During his first two years in Edinburgh he was busily engaged in writing lectures and in adapting his existing stock to the requirements of the new curriculum.  Of these lectures, and of others which he wrote in later years, it must be said that, while all of them were the fruit of conscientious and strenuous toil, they were of unequal merit, or at least of unequal effectiveness.  Some of them, particularly in his Apologetic courses, were brilliant and stimulating.  Whenever he had a great personality to deal with, such as Origen, Grotius, or Pascal, or, in a quite different way, Voltaire, he rose to the full height of his powers.  His criticisms of Hume, of Strauss, and of Renan, were also in their own way masterly.  But a course which he had on Biblical Theology seemed to be hampered by a too rigid view of Inspiration, which did not allow him to lay sufficient stress on the different types of doctrine corresponding to the different individualities of the writers.  And when, after the death of Principal Harper, he took over the entire department of Systematic Theology, his lectures on this, the “Queen of sciences,” while full of learning and sometimes rising to grandeur, gave one on the whole a sense of incompleteness, even of fragmentariness.  This impression was deepened by the oral examinations which he was in the habit of holding every week on his lectures.

For these examinations he prepared most carefully, sitting up sometimes till two o’clock in the morning collecting material and verifying references which he deemed necessary to make them complete.  His aim in them was not only to test the students’ attention and progress, but to communicate information of a supplementary and miscellaneous character which he had been unable to work into his lectures.  And so he would bring down to the class a tattered Father or two, and would regale its members with long Greek quotations and with a mass of details that were pure gold to him but were hid treasure to them.  His examination of individual students was lenient in the extreme.  It used to be said of him that if he asked a question to which the correct answer was Yes, while the answer he got was No, he would exert his ingenuity to show that in a certain subtle and hitherto unsuspected sense the real answer was No, and that Mr. So-and-so deserved credit for having discovered this, and for having boldly dared to say No at the risk of being misunderstood.  This, of course, is caricature; but it nevertheless sufficiently indicates his general attitude to his students.

It was the same with the written as with the oral examinations.  In these he assigned full marks to a large proportion of the papers sent in.  Once it was represented to him that this method of valuation prevented his examination results from having any influence on the adjudication of a prize that was given every year to the student who had the highest aggregate of marks in all the classes.  He admitted the justice of this contention, and promised to make a change.  When he announced the results of his next examination it was found that he had been as good as his word; but the change consisted in this:  that whereas formerly two-thirds of the class had received full marks, now two-thirds of the class received ninety per cent.!