A Great Ministry in the Kirk of St Giles

The following excerpt is from D. C. Macnicol’s book, Master Robert Bruce: Minister in the Kirk of Edinburgh.

THE public life of Master Robert Bruce in the city of Edinburgh was cast in troublous times. His ministry in the Church of St Giles had an influence which was quite unique, and the voice which found utterance in the capital had its echo throughout the whole Church. There were circumstances in Bruce’s previous career which prepared him for the great position in which he found himself. His great social position was in his favour; the breadth and variety of his training gave him exceptional advantage; above all things, he had his mind made up with reference to critical public questions, and there was on him the stamp of a true messenger of Jesus Christ. ‘The godly for his puissant and most moving doctrine loved him; the worldly for his parentage and place reverenced him, and the enemies for both stood in awe of him.’¹Melville’s Diary, p. 271. It was felt that a successor to Knox had been raised up in Providence.

In the very first twelve month of his pastorate, February 1588, Bruce found himself thrust into the chair of Moderator of the General Assembly. The High Court of the Church had been specially summoned, owing to a threatened invasion of the island by Spain. That Bruce was called to preside over its deliberations is a proof that he occupied already a high place in the counsels of the Church.

Let us attempt to bring up to our minds a representation of the preacher and the service in St Giles Church about the year 1589. As to the aspect of Bruce, it must have been commanding, for in an age which was much less curious about such externals as personal appearance than our own, men spoke of Bruce’s countenance and of his calm self-possession when conducting divine service. One close observer, who was resident in Edinburgh, writes: ‘This day Bruce preached, as he ever doth, very calmly.’²State Papers in the State Paper Office, Scotland, vol. lxiv. No. 3. Men remarked upon his manner in prayer also. He was very brief in prayer when others were present, but every sentence was like a strong bolt shot up to heaven.³John Livingstone, ‘Memorable Characteristics,’ in Select Biographies (Edinburgh, 1845), vol. i. p. 307. When deeply exercised in his intercessions he was moved to tears.⁴Cald., Hist. vi., p. 146. He had a habit of knocking upon the table with his fingers as he grew importunate in his prayers.⁵Fleming, Fulfilling of Scripture, i. pp. 366-7. To all this should be added the testimony of Kirkton concerning Bruce: ‘He made always an earthquake upon his hearers, and rarely preached but to a weeping auditory.’⁶James Kirkton, The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the year 1678 (Edinburgh, 1845), p. 26. As in his conduct of the devotions, so in his preaching he tended to brevity. It is a mistake to suppose that our Scottish Reformers were unusually lengthy in their public services. James Melville informs us in the Diary that one and a half hours was set as the limit on Sundays, one hour on week-days. In his St Giles service, at the entry of Queen Anne of Denmark into the capital, Master Robert restricted himself to half an hour. ‘I shall be short, by God’s grace,’ was a common phrase of this preacher, and another equally pertinent expression was, ‘By God’s grace, I shall make it clear.’ His anxiety was to be understood: ‘Ye tak’ me up wrong,’ he interjected in his discourse. Point and lucidity were chief qualities of the great St Giles minister, Robert Bruce.

On entering the pulpit, it was a habit of Bruce to remain silent a while in secret prayer. ‘He was no Boanerges as to his voice,’ remarks a sympathetic worshipper; and, on the contrary, another contemporary speaks of ‘that trumpet-sound by which the walls of Jericho were overthrown.’⁷William Scot, An Apologetic Narration of the State and Government of the Kirk of Scotland since the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1846), p. 142. It is certain that in the great church of St Giles, which even the voice of Knox could but imperfectly fill, Bruce would have had difficulty in making himself heard. In the last quarter, however, of the sixteenth century that pile of buildings known as St Giles Church was subdivided into no fewer than four places of worship, in order to accommodate four congregations. These were called the College Kirk, the Great Kirk, the Upper Tolbooth, and the East or Little Kirk. During the years of his Edinburgh ministry Bruce preached at first in the Great Kirk, ranking as chief minister of Edinburgh. In the later years a series of unhappy events of which he was the victim led to his labours being restricted to a smaller congregation, that of North-West Edinburgh, which met in the Little Kirk. This portion is traditionally known as ‘Master Robert Bruce’s Kirk.’

