better for us that all is as He wills. . . .  Another of the deep deceits of my heart is this, that I have more affection in prayer than I have corresponding holiness in my walk or conversation.  I wondered not to see the men of the world so taken up with covetous, ambitious, vain projects, for no man’s head and heart can be so full of them as my head and heart are.  Oh keep me from these unsober, distempered, mad, unruly thoughts!  When I am away from Thee then I am quite out of my wit.  But God can make use of poison to expel poison.  Oh, if I were examined and brought to the light, what a monstrous creature I would be seen to be!  For as I see myself I am no better than a devil, void of sincerity and of uprightness in what I do myself, and yet judge others, condemning in another man what I excuse and even approve in myself:  plunged in deep snares of self-love, not loving others nor judging nor acting for others as I do for myself and for my relations.’  And then a passage which might have been taken from The Confessions itself:  ’Ere I come to glory and to my journey’s end, I shall have spent so much of Thy free grace—­what in pardoning, what in preventing, what in convincing, what in enlightening, what in strengthening, and confirming, and upholding; what in watering and making me to grow; what in growth of sanctification, knowledge, faith, experience, patience, mortification, uprightness, steadfastness, watchfulness, humiliation, resolution, and self-denial; what for public, what for private, and what for the family; what against snares on the right hand and on the left;—­O Lord, the all-sufficiency of Thy grace!’ Surely the man must run well and must make a good goal at last who can write about sin and grace in himself in that fashion!  And that is not all he wrote on that subject and in that style.  You have no idea of the wealth of personal and experimental matter there lies buried in Alexander Brodie’s diary.  When I first read Brodie’s big diary I said to myself, What a treasure is this I have stumbled upon!  Here is yet another of Scotland’s statesmen, scholars, and eminent saints.  Here, I thought, is an author on the inward life to be set beside Brae and Halyburton, if not beside Shepard and Edwards themselves.

In the religious upbringing also, and lifelong care of his orphaned son and daughter, Brodie was all we could wish to see.  In the sanctification and wise occupation of the Sabbath-day; in the family preparation for communion seasons; in the personal and private covenants he encouraged his children to make with God in their own religious life; in the company he brought to his house and to his table; in his own devotional habits at home—­in all these all-important matters Brodie was all that a father of children too early bereft of their mother ought to be.  Till we do not wonder to find his son commencing his diary on the day of his father’s death in this way:  ’My precious, worthy, and dear father!