrested the attention of the careless, or gave a spark of light to the downcast His pastoral visitation was systematic and faithful. He addressed himself at once to the important business about which he had come. Even in casually meeting with his people on the street, it was his habit to leave a good word as he passed on. He illustrated well the remark, “A word spoken in season, how good is it!”
He was never a robust man. He often suffered from cough, and this sometimes interfered with his pulpit duties. Other ailments were superadded, and he became infirm. In the summer of 1861 he went with his family to the Continent, and passed several months in Switzerland and Germany, enjoying very much the salubrious climate, and delighting in the varied scenery spread around him. His health was considerably benefited by this sojourn, and he returned home strengthened for his important duties. But he became more easily influenced by atmospheric changes, and his loved work was performed with greater difficulty. He at length became convinced that the services of an assistant or colleague were necessary. He was less sanguine than others as to the issue. He thought the disease had now taken a deeper hold of his body, and that his active working life would probably not be very long; yet he spoke calmly and cheerfully, and in his graceful, dignified manner, acquiesced in the arrangements made and intended for his comfort.
It pleased God to withhold His blessing from the means used for his recovery. His death-bed was a bed of suffering—of very great suffering, with few interruptions. In the early part of it, there were intervals when he was comparatively free from pain, and then his conversation was cheerful as was his wont; but latterly pain and exhaustion gave a sombre hue to all that he said. More than once he declared that he knew whom he had believed, and felt thankful that he had not left till that hour of weakness the grand work of life. He addressed striking admonitions to some of those who were beside him, which they are not likely ever to forget; he gave utterance to his affectionate feelings; he expressed his thankfulness for services rendered to him. To one friend he said, “Be sure that you have Christ.” On one occasion he exclaimed, without reference to anything that had been said either by himself or others, “There is light before the throne.” We cannot tell certainly, but we may imagine what he meant by these words. He was in a dark valley: all was dark except one spot, and that spot was the throne of God and the Lamb. There was light there, and when the valley had been passed through, all was light.
It can be truly said that he bore a life-testimony to the Saviour whom he loved and served. Having dedicated himself to the ministry-—first perhaps, merely as a profession, but afterwards as a heart-work—he gave all his energies of mind and heart to its prosecution. He derived his views of doctrine and of duty from the holy Scriptures; and the written word, as he often said, “led to the Incarnate Word.” He preached the freeness of the gospel invitation to all sinners without exception; but he never lost sight of the grand cardinal truth, that God is supreme, all in all; that man’s salvation originated in the mind of God, and that in the case of each individual soul, it is the grace of God which draws the sinner to Himself. He was not only a bold, uncompromising herald of the heavenly message, but a skilful, painstaking, loving pastor; and in both capacities his ministry was blessed with peculiar success, alike in the awakening and conversion of sinners and in the edification of believers. He never belied his character as a Christian minister, or as a Christian gentleman.
Need it be added that he was emphatically a lover of good men? He cherished such wherever he found them, and co-operated with them in works of faith and labours of love. He was Secretary of the Society for Relief of the Destitute Sick from 1843 t0 his death, and did what he could to promote the success of that admirable association.
Dr Tweedie died on the 24th March 1863 (being survived by Mrs Tweedie, two sons, and three daughters), and on the Saturday following his remains were laid in the Grange Cemetery, not far from the resting-place of his revered and beloved friend Dr Chalmers.
David Waters, M.A., Burghead
Author: James MacDonald, M.A., L.L.D., Edinburgh
Source: Our Church Fathers: being Biographical Sketches of Disruption Fathers in and around the Presbytery of Elgin, page 33
The subject of the present sketch was born at Gothagil in the Parish of Olrig and County of Caithness on the 26th of February, 1793 – the youngest but one, of a family of five sons and five daughters. His father Alexander Waters, or Water as the name appears in the Baptismal Record of the Parish, now preserved in the Register House, Edinburgh, occupied one of several farms situated in a valley of the name just mentioned; another quite close to it being in the possession of William Manson, his wife’s brother.
During the greater part of last century the pulpits of many of the Parish Churches of Caithness, as of Scotland generally, were filled by men whose theology was of a very negative character. Owing to this and still more to the arbitrary exercise of patronage, numerous secessions from the Establishment took place in different parts of the country. The churches thus formed were, however, divided into several separate communions in consequence of differences respecting the power of the Civil Magistrate in matters of religion, the descending obligation of the Covenants – National and Solemn League – and other questions. A congregation in connection with one of these, the General Associate Synod, had been formed in Thurso about 1772. Of this congregation William Manson and his sister, Mrs Waters, became attached members, walking every Sabbath day some five miles for the sake of a purer dispensation of Gospel ordinances than they believed was to be got in the Parish Church, which stood at no great distance from their dwellings. Alexander Waters adhered to the Establishment; and his family, as they grew up and could decide for themselves, were equally divided between it and Dissent. While both parents were sincerely pious and bestowed much pains on the godly upbringing of their family, it was from the mother that David seems to have derived those impressions of Divine things that became deeper with the years till they dominated his life. She appears to have been a woman of much individuality of character some traits of which she transmitted to her youngest son; and, although she died when he was but a boy of eight years old, his recollections of what he owed her were never effaced from his memory.
With most of the members of the Thurso Associate congregation, the duty of “bearing,” to use their own phraseology “testimony for the Covenanted Reformation” was looked upon in the light of a bounden duty. Accordingly when in 1820 two branches of the secession—the General Associate or Anti-Burgher Synod and the Associate or Burgher Synod, were again united after a separation of twenty-one years, the Thurso Church and their minister abstained from joining in the movement, chiefly on the ground that the position of the Civil Magistrate with regard to a national profession of religion as well as his obligations thereto, was not sufficiently recognised in the articles that formed the basis of union; and soon after they connected themselves with the Synod of Original Seceders. Although Mr. Waters remained in the National Church, his sympathies, owing to the respect in which he held his mother’s convictions, were to a considerable extent with the Original Seceders. Thus the controversies that arose among the devout people of Caithness in his youthful days had, we may be sure, no small influence in determining the attitude he took up on kindred questions of ecclesiastical polity and doctrinal significance which he had to face in later years.
Mr. Waters received his education first in the schools of his native parish and then at Tain Academy. After leaving Tain he began to take part in the work of teaching and his success was such that at the early age of 22 he was appointed schoolmaster of Bower. Being allowed, as was customary at the time, to entrust the duties of his office during the winter months to a substitute, he spent these at the University of Edinburgh where be prosecuted his studies in the Faculty of Arts till he graduated M.A. – a distinction much less sought after then than now. Of choice his attention was next drawn to Divinity. At first he appears to have hesitated whether he should enter the Hall of the Church of Scotland or like his cousin and contemporary, Thomas Manson, afterwards of Perth, that of the General Associate Synod; but he finally decided for the former. After three divinity winters spent in Edinburgh and a fourth in Aberdeen, he received license from the Presbytery of Caithness in 1823, continuing, however, to discharge the duties of the public office he still held. As a teacher Mr. Waters’ power of imparting instruction was great and soon brought him much fame. Boys from a distance were attracted to Bower, some of whom were boarded with its schoolmaster. To him, as to few, the work was truly a labour of love, which he delighted to undertake in the interest of deserving lads to the very end of his days. Meantime his pulpit appearances also won him popularity; and in 1825 he was chosen minister of the Chapel of Ease at Burghead.
