This brief account was originally a chapter in a book called Thirteen Appreciations by Alexander Whyte. Whyte wrote a volume on Fraser called James Fraser, Laird of Brea. Fraser’s autobiography is included in Scottish Puritans (a two-volume set published by Banner of Truth).
The religious literature of Scotland is remarkably rich in books of religious autobiography. Telling us each one his own spiritual story we have James Melville, and Robert Blair, and John Livingstone, and Alexander Brodie, and James Fraser, and Thomas Halyburton, and Thomas Boston, and Hugh Miller, and John Duncan, and William Taylor, and Andrew Bonar. And there are not a few fragments of the same kind quite worthy to stand beside those full and finished works; such as the autobiographical remains of the Lady Coltness, the Lady Anne Elcho, and Marion Veitch. Every one of those famous autobiographies has its own individuality, idiosyncrasy, and physiognomy; and each several one of them makes its own special contribution to the noblest catalogue of the books of our native land. I know something of all those great books; but there is none of them that draws me and holds me and keeps possession of me like the Memoirs of Sir James Fraser of Brea, written by himself. Dr. Jowett, writing to Lady Airlie, said that he had just finished Boswell for the fiftieth time, and Mr. Spurgeon was wont to say that he had read Bunyan a hundred times. I shall not attempt to count up the times I have read James Fraser of Brea, but if I did I feel sure that I would run both Jowett and Spurgeon hard.
Dr. Aird of Creich has collected the chief facts of Fraser’s life into a short biographical sketch which will be found prefixed to the Inverness edition of Fraser’s autobiography. And Dr. Elder Cumming of Glasgow has an admirable appreciation of Fraser in his Holy Men of God. The following are the main outlines of Fraser’s much-tried life. He was born at Brea, his father’s estate in Ross-shire, on the 29th of July 1639. His father died while his son James was still a child, and some of his greatest troubles in life came to him out of his ownership of that estate. Although he began to study for the legal profession, young Fraser eventually gave himself up to the study of divinity, to which study he brought a mind of the first intellectual order. From his earliest days the Laird of Brea identified himself with the outed evangelical ministers of the north, and all along he was a most pronounced Presbyterian and Covenanter, and both by his tongue and by his pen he fought unflinchingly for the freedom of his Church and his country. Both in the Bass and in Blackness and in Newgate he suffered the most unjust imprisonment, and the wickedest and the most malicious ill-usage. After the Revolution we find Fraser settled as parish minister of Culross, where he closed his troubled career about the year 1698. Dr. Aird adds this note to his short sketch of Fraser’s life: ‘He was assisted at a communion at Culross, very shortly before his death, by the celebrated Boston of Ettrick, then a young man.’
But with all that it is in his Memoirs of Himself that James Fraser of Brea will live, and he will live in that remarkable book as long as a scholarly religion, and an evangelical religion, and a spiritual religion, and a profoundly experimental religion lives in his native land. In saying that I do not forget the warning that Dr. Elder Cumming gives me to the effect that Fraser’s will be a Scottish reputation only, and even that will be limited to readers of a special cast of religious experience and spiritual sympathy. At the same time, Dr. Elder Cumming adds that Fraser’s autobiography is a book that for depth and for grip has few, if any, equals among the foremost books of its kind in the whole world.
Now you will naturally ask me at this point just what it is that gives James Fraser such a high rank as a spiritual writer, and just what it is that so signalises his Memoirs of Himself. Well, in his own characteristic words, his Memoirs is ‘the book of the intricacies of his own heart and life,’ and that on their purely spiritual side. Now, Fraser’s mind was by nature of the most intricate kind that is to say, his mind was naturally of the most acute and subtle and penetrating and searching-out kind. Had he gone into law, as at one time he intended to do, he would infallibly have taken rank as one of the acutest of our Scottish lawyers. And with his immense industry he would to a certainty have left writings behind him that would have been of classical authority in that great profession. But to the lasting enrichment of his own soul, and to the lasting enrichment of all his kindred-minded readers’ souls, Fraser was led of God into divinity, and into divinity of the deepest, acutest, most evangelical, and most experimental kind. ‘I chose divinity,’ says Butler, ‘it being of all studies the most suitable to a reasonable nature.’
