Likewise, Being in the South, the Lord Trysted Me with a Powerful New Testament Ministry
Ow you all know quite well what the young laird of Brea means by a tryst. Every Scottish man and every Scottish woman know in their innermost hearts what a tryst is. And if there are any English men here or English women who do not know that sweet word of ours, let them go to the Free Library and look up Dr. Jamieson, our learned Scottish lexicographer, and he will supply them with page after page of explanations and illustrations of what we mean in our so expressive mother-tongue by a tryst. It is our young lovers who make most use of that sweetest of all their words; and they mean by it their trust; their mutual promise and appointment to meet one another some time soon and somewhere alone. And thus it is that when young Fraser says that the Lord trysted him in the South with a powerful New Testament ministry, his meaning is that what he had never met with to his satisfaction in the North, that he was happy enough to meet with as soon as he came South. The whole passage is in his own peculiarly penetrating style; it is this: ‘ Likewise being in the South, the Lord trysted me with a powerful New Testament ministry, which did keep in my dying life. Many a time was my swooning soul revived, and I brought back from the gates of death. Moreover, that ministry sanctified me more and more, both in heart and in life. And it made me to relish the most heavenly things in my innermost soul.’ Blessedest, surely, of all young Fraser’s trysts! And blessedest, surely, of all his trysting-places!
Now, Fraser does not give us the name of that so powerful minister, nor the name of the town in which he carried on his so powerful ministry. But whatever his name was and whatever his town was, you may depend upon it that that so powerful minister to Fraser felt himself to be the weakest man and the worst preacher and pastor in the whole of Scotland. For it has always been so, that it is the weakest of men in themselves who make the most powerful preachers of Jesus Christ. Pascal, I suppose, was the most powerful preacher of Jesus Christ in all the Christendom of his day, north or south. And yet, again and again, he makes the weak confession that the very buzzing of a fly, or the creaking of a door, or a footstep on the stair, or the hoof of a horse on the street, would sometimes quite upset him for all that day; such was his ‘ disproportion,’ as he called it, and such was his powerlessness over himself. Paul also was the weakest of all the apostles till his Master came to him and strengthened him to be the strongest of them all. And Paul’s Master warns us all that without Him we are all as weak as Paul and Pascal; and, indeed that without Him we can do absolutely nothing as it ought to be done. The short is, that the preacher who was made so powerful to Fraser would be the weakest of the weak to himself. You may always and everywhere depend upon that pulpit paradox, both north and south.
But that was not Fraser’s first experience of preachers and of their powerful sermons in the South. ‘ I remember,’ he writes, ‘ when I came to Edinburgh first, one Sabbath Day, I went to hear an able and a much cried-up preacher. Only, that day, there was such a crowd around the church door that I could not get in. But I stumbled into an Independent church with no great hope to get any good. In that half-empty church the minister took this for his text, “A bruised reed shall He not break.” And, what shall I say? The Lord assisted that preacher with such power that day, and he spoke so seasonably to my soul, that I was again revived, and was at once set forward in the right way, till I resolved to hold on until I truly found the Lord.’ Now that passage in The Memoirs of James Fraser of Brea was surely written for the solace of those preachers in Edinburgh who have no one to cry them up, and who only get the overflow of their neighbour’s overcrowded congregations.
