The following extract is from the pen of the Rev. James Robertson, Newington, Edinburgh, and appeared as an appendix to Dr. Guthrie’s life of Robert Flockhart, the converted soldier, whose renewed life was such a striking evidence of God’s mighty power in grace. MY acquaintance with him had only begun when he was led in from active scenes to the chamber of solitude and the bed of languishing. About two years elapsed between that period and his death—two years during which (as he used to say) “he dwelt in his own hired house, receiving all that came unto him, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.” Often, in the midst of my work, did I drop in upon him, to be refreshed and quickened by the testimonies he was wont to bear to the supports of God’s grace and the help of God’s countenance; and never did I leave him without feeling that I had learned, or ought to have learned, the duty and happiness of living more as a pilgrim-stranger, in habitual anticipation of the Bridegroom’s voice.
The peculiar pithy quaintness of his conversation, it is difficult to convey a clear idea of by any description. Any of his remarks, as written, must be greatly wanting in the point they had when spoken in connection with the circumstances that produced them. His own vernacularisms you will probably approve of my seeking, as far as possible, to preserve.
Among these qualities which seemed to me to constitute his genuine worth were—
I. His great delight in the Bible.
While thankful for the sympathy of Christian friends, he uniformly declared that, “Had it not been for the companionship of God’s Word, its light and consolation,” he “would have perished in his affliction.” “I have just been sitting,” he would say, “under its shadow with great delight, and finding its fruit sweet to my taste. There are grand, sweet apples on that tree. There’s the apple of justification—‘justified freely by His grace.’ There’s the apple of sanctification—we are ‘made partakers of His holiness.’ There’s the apple of adoption—‘Now are we the sons of God.’ And, best of all, there’s the golden apple of glorification—we’ll get that by and by; but ‘it doth not yet appear what we shall be.’ I mind when I’ve been in tropical countries, I’ve seen trees whose fruit just seemed as if it wanted to drop into your mouth, it was so rich and ripe. And doesn’t the Lord say to us, when we come to this blessed book, Now, ‘open thy mouth wide and I will fill it.’”
One day, as he sat looking into the fire, he said to me, “I was thinking about that verse, ‘Is not my Word as a fire and as a hammer?’ saith the Lord. Ay, both a fire and a hammer; the one would not do without the other. I would not have been here if His Word had not been a fire; my ‘will’ was such an ‘iron sinew’ in my unconverted state. But the Lord put my iron will into His fire to make it bend; it was a fire of fierce convictions. I believe my fire was heated seven times hotter than ordinary. But even that by itself would not answer the purpose of making me into ‘a vessel meet for the Master’s use.’ When the iron came out of the fire, He took to the hammer. It was none o’ your wee hammers; it was the Lord’s sledge-hammer. You’ve seen a smith when he was working at the fore-hammer, how he tuckt up his sleeve? Well, ‘the Lord made bare His holy arm’ in order to do His own work on me; and it was a’ needed—a’ needed.”
