His Christian experience was singular. Early taught to know the Lord, one would have expected his course to have been unusually even. But the very reverse was the case; for few Christians ever experienced such marked changes of feeling. Now on the brink of despair under the power of temptation, and soon again in a state of rapturous enjoyment, shade and sunshine alternated in abrupt and rapid succession, during the whole of his life. Ardent and imaginative as he was, the fiery darts of the wicked one flashed the more vividly, and pierced the more deeply into his soul, and the joy that came to him from heaven the more violently excited him. His prayerfulness was the leading feature of his Christianity. Much of his time spent on his knees, and many a sleepless night he passed, sometimes wrestling, as for his life, against the assaults of the tempter, and at other times, "rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God." The nearness to the mercy seat, to which he was sometimes admitted, was quite extraordinary. Proofs of this might be given, because of which we cannot wonder that he had the fame and the influence of a prophet, among the simple people of the north. Avoiding the extreme of superstitious credulity, on the one hand, and the formalist sceptism on the other, it is altogether safe to say that Mr Lachlan enjoyed peculiarly familiar intercourse with God, and received such distinct intimations of His mind, in reference to cases which he carried to the mercy-seat, as but very few of God's children have obtained. [A description of Mr Lachlan Mackenzie of Ross-shire by John Kennedy]
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