'No,'
answered the amused huntsman, 'but if I always kept my bow strung it
would not rebound and send home my arrow when I needed it. I unstring my
bow on the street that I may the better shoot with it when I am up among
my quarry.' 'Good,' said the Evangelist, 'and I have learned a lesson
from you huntsmen. For I am playing with my partridge to-night that I
may the better finish my Gospel to-morrow. I am putting everything out
of my mind to-night that I may to-morrow the better recollect and set
down a prayer I heard offered up by my Master, now more than fifty years
ago.' We readers of the Fourth Gospel do not know how much we owe to the
Bactrian boy's tame partridge, and neither John Owen nor Thomas Chalmers
knew how much they owed to the fishing-rods and curling-stones, the
fowling-pieces and the violins that crowded the corners of the manse of
Fenwick. I do not know that William Guthrie made a clean breast to the
Presbytery of all the reasons that moved him to refuse so many calls to a
city charge, though I think I see that David Dickson, the Moderator,
divined some of them by the joke he made about the moors of Fenwick to
one of the defeated and departing deputations.

William Guthrie, the eldest son and sole heir of the laird of Pitforthy,
might have had fishing and shooting to his heart's content on his own
lands of Pitforthy and Easter Ogle had he not determined, when under
Rutherford at St. Andrews, to give himself up wholly to his preaching.
But, to put himself out of the temptation that hills and streams and
lochs and houses and lands would have been to a man of his tastes and
temperament, soon after his conversion William made over to a younger
brother all his possessions and all his responsibilities connected
therewith, in order that he might give himself up wholly to his
preaching. And his reward was that he soon became, by universal consent,
the greatest practical preacher in broad Scotland. He could not touch
Rutherford, his old professor, at pure theology; he had neither
Rutherford's learning, nor his ecstatic eloquence, nor his surpassing
love of Jesus Christ, but for handling broken bones and guiding an
anxious inquirer no one could hold the candle to William Guthrie.
Descriptions of his preaching abound in the old books, such as this: A
Glasgow merchant was compelled to spend a Sabbath in Arran, and though he
did not understand Gaelic, he felt he must go to the place of public
worship. Gre