Unhappily for us, many of Fraser’s private journals, family papers, and estate documents are hopelessly lost. But if ever they are recovered I feel sure it will be found that he had made out more than once a most exact map and inventory of his inherited estate with his own exact and intricate hands. I can see the delineaments and the depictments of the whole estate of Brea as they were laid down by the honestest, and the exactest, and the intricatest of pens. I can see its hills and its glens, its farms and its crofts, its streams and its lochs, its cattle and its game and its fish, and all laid down with a mathematical exactness and a geometrical completeness as if he were preparing his estate for the Inverness or Edinburgh market; and as if he were determined to do so with the most absolute justice both to the seller and the buyer. Now whether those maps and plans and accompanying documents are ever recovered or no, most happily we have some still more important documents preserved to us from Fraser’s faithful and careful hands. I refer to the delineations he made of the inward estate of his own soul: a delineation and an inventory that has been preserved to us to this day, I will say, under the special and adorable providence of Fraser’s God and our God. And it is an analysis and a delineation and a depictment of such a kind that I know nothing to approach it in any language that I read. And I thank God every day that so intricate and so spiritual a book is not in Hebrew or Greek or Latin, but is in my own Scottish tongue wherein I was born.
Fraser describes his spiritual autobiography as ‘The Book of the Intricacies of his own Heart and Life.’ And so it is. It is a book of such intricacy and sinuosity and complication and reticulation and involution, that in all my experience of such books it stands simply unparalleled and unapproached. No labyrinth ever constructed by the brain of man comes near the heart of Brea. Not even that wonder of the world — the labyrinth of Egypt with its three thousand secret chambers. Not even the Cretan labyrinth of Daedalus with its blood-thirsty monster at its centre, and with only a thin linen thread to lead you out through its endless tortuosities to the open air. All that is but a faint and feeble description of the always spiritually intricate book that Fraser of Brea has bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen and his fellow-churchmen. To as many of them, that is, as have an intricate life of their own, and a labyrinthine heart of their own. And among the thousands of his Christian fellow-countrymen in our day, there must surely be some men still left with something of the intellectual strength, and the spiritual inwardness, and the experimental concentration, and the holy fear and the close walk with God, of the Laird of Brea. Some men who will feel that they are not such absolute monsters among men, and so much alone in Scotland, as they always thought they were till they were told about James Fraser, the Laird of Brea. Well may Dr. Elder Cumming say that Brea’s is a book to be read by all men with wonder and with awe; and, I will add, to be read by some men with an ever-increasing thankfulness and an ever-increasing hopefulness. Yes, well might his old publisher in first venturing Brea’s autobiography out on the market go on to say: ‘There is perhaps no other Performance giving a more distinct Account of a supernatural Work of Grace. And it is thought not to be unseasonable at this juncture for reviving Piety and the Exercise of Grace, and convicting those who make a jest of these serious Matters.’
Now in summing up all I have already said about Fraser and his autobiography, I will say a single word here about the immense importance of intellect in our evangelical preachers and experimental writers. And instead of any weak words of my own on that matter, take these so fresh and so pointed words of Santa Teresa: ‘I always had a great respect and affection for intellectual and learned men,’ she says. ‘It is my experience that all who intend to be true Christians will do well to treat with men of mind when they are being deeply exercised about their souls. The more intellect and the more learning our preachers and pastors have, the better. The devil is exceedingly afraid of learning, especially when it is accompanied with great humility and great virtue. Let no one be taken into this religious house of ours unless she is a woman of a sound understanding. For if she is without mind, she will neither know herself nor will she understand her best teachers. And ignorance and self-conceit is a disease that is simply incurable. And, besides, it usually carries great malice and great malignity along with it. Commend me to people with good heads. From all silly devotees may God deliver me!’ Had Santa Teresa lived in Scotland in the seventeenth century she would to a certainty have taken a house at Culross in order to sit under Fraser’s ministry. Nay, she would to a certainty have taken service as a scullery-maid on the Bass Rock just to be under the same roof with a man of such learning and such intellect in his religion; and a man, at the same time, of such a broken heart in his daily devotions.
