With thanks to Ralph Erskine from Dunfermline

"...The law could promise life to me,
If my obedience perfect be;
But grace does promise life upon
My Lord’s obedience alone.
The law says, Do, and life you’ll win;
But grace says, Live, for all is done;
The former cannot ease my grief,
The latter yields me full relief.."

- from Gospel Sonnets by Ralph Erskine (1745). There is a statue of him in Dunfermline today; he was buried at the Abbey, where most of King Robert the Bruce is also buried.

Seth Sykes "Scotch Evangelists, Composers and Singers" and the Ulster link

Every now and again you meet people who are inspirational. One of these is a retired man from Shotts in Lanarkshire (I'll keep him anonymous) who shares all of my interests in old Scottish evangelists and their connections with Ulster. Earlier this year he sent me a box packed with records, books and home-made CDs of old 78s he has digitised, a brilliant collection. One of the things he sent me was a book entitled 'A Great Little Man - A biography of evangelist Seth Sykes', published in 1958. I have met people over the years who remember Seth and Bessie Sykes on their many trips to Ulster, especially to the Shankill Mission and other parts of urban Belfast. They were from Springburn in Glasgow; the famed Jeremiah Meneely of Kells in County Antrim held a tent mission in Springburn in 1884, the aftermath of which saw a number of gospel halls being established in Springburn. Some of the Sykes' songs still resonate with folk of my vintage and mission hall upbringing:

In the sweet bye and bye, in the sweet bye and bye
I have a mansion so bright and so fair
Won't it be lovely when I get there?
In the sweet bye and bye, in the sweet bye and bye
When the battle is done and we hear the 'Well done'
In the sweet bye and bye

Their chorus 'Thank You Lord for Saving My Soul' became world-famous. Their hymn book 'Songs of Salvation' includes the brilliant 'My Sins are A' Awa'. I am told there was a display of some of the Sykes' artefacts, including Bessie's portable pump organ, at the now sadly-closed Springburn Museum in Glasgow.

'A Great Little Man - A biography of evangelist Seth Sykes' has a marvellous photograph of the Sykes' in action at Largs in 1949, and also features two songs they composed specifically for their Ulster missions: 'He's My All in All' for the Shankill Mission, and 'Just Look Up (The Lisburn Chorus)'. It was getting this package from Shotts which drove me to start work on a similar biography of William MacEwan which I've been publishing here.

I have a fair amount of old items about the Skyes' - like the invitation below, showing that the old 'magic lantern' technology was a big part of their work. I think Derg Street was just off the Crumlin Road. Maybe when I get MacEwan out of my system I'll move on to the Sykes next!

For those of you familiar with Twitter...

The Dying Words of David Dickson of Irvine (1583-1663)

(A brief post as there are other things to attend to just now). I can't thank Billy enough for sending this to me earlier in the week. Last weekend he gave me a tour of a number of important historical sites associated with Dickson. Then this appeared in my inbox on Wednesday.

'...on his death-bed in Edinburgh on December 1662, a friend asked him how he was himself. His reply was 'I have taken all my good deeds, and all my bad deeds, and have cast them together in a heap before the Lord, and have fled from both to Jesus Christ, and in Him I have sweet peace...'

> Wikipedia entry on David Dickson here.

R C Sproul - the Johnny Cash of theologians

I must admit, I thought R C Sproul was dead. He's one of those famous names who knowledgeable people namedrop and quote alongside others who definitely are dead. A bit like Johnny Cash, he just seems to have been around forever and for a while had dropped off my radar. But over the last year or two he's enjoying a resurgence (again like Johnny Cash did) and is writing, blogging and pumping out some great stuff. In his latest book, Unseen Realities; Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons, he revisits some of the territory that CS Lewis explored in The Screwtape Letters. You can get a sample of the book here. His main focus is Ligionier Ministries (superb website here) and with regular audio and video postings here. A biography of Sproul is available here.

A different kind of election

Most of us, if we're honest, tend to respond to style before substance, where tradition and taste become more important than truth. See what you think...

Advance 2011 - Raleigh, North Carolina.

Some of you will enjoy this video; full website here. Shame it's being held on the other side of the Atlantic.

Advance 2011 Promo from Vintage21 Church on Vimeo.

'Reviving an archaic artform'

Of course a phrase like that would make me sit up! So begins this article about Bifrost Arts. A lot of the article really rings true for me, but of course they're all accomplished musicians whereas Graeme and I are just plooterin' aboot. But when someone thinks the same way you do yourself, it draws you in. I hadn't heard of Bifrost until a few weeks ago, but I like what I've seen so far: "...we’d play hymns — unmiked — and pass out songbooks and teach the audience how to sing harmonies. It’s crazy, but the idea of people really getting together to sing has become a novel concept in today’s society... there’s an instant community that forms when people join their voices together...”. Much like what Red Mountain Music are doing, Bifrost eschews schmaltzy, stage-based, spectated, commercial 'gospel' music. It's about community, about being together, about being involved. The video below will tell you more. Their website is here.

