rage Englishman.
His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous and
compulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breaking
down of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There was
a tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that the
average reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things were
very different with the press. The northern part of this island, though
active in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-day
the press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the 'boom' which
has lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements of
the new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of that
fact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over the
border are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong family
instinct, and a passionate love for the things which pertain to our own
part of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen as
they are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomed
Dr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received came
mainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions had
existed in his early day, with what garlands would he have been
wreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!

Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely English
reader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald's work, there is in the main
theme of his best books a reason why he should not be widely
popular. The one issue in which he is most passionately interested is
theological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert,
leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender and
persuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essential
oneness with the Fatherhood of God. He has expended many beautiful
faculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening and
deepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. But
his insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away the
empty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the careless
clever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason in
the reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared to
encounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectual
passion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment,
but it is numerically small, and the writer