THERE have been very few in Stornoway during the last 50 years more highly respected than the late Alexander Maciver, deacon, who was removed from our midst on the 12th
of June, 1933. He was born in Scorraig, near Ullapool, in the year 1861. His father, Mr. John Maciver, elder, highly respected throughout the Church as an outstandingly pious man predeceased his son, Alexander, by only four years, having lived almost a century. Our late friend came to Stornoway as a young man and spent all his active life in business there. He was greatly esteemed for his strict integrity and for his kindness to those in need. The Great Day alone will reveal the number he helped with the necessities of life when in poverty or in want of work. As a shrewd man, in the best sense, and as one of deep and varied experience, his advice was asked and freely given to those who came to him with their difficulties, great and small.
But Alex. Maciver shone most brightly as a sincere and humble follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit of Truth brought home the momentous matters of his soul’s salvation and these occupied his thoughts off and on from his early boyhood. He knew as few have known the mental struggle and disappointment of endeavouring to find peace in a moral life and in a round of religious duties. He tried, as few have tried, to arrive at peace with God by grasping the life line of the gospel, and the knowledge of his inability to do this by mere human effort brought him to despair as one whom, he thought, God did not intend to save. Creature efforts failed him and he spent his days thanking the Lord that these did fail. He was brought into the full peace of the gospel by the light of that glorious passage:—”Jesus said, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me.'” Alexander Maciver understood that day that man’s salvation consisted in a whole-hearted acceptance of the perfect provision God has provided for lost sinners in His Only Begotten Son, Emmanuel, God with us.
For well over forty years he walked in the comfort of the truth by which God caused him to hope, till latterly he became so mellowed by the doctrine of Christ as the Way that he found it impossible to refer to it without emotion. The
High Priest entering with the Blood and the Ark of the Covenant opening a passage through Jordan for the people of God, were the common themes of his family and public exercises. We have known few who carried the sweet savour of Christ which filled the whole house as he did. In his public exercises of prayer and speaking to “the question,” he was invariably short but always lively and savoury. He was a choice one of a very small class who have the almost unknown gift or infirmity of being brief to the regret of the hearers who would wish them to continue longer. He took an active part in the formation of the Stornoway Free Presbyterian Congregation and much of its past and present prosperity is due to his untiring efforts. From the beginning of our movement, he was an office-bearer in the congregation and he magnified his office as he did every other relation of life as consistently as any we ever knew. Alexander Maciver was another of those among us who served his generation to the utmost of his ability, and of his grace, and lived so that he is greatly missed in the Church and in the world.
He was laid aside from active participation in the public service of the sanctuary for the last six months of his life. During that time, his concern was for the Cause and the need there was that the great breaches in the removal of so many witnesses in Lewis should be healed. His end came peaceably and the long procession which followed his remains two days later emphasised the sense of loss and the feeling of the community that a truly noble, great and good man, had been taken from our midst. He left a widow, one son and two daughters to mourn his removal. May the Lord fulfil His promises to them, and take the children in the place of the fathers.—M. G.
We are but as sea passengers—if we look right on, we are upon our country’s coast.—Rutherford.
Sin is the weight on the clock which makes the hammer strike.—George Swinnock.