with equal ease throw a gleam of cheerfulness over the countenances of his friends, and sink them in deepest thought, by the alternate facetiousness and gravity of his remarks.

"His gifts were great-strong natural parts, a clear head, and a sound heart. His voice was of the best sort, loud, and yet managed with charming cadences and elevations; his oratory singular, and by it he was master of the passions of his hearers. His action in preaching was more than ordinary, yet it was all decent and taking in him. But the peculiar charm in his sermons the glow of evangelical feeling and sentiment which pervaded the whole ...... The pointedness and adaptation of his illustrations sent home to the plainest understandings the truths which he expounded. From the treasures of God's word he brought forth things new and old, and his invention and power seemed as inexhaustible as the materials he had to work upon. No wonder, then, that his popularity as a preacher was great......No difference in church opinions could destroy that love he had for

all men."

Dr. Guthrie began to write his autobiography in 1868, but he left it unfinished; a part he wrote in pencil; "and when increasing weakness necessitated dictation, the remainder was taken down from his lips by one of his daughters."

One word in explanation at the beginning, and then the matter need not be referred to again. As we shall closely follow this autobiography, we shall generally speak of our subject, even when referring to his earliest days, as Dr. Guthrie.

It was Dr. Guthrie's ambition to establish a connection between his family and those heroes of the Covenant to whom, under God, Great Britian largely owes her civil and religious privileges; but in this he failed. He came, however, of a righteous seed. His paternal grandfather was of a mild and gentle disposition, and his grandmother a woman of marked decision of character, but withal a woman of deep and genuine, though rather stern piety. His mother's parents were also eminent for goodness. His father and mother were admirable characters, fully deserving the respect in which they were held by the circle in which they moved, and the esteem, love, and filial reverence with which all their children regarded them. His father was long the leading merchant in Brechin, and for some years Provost or chief magistrate of the town. He married early in life-in that, his son says, setting a good example. Thirteen children were the fruit of this marriage, and all of them were trained in the strictest habits of virtue and religion. Some stories which Dr. Guthrie relates of Scottish Sabbaths are amusing enough. That of the woman who parted with a valuable hen because it persisted in laying an egg on the Sabbath-day, and others of like character, we have his authority for saying are all rubbish. The good Scottish people of bygone days, he says, whatever they were, were not fools. But he did not dare, so his friend Mr. Corment told him, speak of shaving on the Lord's-day in Ross-shire, or he need not preach there any more. In the same county there was a servant-girl who would milk but not feed the cows on the Sabbath, assigning the reason, "The

cows canna' milk themselves, so to milk them is a clear work of necessity and mercy; but let them out to the fields, and they'll feed themselves." Dr. Guthrie's judgment on the Sabbath question is, that "with the variety, and piquancy, and attractiveness of books nowadays provided for Sabbath use, there is no excuse for people, whether old or young, seeking relaxation, in museums, or public gardens, or Sunday excursions, or saying that the Sabbath is a weariness, and wishing it were over." But we must not linger on this point, though it is to us profoundly interesting and important. Thomas Guthrie was the youngest but one of his father's family, and was born on the 12th of July, 1803. A hairbreath escape from death when a boy recalls the proverb, "Providence is kind to fools and bairns." When only four years old he was sent to school, for the same reason, probably, in part at least, that many others have been sent very early-to be out of the way. His teacher was a somewhat remarkable man, of whom it might have been said, as a Highland porter, observing a stranger looking intently on Dr. Candlish, said, "Ay, tak' a gude look; there's no' muckle o' him, but there's a deal in him." The mode of pronunciation this good man taught his scholars was very primitive. "Abraham they were taught to pronounce, Aubrawhawm; "Capernaum," Caa-pernauum; "throughout all the land of Israel," throch-oout aul the laund of Israel. At the next school to which Dr. Guthrie was sent, he, for the first and last time, played truant. Ready in a year or two to enter on the higher branches of knowledge, he was transferred to a school that combined the advantages of private and public education. He aspired to keep the top of his class, yet his greatest ambition was to win honours in another field-to be the best fighter among boys of his standing. This combative spirit, which brought him into the ring in his second as well as his first session at college was, nursed if not created by the great war between our country and the armies of Napoleon, which occupied the attention of old and young in those days. Previous to going to college at the end of autumn in the year 1815, he spent the summer in the country with the Rev. Robert Simpson. He was only a little over twelve years of age when he was sent to Edinburgh University. Luxurious living for students was hardly thought of then. Dr. Guthrie says that apart from the expense of fees, books, and what his tutor received, he thinks he did not cost his father more than 10 during his first session at college. He humorously tells us that beyond the departments of fun and fighting, he was no way distinguished there. A very striking reminiscence of his college life was the entrance of the 42nd Regiment of Highlanders into Edinburgh after the Battle of Waterloo. That was, in his view, an imposing spectacle, a grand procession; but when he thought how it brought back to many sad memories of the dead, opening their wounds afresh, he reflects that "war is one of sin's worst curses;' or, as he expresses it another time, it is "man's deepest shame and God's heaviest scourge."

