The Piety of Alexander Whyte (1836-1921)
The Piety of Alexander Whyte
(1836-1921)
In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, can be found the gravestone of a certain John Whyte (1812-1871), who immigrated to America from Scotland in the 1830s. He prospered in his new home. When the Civil War came in 1861, he felt compelled to take up arms, though he was in his late forties. It may well have been out of a sense of gratitude to his new country. He enlisted in the army of the North a few weeks after the start of the war. He eventually became a 1st Lieutenant in Company C of the 79th New York Volunteer Infantry. This was a “Highland Regiment,” comprised of immigrant Scots and Scots-Americans who dressed in traditional kilts and Glengary caps.1 At the first battle of Bull Run (1861), John was captured and spent a considerable amount of time as a prisoner of war in Richmond, Virginia. Upon his release from prison he attempted to obtain a medical discharge, but this was denied. After the war, he continued in business and did well enough to return to Scotland for a visit. Within six years of the war’s end, though, he was dead. For reasons completely unknown, he committed suicide by cutting his throat.2 In a final letter to a son who he had left in Scotland many years before, he asked for prayer that all of his sins would be forgiven and that he would be able to trust in Christ.3 The son probably never knew of the way his father died. The son’s name? None other than the great Scottish preacher, Alexander Whyte (1836-1921), of whom it was said at his death: “What a gift he was to his Church, to his nation!”4
Alexander Whyte was born on January 13, 1836, in Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland. The shame of illegitimacy would not ultimately detract from his usefulness as a servant of Christ.5 He was also born into poverty; his mother, Janet Thomson, supported the two of them by working as a weaver and in the summers as a harvester. How deep their poverty was is not fully known, though we can well imagine the difficulties they faced. Devoid of much that a boy needs in early life, his mother sought to make up for the lack of a father in the home with loving admiration of and devotion to her son. She regularly took him with her to the Free Church in Kirriemuir. As he grew up, he also availed himself of other opportunities for Christian worship in the town.6
It is noteworthy that the saintly Robert Murray McCheyne (1813-1843) came to his town one day. McCheyne, who was ever seeking to spread the truth of God, personally handed the young Whyte a gospel tract.7 How much impact this had on Whyte is not known, though it is very likely McCheyne prayed for the young boy as he gave him the tract. After serving as a shoemaker’s apprentice and then a schoolteacher for a number of years, Whyte realized a dream when he went to study at King’s College, Aberdeen in 1858. It was during his studies at Aberdeen that he made the acquaintance of the writings of the Puritan divine Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680), who was a leading figure in shaping seventeenth-century English Congregationalist polity and thought.8 During the 1650s, Goodwin had also served as President of Magdalen College, Oxford. Although Whyte developed a taste for various other Christian authors of vastly different traditions, it was Goodwin who set the tone for his preaching and writing—a Puritan-like, Christ-exalting, self-abasing ministry.
Whyte graduated in April 1862, with an M.A., and decided to continue his studies at New College, Edinburgh, where, for four more years, he prepared himself for a gospel ministry in the Free Church of Scotland. His first ministry proved to be an excellent introduction to the pastoral life, for he served as an assistant to John Roxburgh, the minister of Free St. John’s, Glasgow. During the three years that he spent in Glasgow, he was the supervisor of the Sunday school and various Bible classes and was ordained as Roxburgh’s colleague. It was also here that his social graces were honed as well as his spiritual gifts.
In 1870, Whyte accepted a call to work with Robert S. Candlish (1806-1873) at Free St. George’s, Edinburgh. At the time, Candlish was the most prominent figure in the Free Church,9 and it was an excellent opportunity for Whyte to be mentored by the older man. Little did Whyte know it, but this was the start of a remarkable forty-six-year ministry at Free St. George’s. Candlish died but three years later,10 and the awesome responsibility passed to Whyte to preach week in, week out in one of Scotland’s most important churches.
A Catholic Spirituality: Some Strengths and Some Pitfalls
Alexander Whyte was a voracious reader and lover of books.11 To a great extent, he read because he was a passionate searcher for truth. He always read with pencil in hand, eager to make notes for future use.12 Through Goodwin, he was introduced to other important Puritan and Reformed authors and became deeply impressed with Puritan thought and spirituality.13 It needs to be noted, however, that sometimes his search for truth took him to some people and places his Puritan favorites would have rightly thought quite strange. On one occasion, it was to the convent door of Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and another time it was to the Birmingham Oratory of John Henry Newman (1801-1890).14 What Whyte was looking for in these other traditions were means of deepening his Reformed faith and challenging his soul to be a more devoted follower of Christ.
