im on Dr. Bonar's
suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and
most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have
had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day
as well as for their pastor all the week. As James Beattie's college
days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental
deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be
anybody's minister. Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible
mark of an able man--an increasing sense of his own inability: and he
had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a
spiritually-minded man--an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of
anything like a spiritual mind. No man but a very able man could have
written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford;
and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a
divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind
in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it.
Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not
been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner
in knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already to
those terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the man
who spends his life among them. Beattie's future congregation will not
vaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship or
eloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all such
superficial matters. Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate will
soon become another illustration of the truth that it is not gifts but
graces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body of
Christ. You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student in
Rutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait of
Beattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's _Preacher and his
Models_. 'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputation
of having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher. But it was
not to those gifts that he owed his unique influence. He moved through
the town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour,
as a hallowing presence. His very passing in the street was a kind of
benediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to each
other with affectionate reverence. Children were p