MANY of our readers would have learned with sorrow by the November Magazine of Mr. Lachlan Maclean’s decease. Mr. Maclean occupied so large a place in the Church’s counsels and work that a more extended notice appears to us to be called for. Mr. Maclean was born at Essich, in the parish of Inverness, on the 28th of April, 1833. He was but a young boy when his father, Charles Maclean, removed with his family to the farm of Whitefield, parish of Stratherrick, of which the latter was for many years tacksman. The subject of this notice married young, and shortly afterwards removed to a home of his own in Duntelchaig, parish of Dores, where he remained for the better part of his life.
It was when he was in Dores, and after he had been a few years married, that he came under concern for his soul. The means which the Lord made use of for this end was the faithful preaching of the Rev. Archibald Cook, Daviot, whose ministry Mr. Maclean had now the opportunity of attending. As a child, indeed, Mr. Maclean remembered to have heard Mr. Cook preach in the North Church, Inverness, when he would accompany his parents from Essich to that densely-crowded congregation. But up to the time we have above specified any serious thoughts that young Lachlan had of eternal realities were but as the morning cloud and the early dew that soon pass away. But when the set time had come, he was plunged into great soul trouble, and he had a long and deep experience of law work.
The writer remembers relating to Mr. Maclean what the excellent Rev. Finlay Cook was reported to have said illustratively of the nature of the Lord’s dealings with some souls in calling them effectually. “The work of grace,” Mr. Cook said, “was like to that of a blacksmith who had a purpose of fashioning some iron instrument. In order to this the iron was placed in the fire, and blown upon until it came to melting heat. The smith then gave it what shape he would, and afterwards threw it away among his coals. The iron would soon become as cold as though it never felt the fire, but the shape that was given it when it was melting hot, it never could lose.” Mr. Maclean supplemented this view of grace by relating how he heard the Rev. Archibald Cook put the matter, making use of a somewhat similar illustration. Mr. Archibald Cook had it that the work of grace in some was as though a blacksmith were engaged in fashioning some work in iron. Whilst this was going on, some other work, more pressing for the moment, was laid upon him, with the result that what the smith was first engaged upon was laid aside, and allowed to cool. Again the half-fashioned instrument was taken up, and again laid aside. If the iron could feel and think, it might conclude that the operations begun on it could never come to a good end. But the smith had his own purposes and his own ways of accomplishing them. And so, said Mr. A. Cook, did the Lord carry on his saving work in some of his people. Mr. Maclean told this note with such feeling and such deep sympathy that the writer concluded that Mr. Maclean must have read in it the true history and meaning of the Lord’s dealings with himself.
This view of the history of Mr. Maclean’s early experiences is also in keeping with much that one has heard him relate on other occasions in connection with those days. Doubtless in those days Mr. A. Cook’s preaching offered him much instruction, but when at length he came to know the peace of God, it was not as a hearer in any public means, but in secret. A portion in which he hoped to the end that he had cast anchor was Isaiah ix. 6, 7.
He appears to have been early led to very clear views of reconciliation with God through the peace-speaking blood of Christ. To the doctrine of justification by faith, of which Luther spoke as the article of a standing or falling Church, he was ever afterwards very faithful, and indeed it sometimes seemed to the writer that one of the greatest services which Mr. Maclean was enabled to render in his generation to divine truth was his constant iteration of the valid objective grounds of a sinner’s peace with God.
Mr. Maclean’s talents, as a thinker and speaker, were above the average, and he was early led to proclaim, as a public speaker, the peace with God through the blood of Christ, which he himself had experienced, and of which he could never speak but with wonder. In 1871 he became an elder of the Free Church congregation of Daviot, of which the Rev. John Macqueen was at the time minister. It was the beginning of troublous times in the chequered history of the Free Church, and Mr. Maclean as a member of Presbytery, Synod, and Assembly, through many years of conflict, stood faithfully by the party who were opposed to removing the old landmarks. He paid several visits to Edinburgh that he might oppose the pretensions of Professor Robertson Smith, and in the old controversy about Union with the U.P.’s, in the controversy about Disestablishment, and in the controversy about the Declaratory Act, Mr. Maclean acted a consistent and manly part. He was a close and trusted friend of the late Rev. Donald MacDonald, Shieldaig, and of the Rev. Donald Macfarlane who is happily still left us, and when those two ministers in 1893 resolved, in the face of all their brethren in the ministry, to abide by the old standards, which we believe was tantamount to abiding by Christ Himself, they had no heartier supporter than Mr. Maclean.
In 1895 Mr. Maclean removed to Inverness, the town wherein was his home up to the end of his sojourn here below, a sojourn, as readers of the Magazine know, which was finished on the 30th day of September, 1911.
Mr. Maclean took the warmest interest in all that concerned the well-being of the Inverness Free Presbyterian congregation during the time of his stay in this town. To the writer, as pastor of the congregation, he was always kind and sympathetic. In Deacons’ Court and Kirk-Session his advice was much esteemed. As long as health lasted, he was a willing helper in supplying religious services on the Lord’s Day, oftentimes in the congregation of which he was elder, and not rarely in neighbouring congregations, as Daviot, Dingwall, and particularly Beauly. We do not suppose that he ever sought or accepted pecuniary remuneration to the extent of the payment of the train fare. This no doubt he was in Providence, above others like-minded, enabled to do, the Lord having prospered him in a business way until he had become one of the largest building contractors in the north. For about a year before his decease it was evident that death had laid its cold hand upon his goodly frame. He endured not a little suffering, but he bore it with much meekness. His soul comforts on his death-bed, as he himself put it, made him often to forget his physical miseries.
With his sorrowing, and very devoted sons and daughters, and other relatives, we feel sincere sympathy.
J. R. M.