Bifrost Arts from josh franer on Vimeo.

Beat it into their heads continually

Not very touchy-feely PC language that now is it? Probably because it's about 500 years old.

“I must hearken to the gospel, which teacheth me, not what I ought to do, (for that is the proper office of the law,) but what Jesus Christ the Son of God hath done for me : to wit, that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it. And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth.

Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”

The above quote, and the graphic below, has been unashamedly copied from this blog. Have a look at this YouTube video by the same man. Great stuff. Thanks yet again to Robin for the tip-off.

William Taylor: Scotch-Irish Methodist Missionary. From Armagh to Virginia to Belfast... and a close shave

William Taylor (1821-1902) was an American Methodist missionary. You can read his bio here on Wikipedia. In his autobiography, first published in 1895, he traced his Ulster ancestry:

'...my grandfather, James Taylor, was one of five brothers who emigrated from County Armagh, Ireland, to the colony of Virginia, about one hundred and thirty years ago. Their names in the order of their birth were George, James, William, John and Caufould... they were fine specimens of that hardy, energetic race known as the Scotch-Irish, of the old Covenanter type. They all fought for American freedom in the Revolution of 1776... George and James married daughters of Captain Audley Paul, of the same hardy clan, the Scotch-Irish. Audley Paul was a fellow lieutenant of George Washington...'

Around 1862 he made a missionary trip to Ireland, arriving first at Drogheda before heading north.

'...I conducted special services, usually a week, but in some places two or three weeks, in each church, in Dublin, Belfast, Portadown, Armagh, Enniskillen, Sligo, Bandon, Cork, and other places of less note, covering a period of about four months. In Armagh, the ancient home of my Scotch-Irish ancestors, I found plenty of folks ready to claim kin with me, although more than one hundred years had passed since my ancestors emigrated to America, so that I found it impossible to trace reliable lines of relationship...'

Bizarrely, he also recounted a story that when he was in Belfast he was advised to shave off his (very impressive) beard:

"...when I was in Belfast, a Primitive minister waited on me to say, 'There are some good people in this city who are greatly prejudiced against a beard, and I think you can be more useful among them if you will go to a barber and get shaved'.

You can read his detailed retort on p344 for yourself - humourous but too long to type!.

• from Story of My Life: An Account of what I have said and done in my Ministry, William Taylor (1895).

The Gospel Coalition: 'They Testify About Me' Conference and Resources

The Gospel Coalition is an international network of rock-solid Christ-centred churches and organisations. For those of you who got in touch following a few recent blog posts here about how Jesus can be found throughout the Bible, and not just the Gospels or New Testament, this three day conference, entitled 'They Testify About Me: Preaching Jesus and the Gospel from the Old Testament' will be of interest. With 70 speakers, including Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, John Piper, Mark Dever, Alistair Begg, our own Keith & Kristyn Getty, Craig Dyer, Darrin Patrick (who I've blogged about before with this hard-hitting video which shook a few of you who emailed me about it), and Russell Moore - it's an astonishing line-up of probably the best Gospel presenters in the world today.

It's just a shame that it's in Chicago! For those of us who can't go, this list of resources (workshops, books, videos, articles and sermons) looks like a brilliant introduction to the subject. Craig Dyer is one of the speakers at this year's Keswick at Portstewart convention in July, so maybe he'll be touching on some of the same themes when he's over here.

There are quite a few UK churches in the Gospel Coalition (directory here), including Ballykeel Presbyterian in Ballymena and Greenwell Street Presbyterian in Newtownards - Graeme and I have played/sung in both (to the best of our limited abilities). Regular readers will know that Greenwell Street is close to the site of the original 1620s Montgomery school in Newtownards where John McLelland was the principal, and occasional lay preacher. Famous people still attend Greenwell St today!

> Follow The Gospel Coalition blog here
> Follow The Gospel Coalition on Facebook here

Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000

Crawford Gribben's latest book carries on the theme he first outlined in this book which I blogged about before. His new one is entitled Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (available here on Amazon). The promotional leaflet says this:

This book offers the first complete overview of the intellectual history of one of the most significant contemporary cultural trends. In the early seventeenth century, European evangelicals recovered those expectations of an earthly golden age that had been deemed heretical by medieval and reformation theologians. Throughout early modernity, and across the spectrum of evangelical belief, these millennial expectations were deployed to mount a series of radical critiques of church and wider culture. In modernity, these expectations were appropriated by religious and cultural conservatives, who found in millennial theology the framework of their hostility to an unbelieving world and a rationale for their critical engagement with it – a critical engagement that ranged from an attempt at the wholesale reconstruction of a Christian society to an expectation of its imminent and catastrophic demise. This account guides readers into the origins, evolution, and revolutionary potential of evangelical millennialism in the trans-Atlantic world.

