member what Owen and Chalmers have said about it. Yes,
you have read the right enough book; but the right book has not yet got
in you the right reader. There are not many readers abroad like Dr. John
Owen and Dr. Thomas Chalmers.

In its style William Guthrie's one little book is clear, spare, crisp,
and curt. Indeed, in some places it is almost too spare and too curt in
its bald simplicity. True students will not be deterred from it when I
say that it is scientifically and experimentally exact in its treatment
of the things of the soul. They will best understand and appreciate this
statement of Guthrie's biographer that 'when he was working at his
_Saving Interest_ he endeavoured to inform himself of all the Christians
in the country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were still
under such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them.' Guthrie is
almost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, he
demonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-important
things he sets out to prove. There is no room for rhetoric on a finger-
post; in a word, and, sometimes without a word, a finger-post tells you
the right way to take to get to your journey's end. And many who have
wandered into a far country have found their way home again under William
Guthrie's exact marks, clear evidences, and curt directions. You open
the little book, and there is a sentence of the plainest, directest, and
least entertaining or attractive prose, followed up with a text of
Scripture to prove the plain and indisputable prose. Then there is
another sentence of the same prose, supported by two texts, and thus the
little treatise goes on till, if you are happy enough to be interested in
the author's subject-matter, the eternal interests of your own soul, a
strong, strange fascination begins to come off the little book and into
your understanding, imagination, and heart, till you look up again what
Dr. Owen and Dr. Chalmers said about your favourite author, and feel
fortified in your valuation of, and in your affection for, William
Guthrie and his golden little book.

XVIII. GEORGE GILLESPIE

'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'--_Rutherford_.

George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of statesmanlike
ministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century. Gillespie
died while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote to
him on his deathbed, he had done