Alexander Whyte,
James Fraser Laird of Brea
Parish Minister of
Culross, Bass Rock, Blackness, and New Gate Prisoner
and Author of "The
Book of the Intricacies of my Heart and Life"
My old and honoured friend Dr. Elder Cumming of Glasgow,
in his admirable appreciation of Fraser expresses his regret that Fraser so
often uses the word "conversion" concerning his whole Christian life. But after
giving the fullest consideration to what that deeply experienced and deservedly
eminent evangelical preacher says concerning Fraser's frequent use of the word
"conversion," I cannot share with him in that criticism and complaint of his.
For so far as I understand Fraser he employs that experimental and
autobiographical word in much the same sense in which your Lord employs it when
he is instructing His disciples concerning the inwardness and the depth and the
intricacy and the unceasing progress of the spiritual life in their souls.
Our Lord must have startled His already converted disciples, and he must
have made the dullest-minded of them to ponder and to think, when, seeing their
pride and their ambition and their jealousy and their envy of one another, He
called a little child unto Him, and said to them, "Except ye be converted, and
become as the little child, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." And
after Peter had been three years called and converted and had been all that
time under the continual tuition of his Master, warning that proud disciple of
his coming fall, his Master said to him, "When thou art converted from thy
coming fall and art truly penitent for it and art forgiven it, then strengthen
thy brethren in all their similar trials and temptations and falls."
Now it
is in that experimental and autobiographical and vivid sense that James Fraser
employs this word "conversion" so often concerning himself. And it is in that
same experimental sense that I shall now employ it when I proceed to speak to
you for a little concerning Fraser and concerning yourselves. "A Christian
man's whole life," says our author in his fifth chapter, "is but a continual
conversion. And the Lord after every time of backsliding draws our souls back
again to Himself very much in the same way as at our first conversion. Yea, He
deals with us sometimes as if we had never been converted before.
"For my
self," he says, "I have found a far deeper and a far more distinct law-work in
my after convictions of sin than ever I felt at my first conviction. I was
converted that communion week in Edinburgh as with a clap. But now the Lord
draws me back and back to himself step by step, so that I am better and better
prepared for Christ before every time of my renewed returns to Him."
Do you
follow that, my friends? Do you take Fraser up? You have had that same
experience yourselves, have you not? Your law-work, as Paul experienced it and
then wrote to the Romans about it, and as Fraser experienced it and now writes
to you about it, your own law-work is a thousand times more deep and deadly in
your after life than ever it was or could be at your first conviction and
conversion. With most converts in their first experiences their law-work is but
skin deep, so to speak. But the awful spirituality of God's holy law is all
experienced more and more as the soul attains to a true spirituality itself.
As Fraser says, "It is only after we have come to know Christ better, and
better, and ever better; it is only then that we come back to Him with more and
more conviction of our utter and everlasting hopelessness but for Him, and but
for His all-sufficient salvation." Just so. No young convert, the very best, as
yet knows much of himself. Paul did not. Luther, our second Paul, did not.
Fraser, our second Luther, did not. No man ever did at first. The unsounded
depth of our own depravity, the bottomless pit of sin and misery that is in us
all - that takes a long lifetime for its full discovery. Indeed it is never
fully discovered to us in this life - else we would go mad at the sight of it.
The Holy Spirit has many awful things to show His subjects about themselves,
but they are not able to bear all those awful things as yet; no more than a
little child is able to bear all that lies wrapped up in its own soul against
its threescore and ten years to come.
"But now," says the minister of
Culross as he began to grow toward his threescore and ten years in the
spiritual life, "but now the Lord insists on my seeing every step of my returns
to Him. So that all the early knowledge I had of myself and of Him now seems to
me to be as no knowledge at all compared with what I have now." Again, and
further on in my pursuit of this intricate man, I find this: "The whole
subsequent life of a truly Christian man is one continual conversion, in which
he is perpetually humbled under an awful and an unbearable sense of his own
incurable sinfulness." That is to say, he is perpetually cast down in his own
soul; he is perpetually degraded in his own eyes; he is perpetually disgusted
at himself; he is perpetually horrified at himself.