Not surprisingly, Whyte would not allow a denominational spirit to cloud his thinking or shrink his heart. His devotion to the Presbyterian cause was never questioned, but he had no time for those who thought the boundaries of God’s kingdom were co-extensive with those of Scottish Presbyterianism.15 There were, for example, numerous occasions when a new Baptist church was being dedicated and opened for public worship that Whyte was the guest speaker.16 Typical of Whyte was the urging of his Edinburgh congregation in November 1905, to “more and more dwell on the thought of our nearness to one another: our essential nearness to all Christian men, and to all Christian churches, everywhere.”17
Whyte’s catholicity, though, led him astray when it came to meeting the great challenge of his day, namely, the advent of German Higher Criticism and liberal Protestantism among the British churches and halls of divinity. There is no doubt at all that Whyte was strong in his opposition to theological error. As he stated in the 1890s: “the doctrines of the evangelical pulpit are the only sure and stable and unchangeable and everlasting doctrines on which the mind and heart and the conscience of mortal man ever rest.”18 Whyte was also an ardent lover of classical Christianity and he was not slow to criticize the theological formulations of his day. “The religious phraseology of the present day,” he maintained, “wholly lacks the apostolicity, and the authority, and the height, and the depth, and the substance, and the strength, and the intellectual, and the spiritual satisfactoriness and finality of the old phraseology.”19
But Whyte’s temperament—he disliked controversy—and his willingness to find truth in all Christian bodies led him to believe that Christians had nothing really to fear from Higher Criticism. Thus, for example, when the celebrated case of William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), who taught Old Testament at the Free Church College in Aberdeen and who advocated what was essentially a liberal approach to the Scriptures, was in full swing in the 1870s and 1880s, Whyte was probably his most notable defender. “Fathers and brethren,” he said to the Free Church Assembly met in 1881,
the world of mind does not stand still. And the theological mind will stand still at its peril. No man who knows, or cares to know, anything of my personal sympathies and intellectual and religious leanings will accuse me of disloyalty to the Calvinistic, Puritan, and Presbyterian polity, or neglect of the noble body of literature we inherit from our fathers. But I find no disparity, no difficulty in carrying much of the best of the past with me in going out to meet and hail the new theological methods.20
Like many a preacher in that day, Alexander Whyte underestimated the virulence of this infection. He thought that Christian spirituality would be unaffected by the new teaching. He was wrong. As the vagaries and inanities of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism have revealed, a truly Christian spirituality can only flourish when it is firmly planted in the rich loam of a biblically faithful and confessional Christianity.
Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), a fellow pastor in the Free Church and a man for whom Whyte had great respect,21 was much wiser in this regard when he stated about those who would trade fidelity to past truth for present relevancy:
Some well-meaning theological literateurs, or rather amateur theologians, who patronize religion in their own way, are fain to warn us of the danger of not “keeping abreast of the age,” as if we were imperilling Christianity by not being quite so learned in modern speculations as they are. We should like, certainly, to “keep abreast” of all that is true and good, either in this age or any other; but as to doing more than that, or singling out this age as being pre-eminently worthy of being kept abreast of, we hesitate. To be “up to” all the errors, fallacies, speculations, fancies, mis-criticisms of the age, would be an achievement of no mean kind; and to require us to be “up to” all this under threat of endangering Christianity, or betraying the Bible, is an exaction which could only be made by men who think that religion is much beholden to them for their condescending patronage; and will only be accepted by men who are timid about the stability of the cross of Christ if left unpropped by human wisdom; and who, besides, happen to have three or four lifetimes to spare. We may be in a condition for believing, and even for defending the Bible, without having mastered the whole deistical literature of the last century, or the present. We may be qualified to accept the doctrine of sacrificial substitution even though we are not “up to” all that has been spoken against it from Cain to Colenso.22
Whyte’s misguided benevolence was replicated in other parts of the English-speaking world. For instance, the comments of Tom Nettles about the American Baptist A. H. Strong (1836-1921)—Whyte’s exact contemporary in age—are equally apropos of Whyte. Liberal Baptists in the northern United States used Strong’s misguided attempt to blend elements of classical orthodoxy and nineteenth-century liberalism to go far beyond what Strong would have wished to advocate. “Strong [and these remarks could equally apply to Whyte] resembles a man pushing a merry-go-round. As a handle comes speeding toward him from one side, he grabs it only long enough to sling it past him to the other side, but he is left standing in the same place.”23
“A Monomaniac About Sin” and Grace24
Probably Whyte’s greatest importance for late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Christianity was the manner and means by which he reminded his hearers of the pervasiveness and odious deceitfulness of sin. In a very real sense, he sought to be a “specialist in the study of sin.”25 As he commented on one occasion:
I know quite well that some of you think me little short of a monomaniac about sin. But I am not the first that has been so thought of and so spoken about. I am in good company and I am content to be in it. Yes, you are quite right in that. For I most profoundly feel that I have been separated first to the personal experience of sin, and then to the experimental preaching of sin, above and beyond all my contemporaries in the pulpit of our day.26
