Career Of The Rev Donald Sage Mackay

FROM AN ARTICLE IN THE HIGHLAND WITNESS OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF SCOTLAND, 1906

The Reverend Donald Sage Mackay of New York City who has just been appointed Moderator of the oldest Presbyterian Church in America, is a son of the Highlands. He was born in Glasgow on the 20th of November, 1863, and is thus still in the prime of life. On the other side (i.e. across the Atlantic) they don't wait til a man has one foot in the grave to put him in the moderator's chair! (This is a sad, mistaken prophesy because our grandfather died two years later, in 1908). Dr. Mackay's father, Reverend William Murray Mackay of Young Street Free Church, Glasgow: a Caithness man who with great singleness of heart laboured for forty years in the east side of that city and left behind a name fragrant in the hearts of the poor and needy. He left only two sons, and both followed him into the ministry — the other being Rev. William Mackintosh Mackay of the South United Church, Aberdeen.

Their grandfather was Reverend Donald Sage who wrote "Memorabilia Domestica"¹, an account of his grandfather, Reverend Aenaes Sage, his life as a minister in Lochcarron, later the site of the most infamous of the Highland Clearances. Their great, great, grandfather was the Reverend John Mackay of Lairg. With such an ancestry, who could fail to have a leaning to the ministry? For a while Dr. Mackay ws drawn to the legal profession and served his apprenticeship to the law in Glasgow. It was then that he came to the consciousness of his gifts as a public speaker. He gave up the law for the gospel and enrolled in the New College, Edinburgh.

It was in his first year as a divinity student that Dr. Mackay began to preach. He was invited to fill in one Sunday at the old free church of Ardclach in Nairnshire. He had no time to write a sermon out, only part of a Saturday to put together his notes. So he preached his first sermon "ex tempore" or "without reading". It was a wise choice. Had he read at the first, he might have continued to do so and so clipped his message of half its power.

Footnotes

1. A more accurate description of "Memorabilia Domestica" by Donald Sage (1789-1869) would be: "An autobiography which includes an account of the life of his grandfather, Rev Aeneas Sage (1694-1774) the first Reformed minister in Lochcarron, that of his father, Rev Alexander Sage (1753-1824), minister of Kildonan, Sutherland, and his own life and ministry in the nearby vicinity and elsewhere, together with chapters on the most infamous of the Highland Clearances which occurred in the area of Sutherland where he and his father ministered." Note that the major clearances referred to in the book were not in Lochcarron, well over 100 miles away on the west coast. Available at various online sites or as a print-on-demand reproduction in paperback form from Lulu.com