It's a contentious, yet deeply influential subject. Particular denominations embrace it, others reject it. Some individuals spend more time trying to work out which emerging world leader might be Antichrist rather than getting to grips with Christ! Some prefer to speculate about the future rather than to understand, and apply, the lessons of the past.

Talking to a Presbyterian friend the other day, he said that his church was about to begin a study on Daniel. Unable to resist a bit of theological banter, I said "Great - will you be getting stuck in to the 70 weeks?", to which he laughed out loud and said, "No, we'll be sticking to the bits that are true, none of that other nonsense!". Philip Thompson tweeted a quote from Alastair Begg last week: "chronology - theology = mythology" !. There's so much divergence within the Protestant denominations that sometimes I wonder if the all-embracing term is even useful any more. But the big charts and diagrams are visually brilliant - I remember seeing a hand-painted one in a mission hall about 30 years ago that was so big it filled the entire back wall and stretched round the corner onto one of the side walls too. A detail of a printed one of mine is below. Click to enlarge.

God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson

This year is the 400th Anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The book shown here, by Adam Nicolson, has been recommended to me by a friend who works in the broadcasting industry here in Northern Ireland. I haven't bought it yet, but I have listened to his other recommendation - a podcast of Nicolson giving an amusing, engaging and informative talk on the subject, which is available FREE here on iTunes.

Here's a short interview that Nicolson gave to PBS about the book.

Jesus in every book of the Bible

A few other folk have posted this onto their blogs, so here it is again. UK readers might squirm a wee bit at the style now and again, but the content is 100% bang on. When I was a small boy, an old man advised me that when reading the Bible, to "look for Christ on every page". When I became a parent I soon realised that, with the ocean of Bible story books that are out there, it's possible to drift into treating much of the Bible as little more than a collection of bedtime stories, with 4 books about Jesus in the middle. The Gospel isn't about believing in God, it's about trusting in Christ. This video is a good starter -



And this is how Jesus presented the (Old Testament part of the) Bible himself: "...And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself..." Luke 24v27

David Johnstone Beattie (1881 - 1964); author, hymnwriter and (Plymouth) Brethren historian from Langholm and Carlisle

The beautiful town of Langholm in the Reiver country of the Scottish Borders is nicknamed 'The Muckle Toun' and is perhaps best known as the birthplace of poet and Scots language activist Hugh MacDiarmid (real name Christopher Murray Grieve). The last time I drove through there were some large entrance signs commemorating this connection. Langholm is also the southernmost point of one of the most beautiful driving routes in the British Isles - the A7 through the Borders to Edinburgh, which has some stretches which are just as spectacular as the famous Skyline Drive in Virginia.

A lesser-known Langholm man, David J Beattie, first came to my attention when I was sent photocopies of a small gospel song book entitled "Songs of the King's Highway", a collection of 77 songs he had written which was published by Pickering and Inglis. It was undated but from the typographic style it looked to be from around the late 1920s or early 1930s - the same era when Pickering & Inglis first published the mighty hymnbook Redemption Songs, and also Duncan McNeill's Hymn Book. Seven of the pieces in Beattie's book were in light Scots rather than standard English, and I have posted them over at Sacred Scotch Solos.

I picked up an original copy of the book a few years ago, and to my surprise inside was a pencil inscription "Author's copy, Beattie lived in Carlisle", along with Beattie's signature. In the introduction Beattie describes the American hymnwriter Charles H Gabriel as his 'intimate friend', to whom Beattie 'owed much for help and encouragement during many years of close friendship'. Gabriel wrote three melodies for the book.

There's an article here entitled 'Langholm's Forgotten Son' which summarises Beattie's life. He and his brother joined the family stonemason/monumental sculptors business in 1898; during and after the two World Wars the firm was responsible for many war memorials in the south of Scotland.

He belonged to the (Plymouth) Brethren and wrote occasionally for the Brethren publication The Believer's Magazine, including articles about Scotland's 1859 Revival. Even though Brethren assemblies/halls had begun in Plymouth and Dublin among (affluent) disaffected Anglicans in the early 1800s, it was post-1859 Revival working-class Scotland and Ulster that was a seedbed in which they really flourished. Beattie's historical account of the growth of the Brethren movement, entitled Brethren - The Story of a Great Recovery (published by Brethren publisher John Ritchie of Kilmarnock in 1939, who also printed some of my grandfather's poetry, is freely available online here), carefully details the intimate connections between the halls of Scotland and Ulster. It tells the stories of men like Jeremiah Meneely, so closely associated with the initial Kells and Connor epicentre of the Ulster 1859 revival and who later led evangelical missions in Ayrshire and Glasgow, where his Antrim voice must have preached the hamely message of his own self-penned hymn "There's a gran' time comin, o brither dear, whun Jesus will tak us hame'.