While noticing his love for the Bible, I may advert to the sort of instinctive dexterity with which he made the most simple incident subservient to the enforcement of Bible truth. For instance, speaking of the time when he first saw the sin-bearing Saviour, he said to me, “Well, you know, after that how I wondered that all the world did not see Him too. I fell to telling all my comrades what a Saviour I had found, and there was one o’ them, a young lad—Edward Brown—that I took great pains to instruct in the ways of peace; but he was little the better of my concern about his soul, for he soon ran again into excess of riot. He was taken up on charge of having to do with a highway robbery, and, along with two other soldiers, was condemned to be hanged. The night before the execution, he sent for me, and said, ‘You’ve been very kind to me, Flockhart; I want to make you my heir; to leave you all my effects.’ So the morning came, when we were all ordered out to attend the execution. There were the three with the halters round their necks. I had heard o’ ‘mercy at the foot o’ the ladder,’ but I never saw it till then. For almost at the last minute a message came that there was a pardon for Edward Brown. ‘Well, lad,’ says I to myself, ‘you’ve got your life, but I’ve lost my legacy; for “a testament is of no force while the testator liveth.” But (turning to me with a beaming face), he added, “Isn’t it precious that we’re so sure that Jesus died; it is attested by so many ‘infallible proofs.’ ‘He died for our sins according to the Scriptures.’ We need not fear about losing our legacy because there’s any doubt about the reality of His death. But we may fear something else. My wife had once a legacy left her by a lady. The lady was dead, beyond a doubt but the lawyers got the legacy into their hands, and it was not easy, I can assure you, gettin’ out again. In fact, they wasted it among them, and my wife never saw a sixpence o’t. Had the kind lady been living, she would have had the business better managed. And isn’t it doubly precious to ‘know that our Redeemer liveth?’ ‘He liveth by the power of God.’ He has made himself responsible to be the executor of His own will. When we put our case into His hands, He’ll let none wrong us o’ our legacy.”
At another time, speaking of the risen Redeemer meeting His disciples on the shore of the sea of Tiberias, he observed, “I suppose the kind of salutation to them, ‘Children, have you any meat?’ had a higher aim than the supply of their bodily wants. Ay, something was to be set right wi’ Peter that day, and the plan Jesus took was wonderful like Himself. He knew that the seafaring trade is a hungry trade; so, in order to keep Peter’s temper sweet, He had a refreshment made ready for him. And it was only after the meal was ended (‘when they had dined’) that He turned to him and asked, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?” He did not cut him short, and say, ‘You denied me the other day, sir.’ No, He took a more telling way of His own. The three askings would put Peter in mind of how often he had misbehaved in the high priest’s hall before the cock crowed outside; and maybe the very ‘fire of coals’ on the shore might be just a picture of the fire at which he had warmed himself that cold night when the breath of a woman threw him down.”
This “maybe it might be a picture” struck me as not a little remarkable as coming from one who had no knowledge of the Greek original, and as confirmed by the fact that there is only one other place in the New Testament where the Greek word translated “fire of coals” is found. It is where this same Evangelist John is relating what took place “that cold night” in the palace of the high priest. Does it not indeed give emphasis to the “maybe,” that busy memory may have been carrying Peter back to the very scene, and that there may have come thronging up before him, now the strong glare of that fire, the taunting questions of the silly maid, and the piercing look of Jesus—now when he sees, on the wild sea-shore, lighted up mysteriously, miraculously, just such another “fire of coals?”
II. Robert Flockhart was eminently a man of prayer.
On no point, perhaps, did I hear him speak oftener than on the sinfulness of “restraining prayer,”—the weight of guilt lying in these days on the churches of Christ, and on individual Christians, for spending in idle visits, frivolous talk, and unprofitable reading time that might be redeemed for prayer. One evening (and I believe it was one of the last on which he was able to take his accustomed place on the street) I happened to call upon him about an hour before his usual preaching hour. On reaching his door I found the room dark; but remaining quite still I could overhear him, in a deep under-tone, “as a man talketh with his friend,” telling out to the Lord his griefs and fears, his designs and expectations, in regard to the work he was going to—”Lord, dinna forsake Edinburgh! dinna forsake Edinburgh! Why should our preaching here be so powerless? Consciences are not pricked, hearts are not broken, souls are not saved. The enemy is come in as a flood. Oh, pluck thy right hand out of thy bosom! Lord, dinna forsake Edinburgh!”
It was real pleading, real wrestling, “crying out of the depths.” When he ceased, and I had stepped forward, he rekindled his light, and as soon as he recognised me, exclaimed, “Oh, I’m glad it’s you, for we’ll be of one mind on the matter. You know ‘we must give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.’ Prayer is the one half of our work, the first half, and the best half, too. Oh! what poor weak things we would be if we were not made ‘mighty through God.'” Thus did the good old man strengthen his soul for active service by living near the Throne. Thus did he go to his post on the street, strong in the power of prayer.
