WE expect to publish a series of letters by this godly young man of esteemed memory, who died at the Free Presbyterian Manse, Inverness, on the 2nd August, 1900, and of whom a notice appeared in September of that year.
I.
STRATHY POINT, 27th December, 1894.
We received your kind and welcome letter yesterday, and were glad to hear from you. What the Lord did in D— is a cause of thankfulness to all the Church of God in the Highlands. Where the Lord works, who can hinder? How beautiful would the Church be if the Lord would grant her ministers and people to be filled with the Holy Ghost, as they were in the time of the Apostles! I have a little desire just now in prayer for the Church—that the glory of the latter house would be greater than the glory of the former. But O! my coldness of love to Jesus, who was made a curse for His people, that He might redeem them from the curse of the law. May the Lord have mercy on His Church at large, and on us as individuals, and deal with us according to
His riches of mercy in Christ! O that He would send His Holy Spirit, whose office it is to take of the things of Christ and reveal them to His poor people. Then and then only will His people rejoice. Sometimes I feel as if one part of me were drawing heaven-wards, and the other part drawing hell-wards, though often to my sorrow there is little, if any, drawing after holiness.
Now, try and forgive my shortcomings, and pray for me in reality. Christ is precious wherever He is; but no one can know Him but as the Holy Ghost reveals Him, either in His people, in His cause, or in His truth. . . . May you and all the faithful servants of Christ get more and more out of the fulness that is in Him, and when you are getting do not forget a poor sinner. Though this place is poor as to our constraining Christ, spiritually and outwardly, yet a few are showing more sympathy than they were at first doing. Be sure and write soon. We are all in the usual health. Donald Polson was up here the Sabbath before last. He spoke twice in the school, and went to see Murdoch (the late godly Murdoch Mackay, elder) at night.
With love.—I am, etc.,
DONALD MACKAY.