letter, he says, "The subjects he
discourses upon are handled with such a pleasant and profitable variety of
thought and expression, that the hearer or reader is taken with it, as if
he had never met with it before. He was such a skilful scribe, as knew how
to bring out of his store things new and old; the old with such sweetness
and savour as it seemed still new, and the new retained its first
sweetness so as never to grow old."

He and some young ministers in the same presbytery, who had been students
of divinity when he was professor of philosophy, did keep private meetings
for Christian fellowship, and their mutual improvement. But finding that
he was in danger of being puffed up with the high opinion they had of him,
he broke up these meetings, though he still kept up a brotherly
correspondence with them, for the rigorous prosecution of their
ministerial work. He studied to be clothed with humility, and to hide his
attainments under that veil. Though he wanted not matter and words
wherewith to please and profit all his hearers, yet at every thought of
his appearing in public to speak of God and Christ to men, his soul was
filled with a holy tremor, which he vented by saying, "Ah! Lord, I am a
child and cannot speak. Teach me what I shall say of thee, who cannot
order my speech by reason of darkness." In his first Sermon, on the fourth
question of our Shorter Catechism, he expresses himself in a most elegant
and rapturous manner. "We are now," says he, "about this question, What
God is? But who can answer it? Or if answered, who can understand it? It
should astonish us in the very entry, to think we are about to speak and
to hear of his majesty, 'whom eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,' nor hath
it entered into the heart of any creature to consider what he is. Think
ye, blind men could understand a pertinent discourse of light and colours?
Would they form any suitable notion of that they had never seen, and
cannot be known but by seeing? What an ignorant speech would a deaf man
make of sound, when a man cannot so much as know what it is, but by
hearing of it? How then can we speak of God who dwells in inaccessible
light, since though we had our eyes opened, yet they are far less
proportioned to that resplendent brightness, than a blind eye is to the
sun's light?"

He was a great student in the books of creation and providence, and took
much pleasure in meditating upon what is written in these volumes. The
wonders h