At whatever time I called upon him, I never got away without our praying together, the one following the other. “I hope you’re not in a hurry,” he would say; “we cannot leave out ‘agreeing together’ to entreat the Lord. Maybe we’ll never meet on praying ground again.”
He carried everything that interested him to the mercy-seat, and he had strong faith in the efficacy of prayer. These were among his favourite maxims—that we are “sure to get relief if we go direct to Christ for it,” and that we should set our hearts not only to “desire greater things than we have gotten yet, but to be aye on the look-out for them.”
I have it on the testimony of one who waited on him much during the closing years of his life, that when alone he spent almost all his time in prayer. Every morning at seven he commenced domestic worship. When afraid, at certain times, of not being awake at that time, he would arrange with the baker to come precisely at the hour. On the Friday he got in his week’s provision, that he might not be disturbed on the Saturday, this being a day he set apart for meditation and special intercession for a blessing on the Sabbath and the labours of the ministry.
He was peculiarly fond of praise-singing, and frequently expressed his astonishment that Christian people should leave praise out of their family-worship, especially since they professed to expect that praise would be their employment for ever in glory. He sometimes alluded to the fact that, when he was first married, he and his wife lived for a time in the same house with a family that had no objection to his making worship; “only,” said he, “they would not let me sing, for fear, I suppose, the neighbours would know what we were at from the sound. Weel, I reasoned with them, and would not give in. All the baits by which they tried to put me past it I rejected. So at last, says I to my wife, ‘Annie, this will never do. We maun hae a house o’ our ain.’ And so we got one, and it was a Bethel to us, where there was ‘heard the voice of joy and melody.’ Oh! it is pleasant, and to praise, ‘it is a comely thing.'”
His prayers were marked by an affectionate precision. Every Christian friend, and every object of Christian interest, were sure of a warm and special mention. He was emphatically one of those who “sigh and cry for the sins of the land.” He had “great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart for his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh.” He made the burden of a dying world his own. I am told by one who was much with him, that during all the time of the Crimean war, he spent some portion of every day in interceding for the soldiers, and that, when he heard of their doing any brave thing, the old martial spirit used to be stirred within him. He would laugh and rub his hands, and say, “shouldn’t it just be the same wi’ Christ’s sodgers? They must charge on the enemy; not content wi’ aye pop, popin’ wi’ the rifles. That’s no the way to do. But up and into the heart o’ them! Three cheers, and down wi’ the enemy’s colours! That’s the way to carry the day.”
He took much pleasure of talking of “the church in the army” in India—”how prayerful they were,” and “how warm their love was to each other.” He was wont to say, “Christian love in this country is like Greenland to theirs.” He had a strong affection for all who love the Lord and whom the Lord loves, to whatever denomination they belonged, if he felt persuaded of their consistent adherence to the grand distinctive doctrines of grace, though on this point he was well known to be “jealous with a godly jealousy.” When I was leaving him one afternoon, a young man came in, as if from College, with books in his hand. He turned to me, and said in a whisper, “That’s a gracious student. I know you like to see a gracious student.” He gathered round him regularly, I understand, a number of such students for the purpose of social devotion, and these scenes were felt to be like a hallowed mount, from which they came down again to the world, prepared to be less ruffled by its cares, and less vulnerable to its temptations.* Several times I took Christian friends along with me to see him, and often afterwards did they refer to such visits as seasons of peculiar refreshment and quickening. By the light he cast on Scripture texts, and his fixed earnestness of soul in pleading the promises, they learned better how to “fight the good fight of faith,” through strength derived from God.
* Those of our readers who are fortunate in having a copy of Mr. Macfarlane’s Memoir and Remains of Rev. D. Macdonald, Shieldaig, will remember the account Mr. Macdonald, while a student, gives of Robert Flockhart’s prayer meetings.
