The Word of God tells us that “the memory of the just is blessed” (Prov 10:7). The fact that these sermons of Rev Archibald Cook are being reprinted in translation 150 years after they were preached is an eloquent testimony to the honour the Lord has put upon the memory of this renowned servant of Jesus Christ. When we read these sermons we are afforded a taste of the preaching that was owned of the Lord in the evangelisation of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a taste of the kind of teaching that nourished and refreshed the most serious and exercised Christians in Cook’s own day. There is little wonder then that these discourses have been highly prized by those who had a thirst for experimental divinity and were able to read the Gaelic language.
Sadly, the number of such as can both appreciate their spiritual content and can understand Gaelic has declined over the generations, and it has become increasingly necessary to have the sermons translated into English if their message is to continue to be heard and heeded. Although some of Cook’s sermons have been previously published in English, this volume is the first translation of those extant Gaelic sermons which were published in 1916 under the title Searmoin Ghàidhlig.2 The project has been a long time in coming to fruition and the Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland are indebted to a number of people who have rendered great assistance over the years. The translation was first undertaken by the late Miss Marjory Dunbar (1908-2008) of Tomatin, whose father, as a child, had the privilege of hearing Archibald Cook preaching. Parts of Miss Dunbar’s manuscript were revised by the late Mr Alasdair Gillies and by the late Rev D J MacDonald. This work was completed by Mr Alan Boyd.
Archibald Cook was born in 1788 in the Isle of Arran. The minister of his parish during Cook’s youth was Rev Neil MacBride (1764-1814), a powerful Evangelical preacher, whose labours were remarkably blessed in the conversion of sinners. There were times of awakening and revival under MacBride in 1804 and 1812. A number of those converted at this time eventually became faithful ministers of the Church of Scotland, among whom was Finlay Cook (1778-1858), Archibald’s elder brother. Having himself been converted at a young age, undoubtedly through the influence of the revival, Archibald came to believe that the Lord was calling him to the ministry. He studied at Glasgow University and had the great privilege of hearing Dr John Love (1757-1825), the godly minister of Anderston, Glasgow. Love’s preaching and example left a great mark on both of the Cook brothers. The leading light in the Glasgow Divinity faculty at this time was Dr Stevenson MacGill (1765-1840), a pastorally-minded professor “who did much to raise the standard of ministerial earnestness and utility in the Church of Scotland prior to the Disruption”.3
Archibald Cook was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of Glasgow in 1822 and ordained as missionary-minister to the charge of Berriedale and Bruan in Caithness in 1823. He was translated to the North Church in Inverness in 1837 and to the rural charge of Daviot, Inverness-shire, in 1844, where he remained until his death in 1865. For further biographical information on Archibald Cook, readers are referred to the recent detailed study by Norman Campbell, One of Heaven’s Jewels, Rev Archibald Cook of Daviot and the (Free) North Church, Inverness; and to the Biographical Introduction by Rev J R Mackay which follows this Introduction4 and was originally published in the 1907 volume of sermons and was also included in Rev Alexander McPherson’s valuable collection Sidelights on Two Notable Ministries.5
What of the sermons themselves? They are marked by a number of outstanding features. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the searching and stripping nature of their content, which is constantly applied so directly and powerfully to the conscience. Cook expresses himself in very pithy, aphoristic and almost abrupt language which gives a tremendous sense of lively, nervous energy to the way he handles his subject. The constant repetition of the emphatic second person singular pronoun thusa “you” is one obvious indication of how Cook brought his message straight home to the hearts of his audience. Although his sermons are not always characterised by precise logical order or close adherence to the method he lays down when announcing his heads, Cook never fails to rivet the attention.
We should also bear in mind that these sermons were taken down in shorthand by Mr Duncan MacIver, a devoted admirer of Cook from Inverness (whose own account of how he came to be Cook’s amanuensis follows the Biographical Introduction). This no doubt adds to the terseness of the language, since we are reading what MacIver recorded of Cook’s addresses and that must inevitably have involved at least some element of condensing. Often Cook makes a bold or highly original statement which leaves the reader wondering exactly what lies behind the remark, since Scripture proofs are not adduced for every single statement he utters. Yet this is one of the most rewarding aspects of reading Cook, since it makes one ponder, and often, upon reflection, it is seen how deeply significant and apposite some of these striking remarks actually are.
The chief reason for the characteristically challenging nature of these discourses nevertheless lies beyond any stylistic consideration and is to be found in the fact that Archibald Cook was a man of outstanding godliness and nearness to the Lord. The private communion he enjoyed with the God of eternity overflowed into his public work and put a stamp of the awe of holiness and spiritual glory upon his words. If Cook was “one of heaven’s jewels”, and if there are “treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places” to be found within these pages, it is because the preacher in his own soul was enabled to dig deep into the storehouses of the everlasting covenant.
