which have made me hate oppression, and, whether it be a pope, or a prelate, or a patron, or an ecclesiastical demagogue, resist the oppressor." An old servant who was in the house when he was born characterised him as a "real ready-witted, sympatheesin' kind o' a laddie." Dr Guthrie's father, engaged in the business of a general merchant, was for some time Provost of Brechin, and brought up and provided for a family of thirteen. He was an influential citizen, upright and hon. ourable in all his transactions. The habits of strict discipline and Sabbath observance which prevailed in his youth he afterwards

Thomas Guthrie was born at Brechin, Forfarshire, on the 12th of July 1803. He was the twelfth child and the sixth son of David Guthrie and Clementina Cay. Thirteen children were born to them, of whom ten grew up. He came of an old and respectable family, which could count kin with James Guthrie the martyr, as also with William, the author of the work entitled, "The Trial of a Saving Interest in Christ." His paternal grandfather was a farmer, like his father before him. His paternal grandmother was a strict disciplinarian, as he had often too good reason to remember, saying what in her conscience she thought right, and with a notion that children of the rising generation were over-indulged. For many years down to the time of her death, she set apart one whole day in each week for fasting and prayer. Her piety, though of this stern character, was genuine enough. On one occasion hearing that her eldest son had fallen in love with the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, and lacking the boldness to ask her, his mother ordered a horse to be saddled, when, mounting behind him on a pillion, her arm round his waist, she ordered him to ride direct towards the farm. Arrived there she had the matter arranged with the girl and her parents before he had the horse stabled. To this ancestor Dr Guthrie was wont to trace what share of decision of character he possessed. The bulk of his mental, moral, and physical qualities can be traced to his mother. "It was," he says, "at my mother's knee that I first learned to pray; that I learned to form a reverence for the Bible as the inspired Word of God; that I learned to hold the sanctity of the Sabbath; that I learned the peculiarities of the Scottish religion; that I learned my regard to the principles of civil and religious liberty,

young in habits of patient endurance, obedience, and self-denial, and in giving to Scotsmen that thoughtful and intellectual cast and hardheadedness which has made them so successful in pushing their fortunes in the world. Speaking of the sneers which had been levelled at Scotch Sabbath observance, he says: "The best answer I can, perhaps, furnish to these libels affecting Scotland is to draw an honest and candid picture of the manner in which the Lord's Day was observed in the home of my youth. Conversation about the ordinary business of life was not engaged in nor allowed. No letters were taken from the post-office, nor any but religious books read. Nor were the newspapers looked at, although in these days our armies were in the battle-field fighting the French. No walk was taken but in the garden and to the church, which we attended regularly both forenoon and afternoon. In the evening, my father, who had the catechism-the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster assembly of divines—at his finger-ends, as they say, used to put us through our drill as to its questions and theology; and I think I see him still in his knee-breeches, white woollen stockings, and white cravat-his costume both on Sunday and Saturday-tall, erect, his dark, crisped hair dashed with grey, walking up and down the floor of the dining-room, as was his wont, with nine children and three women servants ranged up by the walls, each in turn having a question to answer. Besides this, the younkers had to repeat portions of the Psalms which they had committed to memory, and also the texts of the day; while an elder brother, who had a powerful intellect and gigantic memory, gave a summary of the sermons. The Sabbath passed away like a flood that fertilises the land it overflows, leaving a blessing behind it." Twice in his lifetime he had to record a providential escape from drown

Y

ing. At school he was usually dux, but prided himself as much on being a good fighter, often undertaking to fight any boy of his own size and age with his left hand tied behind his back. This martial spirit was nursed and fostered by the news of the wars of Napoleon. Sides would be taken at school and pitched battles fought, and in the mêlée young Guthrie once received a thud on the hip from the opposing "French," which lamed him for a day or two.

