the broken hearts in the west country, all those whose sins had found them out, all those who had learned to know the plague of their own heart, and who were passing under a searching sanctification—­all such found their way from time to time from great distances to the Kirk of Fenwick.  From Glasgow they came, and from Paisley, and from Hamilton, and from Lanark, and from Kilbride, and from many other still more distant places.  The lobbies of Fenwick Kirk were like the porches of Bethesda with all the blind, halt, and withered from the whole country round about.  After Hutcheson of the Minor Prophets had assisted at the communion of Fenwick on one occasion, he said that, if there was a church full of God’s saints on the face of the earth, it was at Fenwick communion-table.  Pitforthy and Glen Ogle, and all the estates in Angus, were but dust in the balance compared with one Sabbath-day’s exercise of such a preaching gift as that of William Guthrie.  ’There is no man that hath forsaken houses and lands for My sake and the Gospel’s, but shall receive an hundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting.’

But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and a great preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer.  A great writer is not a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes.  It is not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work.  Our greatest authors have all written little books.  Job is a small book, so is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle to the Romans, so is the Confessions, so is the Comedy, so is the Imitation, so are the Pilgrim and the Grace Abounding, and though William Guthrie’s small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our day.  You will all find out your own favourite books according to your own talents and tastes.  My calling a book great is nothing to you.  But it may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what two men like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, in the nineteenth, said about William Guthrie’s one little book.  Said John Owen, drawing a little gilt copy of The Great Interest out of his pocket, ’That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that ever wrote.  His book is my vade mecum.  I carry it always with me.  I have written several folios, but there is more divinity in this little book than in them all.’  Believe John Owen.  Believe all that he says about Guthrie’s Saving Interest; but do not believe what he says about his own maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his Person and Glory of Christ, his Holy Spirit, his Spiritual-mindedness, and his Mortification, Dominion, and Indwelling