The Titanic's Last Hero (6 page)

Please come at once. Annie is dying. I want Mary and you beside me.

The Mary mentioned here was my own wife. I returned to my service, called two of our office-bearers onto the platform, and left the service in their hands.

A cab was hired, and with all speed my wife and I got to my beloved brother’s side in his deep sorrow. Ah, he was my brother, and nothing would have kept me from him in his trial. We stood by Mrs. Harper’s bed for twelve hours, doing all in our power to comfort her and alleviate her pain. Then, when her spirit entered the brighter home above, we gently closed her eyelids.

This trial, coming as it did upon the one through which he passed the year before, completely prostrated him. It was his Gethsemane, his fiery baptism. The cup was a bitter one, but he drank it, meanwhile saying, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

CARING FOR HIS BABY DAUGHTER

Shortly after this, my dear wife prevailed upon him to allow us to keep wee Nan for him, which he did for about six months. We would gladly have kept the little pet all through the years that have followed for her father’s sake and for her own sake, but that joy was not granted us. My brother sadly missed the fellowship of his dear wife. His home was never the same to him after. He wanted his baby girl at home with him. He had a nature that craved companionship. Only a few months before he was taken from us, we were together for some days. It was like new life to him. We prayed, sang, walked, and talked much together. How he poured into my ear matters that touched his future, assuring me that to no other one had he thus opened his mind. Would that it had been God’s will to have spared him to have carried through some of these plans and purposes!

THE MOVE TO LONDON

When he accepted the invitation to the pastorate of the church in Walworth Road, London, he wrote to me telling about his anticipated farewell services in Paisley Road. I was urgently requested by him to come to his farewell tea meeting. This I did ungrudgingly. I had been at his first induction service in Govan, and I sat, by his special request, at his side on this last occasion. What a meeting it was. Tears were shed and tributes paid to his sterling worth, but not one sentence in my hearing was exaggerated. In London, as in Glasgow, God set his seal on His servant’s work.

In one year the old church, with many worthy traditions attached to its history, passed through a remarkable season of reviving grace. It bids fair, under the ministry of my esteemed friend and brother, Pastor A. Moncur Niblock, who was co-pastor with dear John, to rival Paisley Road. This was my conviction during a recent visit I paid to it. Then Chicago!

CHICAGO MOURNS HARPER’S PASSING

Who can speak of the marvelous work accomplished through the instrumentality of my precious brother in the famous Moody Church in that city during the winter months of 1911–1912? Reverend E.Y. Woolley, assistant pastor of that great church, in a letter to me on May 11, said, “I have returned to Chicago to find, as I expected, our people grief-stricken through the loss of Mr. Harper. Our mid-week meeting last night was crowded to the doors. We had fully three hundred more people than usually attend, and hundreds were weeping as the meager details of his passing were told. I never knew a man who had so gripped the hearts of people in three short months of fellowship. Next Sunday morning is to be given to a memorial service for him, but it is easy to see that every one of our meetings will be to a large extent memorials. God used him while here as I never have seen a man used before.” Such is Mr. Woolley’s testimony.

I possess a number of letters written to me by dear John from Chicago. The one vehement desire expressed in all these letters is that I would pray for him. “Pray for me, pray for me every minute,” thus he wrote. My brother never spared himself, but as the years advanced, he seemed to sacrifice himself more and more for others, and especially for his Lord.

REAPING IN CHICAGO

The Life of Faith
, referring to this wonderful work of grace in Chicago, said, “His services were attended with such rich blessing that the visit lengthened into three months, the Moody Church passing through one of the most wonderful revivals in its history. The Lord’s own people also received a spiritual uplift, a practical illustration of which was seen in the fact that a debt of one thousand pounds was wiped out in four days.”

On his return from Chicago he paid a brief visit to Scotland, coming first to Edinburgh where he addressed two meetings, both being held in our church at Gorgie. His word was with great power. From Edinburgh he traveled to Glasgow, then to Paisley, Denny, and Cumnock in Ayrshire. In all these places his ministry was “in the Holy Ghost and in much assurance,” though he was considerably run down in body.

THE CALL TO RETURN TO CHICAGO

At the urgent and most cordial request of the Moody Church in Chicago, he consented to return for three months more. In a letter to me dated London, April 1, he wrote, “We are sailing on Saturday with the
Lusitania
from Liverpool.” Would God he had gone by that boat instead of by the ill-fated
Titanic
a week later.

The
Titanic
sailed from Southampton for New York on April 10. On April 15, she went down into the bosom of the ocean, carrying with her more than 1,500 precious lives, and among these my own beloved brother and companion, John Harper.

The details of this sad disaster need not be re-told by me here; they are known to everybody, I suppose, in our land, more or less. I dare say the generation after the present one will be familiar with this dreadful catastrophe at sea, in calm weather, when the acme of man’s genius in mercantile shipbuilding on her maiden voyage perished. I cannot attempt to explain the Providence that removes such a man of God in the midst of his usefulness.

HARPER’S “ABUNDANT ENTRANCE”

I can only say my confidence is in the over-ruling wisdom of God. “Some day we’ll understand.” I think John Keble, English priest and poet, put it well when he wrote:

Thy God hath said ‘tis good for thee

To walk by faith and not by sight,’

Take it on trust a little while;

Soon shalt thou read the mystery right,

In the bright sunshine of His smile.”