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After spending a summer with the Rev. Robert Simpson, at twelve years of age he was sent to Edinburgh University. Apart from the expense of books, his first session would not cost his father over £10. He occupied a room in Bristo❘ Street, for which he paid-cooking, coals, and attendance included-not more than 5s. or 6s. a week. The usual fare was tea once, oatmeal porridge twice a day, and fresh herrings and potatoes for dinner. Beyond the departments of fun and fighting, I was," he says, "no way distinguished at college." During his first year he was twice in the hands of the college porter and policeman, with the threatening of being <reported to the Senatus Academicus; the second year, twice fined by one of the professors, and, besides, set apart on a "cutty stool" as a public spectacle. His remarks on the curriculum of a divinity student are worth noting. It was a lifelong thought with him that the ministers of the churches in Scotland were under-paid, and a lifelong desire to see them better supported. "The Church of England," he says, "has, strange to say, no prescribed course of study for her clergy. The Church of Scotland, on the contrary, as she still does, and as, with slight modifications in some instances, all Presbyterians in Scotland do, requires her students to study literature and philosophy for four years, and divinity for other four; and even after this no young man is allowed to preach, nor any licentiate ordained to the ministry, till he has given proof of his fitness by delivering a certain number of discourses before the presbytery, and submitting to an examination by them also on all the subjects he has studied during his eight years at the university. No profession requires so long, and few so costly an apprenticeship, which, I may remark, makes it all the more disgraceful that, with a preparation so great, ministers should usually receive a payment so small, starvings being a better name than livings for many of their charges. Some gentlemen pay their French cooks, and many merchants their clerks, a larger salary than he receives who has charge of their souls, and in whom they expect the piety of an apostle, the accomplishments of a scholar, and the manners of a gentleman. Look at my own case. It occupied me eight years to run my curriculum. I attended the university, as I have mentioned, for two additional years before I became a licentiate, and other five years elapsed before I obtained a pre

sentation to a vacant church, and became minister of the parish of Arbirlot. Here were fifteen years of my life spent, the greater part of them at no small cost, qualifying myself for a profes sion which, for all that time, yielded me nothing for my maintenance."

He was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Brechin, 2d February 1825, and preached his first public discourse to a considerable audience in the cathedral church of that town. Before securing a settled charge, Guthrie visited London and Paris. In the latter town he gained a knowledge of French language and manners, and walked the hospitals and gained some knowledge of medicine. "I was once," he says in his journal, "disposed to think the French an honest people; but since they have played some of their swindling tricks upon myself I have widely changed my opinion. . . . I neither like French weather nor French ways, French men nor French manners." He returned homewards through Belgium, April 1827; and for two years afterwards filled the post of a bankagent in his native town, acting thus in room of his elder brother who had died, and until his son should come of age to take his place. This he afterwards looked upon as not the least part of his training and education, becoming acquainted with both mercantile and agricultural affairs, and was thus enabled to take a more hearty and thorough interest in the affairs of his people. For five Sabbaths before he had become banker he had acted as assistant to a minister in the neighbourhood, and for this he received five guineas, "all the remuneration I ever earned, though, as a licentiate or preacher, I had been five years what might be called a journeyman, and as an apprentice, so to speak, had spent ten years at the university." He was presented to the parish of Arbirlot in May 1830, at an expense to himself of £60, the fees to the Crown costing £30, and another £30 was required for the complimentary dinner given on the occasion. On 6th October 1830, Thomas Guthrie was married to Anne, eldest daughter of the Rev. James Burns, Brechin.

Some good stories are told in Dr Guthrie's autobiography regarding his new charge. A "Moderate" minister having been convicted of drunkenness, the presbytery had some little difficulty in proving the crime and bringing it home to the offender. "Besides other proofs of drunkenness, having drawn this out of him, that the minister on that occasion, as he lolled over the side of the pulpit-being, in fact, unable to stand upright-said that he loved his people so much, that he would carry them all to heaven on his back, I asked him, 'Now, John, when you heard him say so, what impres sion did so strange a speech make on you!" Others, to the same question, as unwilling witnesses as John, had already said that, though they would not say he was drunk at the

