t written, in justice to his memory, and his great services in the
work of the gospel, that it might go along with this impression. We living
now at so great distance from the time wherein he made a figure in the
world, must be at a considerable loss in giving an exact and particular
relation. However, his pious and exemplary life may in some measure be
known from his writings; and for this end, a great many bright passages
might be gathered out of them, which would raise his character highly in
the eyes of all good men; for the Rev. Mr. Robert M'Ward, minister in
Glasgow, observed, "That his life was his sermons put in print, by which
means they who did forget what he had said in the pulpit, by seeing what
he did in his conversation might remember what they had forgot; he lived
as he spoke, and spoke as he lived." All due pains have been taken to
procure proper materials, and good vouchers of the following narration.
Some few things are learned from the prefaces prefixed to his several
pieces, by worthy and able divines, who revised and published them; more
accounts of him were furnished by persons of great credit, on whose
veracity we can safely rely. But the most remarkable passages in his life
are happily preserved, in a letter written by Mr. M'Ward,(87) to the Rev.
Mr. James Coleman,(88) sometime minister at Sluys in Flanders. The writer
of his life must in the entry confess that his part is so small, that he
can scarce assume any thing to himself, but the procuring the materials
from others, the copying out of those things that were of any moment, and
disposing them in the best and most natural order he could think of;
having studied the strictness of a severe historian, without helping out
things with his invention or setting them off by a rhetorical style of
language. Nay, all that is contained in Mr. M. Ward's large letter
concerning him, is told almost in his very words with a little variation
of the order wherein he had placed the same, omitting the many long
digressions on several subjects which that worthy person judged fit to
insist upon, taking occasion from what he had noticed concerning Mr.
Binning to enlarge on the same.

John Binning of Dalvennan was married to Margaret M'Kell, a daughter of
Mr. Matthew M'Kell,(89) minister at Bothwell, and sister to Mr. Hugh
M'Kell.(90) one of the ministers of Edinburgh; he had by her Mr. Hugh and
Alexander. The father was possessed of no inconsiderable estate in the