At the period of Bruce’s entrance on his ministry the lessons for the day would be taken by a reader. Bruce himself gave out the text, and he read it with much solemnity. His very tone and accent quickened his hearers, and there is at least one occasion when his deliberate, solemn repetition of a text from which he was about to preach led to the conversion of one who was present. Bruce would read, not from the Authorised Version (it was not to be published yet for twenty-three years), but from the Geneva Version, which for about eighty years was used in Scotland, before the adoption of the Authorised of 1611. Consequently the archaic form of many a quotation from Scripture will strike one; for instance, in the text of the thanksgiving sermon for deliverance from the Armada, ‘Thou art more bright and puissant than the mountains of prey’ (Psa. 76:4). Such unfamiliar words as ‘daunton,’ ‘kythe’ or ‘horologe’ (for Isaiah’s sundial) appear in the sermons. But to our ears the strangest thing of all in the preaching of Master Robert would be his use of the old Scots tongue. The dialect is so hard to be understood today that the sermons have been rendered into English for the benefit of modern readers. But this very manner of speech was what gave them their power when first they were uttered. Knox was the pioneer of those who cast aside the pedantry of scholastic Latin, and spoke to the people in their homely vernacular. The Scots tongue was spoken by all the nation from King James downwards. And one of the chief masters of that familiar ‘vulgar tongue’ was Bruce, who deliberately preferred it as a medium. His sermons are without any of those ornaments of quotation in which his generation loved to indulge. He preferred great plainness of speech, and in a preface to the published sermons he apologises for the unpretentious language which he uses. ‘I am somewhat hamely with you,’ he remarks in a sermon, in the course of his argument. Today we can hardly interpret, without a glossary, words like ‘throombes’ or ‘leisum’ or ‘bachill,’ and we are startled by the recurrence of expressions like ‘tak tent’ or ‘spunks of joy,’ no less than of words like ‘fash’ and ‘speir.’ We may well believe that these sermons are to this day full of life. They abound in illustrations drawn from political or social incidents of the moment. Figures of speech are numerous, and they are bold. The preacher can speak of ‘the teeth of the soul,’ meaning that faith which takes hold of Christ. He proposes to ‘open his pack and sell some wares,’ or again he seeks to ‘stanch the bleeding of the cause.’ He bids his hearers try themselves by the square of God’s law, and he describes Jesus Christ as the sconce to which men must flee for safety. He is as fond of a pithy proverb as Mr Spurgeon himself; such as ‘Over great wealth gars wit waver,’ or ‘They haud aye still on ae tune.’ ‘Is it possible,’ asks he, ‘that my drouth can be slokened with that drink that passed never over my halse?’ In the sermons, along with much simplicity and point, there is language of great elevation. One meets splendid expressions like this, ‘A wonderful and miserable madness that is in the soul of man,’ or this, ‘Terrible it is to see the countenance of God in His justice.’⁸Wodrow’s Bruce’s Sermons (Edinburgh, 1843), p. 207. Sometimes his thoughts in the pulpit so move him that he breaks off his argument, and falls to prayer in the middle of the sermon. In fine, these sermons of Bruce reveal a spirit of the loftiest sort, earnest and strong; they have that indefinable note of distinction which indicates a mastermind. Soon we are aware, as we read, that this is a great theologian, whose intellect as well as his heart is engaged in his work. There is discernible throughout his preaching a weird note of prognostication, and a cry of coming judgment, all the more surprising when we remember that the preacher is but a youth. The fact is, that these are due to the special time of Bruce’s entering upon his ministry in Scotland. All around him he finds laxity, treachery, superstition. ‘God,’ cries he, ‘is not like our countrymen, for they, where they are best known are worst loved; but God, on the contrary, where He is best known He is best loved.’

The following extracts may serve to illustrate the lofty and searching thought of Bruce’s pulpit discourse:

It hath been the custom of God from time to time to bring His Church into wonderful extremities, that in the judgment of man there appeareth no hope of safety in them: yea, in our own judgment oft times there appeareth no escape. I say it is His custom to bring His Church into these extremities that His glory may appear so much the more in her extraordinary deliverances … It is a matter of great consequence to subdue and tame the great idol of evil will. We may speak of it as we please, and say that we are able to do it. But of all the works of the earth it is the greatest. For such is the stubbornness of our will, that it will do nothing but what it liketh itself. The perfection of a Christian standeth in striving; we must either strive, or we shall not be crowned … That same fury and rage whereby men think to dishonour God and overwhelm His Church, He turneth to the contrary, and maketh out of that same fury His own glory and the deliverance of His Church to shine. The Lord is a wonderful workman. He bringeth about His purpose in such sort that He can draw light out of darkness, and bring forth His own praise out of their greatest rage … There are two ways set down in Scripture: there is a broad and an open way, wherein the proud and vain men of the earth walk; there is a narrow and a strait way wherein the simple, and they that depend on God, walk. The broad way is easy and pleasant in the entry, but the end is everlasting and terrible straitness; the other way is strait in the entry, yet the end is large and pleasant, and bringeth a joyful eternity … There remains now, of all these great things, and of all this doctrine which has been taught, but this one lesson. Learn to apply Christ rightly to thy soul, and thou hast won all; thou art a great theologian if thou hast learned this well: for in the right application of Christ to the sick soul, to the wounded conscience, and diseased heart, here begins the fountain of all our felicity and the well-spring of all our joy.⁹John Laidlaw, Robert Bruce’s Sermons on the Sacrament (Edinburgh, 1901), p. 71, etc.

It may help us to enter into the soul of that splendid ministry of the Kirk of St Giles three hundred years ago if we try to bring before us a special service conducted by Bruce. In the month of October 1588 he conducted a thanksgiving upon two successive Sundays, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The proclamation enacted that the service should be followed by holy communion, and accordingly Bruce concludes his discourse with an invitation to ‘dress for yon table.’ Those two sermons, preached from Psalm 76, have a special interest as the earliest public utterance of Bruce which has been preserved, and a paragraph or two upon their occasion will be useful. The Spanish Armada had hung for three years as a menace over Scotland and England. The suspense was tremendous and long drawn out. Rumour had it once and again that the foe was already landed at Dunbar or St Andrews, ‘and in very deed,’ says James Melville:

the Lord of Armies who rides upon the wings of the wind, the keeper of His own Israel, was conveying that monstrous navy about our coasts, and directing their hulks and galleys to the lands, rocks, and sands whereupon He had destined their destruction.¹⁰Melville’s Diary, p. 261.

Calderwood describes how the invaders were cast upon the Scottish coast, and wandered through the country begging, and found greater clemency and charity than they deserved or expected.¹¹Cald., Hist., iv. p. 695. Bruce, for his part, had no doubt as to the hand to which the deliverance was due. ‘As truly,’ said he, in his emphatic way:

as truly as the overthrow of Sennacherib, this destruction of the Spaniard was divinely wrought. He thought no doubt to have rooted out the Kirk. Yet what cometh to pass, I pray you? When as he was of mind to combat with the Kirk, he meeteth with the wind, and he findeth the wind more than his match, as the carcases of men and of ships in all coasts do testify … It is commonly asked, and will be asked to the end of the world, when was yon great defeat done, and in what place was yon fleet destroyed? It will be answered again, and I am assured it is answered already, yon fleet was destroyed about the coasts of the Lord’s own dwelling-place, where He made His residence.¹²Wordrow, Bruce’s Sermons, pp. 291, 296.

One must feel thankful that in her hour of delirious joy over the discomfiture of the Catholic invaders Scotland had so sure and so clear a guide in St Giles pulpit. The mob of High Street and the Canongate were easily excited in those great old times, and very readily they slipped out of control. Not on every occasion when they rose was even Master Robert himself able to keep them in check. But upon this historic date he was their master. From the window of his manse he could see that roaring multitude at the cross, who celebrated the victory in their own fashion. Every mixed motive his shrewd gaze could take in, as well as all those inferior passions which were let free. In his sermon at the church no class of men escaped his scrutiny, from the king himself to the simplest folk; the timid clergy, the canny merchants of the Luckenbooths,¹³Tenements which stood to the north of the Kirk of St Giles. the law-breakers, all came under the sweep of his discourse. If the language was somewhat archaic, what must be said of certain of the customs which prevailed in the church worship of that elder time? King James had his royal pew in St Giles, and he took leave occasionally to interrupt the preacher, calling his doctrine in question or giving his approbation. Haughty courtiers might stroll into church noisily, to hear what was said. Men sat in their pews with their hats on. On one occasion the following strange episode occurred when Bruce conducted the service. The lawless, defiant Earl of Bothwell stepped into church and, kneeling as a penitent, made confession before all the assembled people of his wicked life, and vowed with tears that he would prove in the future another man. Bruce’s exhortation, pointed, searching, dignified, is from the text, ‘Flee also from the lusts of youth.’ At the close the miserable nobleman asked the prayers of the assembled congregation; ‘but soon after he brake out into gross enormities.’¹⁴Cald., Hist., v. p. 68.