He has the following story to tell of his predecessor: "Like many other ministers of his time, my predecessor acquired penurious habits, and allowed them, I fear, to obtain too great a mastery over him. There was current a story of another parsimonious minister who evaded discovery by an uncommonly clever manœuvre. When working one day in his garden, or glebe, in his ordinary beggar-like attire, he was alarmed to see the carriage of his patron, the proprietor of the parish, whirling rapidly along the road to his manse. It was too late to attempt a retreat, and get himself put in decent order to receive 'my lord.' To retreat was impossible. To remain where he was-to be shamed and disgraced. With a promptitude seldom or never surpassed, he stuck his battered hat down on his shoulders, drew up his hands into the sleeves of his ragged coat, struck out his arms at an acute angle, planted his legs far apart, and throwing rigidity into all his form, stood there in the potato ground the very beauideal of what in England is called a 'scarecrow,' in Scotland a 'potato-bogle,' never suspected by the visitors as they drove up to the front entrance, while he made for the back door to don his Sunday garb. Another of whom I have heard, standing one evening on the bridge near his manse, was accosted by a mendicant, who, judging the minister by his dress to be one of the fraternity, and wishing for information (being himself a stranger in that part of the country), said, 'And whaur are ye to put up the nicht, man?""

"Arbirlot, with its shores washed by the German Ocean, lies on the sea-coast, reaching almost to the town of Arbroath. In front of it, some twelve miles out to sea, stands the BellRock Lighthouse; and to this position of my first parish, where for seven years I was familiar with the great ocean in all its ever-changing phases, is due, no doubt, the numerous allusions to it which occur in my sermons and speeches." He found the manse in a rickety condition. The floor of the small parlour was like an inclined plane, and "the dining-room, which, unless when we had company, was only used as my study, was so open through many a cranny to the winds of heaven, that the carpet in stormy weather rose, and fell, and flapped like a ship's sail." A new church was built in preference to a new manse, and he settled down to seven years of steady work. The stipend was £197 a year on an average. His parishioners

were noted for their intelligence and sobriety. Many of them were weavers who carried their webs when finished to the town of Arbroath. Many of them were also great readers; a parish library which he instituted, the different Sabbathschools and prayer-meetings which he had set a-going in the various districts of the parish, together with a savings-bank, in which when he left there was £600-all told in the way of moral elevation and reformation. Sabbath preparation had to be gone through early in the week, as Saturday night was devoted to the bank and library, both of which he personally superintended. "The lads and lasses," he says, "liked that their minister should see that they were economical and self-denying," and also to have a "crack" with him about books. This practice he recommends to all who wish their people to realise that he is among them, not as their master, but as their minister, and thus establish himself in the hearts of his people. The presence every Sabbath in his church of superior, able, and pious hearers, helped also to stimulate him, and to keep him "up to his work." In 1832, the cholera year, our trust, he says, was in God and prevention. Stringent measures were adopted to prevent any communication being kept up with the plague-stricken districts, and a medicine chest was got and placed in the manse under the care of the minister. A terrible epidemic, typhus fever, visited the parish in 1834, and the mortality was great. One farmhouse was, he says, like the ward of an infirmary, the father and nine children being all stricken down at one time by the fever. They all recovered. "Trusting in God," and no doubt fortified by his slight previous medical experience, he visited freely amongst the distressed cottages. At one time he cured a youth who had taken lock-jaw after drinking a glass of whisky, by dipping him in a barrel of hot water.

It was at Arbirlot too that he laid the foundation of his after pulpit successes. He laboured at his sermons in manuscript, "cutting out dry bits, giving point to dull ones, making clear any obscurity, and narrative parts more graphic, throwing more pathos into appeals, and copying God in His works by adding the ornamental to the useful." It was always a wonder to Hugh Miller how a minister could come out Sunday after Sunday with even one good and finished discourse. Guthrie quoted in this connection the answer Robert Hall made to the question as to how many discourses a minister might get up each week. "If he is a deep thinker and great condenser," was Hall's answer, "he may get up one; if he is an ordinary man, two; but if he is an ass, sir, he will produce half-a-dozen." Along with these views on preaching he paid more than ordinary attention to the art of elocution. One reform in the Sabbath service which he was the means of introducing was,

Had the ten years from 1833 to 1843 been spent only in the discussion of keen, subtle, and constitutional questions, and of previous legal proceedings and precedents, the Free Church of Scotland-if it even had existed at all-would have been but a small affair. The battle of Christ's right, as Head of the Church, and of the people's rights, as members of the body of which He is the head, was fought and won in every town, and in a large number of the parishes of Scotland, mainly by Hugh Miller, through the columns of the Witness newspaper, and by men who, gifted with the power of interesting, moving, and moulding public audiences, addressed them at public meetings, regularly organised, and held up and down all the country."