And, then, one of the best of intellects of that intellectual day is here to be seen employed, exclusively and unceasingly, upon what its owner conceived to be the best, the noblest, and the most commanding of all occupations — the salvation of his own soul; and in and after that the same salvation of other men’s souls. Let a man constantly examine himself on that supreme matter, says the Apostle. Well, James Fraser has only one fault in that respect: he takes the Apostle much too seriously and much too literally, for he is always and in everything examining himself. Whether Paul would have praised Fraser or blamed him for that incessant introspection of his, you have your opinion, and I have mine. Watch and pray, says our Lord also. Well, did any of the twelve do that like the Laird of Brea? No, I am quite sure that none of them did not, at any rate, to begin with. ‘My people do not consider,’ complained the God of covenanted Israel. Now, our complaint here again with Fraser is this, that he considered too much, and that he would do nothing else all his days but consider inwardly and then act outwardly. Fraser believed with all his deep mind and with all his renewed heart that there was but one thing absolutely and supremely necessary as between him and his God; and he wrote his book and lived his life accordingly. In season and out of season Fraser of Brea pursued that one thing with an intricacy, and with a tenacity, and with a perspicuity unparalleled in all my reading or hearing of such men and such matters.
And then I have this also for my defence and apology in taking up such an out-of-date man — Fraser of Brea is one of ourselves. He is one of our own covenanted household of faith. He is one of our own cloud of witnesses. ‘People are variously constituted,’ says Dr. Newman in an exquisite essay. ‘What influences one man does not in the same way or to the same extent influence another man. What I delight to trace,’ he says, ‘and to study, is the interior life of God’s great saints. And when a great saint himself speaks to me about himself, that is what I like best, and that is what is done by those early luminaries of the Christian Church, Athanasius, and Hilary, and Ambrose, and Theodoret. This is why I exult in the folios of the Fathers. I am not obliged to read the whole of them. I read what I can, and am content.’ And if I may be bold enough to borrow that from Newman, I shall be loyal enough to apply that to myself and to say that that is the very same reason why I so exult in Bunyan, and in Baxter, and in Goodwin, and in Brea, and in Halyburton, and in Boston, and in Chalmers: a body of men who, as Coleridge has it, are, for the matter in hand, worth a whole brigade of the Fathers.
At the same time, I do not forget that people are very variously constituted. What influences one does not in the same way influence another. Nor am I obliged to read the whole of our evangelical and experimental and Puritan Fathers. I read what I can, and am content; or rather, I for one exult and then, as a wise old writer has it, ‘the judicious are fond of originals.’ And then, as to the reward that we may confidently look for from our study of Fraser’s autobiography. In his dedication to Thomas Ross of Tain, our author says: ‘I have in nothing been more refreshed, quickened, and edified than by hearing and reading of the experiences of others of God’s people, and in nothing more comforted and sanctified than by a serious recalling to mind of the Lord’s intricate dealings with myself.’ And far on in the body of the book he returns to that subject, and says: ‘The calling to mind and seriously meditating on the Lord’s secret dealings with myself as to soul and body; my recalling of His manifold and intimate mercies to me has done me very much good; has cleared my case ; has confirmed my soul concerning God’s love to me, and of my interest in Him; and has made me love Him more and more. O what good hath the writing of this book of my Memoirs done me! What wells of water have mine eyes been opened to see that before were hid from me! Scarce anything hath done me more good than the writing of this book!’ And I will say that scarce anything hath done the writer of this Appreciation more good than the reading of such chapters in this book as these: i., iv., vi., xiii., xvi., xviii., xx., xxiv., and three times as many and all as good. Till this line about a great man in a very different dispensation comes to my mind: ‘Probed many hearts, beginning with his own.’
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