Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/342

 effect, the celebrated David Hume, having been led to hear him preach on one occasion at North Berwick, remarked, "That old man preaches as if Christ were at his elbow." Except for his overawing seriousness, and occasionally a melting sweetness in his voice, it does not appear that his delivery was by any means attractive. "It was my mercy," he says, with characteristic modesty, that "the Lord, who had given me some other talents, withheld from me a popular delivery, so that though my discourses were not disrelished by the serious, so far as I heard, yet they were not so agreeable to many hearts as those of my brethren, which it was a pleasure to me to see possessed of that talent which the Lord, to restrain my pride, had denied to me." His labours were not in vain in the Lord. The members of his congregation, the smallness of which he often spoke of as a mercy, seem to have been enabled to walk, in a great measure, suitably to their profession and their privileges; and he had less experience than most ministers of that bitterest of all trials attached to a conscientious pastor's situation—scandalous irregularities of practice among those in regard to whom he can have no greater joy than to see them walking in the truth. In ecclesiastical policy, he was a staunch Presbyterian and Seceder in the original sense of the term, as denoting an individual separated, not from the constitution of the established church, either as a church or as an establishment, but from the policy and control of the predominant party in her judicatures. At the unhappy division of the Secession church in 1745, commonly known by the name of the Breach, on the question of making refusal of the burgess oath a term of communion, though personally doubtful of the propriety of a Seceder's swearing the oath in question, he attached himself to that party, who, from declining peremptorily to pronounce it unlawful, obtained the popular appellation of Burghers,—justly considering that a difference of opinion on this point was by no means of sufficient importance to break the sacred bond of Christian fellowship. His public prayers were liberal and catholic, and he always showed the strongest affection for gospel ministers and true Christians of every name. In an unpublished letter to a noble lady of the episcopal communion, he expresses his hope "that it will afford her a delightful satisfaction to observe how extensive and important the agreement, and how small the difference of religious sentiments, between a professedly staunch Presbyterian and a truly conscientious Episcopalian, if they both cordially believe the doctrine of God's free grace reigning to men's eternal life, through the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ our Lord." He made a point of regularly attending and acting in the church courts, though he avoided taking any leading part in the management of ecclesiastical business. The uniformity and universality of his habits of personal devotion were remarkable. Of him it might well be said, that he walked with God, and that in God he, as it were to his own consciousness, lived, and moved, and had his being. He had acquired a holy skill in deriving, from every scene of nature, and every incident of life, occasions of Christian thought, impulses of Christian feeling, motives to Christian duty. His "Christian Journal" seems to have been literally the picture of his daily course and association of ideas, and the beautiful motto he has prefixed to it, to have been the expression of his own experience: "The ear that is ever attentive to God never hears a voice that speaks not of Him; the soul, whose eye is intent on him, never sees an atom in which she doth not discern her Best Beloved." He could hold sweet communion with his heavenly Father in the most terrible displays of His majesty, not less than in the softer manifestations of His benignity. One day, hearing a tremendous crash of thunder, he smilingly exclaimed to those around, "That is the low whisper of my God." His seasons of prayer, stated and special, secret and domestic, were frequent beyond the rule! of any prescribed routine. Often was he overheard, in the nightly and the