Bruce was above all things a preacher to the conscience. He brought his own conscience to bear on all his work. While he took much pains in searching the Scripture, and in preparing his sermons, which indeed bear marks of wide reading among the Fathers, yet the main part of his business lay in ‘having his soul wrought up to some suitableness of frame.’¹⁵Fleming, Fulfilling of Scripture, i. p. 377. ‘Of all the diseases that can come on any person,’ he says in one of the course of sermons on Isaiah:

no question the disease of the soul and conscience is greatest; and of all the diseases and troubles that overtake the conscience, no question this is the greatest, when with the sight of sin, which is enough, and more than enough to any to sustain, when with this sight there is a feeling of God’s wrath joined. O then, this sickness is unsupportable, when with the sight of sin is joined a touch and feeling of the wrath of God. Merciful God! If the horror be not exceeding great and terrible, so that it is a wonder if the soul can stand, and is not driven to desperation.

‘Is it possible,’ he asks, out of a deep experience, ‘that faith and doubting can have place in our soul?’ And he defines doubt in memorable terms:

It comprehendeth all the errors, fasheries, stammerings, and wrestlings wherewith our faith is assaulted full oft, which makes us sometimes to despair, sometimes to hope; while we look to ourselves to despair, and while we lookon the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, to hope … The soul must utter such stuff as it hath, to wit, doubting and stammering.¹⁶Wodrow’s Bruce’s Sermons, pp. 226, 231, 232.

But this preacher, out of the depths of his own memorable experience, is assured that doubt is the shadow cast by faith,

‘Which like a shadow proves the substance true.’

‘If thy conscience is wounded, assuredly thou shalt doubt. Entertain peace in thy conscience and thou shalt keep faith.’ Only by strict obedience to the voice of this inward companion can one find relief. ‘There is not another lesson in Christianity than this: this is the first and the last lesson, to shake off your lusts and affections piece by piece, and so piece by piece renounce thyself that thou mayest embrace Christ.’¹⁷Ibid., p. 22. ‘Renounce myself’ is his message. ‘Looking to the greatness of our misery, and to the greatness of the price whereby He hath redeemed us, what heart is there but would willingly renounce itself to get a part in that redemption?’ The tense feeling of his mind in this matter of self-immolation for the sake of his Lord comes out in a story recorded by John Livingstone, who tells us that one day he arrived at Bruce’s house to see him, but that it was long ere the other came out of his study. When he came forth all his face was suffused with tears. He said that he had just learnt of the keen suffering of a faithful minister in London for his Lord. ‘My sorrow is not for him, but for myself,’ said Bruce; ‘for had I been faithful like him, I might have got the pillory, and have shed some of my blood for Christ as well as he! But he hath got the crown from us all.’¹⁸Livingstone, ‘Memorable Characteristics,’ in Select Biographies, i. p. 306.

In one of the earliest of those St Giles sermons the preacher closes with a reference to Romans 8, which sounds the very keynote of his teaching. When Master Robert quotes the splendid Quis Separabit,¹⁹Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? he cannot articulate the text of St Paul as a common preacher might. ‘We claim Christ as belonging to us, as if no man had a title to Him but we. Our persuasion becomes so strong that we dare at the last to say with the Apostle, what shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ And as Bruce, in face of the allurements of those who loved him, or of the menace of those who hated him, stood firm as a tower; so also stood his Master steadfast to him up to that supreme hour when, placing his right hand upon the passage from Romans 8, which was his peculiar text and trust, he passed, declaring his faith in the word, ‘For I am persuaded that neither life nor death shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’²⁰Livingstone, ‘Memorable Characteristics,’ in Select Biographies, i. p. 308. Meantime, that right hand is uplifted in St Giles Church, as the minister pronounces the doxology with which he was accustomed to end his discourse: ‘In the righteous merits of Jesus Christ, to whom with the Father and the Holy Ghost be all honour, praise, and glory, for now and ever – AMEN.’

Featured Photo by Erin Raffensberger