There is evidence to show that as far back probably as the eighth century of our era, Burghead was a place of importance in the ecclesiastical economy of the North. A church stood there with characteristics of its own, of which more than one trace can still be pointed out. But ere the written history of the district begins, some great disaster overtook the little Christian community on the headland. Their church was laid in ruins and, for reasons about which we can only speculate, was never rebuilt. The superiority, however, of Burghead as a natural breakwater ensured its continuing to be the home of a sea-faring population, and the chief harbour for the sea-borne trade of the surrounding country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had a population of about 400, two thirds of whom were industrious fishermen and their families. In the course of the first two decades of the present century this element in the population was further increased by small colonies brought to it from some of the coast villages of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire. But up to the year 1821 no special provision was made for the spiritual wants of the people, apart from the Parish Church, that of Duffus, distant from it about 4 ½ miles. The day of ecclesiastical rivalry and church extension was only just dawning. In that year, however, the Elgin Presbytery of the now United Associate Church fixed upon it as a mission station and succeeded in getting a place of worship erected. This roused to activity the friends of the Church of Scotland, and within a short time it was also represented at Burghead. The first minister, the Rev. D. Simpson afterwards of Trinity Church, Aberdeen, remained there only a year or so. It was as his successor that Mr. Waters was ordained in 1826. In the discharge of his pastoral duties not less than in preparation for the pulpit, the new minister was conscientious and faithful, and soon drew around him a large congregation. The bulk of the people not only of Burghead but of Hopeman and the western part of the Parish of Duffus attached themselves to his ministry. His preaching, fresh and vigorous, had the true evangelical ring. Diets of catechising were regularly held at stated intervals, by means of which he was brought into close touch with all the members and adherents of his flock. These meetings, which he valued highly, he continued to hold as long as his strength permitted. Indeed he used to regard catechising as even more important than his pulpit work. With his doctrinal views few of the Presbytery of Elgin, as it was then constituted, had much sympathy, and there were one or two of its pulpits that he was never asked to fill. It was otherwise, however, in the neighbouring Presbytery of Forres, several of the congregations in which were familiar with his voice.
Having no seat in the Presbytery, for the Chapel Act of 1835 did not include within its scope such charges as Burghead then was, Mr. Waters was not called on to take a prominent part in the Ten Years’ Conflict. But from its very commencement there could be no doubt which side he would ultimately take. In spite of any bias in favour of State connection, arising from his early training, he was certain to he found among those who were prepared to resist at any personal sacrifice the intrusion of ministers on reclaiming congregations, and the encroachments of the Civil Courts on the spiritual independence of the Church. More than two generations have passed since the Disruption, and not a few of those now grown to manhood may need to be reminded that it was the last of these grievances rather than the first, which directly led to that event. The three leading causes in which the claims of the Church were successfully disputed were those of Auchterarder, Marnoch, and Stewarton. Briefly told, it came to he that in the two first the majority of the General Assembly were virtually ordered, in the last they were actually forbidden to perform acts which they believed to be purely spiritual and on the propriety of which, as they understood the constitution of the Church and its compact with the State, it lay solely within their province to decide. This position was taken up by the Law Courts, on the ground that certain civil requirements, over which they had undoubted control, could in no other way be fulfilled. There was thus a conflict of jurisdictions; and when the Government of the day, misled as to the strength and sincerity of the motives under which the majority of the Church was acting, refused the necessary redress, nearly five hundred ministers, as is well known, and a still larger proportion of lay members of the Church of Scotland left her pale. The consequences of that momentous step have, in more directions than one, been far reaching beyond what could have been contemplated by either the ministers, the legislature, or the people at the time it was taken. But on that subject we cannot enter here.
Soon after the famous Convocation Resolutions of November, 1842, Mr. Waters’ name appeared among the list of signatories. Now-a-days we can hardly realize the feelings of those who had to contemplate the foregoing of advantages they had long prized, and the breaking up of an institution to which they were deeply attached. Valuing the Church of Scotland, however, as much for her evangelical teaching as for her State connection, many of them felt that their course should be determined by practical realities rather than by abstract principles. With Mr. Waters at least this was, we believe, the weight that turned the scale. God in His own time and way would, he doubted not, bring good out of seeming evil. And once taken, the resolve was unflinchingly adhered to. He “went out” along with almost the whole of his large congregation and set himself at once with his usual energy and decision to organize it on its new lines. In little more than a year a commodious church was built, and soon after a manse and schoolhouse. The Rev. Alex. Steele, a probationer of the Church, who taught a school the General Assembly had for some time maintained at Burghead, having also adhered to the Resolutions demitted his office and emigrated to Canada. But the services of an able teacher in connection with the Free Church – Mr. James Baillie – were speedily obtained. Hitherto there had been no Kirk Session at Burghead, and only one of the Duffus Session, John Grigor, Starwood, joined the Free Church. After two elections, the following were chosen as elders and along with John Grigor formed the first Session, viz.: Andrew Anderson, New Duffus; Alexander Anderson, Hopeman; William Sutherland, Hopeman; James Garden, Ruthills; James Shaw, Burghead; John M’Pherson, Hopeman; Donald Davidson, Hopeman; and Francis Brodie, Burghead.
In the Autumn of 1844, Mr. Waters married Elizabeth, daughter of Captain Macpherson, Wick, and found in her a true helpmate. In the Sunday School, in daily visitation of the sick and aged, as in every good work connected with the congregation or the locality, she took an active part; while her presence in the manse made it a centre of all that was bright and hospitable. Her kindness of heart and her good sense secured for her a welcome in the humblest homes. Yet her left hand knew not what her right hand did. Few were aware how greatly she cheered the heart and strengthened the hands of her husband, as old age began to steal upon him with stealthy pace. Of deep but unassuming piety Mrs. Waters was in every respect a most admirable woman.
Endowed with a vigorous physical as well as mental constitution, Mr. Waters continued for many years to make full proof of his ministry. He was seldom absent from his own or some other pulpit or from his place in the Presbytery. At Communion seasons in Dallas, Edinkillie, Inveravon, and other places beyond its bounds, his services were for long much sought after and willingly rendered. To gratify a desire which a part of the fishing population of Burghead and Hopeman had of hearing the Gospel occasionally preached in the Gaelic tongue, Mr. Waters often sought assistance at Sacramental and other opportunities from well known Highland Ministers. It was in this way that the new church came to be opened by the Rev. Mr. Carment, Rosskeen. The obligations thus incurred widened the sphere of his own ministerial labours, but he was never happier than when so engaged.
