n
earshot were thrown open and filled with eager listeners.

In this continual pursuit of knowledge, and in the contemplation,
whether in history or in the world around him, of Christianity as
a Life, his main interests more and more lay. In the one we can
trace the influence of Hamilton, in the other perhaps that of
Neander--the two teachers of his youth who had most deeply impressed
him. Relatively to these, Systematic Theology, and even Apologetics,
receded into the background. Secure in his "_aliquid inconcussum_,"
he came increasingly to regard the life of the individual Christian
and the collective life of the Church as the most convincing of all
witnesses to the Unseen and the Supernatural.

Meanwhile the apologetic of his own life was becoming ever more
impressive. In the years 1886 and 1887 he lost by death several of
his dearest friends. In the former year died Dr. W.B. Robertson of
Irvine; and, later, Dr. John Ker, who had been his fellow-student at
the University and at the Divinity Hall, his neighbour at Alnwick in
the early Berwick days, and at last his colleague as a professor in
the United Presbyterian College. In the early part of the following
year his youngest sister, Agnes, who with her husband, the Rev. J.C.
Meiklejohn, had come to live in Edinburgh two years before for the
better treatment of what proved to be a mortal disease, passed away.
And in the autumn he lost the last and the dearest of the friends
that had been left to him in these later years, William Graham. These
losses brought him yet closer than he had been before to the unseen
and eternal world.

He was habitually reticent about his inner life and his habits of
devotion. No one knew his times of prayer or how long they lasted.
Once, indeed, his simplicity of character betrayed him in regard to
this matter. The door of his retiring-room at the College was without
a key, and he would not give so much trouble as to ask for one. So,
in order that he might be quite undisturbed, he piled up some forms
and chairs against the door on the inside, forgetting entirely that
the upper part of it was obscure glass and that his barricade was
perfectly visible from without. It need not be said that no one
interrupted him or interfered with his belief that he had been
unobserved by any human eye. But it did not require an accidental
disclosure like this to reveal the fact that he spent much time in
prayer. No one who knew him ever so little could