oner or later find
scope for his special powers and acquirements in a professor's chair.
In the early years of his ministry he received no fewer than four
offers of philosophical professorships, which his views of the
ministry and of his consecration to it constrained him to set aside.
Three similar offers of theological chairs, the acceptance of which
did not involve the same interference with the plan of his life, came
to him later, but were declined on other grounds. When, however, a
vacancy in the Theological Hall of his own Church occurred by the
death of Professor Lindsay, in 1866, the universal opinion in the
Church was that it must be filled by him and by nobody else. Dr.
Lindsay had been Professor of Exegesis, but the United Presbyterian
Synod in May 1867 provided for this subject being dealt with
otherwise, and instituted a new chair of Apologetics with a special
view to Dr. Cairns's recognised field of study. To this chair the
Synod summoned him by acclamation, and, having accepted its call,
he began his new work in the following August.

As in his own student days, the Hall met for only two months in each
year, and the professors therefore did not need to give up their
ministerial charges. So he remained in Berwick, where his congregation
were very proud of the new honour that had come to their minister, and
that was in some degree reflected on them. Instead of "the Doctor"
they now spoke of him habitually as "the Professor," and presented him
with a finely befrogged but somewhat irrelevant professor's gown for
use in the pulpit at Wallace Green.

Dr. Cairns prepared two courses of lectures for his students--one on
the History of Apologetics, and the other on Apologetics proper, or
Christian Evidences. For the former, his desire to go to the sources
and to take nothing at second-hand led him to make a renewed and
laborious study of the Fathers, who were already, to a far greater
extent than with most theologians, his familiar friends. His knowledge
of later controversies, such as that with the Deists, which afterwards
bore fruit in his work on "Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century," was
also widened and deepened at this time. These historical lectures were
almost overweighted by the learning which he thus accumulated; but
they were at once massive in their structure and orderly and lucid in
their arrangement.

In the other course, on Christian Evidences, he did not include
any discussion on Theism which--p