J. P. Struthers

The Beauty of the Bramble

The RP Global Alliance website recently featured an old meditation by J. P. Struthers on the humble blackberry, which Stephen had transcribed. It first appeared in Struthers’ children’s magazine, The Morning Watch, in 1906.

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One day when his companion on a walk amused himself by slashing off the juicy tops of the brambles in the hedge with his walking-stick, the late Dr. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, stopped him sharply: “Don’t do that; it’s breaking the Third Commandment!”

When Dr. Benson made that remark about the Third Commandment no doubt the young man was greatly astonished. A little thought would show him that he was doing a useless thing and a wrong thing, but what had slashing brambles to do with the Third Commandment? He wasn’t speaking, much less swearing, or saying bad words! How then could he be taking God’s Name in vain? And one may be sure that that is what he would say to the Archbishop.

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But if that lad had learnt the Shorter Catechism in his childhood, he would instantly have said to himself – What is required in the Third Commandment? And then, What is forbidden in the Third Commandment? And he would have repeated the answer in his mind – “The Third Commandment forbiddeth all profaning or abusing of anything whereby God maketh Himself known.” That is one advantage in being brought up a Presbyterian! We are “rooted and grounded” in the faith. Indeed I am pretty sure Dr. Benson himself had got his knowledge of what the Third Commandment means either directly or indirectly from that very Shorter Catechism.

A Bramble-berry, like every other berry, is one of God’s works. It is good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and it grows in waste places, and by the roadside, for poor and weary travellers, and it costs nothing, and it comes late in the year, just before winter, when the harvest is all over and the time of other fruits is past, and it is full of honour, for it plays hide-and-seek, and smiles and beams out of the darkness on the diligent that find it. Yes, there is a lot of love in the making of a bramble-bush, and that is how it is one of the things “by which God maketh Himself known”, that is, shows us what He is.

O the Bramble-bush is the Poor man’s tree,
For it loves the king’s high road,
And none dare say, “It belongeth to me,”
For it roams like the winds of God.
O, the Bramble-bush for me!

O the Bramble-bush is the Bairnies’ tree,
For it loves to trail on the ground,
And by little or big, whatever you be
There are berries to be found.
O the Bramble-bush for me!

And the Bramble-bush is like God’s own tree,
‘Tis the place where dwells Goodwill;
For its thorns are hands that say, “Come, see,
Eat every one your fill.”
O the Bramble-bush for me!

But the Bramble-tree improves by cultivation. I knew a man once one of whose hobbies it was to gather every kind and variety of bramble he could find or hear of, and in his grounds he had specimens of bushes from every part of Europe.

But the special beauty of the Bramble as of every other tree is this. Its thorns remind us of Paradise Lost, but its fruit tells us that Paradise has been regained. Every green leaf, every flower, every whistling bird, every drop of water in the world, proves that the great gulf between us and God is not only not yet “fixed,” but has been bridged by Christ; they all prove to us that God is still in the world, and that he is not far from any one of us. Everything God gives us brings with it an offer of Christ and his salvation. The God Who gives us these little things wishes to give us more, wishes to give us everything He has. 

Alexander Smellie: Stranraer man, Stranraer minister

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Probably the third most famous man to minister in Stranraer after John Livingstone and William Symington, was Alexander Smellie (1857-1923). Generations of Reformed Presbyterians are familiar with his book Men of the Covenant, though Smellie himself was actually a minister of the Original Secession Church.

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Smellie was born in Stranraer, where his father James was the Original Secession minister. When Alexander was seven his father accepted a call to Edinburgh. Smellie struggled with a lack of assurance until an encounter with the evangelist D. L. Moody in 1874. A fellow minister commented that ‘through an American evangelist, God spoke to a Seceder boy’.

After completing his theological training, he received a call from the Stranraer congregation in November 1879 and was ordained on 10th March, 1880. His ministry ‘left its impression not only upon the congregation, but upon the community’. We’re told that four characteristics marked his ministry. It was devotional (‘the outflow of a spirit that was careful to keep itself in touch with God and which gave a high tone to the whole service’), evangelical (‘he left his hearers in no doubt about his view of the way of true life’), intellectual (‘old truths were spoken new…he ever kept himself well acquainted with modern trends of though in religion, philosophy and science, and so was able to present the truth in its bearing upon them’) and literary.

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His ministry in Stranraer lasted until 1896, during which time he became a regular contributor to the Original Secession Magazine. Eventually he moved to London to edit The Sunday School Chronicle for two years, before returning to Scotland to minister in Thurso and then Carluke. In London he once walked 35 miles to fulfil a preaching engagement rather than use public transport on the Sabbath. He was a regular speaker at the Keswick Convention, as well as similar gatherings elsewhere: Crieff, Dundee, Glasgow and Portstewart. One report of his Keswick Bible Readings in 1919 said: ‘We saw the Lord Jesus as we had never seen him before - more beautiful and loving; and, like Thomas, we could only fall at his blessed feet in adoration and exclaim, “My Lord and my God”’. An example of one of his sermons can be read here.

The University of Edinburgh conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate of Divinity in 1908. The Scotsman described him as ‘one of the best expository preachers of his day, an exceptionally well-read man, and endowed with a rare, happy saintliness’.

J. D. Douglas comments in the Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology that ‘Smellie always had the vision of “a re-united Evangelical and Presbyterian Church in Scotland” and retained cordial relations with those in other churches’. This included J. P. Struthers - RP minister in Whithorn and Greenock. Smellie contributed to an issue of the RP Witness marking the centenary of Struthers’ birth, where he described Struthers as ‘extraordinarily tender and unselfish and generous and hopeful for other people, even the most disappointing and feckless…one of the most Christlike men I have known’.

An early Keswick Convention

An early Keswick Convention

Smellie died in 1923 following a long illness, having been long predeceased by his only daughter, to whom he dedicated Men of the Covenant - ‘a child whom God leads in green pastures and beside still waters’. His elders in Carluke noted that his last public act in the congregation had been to administer the Lord’s Supper.

After his death, his friend Graham Scroggie commented: ‘He was, perhaps, the greatest devotional writer of his generation…he was read in all sections of the Christian Church, and was loved as widely as he was read’.

His many other books included a biography of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, and a book of daily meditations, In the Hour of Silence. His former congregation in Stranraer had been dissolved shortly before his death and the building on Sun Street sold; since 1922 it has been a Masonic Lodge.

Update: Smellie’s memorial stone, courtesy of Scottish Reformation Tours:

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Update 2: A picture of Smellie himself, which accompanies an account of his preaching by Alexander Gammie in Preachers I have heard

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