ly in that sermon from Deut.
xxxii. 4, 5. See his works, page 502, 557, &c.

After he had laboured four years in the ministry, serving God with his
spirit in the gospel of his Son, he died in the year 1653, of a
consumption, when he was scarce come to the prime and vigour of his
life, being only in the 26th year of his age, leaving behind him a sweet
favour and an epistle of commendation upon the hearts of those who were
his hearers.

He was a person of singular piety, of a humble, meek, and peaceable
temper, a judicious and lively preacher, nay so extraordinary a person,
that he was justly accounted a prodigy of human learning and knowledge
of divinity. From his childhood he knew the scriptures, and from a boy
had been much under deep and spiritual exercise, until the time (or a
little before) that he entered upon the office of the ministry, when he
came to a great calm and tranquillity of mind, being mercifully relieved
from all these doubtings, which for a long time he had been exercised
with, and though he studied in his discourses to condescend to the
capacity of the meaner sort of hearers, yet it must be owned that his
gift of preaching was not so much accommodated to a country
congregation, as it was to the judicious and learned. Mr. Binning's
method was peculiar to himself, much after the haranguing way; he was no
stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter
subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy
and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of
undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention.
Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the
orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that
time inferior to the best pulpit orator in England. While he lived he
was highly esteemed, having been a successful instrument of saving
himself, and them that heard him, of turning sinners unto righteousness
and of perfecting the saints. He died much lamented by all good people
who had the opportunity of knowing him. That great divine Mr. James
Durham gave him this verdict, "That there was no speaking after Mr.
Binning;" and truly he had the tongue of the learned, and knew how to
speak a word in season.

Besides his works which are bound up in one quarto volume, and that
wrote upon occasion of the public resolutioners, which has been already
mentioned, some other little pieces of his hav