Yet another important factor in the case is to be found in the circumstances of his Berwick ministry.  Had his lot been cast in a quiet country place, with only a handful of people to look after, the great book might yet have been written.  But he had to attend to a congregation whose membership was at first nearly six hundred, and afterwards rose to seven hundred and eighty and, with his standard of pastoral efficiency, this left him little leisure.  Indeed it is wonderful that, under these conditions, he accomplished so much as he did—­that he wrote his North British articles, maintained a reputation which won for him so many offers of academic posts, and at the same time laid the foundation of a vast and spacious learning in Patristic and Reformation theology.  Akin to his strictly ministerial work, and flowing out of it, was the work he did for his Church as a whole—­the share he took in the Union negotiations with the Free Church during the ten years that these negotiations lasted, and the endless round of church openings and platform work to which his growing fame as a preacher and public speaker laid him open.

But there is one other consideration which, although it is to some extent involved in what has already been said, deserves separate and very special attention.  Although his friends and the public regretted his withdrawal from the speculative field, it is not so clear that he regretted it himself.  He had, it is true, worked in it strenuously and with conspicuous success, and had revealed a natural aptitude for Christian apologetics of a very high order.  But it does not appear that either his heart or his conscience were ever fully engaged in the work.  He never seemed as if he were fighting for his life, because he always seemed to have another and an independent ground of certainty on which he based his real defence.  There is a passage in his Life of Clark which bears upon this point so closely that it will be well to quote it here:—­

“The Christian student is as conscious of direct intercourse with Jesus Christ as with the external world, or with other minds.  This is the very postulate of living Christianity.  It is a datum or revelation made to a spiritual faculty in the soul, as real as the external senses or any of the mental or moral faculties, and far more exalted.  This living contact with a living person by faith and prayer is, like all other life, ultimate and mysterious, and must be accepted by him in whom it exists as its own sufficient explanation and reason, just as the principles of natural intelligence and conscience, to which it is something superadded, and with which, in this point of view, though in other respects higher, it is co-ordinate.  No one who is living in communion with Jesus Christ, and exercising that series of affections towards Him which Christianity at once prescribes and creates, can doubt the reality of that supernatural system to which he has been thus introduced; and nothing