III. The only other distinguishing feature of his character I shall notice is his zeal in seeking to win souls.
“When the Lord began a work of grace in my heart,” said he, “I made a vow that if He would spare me as long in His service as I had been in the service of the devil, I would do all in my power to try and bring as many souls to Him, through the grace of His own Spirit, as I had been instrumental in destroying. I was a ring-leader in all evil, a perfect Napoleon in Satan’s ranks. So I have good reason to be greedy for the conversion of souls.” Indeed, it was from the quiver of his own experience he ever drew his sharpest arrows. It seemed deeply fixed in his mind, and interwoven with all his convictions, that it was his calling—not his by-job, but his business—to go on a Saviour’s errand in quest of lost souls—to seek to snatch them from perdition, like firebrands from the flame.
I have it on the testimony of a Christian friend who was intimately conversant with all his habits, that “when going to preach in the evening, he could not say a word unless he had first, for a considerable while, wrestled with the Lord for a blessing.” And even at those times when he was scarcely able to walk to the place, “ere he was done with preaching he was strong as a lion.” On getting home he “stirred up the fire, and then getting immediately to his knees, he told the Lord all about what had occurred on the street that night, and besought Him to seal the word spoken by making it the means of conversion to somebody.”
One night when he had mounted his chair at St. Giles’, and was about to commence his work, as usual, by singing praise, a woman stepped forward and said, “Mr. Flockhart, you’ll never attempt to preach in sic a nicht as this,” for it rained very heavily. “Whist, woman,” he replied, “and be thankful that the Lord’s not raining down fire and brimstone on you and me out o’ heaven.” The woman was startled and said no more. “So,” to use the words of my informant, “Robbie set to work in earnest, determined not to be afraid of the elements.”
Another night, when he was discoursing on the spirituality of the Law, and how God has threatened His fierce wrath against every one that goeth on in his iniquity, some passers-by came and listened for a little while, and then went away. But he lifted up his voice and cried after them, “Ye’re not fond, I see, o’ the sparks fleeing about your ears. I doubt ye may be like the dog in the smith’s shop when the red-hot iron is on the anvil. Just when the hammer is coming down, the dog, poor beast, runs in below the bench for fear. And is that the way wi’ you?”
This incident reminds me of one of the first remarks he made to me when I first met him. We were speaking of how difficult it is to awaken reflection and produce conviction in the minds of the ungodly, when he stated that he had almost always found the most alarming subjects the most useful, and he added, “You never saw a woman sewing without a needle? She would come but poor speed if she only sewed wi’ the thread. So, I think, when we’re dealing wi’ sinners, we maun aye put in the needle o’ the law first; for the fact is, they’re sleepin’ sound, and they need to be awakened up wi’ something sharp. But when we’ve got the needle o’ the law fairly in, we may draw as lang a thread as you like o’ gospel consolation after ‘t.”
Certainly, he was not one of those who, by their preaching, sew pillows under the arms of sleepy professors, who “prophesy smooth things,” and “heal hurts slightly,” and “cry Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” “I believe,” said he, on one occasion, “though the High Street were strewed with the blessings of God’s grace, there’s such hard-heartedness and ungodliness among the folk here, they would not stop to lift up one of the gifts so freely given them of heaven. Oh! they’re a ‘generation o’ vipers,’ the drunken, scoffing, crew! They fasten like vipers on the very hand o’ God. But if they dinna mend, I tell them what God will do. He’ll shake the vipers off His hand into the fire, the devouring fire, the unquenchable fire, and yet He’ll ‘feel no harm.'”
Speaking of those that are “backsliders in heart,” he observed, “When the fire of grace is burning low in our hearts, it’s high time to be clearing out the ribs,* and the first way to do that is by making free confession. ‘I said I will confess,’ and I no sooner ‘said it’—I no sooner began to ‘muse’—than ‘the fire’ began to ‘burn.’ ‘I said I will confess my transgression unto the Lord, and Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.'”
