David Brainard - Beloved Yankee, David Wynbeek, Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1961, $3.75.

This is a heart warming story of the soul-struggle of a man of prayer. His thoughts were always God-ward, and his aim was to let God have his way in his life. He said, “I never, since I began to preach, could feel any freedom to enter into other men’s labours and settle down in the ministry where the gospel was preached before.” The offers to “settle down” in a church were often, but “the field was white unto the harvest” to this man of God. With all his zeal to proclaim Christ yearned much for personal holiness. He grieved, “I have thought much of having the kingdom of Christ advanced in the world, but now I saw I had enough to do with myself.”

One must reflect upon the commonality of man in all ages, when the squaw tells him that, “my heart has cried” ever since she had first heard him. He was a man to whom “eternity appeared very near, my nature was very weak, and seemed ready to be dissolved, the sun declining, and the shadows of the evening drawing on apace. 1 longed to fill up the remaining moments of life for God.”

The American Indian, who was a people originally moral, cultured, and healthy, were destroyed by the advent of the white man. Their social structure was shattered, their morals decayed, they became subject to white man’s diseases, and were reduced, many times, to beggars living on the outskirts of the white man’s settlement. The great bane and curse of the Indian was liquor, he could not seem to cope with it.

We see this soldier of God proclaiming Christ to the Indians even after he had contacted “consumption,” that dreaded killer. He taught them when he was so weak he had to immediately go to bed upon finishing. Yet, he wandered if “I was a misimprover of time, by conceiting that I was sick, when I was not in reality so.” He did not know he had consumption at this time. The physical feats he performed, while suffering this disease, in taking Christ to those who had never heard, defies all imagination.

He recognized no sect of his day. He entered into no theological disputes of his time. Rather, he stated his objective was to proclaim Christ to the glory of God. Brainard’s was a personality that had come into contact with the “great life.” He, having experienced Deity bending down to touch the hearts of men, was enabled to bend down to touch the hearts of his fellowman. He was no unfinished sketch of what God would have him to be. This frail human being, who was anointed with the oil of the spirit, became a brightly burning taper that is testimony yet today that the Christ-life is the full-life; that selflessness is Christlikeness. Read it, you’ll be glad. — CLINT EVANS