Hopeman, two miles east of Burghead, has a considerable population most of which belong to the Free Church. For some time it had been acknowledged that there was room for a church there, especially as it would also accommodate those parts of the Parish that were furthest from Burghead. Into the reasonableness of this feeling, Mr. Waters, with rare self denial, fully entered, and a church built in 1858 was soon filled, which continues to prosper under the ministrations of Rev. Mr. Cassie. This new charge lessened for Mr. Waters responsibilities which, though always readily borne, were becoming heavier under the weight of advancing years. But he never ceased to take a lively interest in the well-being of a congregation to many of the members of which he had been so long a spiritual father.
In 1860 the revival movement, that was then spreading like a resistless wave over a portion of Scotland, reached Burghead. Here, by the prudence and tact of Mr. Waters, it was confined, within proper channels. Instead of holding aloof from it on account of certain extravagances, by which its course had sometimes been marked elsewhere, he gave it every encouragement, and sought to direct it aright. “Amongst a people of simple habits and modes of life,” as has been remarked of his action in the circumstances, his “outspoken speech and somewhat abrupt manner told with a force that no other form of appeal could have done. The people felt that Mr. Waters was not a man to be trifled with and that no mere effervescence of feeling without practical result would deceive their sturdy, doughty minister.” He was particularly anxious to guard those influenced by the movement against unsound doctrinal teaching; and his efforts to secure this were unsparing. Two services were held daily for sixteen days running, which, he used to say “were just like so many Sabbaths.”
After Mr. Waters had spent more than fifty years in active ministerial work, it became evident to himself and others that a colleague and successor ought to be given him. Accordingly in 1877 the Rev. R. Niven was unanimously elected. The choice proved a happy one – both for the venerable pastor and his people. During the ten years their connection lasted, the relations between the senior and the junior colleague were of the most harmonious kind, the former occasionally occupying the pulpit after he had reached his 90th year. Notwithstanding this great age his “natural force” was but little abated. He had now more leisure, much of which was given to the reading and study of the Scriptures in the original tongues. Reference has already been made to the innate love he had for his first profession. Years were powerless to quench it. He continued to seek out boys of promising talents and start them on those paths of learning, which had led not a few of his former proteges to positions, that, but for his disinterested kindness they would likely never have reached. To the last he retained the use of all his faculties except that of hearing. This “good man” died on the 31st of March, 1887, at the age of 94 – the oldest minister at that time in the ranks of the Free Church, although junior in point of ordination to the late Dr. Beith, Stirling, but to him only. Mrs. Waters survived him five years.
Mr. Waters’ theology was that of the fathers of the Scottish Reformation and the Puritan Divines, as expressed in the Confession of Faith and other formularies of our Presbyterian Churches. He loved to walk in the old paths, steadfastly refusing to admit that any deviations from them could be safely made. The reaction against a cold morality, to which so great a momentum was given by the preaching of Andrew Thomson and Thomas Chalmers, caught him in its sweep; and the simplicities of the Gospel of Christ were the chief theme of his pulpit addresses. With him the authority of every line, nay of every letter, of Scripture was supreme. Expediency was a word which had no place in his vocabulary; what he once laid down as right remained for him right for all time. Even in secular matters his mind was of a very conservative cast, refusing to sanction any move till the path of duty became perfectly clear. If like every “mere man” he had his failings, they were counter-balanced by many noble qualities. His character as a man may be very briefly summed up: he was a sincere and devout Christian. More it is unnecessary to say here, except perhaps that this did not prevent his giving full play to some peculiarities of temperament. He had a large store of quaint sayings, which he could introduce most happily when the occasion suited, as well as a great fund of humour, which, however, when at its best was apt to run in a caustic vein. Much of the humour was original; the sayings were for the most part assimilated from those of men in a humble sphere of life, by the expressiveness of which he had from time to time been struck. But he was ever most careful to comport himself in word and deed as became the dignity of his office, mindful of the apostolic injunction: “Be instant in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long suffering and doctrine.”
REV. ANGUS J. WATSON, M.Α.
Author: The Editor
Source: The Monthly Record of the Free Church, July, 1904, page 314
With sincere unqualified regret we this month record the death of Mr. Angus Watson, the minister of Lochgilphead U.F. Church. Alone he stood, the one man whom all who loved the truth and enjoyed the ministrations of a spiritually-minded preacher, grudged and grudged sorely to the U.F. Church. We loved him well, but his Master loved him more, and has taken him home to be with Himself.
Mr. Watson was a native of Ross-shire, and was educated in Alness. He was a first-class student and a great preacher. His first charge was at Glenelg, and thence he was transferred in 1896 to Lochgilphead. When the disaster of 1900 came he had not clearness, but believing he would best serve the cause of his Master that way he entered the U.F. Church under cover of a special protest. His own explanation of his attitude to one of ourselves was that he was not very far in “only at the cheek of the door”. His time he felt was to be short, and he desired to know one thing only among his people. Opportunities for meeting him after 1900 were few, but sometimes our paths crossed in correspondence and by the way. The memory of Mr. Watson will ever be sweet. The sermons he preached and the table addresses he delivered in Milton Church will not be forgotten by some who heard them. He would not discuss the doctrine of the destiny of the lost save in the light of the Atonement – surely a deep, profound, spiritual utterance. He “repeated himself” as he discoursed on “the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal.” Above all the discourse on a Communion Sabbath evening – on “More than Conquerors” – remains in its high doctrine of the believers oneness with Christ, the noblest pulpit utterance heard from one of the younger generation.
Strange that a preacher whom the Church needed so much should have been cut short in the midst of his years! But those who knew and loved him best saw long ago that thus it would be. At 40 Angus Watson’s working day was over, and as the evening congregations dispersed in the peaceful Argyllshire town on Sabbath 5th June, his spirit escaped from prison, and he entered into the joy of his Lord. A few weeks before the end Mr. Watson sent for his life-long friend, the Rev. J. Kennedy Cameron, Brodick. To him he revealed all that was in his heart concerning the public cause. The night was closing in but the traveller had some things to say concerning the latter stages of his journey ere silence fell. What these things were belongs to him into whose ears they were uttered. Enough for us that they in Lochgilphead have had a long experience of rich gospel teaching. What is to be the result of it all?
David Welsh
Author: Rev. William Wilson, D.D., Dundee
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 489
David Welsh
David, the youngest of twelve children of the family, was born on the 11th December 1793, at Braefoot, in the parish of Moffat. The farm-house in which this event took place stands at the head of a deep dell, near the source of the Annan. It is in the midst of a purely pastoral country, and his parents, who were both eminently pious, belonged to the class of intelligent gentlemen-farmers. Their youngest son was named after the sweet singer of Israel, and from this circumstance, as well as from their devoted religious character, we may believe that he was specially consecrated from his infancy to the service of God. At a comparatively early period of his life, his father surrendered all charge of his worldly affairs into the hands of his sons, and retired to spend the evening of his days in Moffat, where he died in 1825, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God.
