2. Minister in Inverness and Daviot
Rev J R Mackay
During his Caithness ministry, Cook began those much-needed services for Gaelic-speaking fishermen in Wick, which the well-known Alexander Gair did so much to perpetuate and which, in course of time, became quite a feature of the religious life of the place. Duncan MacIver states that he himself had met with two worthy men – one a catechist and another a farmer in America – who, according to their own testimony, first realised the preciousness of an immortal soul while hearing Cook at some of those services for Gaelic-speaking fishermen.
At a meeting for catechising in Daviot, about the year 1850, Cook said, “I can say for myself, that I never put my hand to anything of the world but I was afraid I would lose my soul by it.” He added, “I will make free to tell you another thing. When I was in Caithness I had a small piece of land, and I knew nothing as to how anything about it should be managed. Yet the Lord was pleased to reveal to me in secret how everything respecting it should be done.”
There are ample proofs that Cook’s Caithness ministry was much owned of the Lord. We have given some concrete cases of blessing; we believe they may be taken as samples of many similar cases. Only the Great Day will fully reveal what were the fruits of a ministry characterised with such genuine humility, such an arresting tenderness of walk and conversation, such unflinching opposition to iniquity, and also such extraordinary prayerfulness. Not long after Cook was settled in Bruan, he married Catherine MacKay from Wick; their family consisted of two sons and six daughters.
In 1829 Finlay Cook accepted a call to Ness, Lewis. After a ministry of little more than four years in Lewis – but one that was manifestly owned by God – he accepted a call to the East Church, Inverness. Finlay Cook’s ministry in Inverness was also brief, lasting only for about three years, at the end of which he became minister of Reay, in Caithness, where he continued to minister with acceptance for the remaining 23 years of his life. When he came to Inverness, the congregation was a mere skeleton, and the church itself £900 in debt. Before he left the town, the church was overcrowded, and the whole of that debt was cleared off. He proved the means of associating with the church a group of men who, before his arrival, were standing aloof from the ordinary ministrations of the Church of Scotland. Among these were some of the excellent of the earth.
When Finlay Cook left Inverness for Reay, the Inverness congregation turned their thoughts to his brother as a desirable successor. Archibald Cook was therefore heard on probation there. One of his sermons, it seems, was from the words: “Keep me, O God,” but, although it was considered by some of the most discerning in the congregation as the finest of the wheat, it gave offence to some others. The consequence was a prolonged and bitter division in what was now a large congregation, ending in the party which was opposed to Archibald Cook carrying their point, although only by a very small majority.
The large minority who had set their heart on him would not give in. They were disjoined from the East Church and built, as a separate congregation, the old North Church of Inverness. When they had, with the General Assembly’s sanction, done this, they sent a unanimous call to Archibald Cook, which he, “much to the regret of his attached friends throughout Caithness”, thought it his duty to accept. His induction to the pastorate of the North Church took place on the 31 August 1837. In his new sphere of labour, Cook had quite a large number of eminently pious men and women in thorough sympathy with his method of preaching and his views of truth. The North Church congregation, always large, grew apace during his seven-year pastorate.
It was during this period that the Disruption of the Church of Scotland occurred. Cook appears to have had no hesitation as to the path of duty and immediately joined the Free Church. As his entire congregation followed him, his people were not greatly disturbed by the upheaval. So far as we know, they were not once threatened with dispossession of the church buildings on account of becoming Free Churchmen.
In his personal life, Cook continued to maintain the high level of spiritual-mindedness which, we have seen, characterised him from the outset. Poor he often was in his own feelings, yet at the same time he was making many rich. “I was three nights with him,” writes his brother Finlay, in a letter of March 1842, “on my way home from Edinburgh. He is really an excellent man; there are few in this generation like him. I never saw a man that keeps so near to the Lord as he does. He is constantly praying or reading or meditating when he is not engaged in public. Though you would be a year with him you would not hear a vain word out of his mouth.” Very different, however, was his own estimate: “My own barrenness and distance from God,” he writes in a letter from this period, “the want of spiritual-mindedness, and the fear of becoming a barren tree in the Church, these often make my life a burden, and I often wish that I never appeared in public, or that I had been born dumb”.
Through God’s blessing on a life of such humility as well as of devotedness to service, Cook became a power for good in the town of Inverness. Not only were the North Church people devotedly attached to him, he was, to an extent he would himself scarcely have looked for, a means of elevating the moral tone of the community around him. For instance, he became in a great measure the means of bringing to an end in this neighbourhood those disreputable functions, not uncommon in those days, known as penny weddings. These were weddings held in public houses, to which all who paid the fiddler and his drink were made welcome. Cook, whose mind, ever since his experience of the dancing school in Arran, was averse to all such frivolities, set himself to denounce this way of celebrating marriages with all his might. On one occasion at least, his denunciations were owned of the Spirit of God for the conversion of one of the party to whom the rebuke was administered. Cook had before long the happiness of seeing this form of iniquity hide its face, as ashamed.
For four years after the death, in the summer of 1839, of James Macphail (son of the well-known Hector Macphail of Resolis) the parish of Daviot was without a pastor. The patron – such was then the way – sought, after Macphail’s death, to set over the congregation a man utterly unacceptable to the people. The people firmly stood out against this arrangement, but it was only the Disruption that brought them relief. In this struggle, Cook sympathised deeply with the people of Daviot. The Daviot case, as it was called, may have helped to make his path of duty plainer to him when the Disruption arrived. At any rate, it would seem to have affected him favourably towards that people when, in the summer of 1843, the Free Church congregation of Daviot asked him to become their pastor.
