During the winter months he preached a good deal in Edinburgh, especially by way of helping young or weak congregations, more than one of which he had at different times under his immediate care until they had been lifted out of the worst of their difficulties.  In summer he ranged over the whole United Presbyterian Church from Shetland to Galloway, preaching to great gatherings wherever he went.  In arranging these expeditions, he always gave the preference to those applications which came to him from poor, outlying, and sparsely peopled districts, where discouragements were greatest and the struggle to “maintain ordinances” was most severe.  His visits helped to lift the burden from many a weary back, and never failed to leave happy and inspiring memories behind them.  Among these summer engagements he always kept a place for his old congregation at Berwick, which he regularly visited in the month of June, preaching twice in the church on Sunday, and finishing the day’s work by preaching again from the steps of the Town Hall in the evening.  On these occasions the broad High Street, at the foot of which the Town Hall stands, was always crowded from side to side and a long way up its course, while all the windows within earshot were thrown open and filled with eager listeners.

In this continual pursuit of knowledge, and in the contemplation, whether in history or in the world around him, of Christianity as a Life, his main interests more and more lay.  In the one we can trace the influence of Hamilton, in the other perhaps that of Neander—­the two teachers of his youth who had most deeply impressed him.  Relatively to these, Systematic Theology, and even Apologetics, receded into the background.  Secure in his “aliquid inconcussum,” he came increasingly to regard the life of the individual Christian and the collective life of the Church as the most convincing of all witnesses to the Unseen and the Supernatural.

Meanwhile the apologetic of his own life was becoming ever more impressive.  In the years 1886 and 1887 he lost by death several of his dearest friends.  In the former year died Dr. W.B.  Robertson of Irvine; and, later, Dr. John Ker, who had been his fellow-student at the University and at the Divinity Hall, his neighbour at Alnwick in the early Berwick days, and at last his colleague as a professor in the United Presbyterian College.  In the early part of the following year his youngest sister, Agnes, who with her husband, the Rev. J.C.  Meiklejohn, had come to live in Edinburgh two years before for the better treatment of what proved to be a mortal disease, passed away.  And in the autumn he lost the last and the dearest of the friends that had been left to him in these later years, William Graham.  These losses brought him yet closer than he had been before to the unseen and eternal world.