he share he took in the Union negotiations with the Free
Church during the ten years that these negotiations lasted, and the
endless round of church openings and platform work to which his
growing fame as a preacher and public speaker laid him open.

But there is one other consideration which, although it is to some
extent involved in what has already been said, deserves separate and
very special attention. Although his friends and the public regretted
his withdrawal from the speculative field, it is not so clear that he
regretted it himself. He had, it is true, worked in it strenuously
and with conspicuous success, and had revealed a natural aptitude for
Christian apologetics of a very high order. But it does not appear
that either his heart or his conscience were ever fully engaged in the
work. He never seemed as if he were fighting for his life, because he
always seemed to have another and an independent ground of certainty
on which he based his real defence. There is a passage in his Life of
Clark which bears upon this point so closely that it will be well to
quote it here:--

"The Christian student is as conscious of direct intercourse with
Jesus Christ as with the external world, or with other minds. This is
the very postulate of living Christianity. It is a datum or revelation
made to a spiritual faculty in the soul, as real as the external
senses or any of the mental or moral faculties, and far more exalted.
This living contact with a living person by faith and prayer is, like
all other life, ultimate and mysterious, and must be accepted by him
in whom it exists as its own sufficient explanation and reason, just
as the principles of natural intelligence and conscience, to which it
is something superadded, and with which, in this point of view, though
in other respects higher, it is co-ordinate. No one who is living in
communion with Jesus Christ, and exercising that series of affections
towards Him which Christianity at once prescribes and creates, can
doubt the reality of that supernatural system to which he has been
thus introduced; and nothing more is necessary than to appeal to his
own experience and belief, which is here as valid and irresistible as
in regard to the existence of God, of moral distinctions, or of the
material world. He has no reason to trust the one class of beliefs
which he has not, to trust the other.... To minds thus favoured, this
forms a _point d'appui_ which can never be overturned--a