* Bars of a fire grate.
When he heard that the matter of open-air preaching was stirring so much the minds of ministers and churches, it made him very happy, and he said, “You will never get at the ignorant and the profligate mass without it. I’m so glad I had to bear the brunt o’t for you. I had to ‘suffer shame’ many a day for what’s so respectable now. I had to go to ‘bonds and imprisonments’ for doing what our Master did, for He preached far oftener by the road-side, and by the sea-side, than in the synagogue.” Well did He know, and often testified how well He knew, that one great cause of the ill success of the gospel among the careless multitude is their disposition to regard stated official ministrations within church-walls as just so much paid work. But when one approaches them, on whom they have no claim—one who asks nothing but a patient hearing, and who exposes himself to toil, and contempt, and danger, for no conceivable reason except that he is seeking to do them good—in this case a state of feeling is produced peculiarly fitted to gain attention, and, by the blessing of God, to ensure saving impression. How much better to die of George Whitefield’s asthma, or of Robbie Flockhart’s palsy, through “labours more abundant” in such service, than to die of dignity through letting it alone.
He was going on with his street-work, with undiminished zeal, when palsy overtook him. “We’ve met at last,” said he, speaking of the disease, “and we’ll never be parted but at the grave’s mouth.” For some days he seemed to be hovering between life and death, yet he rallied again with wonderful rapidity, though never to the reattaining of that point of strength from which this attack had brought him down. His wonted vivacity and cheerfulness still remained unshadowed. I never saw him spiritually depressed. He regarded it as his duty to “rejoice in the Lord always,” as really as it is to “pray without ceasing.” And upon this he was accustomed to lay particular stress, as the true way of honouring “the God of all comfort.”
To adopt the expression of one of his friends, “He appeared to take that palsy as kindly from the Lord’s hand as if some one had left him a fortune.” Yet he did say at times, “I feel my wings are clipped now. I’m like a bird wi’ a stone tied to its leg. It tries to get up, but cannot rise. The time’s coming, though, when I’ll be relieved o’ this heavy load. Then I’ll clap my glad wings and flee away. I’ll be young again when I reach that happy home. How I’ll make the arches o’ heaven ring with loud hallelujahs to God and the Lamb for ever! Oh, what a glorious body ‘the celestial body’ will be! No bleary-eyed Leahs nor limpin Jacobs up yonder!”
One of the last times I was with him, we were speaking of Christ’s “learning obedience by the things which He suffered,” when he said, “Ay, but what a difference there is between His language in His state of humiliation and in His state of exaltation. In His humiliation, it was ‘Father, not My will, but thine be done.’ But now, in His exalted state, He says, ‘Father, I will.’ And He gets the request of His lips, when any believer dies, ‘Father, I will that they whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, to behold my glory.'”
As his end drew near, his thoughts appeared to dwell the more delightedly on “the things that are above.” For instance, one afternoon when heaven was the theme of our conversation, he remarked, that “Faith, Hope, and Love will be our good company all the way up to the door o’ our Father’s house. But there Faith will make her bow, and retire, saying, ‘You’ll not need me more, for you’re now to “see Him as He is,” without the veil.’ And Hope, too, will say ‘Farewell! I’ve been glad to get you guided this length. And now, when I’ve served your turn, I must see after other pilgrims coming the same road.’ But Love will smile, and say, ‘You and I are not to part that way. No, no! I’m going in to stay wi’ you to all eternity.'”
It needs but to be added, that he died as he had lived, to the praise of God’s grace. It was striking and most instructive to witness how his long life of active service came in no degree into the account of his final hope. His heart, in the end, found rest alone in the merits of Him who had been “the beginning of his confidence.” And with this sure anchor before him, he passed “within the vail.”