It was about this time that the managers and congregation of the new church, St. Peter’s, Dundee, invited him to preach as one of the candidates; and, in the end of August, chose him to be their pastor, with one accord.  He accepted the call under an awful sense of the work that lay before him.  He would rather, he said, have made choice for himself of such a rural parish as Dunipace; but the Lord seemed to desire it otherwise.  “His ways are in the sea.”  More than once, at a later period, he would say, “We might have thought that God would have sent a strong man to such a parish as mine, and not a feeble reed.”

The first day he preached in St. Peter’s as a candidate (August 14th) is thus recorded:  “Forenoon—­Mind not altogether in a preaching frame; on the Sower.  Afternoon—­With more encouragement and help of the Spirit; on the voice of the Beloved, in Cant. 2:8-17.[6] In the Evening—­With all my heart; on Ruth.  Lord, keep me humble.”  Returning from St. Peter’s the second time, he observed in his class of girls at Dunipace more than usual anxiety.  One of them seemed to be thoroughly awakened that evening.  “Thanks be to Thee, Lord, for anything,” he writes that evening; for as yet he had sown without seeing fruit.  It seems to have been part of the Lord’s dealing with him, thus to teach him to persevere in duty and in faith, even where there was no obvious success.  The arrow that was yet to wound hundreds was then receiving its point; but it lay in the quiver for a time.  The Lord seemed to be touching his own heart, and melting it by what he spoke to others, rather than touching or melting the hearts of those he spoke to.  But from the day of his preaching in St. Peter’s, tokens of success began.  His first day there, especially the evening sermon on Ruth, was blessed to two souls in Dundee; and now he sees souls begin to melt under his last words in the parish where he thought he had hitherto spent his strength in vain.

     [6] See this characteristic sermon in the Remains.

As he was now to leave this sphere, he sought out, with deep anxiety, a laborer who would help their overburdened pastor, in true love to the people’s souls.  He believed he had found such a laborer in Mr. Somerville, his friend who had shared his every thought and feeling in former days, and who, with a sharp sickle in his hand, was now advancing toward the harvest field.  “I see plainly,” he wrote to Mr. Bonar, “that my poor attempts at labor in your clear parish will soon be eclipsed.  But if at length the iron front of unbelief give way, if the hard faces become furrowed with the tears of anxiety and of faith, under whatever ministry, you will rejoice, and I will rejoice, and the angels, and the Father and God of angels, will rejoice.”  It was in this spirit that he closed his short ten months of labor in this region.