Late Victorian British society, with its romantic view of the Christian life and its faith in a God who was more a doting Father than the awesome Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, presented real temptations to Whyte to focus on things less morbid. Yet he steadfastly refused to change his ways. Little wonder his assistant, John Kelman, stated in his funeral sermon that Whyte was “a Puritan risen from the dead, and prophesying in pagan times to a later generation,” who had “no respect whatever for those who thought lightly of sin.”27
On one occasion, Whyte was walking with a friend in the Pass of Killiecrankie and the name of Henry Drummond (1851-1897) came up. Drummond was a popular author and essayist, whose thought was an eclectic blend of Darwinism and Christianity. “The trouble with Hen-a-ry,” Whyte told his companion, “is that he doesna ken [know] onything aboot sin.”28
Nor was this preoccupation with sin simply a Pharisaic focus on the sins of others. Whyte was very conscious of his own sinfulness, failings, and shortcomings. “Blessed are we…if we know our sin,” he could say honestly.29 As he recalled when fifty years of age:
The first text I ever heard a sermon from was that great text in Zechariah, “Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” “It is I, Lord,” my young heart answered; and my heart is making the same answer here to-day.30
W. E. Sangster relates the story of a visiting evangelist who came to Edinburgh and during a service publicly criticized a number of the ministers in the city. A man who heard the critical remarks went to see Whyte and told him that the evangelist had publicly said that James Hood Wilson of the Barclay Church in the city was not a converted man. Whyte apparently leapt from his chair in anger and indignation, exclaiming, “The rascal! The rascal! Dr. Wilson not a converted man.” The man continued, though. “That wasn’t all he said, Dr. Whyte. He said that you were not a converted man, either!” Whyte stopped short, fell back into his chair, and for a long minute said nothing. Then, with awful earnestness, he told his visitor, “Leave me, friend; leave me! I must examine my heart.”31 His friend may well have left astonished.
Similarly, Whyte told an astonished audience on one occasion that he had discovered the name of the wickedest man in Edinburgh. “His name,” he told them in whispered tones, “is Alexander Whyte.”32 It was, therefore, in all honesty that he could state, “I would rather take my degree in [sin] than in all the other subjects set for a sinner’s examination on earth or in heaven. For to know myself, and especially, as the wise man says, to know the plague of my own heart, is the true and the only key to all other true knowledge.”33 This concern to plumb the depths of the human heart is well captured by a Latin phrase that he loved to quote: generalia non pungunt, or “generalities do not pierce deep.”34
Coupled with this exposure and analyzing of sin, Whyte was also insistent on what he knew to be the only perfect and most profound remedy: Christ’s death for the sin of sinners and His free offer of a perfect righteousness. As he stated in what may be regarded as his magnum opus, his reflections on the teaching of Thomas Goodwin:
Human sinfulness is such an absolutely boundless universe of a thing: and then, God’s salvation is such a correspondingly absolutely boundless universe of a thing, that it takes every single one of that great multitude which God alone can number to exhibit all the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and all the unspeakable malignity and persistency of sin; and then, over against all that, to exhibit all the much more abounding grace of God.35
Thus, he could declare with authority:
…Though thy sin be very great, though thou hast a past life round thy neck enough to sink thee for ever out of the sight of God and all good men; a youth of sensuality now long and closely cloaked over with an after life of worldly prosperity, worldly decency, and worldly religion, all which only makes thee that whited sepulchre that Christ has in his eye when he speaks of thee with such a severe and dreadful countenance; yet if thou confess thyself to be all the whited sepulchre he sees thee to be, and yet knock at his gate in all thy rags and slime, he will immediately lay aside that severe countenance and will show thee all his goodwill. Notwithstanding all that thou hast done, and all thou still art, he will not deny his own words, or do otherwise than at once fulfil them all to thee. Ask, then, and it shall be given thee; seek, and thou shalt find; knock, and it shall be opened unto thee. And with a great goodwill, he will say to those that stand by him, Take away the filthy garments from him. And to thee he will say, Behold, I have caused all thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.36
As one of his elders stated about Whyte: “No preacher has so often or so completely dashed me to the ground as has Dr. Whyte; but no man has more immediately or more tenderly picked me up and set me on my feet again.”37
The impact of such a Christ-centered spirituality from the pulpit of Free St. George’s was profound. John MacNeill (1854-1933), who became a prominent pastor and evangelist, remembered: “How he burst upon some of us,” he remarked, “who had no warning that there was such a preacher, and had never heard such preaching. After the service, we walked away back along Princes Street, each man retired into himself; the spell of the world to come had fallen upon us, And, God helping us, we would not turn again to this or that foolishness.”38
A Man of Prayer
“Prayer and work,” Whyte said on one occasion; “all great and true and eminently successful ministers from Paul’s day downward bear the same testimony: prayer and work.”39 And prayer was indeed central to Whyte’s life and spirituality. First of all, prayer was envisioned as being vital to the central goal of the Christian life, knowing Christ.