In his early years David attended the parish school of Moffat, to which he rode daily a distance of three miles, and enjoyed besides, the services of a competent tutor at home, the Rev. Mr McWhir, who became afterwards minister at Urr in Galloway, and was distinguished for his zeal and manifold labours. In his thirteenth year he was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, which he attended for one year as a pupil of Dr Carson. In the year following he entered the University of Edinburgh, in which he regularly passed through the Arts classes. In the third year of his course he became the pupil, as afterwards the intimate friend, and ultimately the biographer, of Dr Brown, then the Professor of Moral Philosophy. He early shewed a decided predilection for the science of logic and psychology. It was this which brought him into such intimate relationship with Dr Brown, and distinguished him as a student, although in the prosecution of his studies in mental science he departed very widely from the method of his instructors, and became an ardent advocate of phrenology, of which he continued to be a disciple to the end of his life.
In November 1811, when he was in his seventeenth year, he entered the Divinity Hall, and devoted himself with peculiar ardour to those studies by which he was to prepare himself for the work of the ministry, and which were so congenial to the taste and habits of mind of a youth of ardent piety. While prosecuting these studies, he also acted as the private tutor of Alexander Dunlop, who afterwards earned such merited distinction as one of the Disruption Worthies; and this connection resulted in a life-long friendship, which was mutually pleasant and profitable. During his theological course he attended the ministry of Dr Andrew Thomson, which could hardly fail to have a stimulating effect upon him, and to aid in moulding those ecclesiastical views, of which he became such an earnest promoter.
In 1816 he was licensed as a preacher of the gospel by the Presbytery of Lochmaben. He was not ordained as a minister till 1821. His father had been advised to purchase a presentation for him, but declined, saying— “I gave him up to God twenty years ago, and in His hands I will leave him.” Mr Welsh’s ecclesiastical and political views were alike hostile to his obtaining the favour of patrons of parishes; but, in 1820, Sir Alexander Gordon, for the good of the parish, so far overcame his political predilections, as to present him to the parish of Crossmichael, of which he became the minister in March 1821.
He at once set himself with great zeal and vigour, and with eminent success, to the work of the ministry. In prosecuting that work, he laboured under very considerable disadvantages. He had a weak chest, and preaching was always to him an oppressive labour. He had little facility of utterance, and his bodily frame was but ill fitted to endure the laborious fatigue of his pastoral duties. Notwithstanding, he soon came to be beloved by his congregation, and to be known over all the district as a preacher of singular power. The publication by him in 1825, moreover, of a life of Dr Brown, made him known in all literary and scientific circles as a man of extensive reading, of cultivated taste, of sound and acute judgment, and of searching and discriminating analytical power. At this period of his history, the following quotation from his diary will let us see in what frame of mind his work was carried on, and wherein lay the secret of his power:—
It was not to be expected that a minister of Mr Welsh’s accomplishments and power, especially at such a time in the history of the Church of Scotland, should be permitted to remain in the seclusion of Crossmichael; and accordingly, in 1827, the congregation of St David’s, Glasgow, which was then vacant, recommended him to the Town Council of the city for presentation to that parish. This they were induced to do mainly on the recommendation of Dr Brown, of St John’s Parish, who, as former minister at Tongland, had been a co-presbyter of Mr Welsh. The Town Council acted on the recommendation, and Mr Welsh, having accepted the presentation, was translated to Glasgow, to the deep regret of all his congregation, and with a sore wrench to his own tender nature. “The tie that connected us together,” he said, “was of the closest and most endearing nature, though I never knew with what strength it mutually bound us till it came to be broken.”
Mr Welsh engaged in the work of his city charge with all the faithful diligence and ardour which had characterised his previous ministry, although now the field of his operations was greatly enlarged. Besides the duties of his parish and congregation, he could not fail to encourage every philanthropic scheme for the good of his fellow-citizens. His interest in the cause of education was peculiarly active and intelligent, and, in conjunction with David Stow, and others like-minded, he contributed greatly to extend the means of education in the city, particularly in setting up infant schools for the training of the young. He was in labours most abundant, too much so, indeed, for his weak bodily frame; and although he was daily growing in the affectionate esteem of his congregation, and in his influence for good in the community at large, it became evident that he could not long endure the strain upon his physical strength.
This formed at least one powerful inducement to him to accept the offer made to him by the Government of the day, to accept the Chair of Church History in the University of Edinburgh, to which he was appointed in October 1831, and he entered upon his work as professor in November following. The year before leaving Glasgow, he was united in marriage to the sister of Mr William Hamilton, Provost of Glasgow at the time of his translation from Crossmichael, and on the occasion of his removal to Edinburgh he received the degree of D.D. from the Glasgow University.
By the students of the Theological Hall in the University of Edinburgh his appointment was hailed with universal delight, and short as was his time for preparation, he got through the labour of his first session with great credit and acceptance. His work as professor was very congenial to his tastes, and he grew more and more in successive years in the esteem of his students and of all who knew him. His tenderly affectionate nature, notwithstanding his peculiar shyness and reserve, drew their hearts towards him, and the high tone and ability of his prelections commanded their respect. The spirit that animated him in the duties of his class, will appear from the following record of his aims: “To set apart one hour every Saturday for prayer for my students. To make a study, as opportunity presents, of the passages of Scripture that relate to my duties as a teacher, and to the duties of the young. To add to my resolutions, from time to time, as new light shines. In looking at a student, ask, How can I do him good? or, Have I ever done him good?”
So long as he could resist the pressure of higher obligations, Dr Welsh devoted himself exclusively to the business of his class, refusing all solicitations to engage in other work, and refusing even to preach except on rare occasions. The time, however, was hastening on which constrained him to depart from this rigid rule. He had never been an ecclesiastic; but ecclesiastical questions of high moment were pressing to the front, and his sense of duty was such that he could not avoid taking part in them. From the time when he became a professor till his death, he was a member of the General Assembly. He was one of the comparatively few at that time who regarded the total abolition of Patronage as necessary for the wellbeing of the Church, and in the Assembly 1833 made his first speech on that subject. Notwithstanding some slight hesitation in manner, he spoke with admirable effect, although at the close of the debate only thirty-two voted along with him.
Dr Welsh was not present at the Assembly 1834, which passed the Veto Act, having gone with his family to reside at Bonn, but he heartily approved of what was done. In that year also he published a volume of sermons on practical subjects, which amply sustained the reputation he had acquired as a preacher of the gospel. From this time forward he felt himself under obligation to take a larger share than hitherto in the general business of the Church. He never, indeed, became a prominent leader in public discussions, whether in the General Assembly or in public meetings. His physical infirmities were a barrier to his efforts in that direction. “But he joined,” Mr Dunlop tells us, “in the consultations and exertions of the time, contributing much, by his judgment and prudence, to the wisdom of the counsels adopted, and cheering all by his confident spirit of reliance on the righteousness of the cause, whatever the immediate issue might be.”