One truly feels this is all one can do in the presence of such a Providence. There was no farewell message sent to us from the sinking ship, not even a parting kiss, so far as we know, given to his little child. Calm and collected, he handed her to one of the ship’s officials on the top deck, while he himself remained by orders of the captain on the second deck. This was only half an hour before the mighty leviathan took her final plunge.

What his thoughts were during that last half hour on earth, no one will ever tell. One thing we rest assured of, there was “no moaning at the bar” when he “put out to sea.” His was “the abundant entrance.”

“E’en for the dead,

I will not bind my soul to grief.

As though death can divide:

For is it not as though

The rose that climbed my garden wall

Had blossomed on the other side?

Death doth hide

But not divide;

Thou art but on the other side,

Thou art with Christ, and Christ with me,

In Christ united still are we.”

THINK MORE OF THE LIFE THAT IS,
THAN OF THE LIFE THAT WAS

Along with scores of others, an esteemed brother wrote to me, “Do not grudge the liberty your Heavenly Father has taken with you. He has honored you, and at the same time fulfilled his own promise, ‘where I am, there shall also my servant be.’ The angels would have a warm welcome for your brother. Think more of the life that is, than of the life that was. More of the abundant entrance, than of the strange, sudden departure. Love and wisdom are on the throne—perfect love and perfect wisdom. It may seem at times all so strange, but it must be right. Try and dig a well in your Valley of Baca.”

Thanks, dear brother. This is what I have been trying to do, and as my well becomes deeper, my soul longs yet more and more for the glorious coming morn when the enigmas of life will be read in “His light clearly.”

I would like to say here how deeply I value all the kind messages of sympathy that I have received in this my hour of sorrow and weeping. Will friends please accept of this assurance of my personal appreciation? I am not alone in my sorrow. My dear wife has been broken-hearted over the loss of her brother-in-law. Then my sisters—Mrs. Sinclair and Mrs. Given in Johnstone, Mrs. Balloch in St. Boswell’s, and Mrs. Auckland in Govan—all weep with me over our irreparable loss. Our brother was very dear to us as a family. To one and all of us his “love was wonderful,” and by us (sisters and brother), it was reciprocated.

OH, THAT HIS SOUL-RAVISHING VOICE
WOULD SO REACH OUR COLD HEARTS

His little girl, Nan, does not realize her great loss yet. May her father’s God put his mantle over her and protect her from the blast of a cold, sinful world! May our Heavenly Father’s will concerning her be carried out, and in some measure at least, her earthly father’s spirit of devotion to his Lord in due time be found in her.

Multitudes sorrow over the loss of my beloved brother. He was a great soul-winner and a true pastor. He led multitudes to the feet of Christ, and afterwards fed them upon the finest of the wheat. His analytic and homiletic gifts were of a very high order, as will be seen in another part of this book, and as other brethren gladly bear witness to this fact, I merely mention it.

In a letter to one of his sisters, as far back as June 27, 1892, when he was a young preacher, John wrote, “Oh that we could only have more faith in a loving, living Savior, and that we would only open our hearts wide enough to receive more of His sweet, consuming, constraining, heart-piercing love, and oh! That we would open our ears to hear the sweet voice of the Bridegroom as He whispers to our souls, ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, and leave the fleeting phantoms of this fleeting day.’ And oh, that His soul-ravishing voice would so reach our cold hearts that we would be made to thirst and cry out for a closer fellowship with the crucified Savior.”

Such is only a brief quotation from a letter in front of me, many parts of which one feels are too sacred for public print. Ah, yet! The message of the Cross was the message of his burning ministry from first to last. But perhaps in a very special degree the Cross filled his vision during his closing ministry. His intention was to write and publish in book form some of these addresses which God used in the Chicago movement, but God saw fit to write them in another way, indelibly upon the hearts and lives of ransomed sinners and revived saints. Some hundreds of his rich and suggestive outlines are buried in an ocean grave. Nevertheless, of his witness and work for his Lord, we can truly say, “He being dead yet speaketh.”

MY BROTHER’S WEAKNESS

There was a side of my brother’s character that seemed out of harmony with the side I have written at length upon. He was very easily imposed upon. I often remonstrated with him regarding this. I could easily give instance after instance from my own personal knowledge of how he suffered—sometimes severely and for long—at the hands of those who were little short of imposters. But upon being remonstrated, he would only reply, “Well, well, the Lord knows about them; He will deal with them.” But for this little weakness in his character, to some of us who knew him intimately, he would have been little short of our ideal in human perfection.

The reader will please be assured that I seek in all I write concerning my beloved brother to magnify the grace of Christ as so wonderfully manifested in His servant. I feel this poor, groaning, dying world, steeped in sin, and openly rejecting Christ, can ill afford to part with a man of God like my brother, who constantly wept over it and poured out his life’s strength for it. I also feel the church of Christ, alas, so often lethargic, can ill afford to bid adieu to a ministry so awakening, so needful. But it may be God in this way is calling to deeper consecration, to truer service, to the filling of the breach made by dear John’s translation, some others of His servants. “Whilst Thou’rt calling, Lord, call me.”

May multitudes by baptized with the same spirit and zeal and enthusiasm for the glory of Christ, the conversion of the lost, and the hastening of the day of the long looked-for coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.