at was his delight when he saw William Guthrie come into the
pulpit. And he tells us that though he had heard in his day many famous
preachers, he had never seen under any preacher so much concern of soul
as he saw that day in Arran, under the minister of Fenwick. There was
scarcely a dry eye in the whole church. A gentleman who was well known
as a most dissolute liver was in the church that day, and could not
command himself, so deeply was he moved under Guthrie's sermon. That day
was remembered long afterwards when that prodigal son had become an
eminent Christian man. We see at one time a servant girl coming home
from Guthrie's church saying that she cannot contain all that she has
heard to-day, and that she feels as if she would need to hear no more on
this side heaven. Another day Wodrow's old mother has been at Fenwick,
and comes home saying that the first prayer was more than enough for all
her trouble without any sermon at all. 'He had a taking and a soaring
gift of preaching,' but it was its intensely practical character that
made Guthrie's pulpit so powerful and so popular. The very fact that he
could go all the way in those days from Fenwick to Haddington, just to
have a case of real soul-exercise described to him by the exercised man
himself, speaks volumes as to the secret of Guthrie's power in the
pulpit. His people felt that their minister knew them; he knew himself,
and therefore he knew them. He did not pronounce windy orations about
things that did not concern or edify them. He was not learned in the
pulpit, nor eloquent, or, if he was--and he was both--all his talents,
and all his scholarship, and all his eloquence were forgotten in the
intensely practical turn that his preaching immediately took. All the
broken hearts in the west country, all those whose sins had found them
out, all those who had learned to know the plague of their own heart, and
who were passing under a searching sanctification--all such found their
way from time to time from great distances to the Kirk of Fenwick. From
Glasgow they came, and from Paisley, and from Hamilton, and from Lanark,
and from Kilbride, and from many other still more distant places. The
lobbies of Fenwick Kirk were like the porches of Bethesda with all the
blind, halt, and withered from the whole country round about. After
Hutcheson of the _Minor Prophets_ had assisted at the communion of
Fenwick on one occasion, he said that, if there was a churc