THE decease of Angus Gray, Lairg, was duly chronicled in the March number of this magazine. We think a somewhat more extended notice is called for, inasmuch as this worthy was beyond question an epistle of Jesus Christ, written by the Holy Ghost.
Angus Gray was born in Lairg, the parish in which he died. The date of his birth was the 16th of November, 1808. From youth his manner of life was outwardly most correct. While yet a stranger to the power of Divine grace, he was urged to become a member in full communion, and shortly afterwards to accept the eldership, so decorously and religiously did he conduct himself.
The following account of this period of his life is kindly contributed by a friend, and is as far as possible in words uttered by the subject of this memoir two or three years before he finished his course here below :—” I was,” he said, ” three years an elder before I knew anything of the power of grace. I was often praying when I was a boy, and when I became a young man I had great pleasure in praying in the woods. I was not taken up with vain company, and was on good terms with myself. One day I met Mr. MacGillivray, the minister, who said to me, ‘ I think it is your duty to join the Church ; you are making a private profession when you go to pray in the woods, and it is your duty now to make a public profession.’ I told him I had no thought of that, but he said ‘ Go and pray in the woods about it, and tell me afterwards.’ I did as he wished me, and had very joyful light thoughts about it. Soon after that I was called to pray in meetings, and people were thinking well of me, and I was of the same opinion myself. Bye and bye they made me an elder.’ I was not long in that office when I began to know the strength of sin and the terrors of the Lord. I fell into such a deep thought that I could not read nor pray, and a spirit of perfect atheism came over me. I could not believe that there was a God. I felt very miserable, and had it not been that I had a wife and family I would have fled from the country. One day as I was going along the road driving a horse and cart the words ‘ our God is a consuming fire ‘ came like thunder. These words filled me with fear, and I felt as if between two hedges, an angry God on the one side and the broken law on the other, and my heart filled with enmity against both. For some months I was in that fearful pit. Then it was He sent His Word and healed me. The words in John’s 1st Epistle—’Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins’—were made peculiarly precious to me then. Then I had great joy in the finished work of the Redeemer, and you see I needed a sore cure for the false religion of my younger days, when I thought my love and joy and prayers had gotten me the land.” On being asked how long this happiness remained, and if the atheism returned, he continued—”I have often been troubled with the unbelief of my heart, but never had again the same spirit of atheism, and my joy lasted a considerable time. Some time after my deliverance I heard Dr. Kennedy preach in Creich, and he spoke of the love of Christ, and so described my case that I was drunk with joy, and when I came out of the church I might as well have been in a foreign land for all I knew where I was. That was an English sermon, and through it I lost what prejudices I might before then have had against the English language. It was the greatest day I ever had in the world.”
It is not necessary to add much to the preceding interesting account of this period, but a few additional notes equally well authenticated may not be out of place. The late Mr. Kennedy of Dornoch was the instrument in the Lord’s hand to bring him first to see that his natural religion would not stand him in good stead when the day of trial came. Mr. Kennedy and he were companions from boyhood. In after years Angus Gray, when alluding to his indebtedness to Mr. Kennedy, would playfully state it thus: “Once when boys Mr. Kennedy and I, with a number of other boys, had a scramble together. My heel came against his mouth, and I knocked out one of his teeth, but he afterwards knocked a tooth out of me.” It is also well known that soon after this time he came powerfully under the influence of Rev. Alexander Macleod, Rogart, one of the most richly anointed of our Northern ministers, and whom for a long period he regularly heard preach, walking all the distance between Calmaly, Lairg, and Rogart in order to have that privilege. He used afterwards to say that he owed his discernment of true Gospel preaching to his having heard Mr. Macleod so long, and Angus was generally acknowledged by the pious people of his acquaintance to be the most discerning Christian in those parts.
At a somewhat early period in his history he found it his duty to protest against what he considered to be not the gospel of the grace of God, but another gospel. When Messrs. Moody and Sankey came for the first time into this country a movement was inaugurated which cost him many an anxious thought. Some time afterwards when speaking to the question at a fellowship meeting in Dornoch, alluding to the teaching of the American evangelists, he said that if this was the true gospel they, for their part, had Christ yet to find—very solemn words, with which it was generally understood his friend, Rev. George Kennedy, did not sympathise. But it was marked that from that day forward Angus Gray spoke with a power and authority that were not his before then.
In manner the subject of this notice might, to outsiders, appear somewhat stern and unbending, but he was in reality a perfect gentleman, and when thoroughly known was always regarded as one of the kindest, humblest, and most sympathetic of Christian men. Only he was as firm as a rock in his convictions of truth.
We shall not weary our readers with a detailed account of the downgrade which began to be such a marked feature of the Church, especially the Free Church of Scotland, during the last more than thirty years. Suffice it to say that innovations in worship, laxity in discipline, corruption in doctrine, came on apace, on all which account Angus Gray felt less and less sympathy with what was passing as the current Church life of his day. When, therefore, the notorious Declaratory Act was passing through the Presbyteries in 1892 he was one of the first to realise the seriousness of the situation, and was early enabled to make up his mind not to come under the yoke, cost what it might. And although, as he himself often put it, he followed no man, but the truth only, it afforded him the sincerest pleasure when the first Presbytery of what is now known as the Free Presbyterian Church was formed in the summer of 1893. It is not too much to say that for the remaining ten years of his life, with the possible exception of the salvation of his own soul, nothing lay so near his heart as the highest well-being of this branch of Christ’s Church. He was no stranger to the temptations of the Wicked One, touching both his own interest in the Redeemer and the genuine worth of the testimony raised in 1893, but when those fiery trials passed he saw with clearer vision than before the certainty of the former and the genuine worth of the latter.
One would not act the part of an impartial historian if one were not to say that the proposals for union between the anti-unionist Free Church section and the Free Presbyterians filled him with the deepest anxiety. To others as well as to the writer of this notice he sent solemn warning more than a year before the end that he was fully persuaded that what the Spirit was saying to our Church in the matter was contained in Jeremiah xv. 19, “Let them return unto thee, but return not thou unto them.”
Although he attained the great age of 94 years, his faculties remained unimpaired to the end. He had an unusually deep sense of sin. Some months before the end he complained in the hearing of the present writer bitterly of his great sinfulness, but he said his hope was built upon that word “I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions.” The last days of his life were by far the most joyous. His cup was at last made to run over. Often times before then he put the question “Why am I being left so long?” and although at seasons one might then find it difficult to give a satisfactory answer, it appeared an easily answered question at last. The time of the latter rain had not yet fully come. But plentifully did it come in its time. The doctrine which towards the very end was most firmly fixed in his mind was the love of the Father. His son Alexander relates how he would stop him when reading portions of the Gospels to point out the place the electing love of the Father occupied according to the Gospels in the scheme of redemption. This love was all his desire at last. To one beside him he said “I am not now afraid to die. I am persuaded that neither life nor death nor any creature can separate me for ever from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is even now comforting me with those words “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins, and they are the words with which He drew me to shore at the first.”
But enough. He fell asleep in Jesus on the 24th of Feb., 1903. “Mark thou the perfect, and behold The man of uprightness, Because that surely of this man The latter end is peace.” J. R. M.