In consequence of entering college at so early an age-at too early an age, indeed; for what eminence can be expected of a youth

who had finished his four years' curriculum of literature and philosophy before he was sixteen years of age?-Dr. Guthrie tells us he was saved from self-conceit, no small blessing, and had finished his eight years' course-four at the literary and philosophical classes and four as a student of theology-two years before he could be taken on his "trials" for license as a "probationer" or "preacher." He returned to the university for those two years, thereby enlarging his mind and adding to his stores of knowledge. His father was prudent enough to keep him short of money, and required him to account for every penny which he received. Almost all divinity students in those days were eager to get tutorships, and in that way boorish cubs were licked into shape, and vulgarly-bred lads acquired the manner of gentlemen. And it is unquestionably true that, however vulgar themselves, the common people appreciate and admire good breeding and gentle manners in their ministers. Dr. Guthrie says, "Short of a moral crime, nothing is more offensive in a minister than vulgarity; unless, indeed, it be when they swing over to the other side, and we have vulgar gentility and a pompous affectation of high breeding. With my own ears I heard an Independent minister in England-a very fine gentleman, with his ring and well-arranged hair-deeming meal a very vulgar term, speak of the widow's barrel of 'flour,' when referring to her who had the cruse of oil and barrel of meal; and to my old country neighbourhood there came a Seceder youth, affecting such refinement that, while some of his worthy predecessors would have called children bairns, he spoke of them as "those sweet and interesting bipeds that call man father!'"

Dr. Guthrie was "licensed" by the Presbertery of Brechin in 1825. When he delivered what is called the "popular discourse"a trial sermon, in fact-he found himself, being in his native place, face to face with a large congregation. That was a written discourse, and read as was the common practice; but he determined that he would be no reader, considering that if the preacher does not look his hearers in the face, he throws away a great advantage. On the Saturday after, on his way to Dun, about four miles from Brechin, where he was to preach the next day, he spent his time in repeating, or trying rather to repeat over to himself the sermon he had prepared for the following day; and his memory so often failed him, that he said to himself, "I have mistaken my profession! I shall never succeed as a preacher!" And the hour after he had left the pulpit the next nay, as he had got through his work without halt or blunder, was perhaps the brightest, happiest of all his life. Owing to his father's political influence, in four mouths after he was licensed as a preacher Dr. Guthrie had one of the largest charges and best livings of Scotland in his hand, but on the condition that the "Moderate," the anti-popular, and in many instances the anti-evangelical party in the church at that time should have his vote in the Church Courts, and that was a degrading condition from which his whole soul instantly and decidedly recoiled. And as he did not require to become a tutor for his maintenance, he made up his mind to spend the winter of 1826-27 in Paris, as a student at the Sorbonne. All the incidents he relates of that period

B

we must pass over, and content ourselves with simply recording his opinion that "a man needs not only good principles, but to have his wits about him, in such a place as Paris ;" and that "those parents are either very careless or very ignorant who, for the sake of the Parisian accent, the French, German, or Italian tongues, send their children abro: d to be educated."

Disappointed in his hopes of "obtaining a living" on his return home, Dr. Guthrie spent the next two years in a bank, which was not the least valuable part of his training and education, preaching three or four times each year to let the public know that he had not abandoned his original profession. The practical experience he thus acquired induced the sagacious remark, in reference to some old arrangements connected with the administration of the Lord's Supper in Scotland, "If ministers were less shut up in their own shells, and had more common sense and knowledge of the world, they would cling less tenaciously to old forms, suitable enough to bygone but not to the present times."