In between times Beattie wrote six other books which spanned his interests of local history, language, music, the stories of hymnwriters, as well as the history of the "wee halls" - Oor Gate En' (1915), Psalm Singing Among the Scottish Covenanters: A Lecture (pamphlet, 9 pages, Steel Bros. Carlisle 1915), Prince Charlie and the Borderland (1928), Oor Ain Folk (1933), Stories and Sketches of our Hymns and Their Writers (1934; the frontispiece photo of which is Ayrshire hymnwriter Anne Ross Cousin), The Romance of Sacred Song (1935; in the Preface of which he wrote that 'my bookshelves already groaned under the weight of volumes on this engrossing subject') and Lang Syne in Eskdale (1950).

For those of you with an interest in gospel music, his chapter How We Got our Popular Gospel Song is a fascinating read - available here. In it Beattie rhymes off a "Premier League" list of hymnwriters of his time:

"...Among writers who laid the foundation of American Gospel hymnody the following names are familiar: W. B. Bradbury, P. P. Bliss, Philip Phillips, Ira D. Sankey, James McGranahan, W. J. Kirkpatrick, Robert Lowry, George C. Stebbins, H. R. Palmer, D. W. Whittle, T. C. O’Kane, J. R. Sweney, W. H. Doane, Fanny Crosby, E. O. Excell and Charles H. Gabriel. Of this group of sweet singers, whose songs have been carried to the ends of the earth, Mr. Stebbins and Mr. Gabriel alone remain...." - it's significant that of the 16 he listed, a quarter of them (the ones I've marked in bold) all had Ulster connections.

Beattie also contributed a hymn to The Believer's Hymnbook - 'Assembled, Lord, at Thy Behest' (no 367), a book which is still used in the simple Sunday morning 'Breaking of Bread' meetings in Brethren-minded gatherings around the world; Beattie is named in the acknowledgements section at the front of the book.

Beattie died in July 1964 and his funeral service was held in Hebron Hall in Botchergate, Carlisle. The stonemasonry business still operates from the same building, now under different management, but is still called Beattie & Co, shown below.

If you know more about him which could be added to this post, please get in touch.

Luther

"...I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self."

Martin Luther

Psalms Roadshow events

This event was filmed at High Kirk in Ballymena last Sunday, giving a flavour of the "Psalms Roadshow" events. The next two are at Banbridge 5th Feb / Orangefield 5th March. (I'm not involved in this, but just thought it would be of interest to some of you).

Thanks to my cousin for this one

After twenty years of shaving himself every morning, a man in a small town decided he had had enough. He told his wife that he intended to let the local barber shave him each day. He put on his hat and coat and went to the barber shop, which was owned by Pastor O'Loan of the town's Baptist Church.

The pastor's wife, Grace, was working that day, so she performed the task. Grace shaved him and sprayed him with lilac water, and said, "That will be £40." The man thought the price was a bit high, but he paid the bill and went to work.

The next morning the man looked in the mirror, and his face was as smooth as it had been when he left the barber shop the day before. Not bad, he thought. At least I don't need to get a shave every day. The next morning, the man's face was still smooth. Two weeks later, the man was still unable to find any trace of whiskers on his face.

It was more than he could take, so he returned to the barber shop. "I thought £40 was high for a shave", he told the pastor's wife, "But you must have done a great job. It's been two weeks and my whiskers still haven't started growing back."

Expecting his comment, the expression on her face didn't even change.

She responded, "You were shaved by Grace O'Loan. Once shaved, always shaved."

A gem from Mark Driscoll

This today from his Facebook page: "There are 2 ways to get attention for yourself & your cause online. 1. Do something; 2. Criticize someone who has done something".

And here he is below on fine form dealing with "Marriage and Men - 1 Peter 3 v 7". Get the kettle on, stay inside from the snow, and get your head around this - 75 minutes of first class stuff.

"Weary of earth, myself and sin..."

... is one of the songs by Red Mountain Music on their 15 track "Help My Unbelief" album which they are currently giving away as a free download here. I've blogged about them before; their (perhaps final) cd is being released next month. "Weary of Earth, Myself and Sin" was written by Samuel Medley (1738-1799), and was published in Gadsby's Hymns - a Reformed Baptist hymnal from Manchester which was first printed in 1838. (The melody on the Red Mountain version is new but the words are the original ones - those of you who download it and who are of a similar vintage as me might detect a slight similarity to the intro from "One" by Metallica).