The Ten Years’ Conflict had begun. It is not our part here to speak of its successive stages, but during its progress, Dr Welsh, in several departments of Christian work, was busily and profitably engaged. In 1838 he was appointed Vice-Convener of the Colonial Committee, and in 1841 became Convener. From the time of his appointment, he infused a new and vigorous spirit into the work of the Committee, and not a few of our expatriated countrymen owe to him the blessing of a faithful ministry among them. His eye was upon every emigrant seaport, and he made it his business to infuse students, probationers, and ministers, with a desire to devote themselves to the service of God in the colonies.
About the same time, on the abolition of the monopoly for printing the Bible, Dr Welsh was made Secretary of the Bible Board in Scotland, and upon him chiefly devolved the responsibility of securing that the editions of the Bible issued by several publishers were in conformity with the authorized version. His aptitude, intelligence, and zeal were also conspicuously manifested in the duties of this office, of which the Government of 1843 had the discredit of depriving him, because of his having cast in his lot with the Free Church.
In 1842 he was Moderator of the General Assembly, perhaps the most momentous Assembly ever held by the Church of Scotland in connection with the State, and on him it devolved to preside at the opening of the Assembly 1843. Never, perhaps, was a man of such humility and modesty as Dr Welsh placed in a position of such conspicuous eminence. But he proved himself fit for the occasion. The crisis seemed to inspire him with new life and vigour, and nerved him to powerful and eloquent speech. His sermon in the High Church—from the text, Rom. 14:5, “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind”—thrilled through every heart, and when he took the chair in St Andrew’s Church, in which the Assembly met, the crowded audience gazed upon him in breathless silence. Mr Dunlop says;—
The Protest being read, Dr Welsh left the Chair, followed by a procession of ministers and elders who constituted a majority of the Assembly, to the amazement of many incredulous statesmen and others, and in conformity with the glad expectation of the great body of the religious people of Scotland. Dr Welsh constituted the Free Church Assembly in Tanfield Hall, after which Dr Chalmers was called to the Chair, and presided over its deliberations. Dr Welsh, however, was enabled to take part in its proceedings, and amazed those who knew him best, by the freedom and fluency with which he spoke, and by the gladsome spirit with which he was animated.
The branch of the Church’s business, which was specially committed to him, was Education in all its departments. As Convener of the Committee appointed on this subject, the Free Church owes to him, in great measure, the noble library of the New College, as well as the stately building which contains it; and to him also the Church is to a considerable extent indebted for the normal and elementary schools which have been conducted with so much success.
But his manifold and distinguished labours were now drawing to a close. He was able at the Assembly 1844 to attend only a few of the sederunts, and in the November following, when he had commenced the labours of his class, he was able to continue in them only for a few weeks. He retired to Drumfork House, near Helensburgh, on the estate of his brother-in-law, so soon as the weather permitted, but his health did not improve. He was subject to violent spasms of pain, which he bore with great fortitude and resignation. On the last day of his life, the 24th April 1845, he was able to take a drive, and was more cheerful than usual. “After dinner he slept for a little, leaning his head on the table. On his waking up, Mrs Welsh began, as usual, to read occasionally a verse or two from the Bible. She read Isaiah 61:10, ‘I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with jewels.’ He turned the passage, as was his wont, into a fervent prayer; and, in a few moments afterwards, stretching out his arms, he passed into the presence of his God and Saviour.”
John Wilson, D.D., F.R.S.
Author: Rev. J. Murray Mitchell, D.D., Edinburgh
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 497
John Wilson
John Wilson was born at Lauder, in Berwickshire, on the 11th December 1804. He received his early education at his native town; from which he proceeded to Edinburgh University, passing through the usual curriculum in the Arts classes to the Theological Hall. Mr Wilson threw himself with ardour into the various subjects of study which the College and Hall successively presented. Probably the special bent of his mind was towards the Natural History sciences. In these, especially Zoology and Geology, he took through life a deep interest. But his mind was wonderfully comprehensive; he rapidly accumulated knowledge of all kinds, and seldom lost what he once acquired.
His interest in missionary work, which began early, deepened in his progress through the Hall. Towards the end of his theological course he published a life of John Eliot, the great North-American missionary. He was one of the founders—if not indeed the founder—of the Missionary Society in the Edinburgh Hall; and an earnest address, which he delivered to the members on the subject so dear to his heart, was given to the public.
He had by this time been accepted as a candidate by the Scottish Missionary Society, a catholic institution, founded in 1796, which received support from the Evangelical party in the Established Church, as well as from other bodies in Scotland.
He was ordained by the Presbytery of Lauder in June 1828. Soon after, he was married to Margaret, daughter of the Rev. Kenneth Bayne of Greenock—a woman remarkable in many respects, highly gifted, highly cultivated, and entirely devoted to the great Master’s service. The marriage ceremony was performed by Dr Andrew Thomson on the 12th August, and on the 30th of the same month Mr and Mrs Wilson sailed from Newhaven to London, on their way to Western India.
The American Mission, after much opposition on the part of Government, had commenced operations at Bombay in the end of 1814. The Scottish Missionary Society turned its attention to the great continent of India in 1822. The Society was by no means wanting in comprehensiveness of plan; and among other reasons for selecting the Presidency of Bombay, they mentioned its contiguity to Persia—to which they hoped to send missionaries. The Rev. Donald Mitchell, the first agent of the Society, reached Bombay in 1823—Messrs John Cooper, James Mitchell, Alexander Crawford, and John Stevenson following speedily after. Of this band of honoured men, Mr Cooper yet survives, “still bringing forth fruit in old age.” Mr Robert Nesbit joined them in September 1827. Mr and Mrs Wilson reached Bombay in February 1829. They speedily proceeded to a village in the Southern Konkan, that they might learn the Marathi language without distraction; and, having made rapid progress, they began their missionary labours at Bombay in the November following.
