To the church militant the death of the righteous brings sorrow; to the church triumphant joy. This contrast is due to difference of place, circumstance, and outlook. On earth, especially in a day of declension, the Church, contending for truth and righteousness, mourns the loss of the prayers, example, and fellowship of those who have entered into the rest that remaineth to the people of God. In heaven, the assembled hosts, resting from their labours, rejoice at the safe arrival of another trophy of sovereign grace, redeemed by blood, and brought by the Captain of Salvation to join the multitude who are before the throne singing the praises of God and of the Lamb.
On February 5, 1953, Mrs. Fraser, The Cottage, Stratherrick, passed to her everlasting rest. Margaret MacGillivray, for this was her maiden name, was born on December 28, 1857, at Balnabiran, of godly parents who reared their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Their home was the resort of many of the godly, and in it the eminent Donald Duff held, periodically, the catechising diet for the district. After the service it was customary for some of the godly to remain behind with Mr. Duff and the evening was passed in conversation on things spiritual and eternal.
Her mother died when Margaret was but eighteen years, and at this early age, as the oldest of the family, she undertook the care of the household, acting a mother’s part to her brothers and sisters. When her mother was on her death-bed she gathered her young family around her, counselled them with regard to their conduct, and urged them to read the Bible and seek the salvation in Christ it sets forth. Especially she urged them to consider prayerfully Psalm lxxiii. Of Margaret’s awakening to a sense of her lost state the writer was not informed but she got deliverance with the words, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” It was during the night. She was in bed. The Scripture, giving “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” shined in her heart filling it with the light of life, and with a sense of pardon, peace and joy. At the same moment as if to convey visible assurance that the Lord had made her darkness to be light: that the darkness was past and that she was now light in the Lord, there shone a bright light around her in the bed. Now she began to understand in a measure, and to find joy in imitating the exercise of the Psalmist in Psalm lxxiii. 6, 8.
In 1881 she married William Fraser, farmer, Ledclune, a man like-minded with herself. The late Rev. D. Macfarlane when minister in Tomatin, often assisted at the communion services in Stratherrick. On these occasions he gave solemn warning of how the Free Church was departing from Scripture doctrine and her own Constitution, especially how she was allowing many of her ministers to reject the doctrine of election and the Scriptural relation of Church and State, and to attack the Confession of Faith. These evils were soon afterwards embodied in the Declaratory Act which turned the Church’s Calvinistic Constitution into an Arminian Constitution, and bound these evils upon all who remained in the Church after the defeat of the attempt to rescind the Act in 1893. After the service on one of the occasions referred to, Mr. Fraser thanked Rev. D. Macfarlane for the clear and sober way in which he had described the Church’s declension, adding, that they as a congregation were not informed of the evils he had spoken of as being in the Church. Rev. D. Macfarlane in other places stated publicly that he was greatly encouraged by Mr. Fraser’s words, for in those days he got very little encouragement in the uphill task of exposing the evils within the Church.
Mrs. Fraser had a family of five sons and six daughters, and she had the great joy of seeing several of them and some of her grandchildren brought to a saving knowledge of the Divine Redeemer. She was gifted with remarkable calmness of mind in the midst of trying circumstances. That calmness, however, was often severely tested, for the gifts which the Lord bestows He will test that they may be exercised to His glory and the advancement of the believer’s sanctification. So it was in Mrs. Fraser’s case. Her husband, in 1908, while in seemingly good health, died suddenly outside his own home. All her brothers and sisters predeceased her. Death cut off five of her family, two sons and three daughters. She met with other trials, too, but she bore them all with remarkable calmness. Submission under the afflicting hand of the Lord, she said, was a duty. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”
When about to seek admission to the Lord’s Table, at the last moment she became discouraged and refrained. Soon afterwards she burnt her arm severely. This she took as a rebuke for failing to confess publicly her Lord, a duty she performed at the next communion season. At the last communion she attended at Inverness, at the age of ninety-two, she enjoyed much of the Lord’s presence. Not long afterwards death removed her much-esteemed sister, Matron MacGillivray, to whom she was deeply attached. This blow, followed by a pneumonia attack, and later the death of her youngest son, sapped her strength but, on the whole, her health continued favourable until near the end, and her faculties were unimpaired to the last. Latterly, her daughter, Mrs. John Fraser, took her to her home at Migoivie where she passed away peacefully in her ninety-sixth year, surrounded by members of her family.
In her case the Scripture was fulfilled, “Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season.” “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.”—F. B.