Between the delivery and the publication of the Cunningham Lectures Dr. Cairns spent five months in the United States and Canada.  The immediate object of this American tour was to fulfil an engagement to be present at the Philadelphia meeting of the General Council of the Presbyterian Alliance—­an organisation in which he took the deepest interest, as it was in the line of his early aspirations after a great comprehensive Presbyterian Union.  But he arranged his tour so as to enable him also to be present at the General Assembly of the American Presbyterian Church at Madison, and at that of the Presbyterian Church of Canada at Montreal.  The rest of the time at his disposal he spent in lengthened excursions to various scenes of interest.  He visited the historic localities of New England and crossed the continent to San Francisco, stopping on the way at Salt Lake City, and extending his journey to the Yo-Semite Valley.  More than once he went far out of his way to seek out an old friend or the relative of some member of his Berwick congregation.  Wherever he went he preached,—­in fact every Sunday of these five months, including those he spent on the Atlantic, was thus occupied,—­and everywhere his preaching and his personality made a deep impression.  As regarded himself, he used to say that this American visit “lifted him out of many ruts” and gave him new views of the vitality of Christianity and new hopes for its future developments.

After the publication of the Cunningham Lectures there was a widely cherished hope that Dr. Cairns would produce something still more worthy of his powers and his reputation.  He was now free from the incessant engagements of an active ministry, and he had by this time got his class lectures well in hand.  But, although the opportunity had come, the interest in speculative questions had sensibly declined.  There is an indication of this in the Cunningham Lectures themselves.  In the last of these, as we have seen, he had selected Mill as the representative of English nineteenth-century Unbelief.  Even then Mill was out of date; but Mill was the last British thinker whose system he had thoroughly mastered.  In the index to his Life and Letters the names of Darwin and Herbert Spencer do not occur, and even in an Apologetic tract entitled Is the Evolution of Christianity from mere Natural Sources Credible? which he wrote in 1887 for the Religious Tract Society, there is no reference whatever to any writer of the Evolutionary School.  With his attitude to later German theological literature it is somewhat different, for here he tried to keep himself abreast of the times.  Yet even here the books that interested him most were mainly historical, such as the first volume of Ritschl’s great work on Justification (almost the only German book he read in a translation), and the three volumes of Harnack’s History of Dogma.