airns spent five months in the United States and Canada. The
immediate object of this American tour was to fulfil an engagement to
be present at the Philadelphia meeting of the General Council of the
Presbyterian Alliance--an organisation in which he took the deepest
interest, as it was in the line of his early aspirations after a great
comprehensive Presbyterian Union. But he arranged his tour so as to
enable him also to be present at the General Assembly of the American
Presbyterian Church at Madison, and at that of the Presbyterian Church
of Canada at Montreal. The rest of the time at his disposal he spent
in lengthened excursions to various scenes of interest. He visited the
historic localities of New England and crossed the continent to San
Francisco, stopping on the way at Salt Lake City, and extending his
journey to the Yo-Semite Valley. More than once he went far out of his
way to seek out an old friend or the relative of some member of his
Berwick congregation. Wherever he went he preached,--in fact every
Sunday of these five months, including those he spent on the Atlantic,
was thus occupied,--and everywhere his preaching and his personality
made a deep impression. As regarded himself, he used to say that
this American visit "lifted him out of many ruts" and gave him new
views of the vitality of Christianity and new hopes for its future
developments.

After the publication of the Cunningham Lectures there was a widely
cherished hope that Dr. Cairns would produce something still more
worthy of his powers and his reputation. He was now free from the
incessant engagements of an active ministry, and he had by this time
got his class lectures well in hand. But, although the opportunity had
come, the interest in speculative questions had sensibly declined.
There is an indication of this in the Cunningham Lectures themselves.
In the last of these, as we have seen, he had selected Mill as the
representative of English nineteenth-century Unbelief. Even then Mill
was out of date; but Mill was the last British thinker whose system
he had thoroughly mastered. In the index to his _Life and Letters_
the names of Darwin and Herbert Spencer do not occur, and even in an
Apologetic tract entitled _Is the Evolution of Christianity from mere
Natural Sources Credible_? which he wrote in 1887 for the Religious
Tract Society, there is no reference whatever to any writer of the
Evolutionary School. With his attitude to later German t