Even then Bombay was a large city—about as large as Edinburgh and Leith put together are now; and it contained a truly remarkable assemblage of races and creeds. Mr Wilson, with his usual quickness of eye, surveyed the entire field. The American Mission, and one or two agents of the Church Missionary Society, were labouring with all fidelity among the Hindus. Not neglecting them—nay, with his zealous wife’s assistance, planting schools for males and females wherever he could find an entrance—he was deeply moved by the spiritual destitution of the Mohammadans and Parsis. Mr and Mrs Wilson were heartily aided, in their efforts to arouse the people, by a band of Christian friends, among whom, without disparaging other excellent men, we may single out the late Dr Smyttan, and Messrs R. C. Money, J. Farish, and R. T. Webb, of the Bombay Civil Service, as specially remarkable. Mr Wilson was incessantly engaged in lecturing, preaching, writing, publishing. In 1830, along with two other friends, he established a monthly periodical called the Oriental Christian Spectator; a valuable repository of information on Indian literature and missions. He also took extensive missionary tours. Having acquired the Marathi language, he next learned Gujarati and Hindustani; and, following the example of his learned colleague, Stevenson—who early studied Sanskrit, and published a portion of the Rig Veda with a translation, before Rosen’s celebrated “Specimen” had come out-—he made progress in the far-famed holy tongue of the Brahmans. He then attacked the enigmatical Zend, which the distinguished savant Burnouf had just begun to elucidate; and he was able to discuss, at least on equal terms, with the Parsi priests, the meaning of the Zendavesta.
Mrs Wilson died in 1835—a most grievous blow to her husband and the whole mission. Her Memoir, compiled by her husband, is one of the best of missionary biographies. About Mrs Wilson’s letters, which make up a great part of the book, there is an indescribable charm. Two of Mrs Wilson’s sisters—Anna and Hay Bayne—soon after her death proceeded to Bombay at Dr Wilson’s earnest request, and were a great comfort to him in his solitude. Both of them were highly gifted and devoted women. The younger sister became the wife of the saintly Robert Nesbit.
The same year, in the month of August, the three Scottish missionaries then labouring in West India—Messrs James Mitchell, Nesbit, and Wilson —were received as agents of the Established Church of Scotland. Mr Wilson had been the moving spirit in making the application, which was most heartily agreed to.
In the year 1836 Mr Wilson received the degree of D.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
Mr Alexander Duff, the General Assembly’s first missionary, had reached Calcutta in May 1830; and the marvellous success of his educational efforts had stimulated the desire that a seminary on the model of his should be set up in Western India. Mr Wilson did all that he could attempt single-handed to conduct such a school; and by the end of 1838, when the Mission was reinforced by Mr Nesbit’s return from the Cape, and Mr Murray Mitchell‘s arrival from Scotland, the General Assembly’s Institution was fully organized. It was numerously attended by Parsis; but the baptism of two Parsi pupils (now the Rev. Messrs Hormazdji Pestonji and Dhanjibhai Nauroji) speedily shook the school to its foundations. The attendance, from being nearly three hundred, fell at once to forty-five; and these were nearly all Portuguese. Of the very few Hindus who remained, one was Narayan Sheshadri; who said he could safely do so, as he was determined the missionaries should never catch him in their net!
Dr Wilson now commenced a series of lectures, which, in the end of 1842, he published in a volume of fully six hundred pages, entitled, “The Parsi Religion.” This was the most elaborate work on the Zoroastrian system that had appeared since Hyde had given to the world his celebrated treatise, De Veteri Religione Persarum.
Dr Wilson sailed for Europe early in January 1843, accompanied by Mr Dhanjibhai Nauroji; travelled through the Holy Land; and reached Scotland soon after the great Disruption. No one had watched with deeper anxiety the sore struggle which the Church had been called to pass through. No one more firmly held the great principle of spiritual independence. He lost no time in signifying his hearty adherence to the Church of the Disruption; he rejoiced and gave thanks to God that, on this deeply important question, all the missionaries of the Church, whether to Gentiles or Jews, were of the same mind; and he took part at home in explaining and vindicating the position assumed by the Free Church. He accompanied Dr Candlish into England; and at Oxford, in particular, in presence of a somewhat critical audience, he preached on the spiritual glory of the Church of Christ and its inalienable freedom. Dr Wilson often mentioned with great gusto his delight at the answer given by one of the boatmen when he landed at Dover. He had asked the man, “Any news about the Church of Scotland?” “They’re all out, sir,” was the reply; and to Dr Wilson they were thrilling words. “My mind,” he used to say, “was made up; I would have gone out although I had only had half a dozen associates.” It is right to add that, while strongly attached to the Presbyterian form of Church government, and to the Free Church, Dr Wilson was a man of truly catholic sympathies, and ever ready to co-operate in all good works with men of evangelical sentiments. He heartily favoured the Evangelical Alliance, and he took his share in preparing the way for a great confederation or alliance—the doctor himself called it a consociation—of Presbyterian Churches in India. On the question of the union of the Free Church with the Reformed Presbyterian and United Presbyterian bodies, Dr Wilson sided with the majority of his own Church.
Passing rapidly over the time he remained in Scotland, during which he was mainly occupied with the composition of an elaborate work on the “Lands of the Bible,” we find Dr Wilson back at his post in Bombay by November 1847. In 1846, he had married as his second wife Miss Isabella Dennistoun—an admirable woman, simply and earnestly devoted to the work of God. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society during his residence at home, as he had been made President of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society during the latter part of his residence in India.
The next ten years of Dr Wilson’s life passed over without anything very remarkable taking place. He was as active in mind and body as before, assisting in the revision of the translations of Scripture, gathering acquaintance with the aboriginal tribes, and promoting every religious and philanthropic effort in the western capital. The great Mutiny occurred in 1857; and since then the main literary occupation of Dr Wilson has been the preparation of a very full, elaborate work on Caste, which he was led to take up by his conviction that caste-prejudices were closely connected with the outbreak. But his pen was never idle. He published a careful résumé of the efforts of the Bombay Government to suppress infanticide, and several Memoirs on the remarkable cave-temples of Western India. In the new and exceedingly important step taken for the advancement of education, in the establishment of three great Universities in India, Dr Wilson took a deep interest; and by-and-by he received the honour of being appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay.
Years passed on, and Dr Wilson had attained quite a patriarchal position in Bombay. He connected a present and past that were in many respects strangely contrasted. No man had more acquaintance with India as it was; and no man had so much with India as it is. His knowledge of Western India, in particular, with its endless complexity of tribes and dialects and customs, was perfectly marvellous. He became an authority superior to all others on any question connected with the native races. In his judgment as well as in his knowledge, both Government and the public could repose the most entire confidence. He was by no means a mere scholar; he was a man of great practical sagacity. In the dark and trying times of the Mutiny—darker and more trying than any one who was not then in India can possibly understand—Dr Wilson was an invaluable counsellor to Government. Lord Elphinstone, who proved, under God, a ruler equal to the terrible emergency, often sought his sympathy and advice; and never did so in vain.
The applications made to him for information, for advice, were endless, and would have worn out any ordinary man’s patience; but he hardly seemed to look upon the tax as unreasonable. To every one who came to him, whether European or Asiatic, he was uniformly kind, accessible obliging. The feeling of regard entertained for him was beautifully witnessed in 1868, when a sum of 21,000 rupees was contributed by the Bombay community to form the Wilson Memorial, the interest being drawn by Dr Wilson during his life, and the capital being devoted, according to his own suggestion, to the endowment of a chair of Comparative Philology in the Bombay University.