No doubt that forsaken preacher had been staying up his downcast heart all the past week with that divine promise which he took that Sabbath morning for his text. And ‘ as God would have it,’ he had the young laird of Brea among his hearers that morning. And that bruised reed in the pulpit so spoke to that bruised reed in the pew that he cries up that preacher to this day. All the same, I feel quite sure that that despised and deserted preacher would far rather have had his church crowded with people to cry him up from week to week, than he would have had that cry put olF till Fraser wrote his Memoirs and till we read his Memoirs in Edinburgh to-night. We who are cried-up preachers in Edinburgh are far more anxious to have a great throng of people every Sabbath around our doors than we are to have a hearer or two who shall go home from our sermon revived and set forward in the right way. ‘ Sir, your sermons are doing my soul great good! ’ said Mrs. Bain, first of Logiepert Manse, and afterwards of our School Board, as she met me with her somewhat military manner one day in Princes Street, more than twenty years ago. In looking back to that salutation I hope I took her good words in something of a proper spirit. But in looking within I feel sure that I would far rather that she had cried me up as by far the ablest and by far the most eloquent preacher in the whole city. Had she said that, and enough of that kind, I would have gone home with the sun on my face, and I would have beamed my happiness on all about me. Poor easily pufFed-up sinners that all your preachers are! And as easily cast down again! Brethren, pray for us! wrote Paul to the Thessalonians. Lest, having strengthened others, we ourselves should be castaways! But with all that Fraser frankly confesses that when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh he was often guilty — they are his own words: ‘ I was often guilty of neglecting powerful sermons that were preached in that city by some of the ablest men in the whole kingdom.’ Now, both the Covenanters in Scotland in Fraser’s day and the Puritans in England had the most powerful preaching that the Church of Christ has ever enjoyed since it was a Church. England, especially, has never had preaching like that again. And England has largely to thank one of her greatest preachers for that sad pulpit declension. F’or Richard Hooker was so carried away by the disastrous spirit of controversy that he led the way in England in his unwise and to this day disastrous depreciation of preaching till Coleridge answered him in his splendid Notes on English Divines. And multitudes in England, and some here and there in Scotland, who have never opened a page of Hooker, have got of themselves into his mischievous way of setting publicly recited prayer over against gospel preaching. Till it has come about, especially in the pulpits of the Church of England, that where so much protestation is made about public prayer able gospel preaching has become all but wholly neglected to the wide¬ spread impoverishment of the English people. You will sometimes hear superior persons advertising themselves that they go to Church for the beautiful liturgy and then leave the Church as soon as the liturgy is over. This indecent conduct is conclusively treated by Dr. Stalker in his admirable address delivered in St. Giles on the occasion of the Calvin celebration. I will give you the able passage to think about. ‘ The prominence,’ says the Professor, ‘ given among us to preaching, is a peculiarity of our Calvinistic worship. It is frequently indeed demanded, and with great confidence, by those who. are unfavourable to Calvinistic views on this subject; it is demanded whether it is not better to go to church to pray than to go to
hear sermons. But it is not better, if our preaching is all that Calvin insisted it should be. For in prayer man speaks to God, whereas in preaching God speaks to man. And where this prophetic and apostolic strain is present, preaching ought not to yield even to prayer. And where this prophetic and apostolic strain is absent, the less preaching the better.’ To which passage let this out of John Foster be added: ‘ It is mainly by the institution of preaching that the Christian religion is kept a conspicuous thing; a public acknowledged reality. If we are told that we ought rather to say that it is public prayer that has this effect, we have to answer, that public prayer, when separated from preaching, has a very small effect in favour of religion. It is quite certain that where the conductors of public worship have not knowledge enough, and religion enough, to enable them to preach, public worship will soon become little more thanaceremonial routine.’ And Mr. Gladstone, with all his Anglicanism — and it was not small — was such a church-goer, and such a hearer of sermons, that he was wont to call himself a ‘ thricer’ — coining a new word for his church attendance, as against the twicers and the oncers as he called them. Speaking of Mr. Gladstone’s Oxford days, Lord Morley says: ‘ On some Sundays he hears two discourses in the forenoon and the afternoon, and a third in the evening; for though he became the most copious of all speakers, Mr. Gladstone was ever the most generous of listeners.’ But to come back to James Fraser the sum is: if you are trysted, and that by God, to have a powerful ministry in your neighbour¬ hood, do not neglect it. And do not accustom your young children nor your student-sons to neglect it. For you know of Whom it is recorded that ‘ He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up: and, as His custom was. He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath Hay.’