After this weary waiting, Dr. Guthrie, when the living of Arbilot became vacant in the autumn of 1829, had, apparently through the favour of his patron, the Honourable William Maule, reached land at last. For months even then no answer came from the Crown (the real reason was the illness of the King, which his ministers wished to conceal); and he had therefore reason to dread the worst from the delay. But when a favourable answer was received, he did not feel sure at first, as people say, whether his head or heels were uppermost. He was thankful to God; happy not only for his own sake, but for the happiness he knew he was carrying to her to whom he had been engaged for some years, and to whom he was married five months after entering on his charge, as well as to his mother and family, also very naturally anxious as to the result. He was inducted into the living in May, 1830. At the dinner which was given to the Presbytery, some private friends, and the farmers of the parish, two of the latter were rather uproarious, and one minister got drunk before leaving the table. Happily, now-adays, these old convivial customs are, to a large extent, abandoned, and the sooner they are altogether, the better. The transgressing minister, on this occasion, was afterwards tried by the Presbytery, and deposed by the general assembly for drunkenness and other crimes. A strong partisan of the offender was an unwilling witness. When he was asked the question, anent the remark of the minister when lolling over the pulpit on one occasion, that he loved his people so much that he would carry them all to heaven on his back, "Now, John, when you heard him say so, what impression did so strange a speech make on you?" he showed himself equal to the occasion. "Weel, Maister Guthrie, I'll just tell you what I thought. There was a great fat wife, you see, sitting in the seat before me, and thinks I, 'My lad, if you set off to the kingdom of heaven with that wife on your back, my certie, you'll no be back for the rest o' us in a hurry!'" No wonder that the ludicrous picture of the minister on his way through the sky with this enormous wife seated on his back, and the serious air with which John delivered himself of his reply, proved to be irresistible.

Two or three of the greatest blackguards in the parish tried in vain to blast the new minister's happiness and usefulness, though the saying of a worldly old woman concerning him is none the less true, and may be quoted because it surely embodies a principle of wide application: "If he is faithful to his Master, be sure he'll have a' the blackguards of the parish on his tap in three weeks." In his population of a thousand parishoners there were three units that stood out in a marked way from the rest. There was one Dissenter, a very worthy man; one man who could not read, but he was not a native; and there was another man who did not attend church, and he was crazy. On the other hand, there were two or three as bad, immoral fellows as were to be found in the whole country, yet they were never out of church. His minister once very cleverly took the wind out of the sails of one of these. A fierce and scurrilous attack had been made upon Christ's servant by a low pamphleteer. This parishioner had obtained a copy, and when his minister had paid him a visit after he had been very ill, no better method of repaying his kindness did not occur to the man than to give his minister the pamphlet to take home and read. The malicions gleam in his eye told too plainly the truth. "Is it for me or against me?" was asked. Oh, against you;" and never did a man look more mortified, more chopfallen than he, on Mr. Guthrie's saying, with a merry laugh, "Ah, well, you may keep it; had it been for me, I would have read it. I never read anything that is against me."

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Another parishioner was rather an odd sort of person, a curious mixture of benevolence and folly, and might have become the wealthiest man in the parish, instead of a bankrupt, had he never touched drink. He died as he had lived. The lawyer who was writing to his dictation, having written down legacies of five hundred pounds to this person, and a thousand pounds to that, and so on, at length laid down his pen, saying, "But, Mr. don't believe you have all that money to leave." "Oh," was the reply, "I ken that as well as you, but I just want to show them my good will."

I

For industry, sober habits, intelligence, moral conduct, the common people of Arbilot stood very high; but they were more favourably situated than most, as, after Mr. Guthrie had succeeded in getting an alehouse closed which stood close to the manse, only one remained to corrupt the people, and that was miles away from most of them, so that its curse was but little felt.

A parish library was instituted, a number of Sabbath Schools set a-going, prayer-meetings were also established, and a bank likewise, which was a great success.

Dr. Guthrie in this connection employs words which we will make bold to quote and recommend to the attention of all who are desirous of winning souls for the Master :

"These, and other extra labours which I undertook, showed the people that I was seeking to live for them, not for myself-that I came, not to lord it over God's heritage, not to be their master, but their minister, in the original sense of the word; and to the man who wants to establish himself in the hearts of his people, wean