In reading Sir John
Coleridge's beautiful biography of John Keble the other day I came on an exact
case of this same experience. John Keble was perpetually humbled under his own
inward and unconquerable sinfulness, till he could not keep his humiliation out
of his Christian Year, nor out of his private letters to such intimate friends
as his future biographer. But Sir John cannot comprehend Keble. He had never
had that perpetual humiliation himself, and able and good man as Sir John was,
his shamefaced apologies for his friend and his exculpatory explanations of his
too strong language all make me smile at his babe-like innocence. I wonder what
Sir John would have said about James Fraser if Dean Ramsay, or some other of
his Edinburgh correspondents, had been bold enough to send him a birthday gift
of our intricate and perpetually humbled autobiography. Alexander the Great
always had his camp-bed made with Homer under his pillow because of the
incomparable battle-pieces in that book of battles. And Keble would have
somehow found out James Fraser, and would have kept him under his pillow, had
the Laird of Brea been in the Church of England, or been in the Church of Rome.
But Scotland was "Samaria" to Keble and to all the other Tractarians of
those days. All the same, I know more than one old covert in Scotland who read
that intricate book with their midnight lamp, and who find a true companionship
in such frequent passages as these: "I am perpetually humbled under the
experience of my own sinfulness; till I creep nearer and nearer to God in
Christ, and with more and more fervent faith and love every day and every
night. And till I am drawn continually to walk closer and closer with Christ,
endeavoring after His likeness in all my walk and conversation."
In spite
of Sir John Coleridge, and all such innocent and easily sanctified men, the
Laird of Brea keeps on returning and returning to his deadly need of a more and
more radical and more and more root-and-branch conversion all his days. "I have
been searching," he says, "into the Lord's ends with all this in my case.
And I have come to this conclusion in this matter. I think He has taken
these ways with me so that I might know something of the unspeakable plague of
my own heart, and that I might be more and more humbled because of my continual
departing from God. Also this I think has been one of His ends with me: that I
might be the better acquaint with His various processes and methods and His
different styles of conversion, with which through my own somewhat hasty
incoming I was not at that time so well acquaint. God does now, as it were, act
my conversion over and over again. He convinces me more and more, not only of
my actual and my open sins, but still more now of my secret and my soul-sins,
of the plague of my own heart, and of that fountain-sin of my very nature,
which carries me away from my God and from His holiness continually. He
convinces me also that this is a matter in which I cannot really help myself,
or redeem myself, or in any way cure myself, do all I can. And all that, till I
am shut up to believe, and to trust, and to live in and on Christ as never
before. And then in all that, that I might be the better able to guide and to
direct such of His people as He is pleased to put under my charge at Culross or
else where."
Now, speaking of Culross, what do you think? For my part, I
cannot but think that it was by far their greatest blessing in this world to
the people of Culross to have the Laird of Brea for their parish minister: that
so difficult to convert and so intricate-minded man. And I think I know some of
yourselves who would willingly have walked across the whole peninsula of Fife
to have spent the week-end at Culross. We are told that Ezra the scribe stood
upon a pulpit of wood which the carpenters of Jerusalem had made for the
purpose, and he read in the Book of the Law distinctly, and gave the sense, and
made the people to understand the reading. And exactly like that was the Laird
of Brea in his pulpit of wood at Culross. He made his parishioners to
understand the law of God through the law-work that was first in their
minister's own heart, and then through all that in their own hearts. So much
so, that all the people in that favored parish who were already converted, and
all those who collected into the parish kirk every Sabbath-day seeking
conversion, would almost worship James Fraser as the people of Anwoth were
already almost worshipping Samuel Rutherford.
For on every returning
Sabbath-day Fraser went up into his pulpit of wood and gave out such psalms and
such paraphrases and selected such Scriptures and so drew out their deepest
sense as to throw a divine light on the hearts of all his spiritually-minded
people; till, like his favorite divine Thomas Shepard of New England, Fraser
would never have a Sabbath on which both he and his like-minded kirk-session
did not expect some young converts to be added to the church, and some old
backsliders to be restored to it. Now, may this pulpit of wood in which I now
stand be like the pulpit of Ezra in Jerusalem and like the pulpit of Fraser in
Culross! And may I and my colleague be your Ezra and your Fraser? And all that
first to our own true and intricate and repeated and completed conversion! And
then to the same completed conversion in you all! And all to the glory of God
both in us and in you! Amen.