This intimate communion with the Lord bore fruit particularly in the field of Christian experience: as a result these sermons exhibit much discrimination between the marks of true and false religion. Here Cook’s deep understanding of human nature was combined with a gift of analysing the true work of grace in its beginnings, progress and evidences. Whilst his exposing of what was merely “born of the flesh” was withering, Cook could be wonderful in comforting broken-hearted hearers at the same time. He was “most careful that the tendency of his preaching should not be to drive his hearers to despair. ‘I like the Holy Ghost to convince me of sin’, he used to say, ‘for He never magnifies it above the mercy of God.’6
Having been preached near the end of his life, “these sermons”, according to Rev J R Mackay, “embody Mr Cook’s mature judgement concerning matters that are of the deepest interest touching doctrine, experience and preaching”. Certainly, the treatment of such topics as God’s love to Christ, the preciousness of the day of grace for the sinner, the ground of the sinner’s warrant to lay hold upon Christ, assurance of salvation and the nature of saving faith show Cook to have been profoundly taught of God as an expositor of the Word of life. Another feature of these sermons is how freely they exalt the righteousness of Christ and press the claims of the gospel upon the soul. The “infinite, intrinsic efficacy of the blood of Christ” is prominently held forth because, whatever the needs of the sinner: “For Mr Cook the remedy was always, in one word, Christ”.7
Cook’s theology is robust old-school Calvinism, which clearly evidences itself here in a profound sense of the glory and sovereignty of God in salvation; yet nowhere is there a hint of any restriction of the freeness of the gospel offer to the chief of sinners. The nature and attributes of God are often pondered over and Cook’s sense of the glory of God manifested in Christ as a God of mercy is palpable throughout. Christ’s atoning death as the ultimate expression of that mercy was never far from his thoughts. Furthermore, the immeasurable value of the human soul itself seems to have impressed Cook greatly, and his earnest warnings and appeals to sinners not to neglect the great salvation still have an urgency and pathos that it would be our wisdom to lay to heart.
On the publication of the first volume of Cook’s sermons (Gaelic and English) the eminent American theologian, Professor B B Warfield, wrote in the Princeton Theological Review in 1908: “His preaching was of that pungent order best represented in our American pulpit, perhaps, by Dr Archibald Alexander, in which the appeal is characteristically to the conscience, and the prime quality of which is searching analysis of the state of mind of the sinner lacking, and the sinner under, the power of grace.
“While not a theologian in the technical sense, he was yet well learned in the great doctrines of grace, and all his preaching was sustained and given body by his underlying evangelical system, which informed it. He felt keenly what sin is and made his hearers feel its dreadful evil and power: and he pointed them with the most winning appeal to the love of the sin-forgiving God as the source of all their hope. . . . The thing which made all his preaching acceptable and effective was the intense reality of the man. He preached no intellectual abstractions, but in the truest sense of the word vital truths . . . . Such a preacher’s memory should be kept green, and these discourses . . . are yet sufficiently touched with the fire of his fervid appeals to serve that purpose. But we should beware of estimating his power by these coals from the altar.”8
One final point about Cook’s discourses is the powerful sense of the eternal world which pervades the whole. Here we have a Spirit-taught preacher bringing everlasting realities to the minds of sinners on the brink of eternity. While the many references to hell here may stand in stark contrast to the widespread neglect of the subject in modern Evangelicalism, we believe that, by constantly and compassionately warning sinners to flee from the wrath which is to come, Archibald Cook was eminently faithful to His Master, for no one in the Bible ever dwelt more on this most solemn subject than the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
1This is the Introduction to Eternal Reality, the English translation of Cook’s Gaelic sermons which is due to be published this month, DV, by Free Presbyterian Publications. It is a hardback of around 330 pages and is to cost £19.50. Besides the sermons, the volume contains further interesting biographical and introductory material.
2J R Mackay (ed), Sermons in Gaelic and English by Rev A Cook (Glasgow, 1907); Searmoin Ghàidhlig leis an Urr Gilleasbuig MacCuaig, a bha ann an Deimhidh (Glasgow, 1916, reprinted 1946).
3See D E Meek, “Neil MacBride”, in N M de S Cameron (ed), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology (Edinburgh, 1993), p 504; J R McIntosh, “John Love”, ibid, p 498, and K J Stewart, “Stevenson MacGill”, ibid, p 514.
4In the volume, Eternal Reality.
5N Campbell, One of Heaven’s Jewels, Rev Archibald Cook of Daviot and the (Free) North Church, Inverness (Stornoway, 2009); A. McPherson (ed), Sidelights on Two Notable Ministries, Rev Finlay Cook and Rev Archibald Cook (Free Presbyterian Publications, 1970). The latter, which is still in print, was collected from two earlier publications: The Revs F and A Cook’s Letters (Inverness, 1895), edited with a memoir by Rev J. Kennedy, Catacol, Arran; also the above-mentioned Sermons in Gaelic and English by Rev A Cook, with biographical and theological introduction by Rev J R Mackay. See also A Auld, Ministers and Men of the Far North (Wick, 1868, and reprinted by Free Presbyterian Publications), pp 100-33, 287-344; D Beaton, Some Noted Ministers of the Northern Highlands (Free Presbyterian Publications, 1985 reprint), pp 240-250; D Sage, Memorabilia Domestica (Edinburgh, 1899 edn) p 298.
6Sidelights on Two Notable Ministries, p 44.
7Sidelights, pp 40-43.
8Princeton Theological Review, 1908, vol 6, no 4, p 689.