There is this magnificence about the world of prayer, that in it we work out, not our own bare and naked and “scarce” salvation only, but our everlasting inheritance, incorruptible and undefilable, with all its unsearchable riches. Heaven and earth, time and eternity, creation and providence, grace and glory, are all laid up in Christ; and then Christ and all His unsearchable riches are laid open to prayer.40
As a central feature of the Christian life, prayer must be unceasing. For it to have this quality, though, Whyte emphasized that there must be “sacrifice of time, thought, and strength.”41
When reading and meditation and prayer do once begin to come in on a man, they make great inroads both upon his hours of work, and his hours of recreation, and even upon his hours of sleep. It is not that the Hearer of prayer has any need of our hours… He has always plenty of time. He inhabits eternity. He is always waiting to be gracious. It is we who need time to prepare our hearts to seek God. And it takes some men a long, and a retired, and an uninterrupted time to get their minds and their hearts into the true frame for prayer and for the presence of God.… As life goes on, we come to discover that time, pure time, is as indispensable and as important an element in all true prayer as is repentance, or faith, or reformation itself. Indeed, without a liberal allowance of time, no man has ever attained to a real life of prayer at all.… Now that cannot, surely, be said to be bought cheaply, which despoils us of so much of the most precious thing we possess; and a thing, moreover, which is so fast running short with so many of us.42
Whyte also especially prized prayer for the way that it created humility, which he considered to be foundational to Christianity. “A lifetime of unceasing and ever-deepening prayer is by far the best security against pride,” he could write, “and by far the best guarantee of a genuine evangelical humility.”43 It is noteworthy that Whyte himself was remembered as a humble man. A plaque erected to him in the foyer of Free St. George’s calls him “A lowly follower of Christ.”
Whyte retired from the ministry at Free St. George’s in 1916. Full retirement, though, did not come for another two years, for Whyte had been also been serving as Principal of New College since 1909. He retired from that position in 1918. When he died in 1921, his lifelong passion to live forever in Christ’s presence was realized. It was fitting that below his name on his tombstone there should be Psalm 17:15, “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness,” and Psalm 16:11, “In thy presence is fullness of joy.”
1. See “Union Regimental Histories: New York: 79th Regiment Infantry ‘Highlanders’” [http://www.civilwararchive.com/Unreghst /unnyinf7.htm; accessed July 10, 2002] for the history of this regiment during the Civil War. According to the regimental roster, Whyte was mustered in on May 28, 1861 and mustered out on May 31, 1864.
2. New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives, New York. New York.
3. G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte (7th ed.; New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925), 143-44.
4. Cited in Warren Wiersbe, Walking with the Giants. A Minister’s Guide to Good Reading and Great Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976), 100.
5. On the shame, see Harry C. Howard, “Alexander Whyte,” in his Princes of the Christian Pulpit and Pastorate (Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press, 1927), 345.
6. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 21-28.
7. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 22.
8. See below, pages 73-76.
9. See J. R. Wolffe, “Candlish, Robert Smith” in Nigel M. de S. Cameron et al., eds., Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 134.