When the North Church congregation came to hear of this movement, countenanced though it was by Cook himself, they set themselves to use all the means within their power to thwart it. By a statement signed by more than 900 people they appealed to the Presbytery of Inverness not to sanction Cook’s removal from the town. The statement bore eloquent testimony to the very strong attachment which the North Church congregation, to a man, felt for their pastor, to their conviction that God’s blessing had in a conspicuous manner rested upon his labours among them, and it asserted that his removal to another sphere of labour meant irreparable loss for the North Church congregation. It was only then that Cook fully realised his people’s strong attachment to him, and in the circumstances he threw himself upon the Presbytery to decide the matter for him. The consequence was that Daviot was disappointed for the time being.
In the following year, however, the Daviot congregation approached Mr Cook a second time. Meanwhile the conviction had been growing on him that town life was damaging his health. In the circumstances, The North Church congregation intimated that they would not again offer such opposition to his leaving them, if he himself thought it his duty to go elsewhere. Cook did think it his duty to accept the call from Daviot, and his induction took place on 1 August 1844.
In March 1844 the Free Church congregation of Moy had become vacant through the translation of Thomas MacLachlan to Stratherrick. The people of Moy then sought to secure Mr Cook as their pastor, before the Daviot congregation had approached him the second time. His preference was for Daviot, but in the circumstances he expressed to the Presbytery a willingness to preach on every third Sabbath at Moy, until such a time as the Moy congregation was provided with a pastor of their own. This arrangement concerning Moy was heartily agreed to by all concerned. It was not to last long; as a matter of fact it came to an end only three years before Cook died, when John Baillie was induced to Moy.
At Daviot, while Cook’s health lasted, his labours were, as in his earlier charges, most abundant. From November to May each year, his time was largely occupied in catechising his people, an exercise in which he greatly delighted. Those who admired him most thought that, as he excelled most other ministers in preaching, so in catechising he excelled himself. Referring in one of his letters to this part of his ministry, he remarks: “Though I find it heavy, it is the happiest part of my time in the whole year. I feel myself free of worldly cares when so engaged and often feel my own soul refreshed in speaking to sinners of a Saviour, though myself the greatest sinner among them.” In thus catechising the people of two parishes, he was wont to hold about 90 meetings each winter, and most of them would occupy between two and three hours. Generally they were held in barns, for it was not an uncommon thing to see congregations of several hundred. Many thirsting for the water of life attended these services from neighbouring parishes, some from very considerable distances.
“Mr Cook’s catechising,” says Duncan MacIver “cannot be described. It was just flashes of light for the occasion. In dealing with a person who had the least concern about eternity, he was all tenderness, as if the fears and difficulties – yes, and even the thoughts then passing through the person’s mind were open before his eyes; yes, more than if the person tried to tell his troubles, and he used them all to draw the soul to the Love that came to seek and to save that which was lost. On the other hand, his faithfulness and severity were just as remarkable. When a person stood before him, although a perfect stranger to him, that person’s manner of living seemed to be as clear to him as if he were an eye-witness, and he dealt with him according to the person’s ways, so that some had a great dread of the catechising, yet would not shirk it lest people would think them worse than they were.” For wit, let it be added, for sympathy with the distressed, for reprobation of wickedness, for profound intuitions into theological questions, experimental and doctrinal, this catechist, according to all that one has heard of him from many sources, was unique.
During the summer months Cook frequently gave assistance to neighbouring ministers during communion seasons, and occasionally travelled great distances for such purposes. While his brother, Finlay Cook, lived, he was as a rule once a year in Reay. Only once did he visit that parish after his brother’s death. An intelligent and appreciative hearer on that occasion writes: “Mr Archibald Cook came to Reay shortly after his brother’s death in 1858 to dispense the Communion. He conducted the Gaelic service on the hillside on Sabbath and the English in church on Monday. His text on Monday was John 3:30, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’
“At the conclusion, and before pronouncing the benediction, he said in very solemn tones, ‘I have a message to deliver to the people of Reay, and it is this: “Behold the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). My friends, this is a terrible threatening and although, by the forbearance of the Lord, His spiritual judgements usually come on gradually, yet I believe there are some in this church today who will see this realised. What a judgement it was upon Israel when the ark – the symbol of God’s presence – was taken from their midst! I was thinking this morning what the feelings of a godly Israelite would be as he stood in the door of his tent and watched the ark carried over the brow of the hill, unto the land of the Philistines. I bless the Lord that I got a glimpse of the ark before it has been quite taken away out of this land, for if I had not, the religion which is now coming into fashion would make wreck of anything I have.'”
The same correspondent adds: “On the following day, Mr Cook came to Thurso to take the mail coach for the south. Going along the street with the Rev Mr Taylor, they met an aged, pious woman (Kitty Cormack) who was sadly deformed and bent almost twofold. Mr Taylor stopped and asked Mr Cook, who did not know Kitty Cormack, to shake hands with her. He did so, saying, ‘You are very infirm and seem to be near the end of your journey; where do you think will your landing be?’ Looking up at him and with a smile overspreading her countenance, she replied, ‘At the place I am desiring, sir’. Not expecting such an answer, Mr Cook looked tenderly at her and said, ‘What a wonderful Lover is the Saviour when He would fall in love with the like of you!’”
^1This is the biographical introduction to a volume entitled, Sermons (Gaelic and English) “by the late Rev Archibald Cook, Daviot”; it was published in 1907. Mr Mackay was then the Free Presbyterian minister in Inverness. This introduction is included in the forthcoming volume of sermons by Cook being produced by Free Presbyterian Publications; as reprinted here, the introduction has been edited. The first article, last month, told of Cook’s early years, until he was inducted as missionary-minister of Berriedale and Bruan, in Caithness.