28. To the congregation of St. George’s United Free Church
28
To the congregation of St. George’s United Free Church
Dearest of People,
May 1916
This is my continual song in these days concerning you and myself:
If Thou shouldst call me to resign
What most I prize, it ne’er was mine.
I only yield Thee what was Thine:
Thy will be done.
For years past God has been preparing me for my resignation by my decaying strength, by his voice in my judgment and in my conscience, and by many conspiring providences of his around me and toward me. I was not precipitate to resign, because he had made his work among you very dear to my heart; and if my resignation has been at all a wrench and a pain to me he will forgive me all that and will still uphold and accept me.…
In his old-age diary Thomas Boston has a heart-touching entry about his “silent Sabbaths.” But, after making that entry, Boston soon came to see that his silent Sabbaths were all ordained, both to his people and to himself, with divine wisdom and divine love. To his people, in order that the Ettrick pulpit might gain a freshness and an attractiveness that it sorely needed after his too long and too monotonous ministry; and to himself, in order that he might attend to his own soul all the remaining Sabbaths of his life, as he had been wont to attend to the souls of his people. Also, on those silent Sabbaths he learned to pray for the comfort and the prosperity of his successor in the pulpit as he had been wont to labour and to pray for his own comfort and prosperity. His silent Sabbaths gave Boston time also to read his Bible, and that not in search for pulpit texts, as formerly, but to read it as all “written to himself,” as he now saw, for his own salvation. In short, Thomas Boston came to see with Thomas Chalmers that some years of silent Sabbaths are a good way of winding up a pulpit and pastoral life, and a good opportunity of making preparation for the better life and better services in the Upper Sanctuary.—Believe me, in all this,
Alexander Whyte.
*From G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte (7th ed.; New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925), 580, 581-82.