The death of his excellent wife in 1867 had been a very sore affliction, though his niece, Miss Taylor, did all she could to minister to his comfort.
In 1870 he was called home by the Church to fill the Moderator’s chair. We do not require to tell our readers how well he did his part. Courteous, conciliatory, dignified, with a ready tact that seldom failed in doing and saying the right thing, he was one of the best of Moderators. During the months that followed the Assembly, he did much to advance the cause of missions. If not an eloquent, he was a winning advocate. His powers of persuasion were great; and he seemed to draw to himself the hearts of all.
Since his return to India, with the infirmities of age becoming too serious to be any longer doubted even by himself, his error was that he continued to attempt too much. Doubtless by so doing he wore himself out too soon. We often thought of a remark which Dr Candlish once made regarding the venerable Dr Gordon: “It is far more important that he should live ten years than that he should do any work.” But the veteran would work on in spite of entreaties, till he has fallen at his post.
One of his letters, dated 18th April 1875, thus refers to the death of his sister-in-law, Miss Bayne: “How few of my early friends now remain on earth! and how many of them have gone to heaven before me! May ‘ upwards and onwards’ be more and more my watchword !”
On June 18th he wrote:—
The last letter we received from him is dated November 1, 1875:—
After this, “he fell by leaps,” as Mr Beaumont expresses it. The day before his death he said to a friend, “I have perfect peace, and am content that the Lord should do what may seem good to Hun.” He died without much suffering on 1st December. He has passed away: but neither the Church nor India ever can forget him.
Dr Wilson has left two sons. The elder is the accomplished author of “The Abode of Snow,” and other works. The younger, who studied medicine, has long been in shattered health.
The following resolution of the Senate will shew the estimate in which Dr Wilson’s services are held by the University of Bombay:—
William Wilson, D.D.
Author: Rev. John Macpherson, Dundee
Source: Disruption Worthies: A Memorial of 1843, page 505
William Wilson
Dr Wilson was born in the parish of Westruther, Berwickshire, in the year 1808. As in the case of most of our eminent men, the foundations of his education were laid in the parish school.
The winter of 1825-26 saw him enter the Edinburgh University, where he prosecuted his studies with the energy and success that never fail to command the respect alike of fellow-student and teacher. With intellectual powers of the higher order and a rare capacity for work, the Westruther student could occupy no mean place. One can easily imagine with what infinite zest, tempered with method and the self-restraint of a well-ordered mind, he would pursue his curriculum. In the Divinity Hall, four years later, he sat at the feet of Chalmers, Welsh, and Brunton. How far he profited by the rare lights of sanctified genius he then enjoyed, and how far he succeeded in grasping the grand, clear, profound Christian philosophy, which can only be superseded when something nobler, or truer, or anywise better appears, of which the present somewhat murky theological horizon affords not even a prophetic ray, let his own subsequent career as a preacher and a master in Israel testify.
The sympathies of the student were wholly with the Evangelical party in the Church. He was one of a band of young men who, fearing the Lord, met often for fellowship in the truth. Meeting at half-past six on Saturday mornings in what was called the Exegetical Society, such young men as Robert M. McCheyne, Horatius Bonar and his brother Andrew, Alexander Somerville, George Smeaton, Henry Moncreiff, Walter Wood, William Wilson, and others of a kindred spirit, gave themselves to the study of the Word of God and prayer, little dreaming they were then sharpening swords soon to be employed in one of the noblest battles for the independence of the Church and the crown-rights of her Divine Head, this age, or for that matter, any age has witnessed.
Licensed by the Presbytery of Earlston in 1833, the young preacher boldly launched forth as an evangelical divine, a teacher of the ancient Gospel in its purity; and to venture out on the troubled sea of that period, in the primitive craft in which the apostolic fishermen of Galilee prosecuted the first Christian voyage, demanded no little courage. To raise the simple banner of the doctrines of grace at that time was to provoke, in many quarters, opposition, and odium, and scorn. But it was the fearless bearing of this cross that made the Disruption men the heroes they were, that made the Disruption the great fact it was, and gave the young Free Church that apostolic fervour, purity, and spiritual power, which was her truest glory.
From 1835 to 1837, Mr Wilson held the important position of bearing aloft the evangelical banner of that period, the well-known Scottish Guardian, of which he was editor. It was with no trembling hand the standard bearer carried the flag. A non-intrusionist of his calibre, and standing so well to the front as he did, could not expect favours from quarters where the proud but mean spirit of patronage reigned. So, when he became minister of Carmylie, it was not by the grace of the Crown, which then held the patronage of that parish. For the man with the non-intrusion banner in his hand to become the favoured child of patronage would have been a kind of miracle. Mr Wilson entered Carmylie as its minister in a more excellent way. Under the jus devolutum, the Presbytery of Arbroath, in compliance with a petition from the parishioners presented him, and he was ordained in 1837.
The movement that preceded and prepared the way for the Disruption was, beyond dispute, a great spiritual awakening. The grace that settled in a man’s soul the question of his entire subordination in heart and conscience to his Lord and Saviour, of necessity also settled in the mind of the same intelligent inquirer the question of the Church’s independence, and Christ’s sovereignty, absolute and undivided, in His Church and over her. The minister of Carmylie threw himself with energy and ardour into the twofold work of seeking the emancipation of the souls of men from sin and of the Church from the fetters that were being riveted upon her.
The Disruption came and Mr Wilson found himself without church or manse. Refused a site, denied the liberty of public worship on a single square yard of ground in the parish, the only place of meeting left the minister and his people was the highway. The time had come when, in many a parish, the people, loyal to their Divine Head, were content to worship with the heavens for a canopy, and surrounding nature for a cloud of witnesses. In Carmylie, the conflict was peculiarly severe. The minister was compelled to seek a lodging in East Haven, some seven miles distant from the sphere of his labours. Week after week, in sunshine and in storm, in the pelting rain, in the piercing east “haar,” in season and out of season, he trudged those weary miles, prosecuting his ministry with indomitable courage and undoubted success. Nor were the faithful adherents of the Free Church cause found wanting. The farmer of Mains of Carmylie, boldly defying the powers that were, heroically risked his lease by permitting the congregation to erect its tent on one of his fields. In the same spirit of fearless independence, this noble-hearted elder gave up his dwelling-house to the homeless minister, contented himself with his own household to lodge in the barn. For a period the minister and his people were driven from post to pillar, now worshipping in a tent here, anon in a barn yonder, and again in a wooden shed, often on one Sabbath not knowing where they should assemble the next. At length, to Christian endurance fell the victory. Sites were granted; a church and a manse were built, and the heroic struggle reached a happy close.
Those who remember Mr Wilson’s preaching at that period, speak of it with enthusiasm. Such as have only seen him in the cool discharge of official routine, or heard him calmly reading one of his clear, terse, weighty discourses, could not easily imagine the outbursting energy, the vehemence, the fire, with which he preached in those days. In regard to his church warfare, it will be sufficient to quote the words of a parishioner. “Oor minister,” said he, “can haud the gully o’er the dyke tae ony o’ them.” This witness was true.