10. See the description of the passing of the mantle, as it were, from Candlish to Whyte in Wiersbe, Walking with the Giants, 89-90. For Whyte’s appreciation of Candlish’s life and ministry, see Former Principals of New College, Edinburgh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), 27-34. For a web-site on Candlish, see www.newble.co.uk/candlish.
11. As he once said: “I spend a large part of my life among books…” [Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, [1908]), 235].
12. Wiersbe, Walking with the Giants, 92. A good example is found in a letter Whyte wrote to a friend, the blind preacher and author George Matheson (1842-1906), upon his having read Matheson’s Studies of the Portrait of Christ (2 vols., 1899-1900). He told Matheson: “I have read your brilliant Portrait of Christ, at a long down-sitting and pen in hand. And now I sit down to put my notes of your book in order for future inspiration and use” [cited D. Macmillan, The Life of George Matheson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907), 340].
13. See below, pages 23-24, 53-56, 57-59.
14. Santa Teresa: an Appreciation (3rd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1900); Newman: an Appreciation in two Lectures: with the Choicest Passages of his Writings (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1901). For a good indication of his favorite authors, see Thirteen Appreciations (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., [1913]).
15. See, for instance, his That They All May Be One: A Reunion Sermon (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1906).
16. George Yuille, ed., History of the Baptists in Scotland (2nd ed.; Glasgow: Baptist Union Publications Committee, 1926), 131, 185-86.
17. A Church Case in Israel and Some of its Lessons to Ourselves (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1905), 9-10.
18. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 87.
19. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 220.
20. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 219. Cp. his remarks in Saul Called Paul (London/Edinburgh: Oliphants Ltd., 1955), 73: “there has been nothing that has been so fatal to the Church of Christ in all ages as stagnant and intolerant orthodoxy.”
21. See his “Dr. Bonar as Scholar and Theologian” in Memoir of Dr. H. Bonar (Edinburgh, 1909), 77-82.
22. “Preface” to his ed., Catechisms of the Scottish Reformation (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1866), xxxiii-xxxiv, n.*. J. W. Colenso (1814-1883), Bishop of Natal, was a theological liberal whose 1861 commentary on Romans denied eternal punishment as well as undermining other aspects of Christian orthodoxy. He was eventually excommunicated by the Anglican Church.
23. By His Grace and for His Glory (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), 240.
24. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 195.
25. “Preface” to Lord, Teach Us to Pray. Sermons on Prayer (New York: George H. Doran Co., [1923]), xi. On Whyte’s emphasis on sin, see also Howard, “Alexander Whyte” in his Princes of the Christian Pulpit and Pastorate, 356-58; Peter Davidson, “The Main Themes of Alexander Whyte,” The Evangelical Quarterly, 27 (1955), 94-103.
26. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 195. Cp. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 119: “Many of yourselves now hearing me have—I will not say too little sin—but I will say far too little conscience of sin to make you good hearers of good preaching.”
27. “Whyte of St. George’s” in Ralph G. Turnbull, ed., The Treasury of Alexander Whyte (Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1953), 25, 26-27.
28. Cited in Alexander Gammie, Preachers I Have Heard (London: Pickering & Inglis, Ltd., 1945), 12. For a biography of Drummond by one of Whyte’s friends, see George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond (Toronto: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1899).
29. Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series, 124.
30. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 305. The verse to which he is referring is Zechariah 3:2.
31. The Pure in Heart: A Study in Christian Sanctity (London: Epworth Press, 1954), 161-62.
32. Kelman, “Whyte of St. George’s,” 29.
33. Bunyan Characters, First Series (2nd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1895), 57-58.
34. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 305.
35. The Spiritual Life: The Teaching of Thomas Goodwin (Edinburgh/ London: Oliphants Ltd., [1918]), 65.
36. Bunyan Characters, First Series, 62-63.
37. “Preface” to Lord, Teach Us to Pray, xiii.
38. Alexander Gammie, Rev. John McNeill: His Life and Work (London: Pickering & Inglis, n.d.), 48.
39. Cited Howard, “Alexander Whyte” in his Princes of the Christian Pulpit and Pastorate, 355. For a very helpful discussion of this area of Whyte’s spirituality upon which I have drawn, see Davidson, “Main Themes of Alexander Whyte,” 103-107.
40. Lord, Teach Us to Pray, 9.
41. Davidson, “Main Themes of Alexander Whyte,” 105.
42. Lord, Teach Us to Pray, 194-95. The sermon from which this extract is taken is entitled “The Costhness of Prayer” (Lord, Teach Us to Pray, 194-205).
43. See below, pages 69-71.