There is an excellent story told of James Guthrie’s family worship in the manse of Stirling, that bears not unremotely on the matter we have now on hand.  Guthrie was wont to pray too much, both at the family altar and in the pulpit, as if he had been alone with his own heart and God.  And he carried that bad habit at last to such a length in his family, that he almost drove poor James Cowie, his man-servant, out of his senses, till when Cowie could endure no longer to be singled out and exposed and denounced before the whole family, he at last stood up with some boldness before his master and demanded to be told out, as man to man, and not in that cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made his master actually every day thus denounce and expose him.  ’O James, man, pardon me, pardon me.  I was, I see now, too much taken up with my own heart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest.’  ’It was that, and the like of that,’ witnessed Cowie, ’that did me and my wife more good than all my master’s well-studied sermons.’  The intimacy and tenderness of the minister and his man went on deeper and grew closer, till at the end we find Cowie reading to him at his own request the Epistle to the Romans, and when the reader came to the passage, ’I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,’ the listener burst into tears, and exclaimed, ’James, James, halt there, for I have nothing but that to lippen to.’  And then, on the ladder, and before a great crowd of Edinburgh citizens:  ’I own that I am a sinner—­yea, and one of the vilest that ever made a profession of religion.  My corruptions have been strong and many, and they have made me a sinner in all things—­yea, even in following my duty.  But blessed be God, who hath showed His mercy to such a wretch, and hath revealed His Son unto me, and made me a minister of the everlasting Gospel, and hath sealed my ministry on the hearts of not a few of His people.’  James Guthrie’s ruling passion, as Cowie remarked, was still strong in his death.

On one occasion Guthrie and some of his fellow-ministers were comparing experiences and confessing to one another their ‘predominant sins,’ and when it came to Guthrie’s turn he told them that he was much too eager to die a violent death.  For, said he, I would like to die with all my wits about me.  I would not like eyesight and memory and reason and faith all to die out on my deathbed and leave me to tumble into eternity bereft of them all.  Guthrie was greatly afraid at the thought of death, but it was the premature death of his reason, and even of his faith, that so much alarmed and horrified him to think of.  He envied the men who kneeled down on the scaffold, or leaped off the ladder, in full possession at the last moment of all their senses and all their graces.  ’Give me a direct answer, sir,’ demanded Dr. Johnson of his physician when on his deathbed. . . .  ’Then I will take no more opiates, for I have prayed that I may be able to render up my soul to God unclouded.’  And when pressed by his attendants to take some generous nourishment, he replied almost with his last breath, ‘I will take anything but inebriating sustenance.’