Translated to Dundee in 1848, he became minister of the Mariners’ church, afterwards named St Paul’s. Under his ministry the congregation flourished remarkably, its membership increasing well-nigh threefold. A handsome new church was erected, and a congregation embracing not a little of the intelligence and influence of the town gathered and consolidated.
Of the many services rendered by the minister of St Paul’s to the Free Church and the cause of the Gospel in Scotland, not the least important were his labours as Convener of the Home Mission Committee. To this office he was appointed in 1863, and for ten years discharged its onerous duties, with admirable tact, untiring energy, and much success.
In 1870, the Church conferred upon him her highest honour by raising him to the Moderator’s Chair; and in 1870, he received the degree of D.D. from the University of Edinburgh. It is hardly necessary to remark in passing, that Dr Wilson discharged the duties of Moderator with perfect dignity and efficiency. Those who attended the opening services of the Assembly in 1867, will readily recall an incident, too impressive to be ever forgotten. The retiring Moderator, Dr Wilson, was in the midst of a sermon characterised by wonted lucidity and weight of statement, and a more than ordinary freshness and point, when suddenly a shrill cry was heard, and Dr Clason, the venerable Clerk of Assembly, was seen to throw up his hand and fall backwards on his seat, as if dead. A thrill of deepest solemnity passed through the audience, while the preacher paused, and several members of the court hastened to raise the prostrated form of the aged minister upon their shoulders and carry him out. It was the beginning of the end, the work of a faithful servant of the Church had reached its close. The Master found him at his post, and called him up higher, from the assembly on earth, to the general assembly and church of the first-born in heaven. In the intense excitement produced by this incident the man who seemed most calm and self-possessed was the preacher. Resuming his discourse, he proceeded to fulfil the solemn duties of the office and the hour in a manner befitting the occasion and the scene.
In 1868, Dr Wilson was elected by the General Assembly to the office of Junior Clerk, and in 1877, he was with entire unanimity and cordiality appointed Secretary to the Sustentation Fund Committee, of which he is also Joint-Convener. This rendered necessary his retiring from the pastorate of St Paul’s, Dundee; but he is still minister emeritus of that congregation. His removal to Edinburgh was the occasion of deep regret to his numerous friends in Dundee, and indeed to the entire community, by whom he was held in high respect. As natural and appropriate tokens of grateful appreciation of his many invaluable services, two presentations were made to him at this time, one in Edinburgh by friends of the Church generally, the other by his friends in Dundee, where he had exercised his ministry and served the Church and cause of Christ with so much ability and success for well-nigh a whole generation.
Among his literary efforts, his last and most important work is the Memoir of Dr Candlish, his long and close intimacy with that great and good man giving him a peculiar title and fitness to discharge the office of biographer.
Possessing gifts of an order solid rather than brilliant, an intellect strong and clear, robust common sense, far-seeing sagacity, a judicial faculty of rare soundness, immense capacity for work, uncommon firmness of purpose and power of endurance, Dr Wilson, as a loyal servant of the Church, a judicious counsellor in her times of trouble, a man of affairs proficient in the silence that is golden, as well as the speech that is silvern, an indefatigable worker in the vineyard, a valiant soldier of the truth, and a hearty lover of his country, has spent a long and laborious life in the service of the Gospel.
20 The British Quarterly Review. July, 1872, p.134. On the “Ecclesiastical Tournament” between Dean Stanley and Dr Rainy.
21 Noted for the Abbey of Lindisfarne (Scott’s Marmion, Canto 2)
22 The original trustees of St Luke’s in Young Street, were:—Mr Archibald Bonar, banker, Mr Archibald Gibson, W.S., Dr James Russell, F.R.C.S.E., Mr Adam McCheyne, W.S. (the father of the Rev. R. M. McCheyne), Dr John Home Peebles, Mr Thomas Gardner, and the Rev. Robert Cunningham (who had five years before founded the Edinburgh Institution). Of these seven, the last (the father of the writer of this notice) alone survives.
23 Of Dr Moody Stuart’s children, numbering seven sons and three daughters, the second son, Andrew, died in 1866, after completing his theological studies, in the course of which he had given evidence that he was by grace as well as by superior gifts, peculiarly fitted for the work of the ministry; and the eldest daughter Margaret died in “the peace of believing” in March 1880. Of those who survive, the eldest, Kenneth, is a Free Church minister (at Moffat), and the author of a Memoir of the public life of the late Brownlow North.
24 On 11th August 1840, the Solemn Engagement by which many members of the Church of Scotland pledged themselves to be faithful to the liberties of the Church and the crown-rights of the Redeemer was signed in St Luke’s. On 18th November 1840, the Commission of the General Assembly met in St Luke’s when no other Established church in the city was opened to receive it. On 25th August 1841, an extraordinary meeting of the Commission of the General Assembly was held in St Luke’s, at which the same resolution as had been declared in the Solemn Engagement a year before was adopted by the Commission. On 24th May 1842, the overture which was on 30th May adopted by the General Assembly of that year as the Claim of Right, was subscribed in St Luke’s by members of the Assembly.
25 Messrs Stothert, Russell, Macdonald (the General Treasurer of the Free Church), Gardner, Howden, Hogg, Smith, McCheyne, Pringle, Boyack, Henderson, and Robertson.
26 The first intimation which Mr Moody Stuart received of the actual consummation of the Disruption was somewhat singular. Arriving in Plymouth after the two months’ voyage from Brazil, he searched earnestly the columns of the English newspapers for information as to what had taken place, but found nothing beyond occasional allusions to the troubles of the Church in Scotland, until his eye fell upon a short paragraph mentioning the induction of the Rev._____ _____ as minister of the parish of Kilsyth. It was in reading of the transference of the emoluments and the manse of the pastor of Kilsyth to another, that he first learned that the ministers who esteemed the principles of the Church of Scotland more highly than the privileges of connection with the State, had made the sacrifice which conscience required of them.
27 Besides numerous occasional discourses and pamphlets on topics of public interest, Dr Moody Stuart had then published “The Life of Elizabeth the last Duchess of Gordon,” “Recollections of John Duncan, D.D.,” “The Land of Huss,” “Commentary on the Song of Solomon,” “Capernaum,” and “The Three Marys.” To these he has added within the last few years several brief treatises on subjects connected with the tendencies of modern Biblical Criticism, which are the fruits of mature thinking and scholarly research, “Moses on the Plains of Moab,” “The Prophecy of Isaiah,” “The Fifty-First Psalm,” “The Fall of Babylon: Its Prediction not Anonymous.”
28 London: Nisbet & Co. 1857.
29 In 1851 he received from this University the degree of Doctor in Divinity.
30 Afterwards of Free St Andrew’s, Edinburgh