James Fraser, Laird of Brea

He religious literature of Scotland is remarkably rich in books of religious autobiography. Telling us each one his own spiritual story we have James Melville, and Robert Blair, and John Livingstone, and Alexander Brodie, and James Fraser, and Thomas Halyburton, and Thomas Boston, and Hugh Miller, and John Duncan, and William Taylor, and Andrew Bonar. And there are not a few fragments of the same kind quite worthy to stand beside those full and finished works; such as the autobiographical remains of the Lady Coltness, the Lady Anne Elcho, and Marion Veitch. Every one of those famous autobiographies has its own individuality, idiosyncrasy, and physiognomy; and each several one of them makes its own special contribution to the noblest catalogue of the books of our native land. I know something of all those great books; but there is none of them that draws me and holds me and keeps possession of me like the Memoirs of Sir James Fraser of Brea xvritten by Himself Dr. Jowett, writing to Lady Airlie, said that he had just finished Boswell for the fiftieth time, and Mr. Spurgeon was wont to say that he had read Bunyan a hundred times. I shall not attempt to count up the times I have read James Fraser of Brea, but if I did I feel sure that I would run both Jowett and Spurgeon hard.

Dr. Ail’d of Creich has collected the chief facts of Fraser’s life into a short biographical sketch which will be found prefixed to the Inverness edition of Fraser’s autobiography. And Dr. Elder Gumming of Glasgow lias an admirable appreciation of Fraser in his Holy Men of God. The following are the main outlines of Fraser’s much-tried life. He was born at Br£a,liisfather’s estate in Bossshire, on the 29th of July 1639. His father died while his son James was still a’bhild, and some of his greatest troubles in life came to him out of his ownership of that estate. Although he began to study for the legal profession, young Fraser eventually gave himself up to the study of divinity, to which study he brought a mind of the first intellectual order. From his earliest days the Laird of Bra identified himself with the outed evangelical ministers of the north and all along he was a most pronounced Presbyterian and Covenanter, and both by his tongue and by his pen he fought unflinchingly for the freedom of his Church and his I country. Both in the Bass and in Blackness and; in Newgate he suffered the most unjust imprisonment, and the wickedest and the most malicious ill-usage. After the Revolution we find Fraser settled as parish minister of Culross, where he closed his troubled career about the year 1698. Dr. Aird adds this note to his short sketch of Fraser’s life: ‘ He was assisted at a communion at very shortly before his death, by the celebrated Bosignof Ettrick, then a young man.’

But with all that it is in his Memoirs of Himself that James Fraser of Brea will live, and he will live in that remarkable book as long as a scholarly religion, and an evangelical religion, and a spiritual religion, and a profoundly experimental religion lives in his native land. In saying that I do not forget the warning that Dr. Elder Gumming gives me to the effect that Fraser’s will be a Scottish reputation only, and even that will be limited to readers of a special cast of religious experience and spiritual sympathy. At the same time. Dr. Elder Gumming adds that Fraser’s autobiography is a book that for depth and for grip has few, if any, equals among the foremost books of its kind in the whole world.

Now you will naturally ask me at this point just what it is that gives James Fraser such a high rank as a spiritual writer, and just what it is that so signalises his Memoirs of Himself Well, in his own characteristic words his Memoirs is ‘ the book of the intricacies of his own heart and life,’ and that on their purely spiritual side. Fraser’s mind was by nature of the most intricate kind — that is to say, his mind was naturally of the most acute and subtle and penetrating and searching-out kind. Had he gone into law, as at one time he intended to do, he would infallibly have taken rank as one of the acutest of our Scottish lawyers. And with his immense industry he would to a certainty have left writings behind him that would have been of classical authority in that great profession. But to the lasting enrichment of his own soul, and to the lasting enrichment of all his kindred - minded readers’ souls, Fraser was led of God into divinity, and into divinity of the deepest, acutest, most evangelical, and most experimental kind. ‘I chose divinity,’ says Butler, ‘ it being of all studies the most suitable to a reasonable nature.’

Unhappily for us, many of Fraser’s private journals, family papers, and estate documents are hopelessly lost. But if ever they are recovered I feel sure it will be found that he had made out more than once a most exact map and inventory of his inherited estate with his own exact and intricate hands. I can see the delineaments and the depictments of the whole estate of Brea as they were laid down by the honestest, and the exactest, and the intricatest of pens, I can see its hills and its glens, its farms and its crofts, its streams and its lochs, its cattle and its game and its fish, and all laid down with a mathematical exactness and a geo¬ metrical completeness as if he were preparing his estate for the Inverness or Edinburgh market; and as if he was determined to do so with the most absolute justice both to the seller and the buyer. Now whether those maps and plans and accompanying documents are ever recovered or no, most happily we have some still more important documents preserved to us from Fraser’s faithful and careful hands, I refer to the delineations he made of the inward estate of his own soul: a delineation and an inventory that has been preserved to us to this day, I will say, under the special and adorable providence of Fraser’s God and our God. And it is an analysis and a delineation and a depictment of such a kind that I know nothing to approach it in any language that I read. And I thank God every day that so intricate and so spiritual a book is not in Hebrew or Greek or Latin, but is in my own Scottish tongue wherein I was born. Fraser describes his spiritual auto¬ biography as ‘ The Book of the Intricacies of his own Heart and Life.’ And so it is. It is a book of such intricacy and sinuosity and complication and reticulation and involution, that in all my experience of such books it stands simply un¬ paralleled and unapproached. No labyrinth ever constructed by the brain of man comes near the heart of Brea. Not even that wonder of the world the labyrinth of Egypt with its three thousand secret chambers. Not even the Cretan labyrinth of Daedalus with its blood-thirsty monster at its centre, and with only a thin linen thread to lead you out through its endless tortuosities to the open air. All that is but a faint and feeble description of the always spiritually intricate book that Fraser of Brea has bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen and his fellow-churchmen. To as many of them, that is, as have an intricate life of their own, and a labyrinthine heart of their own. And among the thousands of his Christian fellow-countrymen in our day, there must surely be some men still left with something of the intellectual strength, and the spiritual inwardness, and the experimental concentration, and the holy fear and the close walk with God, of the Laird of Brea. Some men who will feel that they are not such absolute monsters among men, and so much alone in Scot¬ land, as they always thought they were till they were told about James Fraser the Laird of Brea. Well may Dr. Elder Gumming say that Brea’s is a book to be read by all men with wonder and with awe; and, I will add, to be read by some men with an ever-increasing thankfulness and an ever-in-. creasing hopefulness. Yes, well might his old publisher in first venturing Brea’s autobiography out on the market go on to say, ‘ There is perhaps no other Performance giving a more distinct Recount of a supernatural Work of Grace. And it is thought not to be unseasonable at this juncture for reviving Piety and the Exercise of Grace, and convicting those who make a jest of these serious Matters.’

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