Out of scores of references to the pulpit of his day take this also out of Fraser: ‘ While I was helpless and hopeless and not knowing what to do, to aggravate all my other miseries, I was compelled to sit under a dead preacher. Ah! said I, and must I have this with all my other evils, an absolutely graceless and lifeless minister!’ Now being set upon his salvation above everything else, what did Fraser do in these circumstances? For one thing, he had living and life-giving books at home, just as the people of Kilmany had living and life-giving books at home when young Chalmers was as yet a dead and a graceless parish minister. ‘ What do you do then? ’ I asked the other day at a poor old saint who is in Fraser’s circumstances as regards a minister. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I have a volume of Spurgeon’s sermons that a good friend gave me, and when I have finished the volume I just begin it again.’ Spurgeon was a truly living and a truly powerful preacher, and multitudes who had a lifeless and powerless preacher set over them, found life and power as often as they opened his life-giving and powerful sermons. And it is a great question for all us ministers what it was that made that English minister so living and so powerful himself, and so life-giving and so powerful to so many? You will remember what the play-actor said to the preacher who asked him why the theatre was so full while the church was so empty. ‘ Simply,’ said the player, ‘ because we act fiction as if it were fact; whereas you preach fact as if it were fiction.’ ‘ Set the four last things — death and judgment and heaven and hell — before your eyes every time you enter the pulpit,’ said Newman to his divinity students. And then he added to that his favourite passage from Shakespeare: —
‘ Yea, this man’s brow, like to a title leaf.
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.
Thou tremhlest, and the whiteness in thy cheek Is apter than thy tongue to tell thine errand.’
Only, Paul would have added to the four last things, Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And these five, these six things will make the deadest minister among us as alive as Spurgeon was — yes, as alive as the apostle was himself.
But with all that and after all that, by far the
best way to look on all our Sabbaths and on all our
sanctuaries and on all our Scriptures and on all our
sermons, is to see in them all our Saviour’s very own
trysts and trysting-places with our souls. For after
all the real tryst is between Him and ourselves alone.
And, O happy the human heart that has been so trysted, and has been so met at the try sting-place, by the Son of God! And all you whose other trysts have come to nothing and to worse than nothing — all you whose most promising trysts have long ago come to a bitter disappointment and to a broken and a desolate heart! — I beseech you, do not despair! Do not give over your heart-hunger and your heart-hope. Rise up and open your desolate hearts, and this very night, to far sweeter and far surer words than any lover on earth was ever able to whisper at his truest tryst. ‘ Fear not,’ says One to you who is far fairer and far sweeter than the fairest and the sweetest of the sons of men, ‘ F’ear not: for thou shalt not be ashamed: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widow¬ hood any more. F’or thy Maker is thy Husband: the Lord of Hosts is His Name: and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For the Lord hath called thee, as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit; and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.’ And, when, as the ways of all true lovers are. He demands of you, and says: ‘ Say, poor sinner, lovest thou Me.^’ be sure you give Him the sweet joy of hearing you say in answer:
‘ Loi’d! it is my chief complaint
That my love is weak and faint;
Yet 1 love Thee and adore;
O for grace to love Thee more! ’
And as the truer their own love is, the harder it is to satisfy our lovers that they are absolutely and alone loved in return, go on to say to Him:
Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts,
Thou Fount of life. Thou Light of men!
From the best bliss that earth imparts
We turn unfilled to Thee again/
And if all that does not yet satisfy the most insatiable of Lovers, go on to accumulate and to emphasise your assurances, and say to Him:
Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend!
My Prophet, Priest, and King!
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End!
Accept the praise I bring!
IFeak is the effort of my heart,
And cold my warmest thought.
But, when I see Thee as Thou art,
1 ’ll love Thee as I ought.
Till then, I would Thy love proclaim
Fith every fleeting breath.
And may the music of Thy Name
Refresh my soul in death.