Dr Guthrie's own position during this controversy is best described in his own words: "Before the Disruption I oftener found myself at the guns than at the wheel. . I have never taken an active part in the management of our Church. No man can be more thankful than I am that God has, in His kind providence, furnished our Church with so many men who have not only the talent but the taste for Church courts." Dr Candlish said of him at this time: "Guthrie was a power, unique in himself, and rising in his uniqueness above other powers. He did not, indeed, venture much on the uncongenial domain, to him, of ecclesiastical polemics, or the wear and tear of ordinary Church administration; leaving that to others whose superiority in this department he was always the first to acknowledge. But in his own sphere, and in his own way, he was, to us, and to the principles on which we acted, a tower of strength. His eloquence alone-so expressive of himself, so thoroughly inspired by his personal idiosyncrasy, so full always of genial humour, so apt to flash into darts of wit, and yet withal so profoundly emotional and ready for passionate and affectionate appeals-that gift or endowment alone made him an invaluable boon to our Church in the time of her ten years' conflict and afterwards." The ecclesiastical atmosphere of Scotland was deeply moved; 782 distinct pamphlets on the subject were published during these years. The bone of controversy was very clearly shown by Lord Cockburn, in his "Life of Lord Jeffrey:" "The contest at first was merely about patronage, but this point was soon absorbed in the far more vital question whether the Church had any spiritual jurisdiction independent of the control of the civil power. This became the question on which the longer coherence of the elements of the Church depended. The judicial determination was, in effect, that no such jurisdiction existed. This was not the adjudication of any abstract political or ecclesiastical nicety; it was the declaration, and, as those who protested against it held, the intro

duction of a principle which affected the whole practical being and management of the Establishment." When Guthrie was leaving the door of his house in Lauriston Lane on the morning of the 18th May 1843, he turned round to his wife and said: "Well, Anne, this is the last time I go out at this door a minister of an Established Church." And speaking about twenty years after the Disruption was consummated, he said: "There is something more eloquent than speech. I am bold to say that Hall, Foster, or Chalmers never preached a sermon so impressive or sublime as the humblest minister of our Church did on the 18th day of May 1843, when he gave up his living to retain his principles, and joined the crowd that, bursting from the doors of St Andrew's Church, with Chalmers at its head, marched out file by file in steady ranks-giving God's people, who anxiously thronged the streets, occasion to weep tears, not of grief, but of joy, as they cried, "They come! they come! Thank God, they come.' We did not come

out a small and scattered band; but, on the day of the Disruption, burst out of St Andrew's Church as a river bursts out from a glacier-a river at its birth. In numbers, in position, in wealth, as well as in piety, our Church, I may say, was full-grown on the day it was born. Above all, and next to the prayers which sanctified our cause, we were followed by a host of countrymen, whose enthusiasm had been kindled at the ashes of the martyrs, and who saw in our movement but another phase of the grand old days that won Scotland her fame, and made her a name and a praise in the whole earth." Four hundred and seventy-four ministers thus voluntarily were disestablished and disendowed. "I'm proud of my country," remarked Lord Jeffrey when he heard of this; "there is not another country on earth where such a deed could have been done." Headed by the late Dr Duff, the foreign missionaries of the Church of Scotland sided with the out-going party.

The funds of the Free Church of Scotland prospered; £363,871 were collected in the first year of its existence. In the meantime, more was required, and the necessity of a manse scheme for the ministers of country churches was admitted. It was agreed that the case be met by a general fund for the whole Church, which was fixed at £100,000, and by a local fund for each congregation. Guthrie, who was peculiarly well fitted for the work, devoted the year 1845-46 to it, addressed meetings and received subscriptions over the whole of Scotland, and he was enabled to assure the General Assembly of 1846 that the amount subscribed exceeded what was proposed, being £116,370, 14s. 1d. The severe labours in connection with this scheme had, however, taxed his strength, and laid the seeds of heart disease, to which he finally succumbed. He remarked regarding his work: "I once thought-seeing that I have made a fortune of £116,000 in twelve