h full of
God's saints on the face of the earth, it was at Fenwick communion-table.
Pitforthy and Glen Ogle, and all the estates in Angus, were but dust in
the balance compared with one Sabbath-day's exercise of such a preaching
gift as that of William Guthrie. 'There is no man that hath forsaken
houses and lands for My sake and the Gospel's, but shall receive an
hundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting.'

But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and a
great preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer. A great writer is
not a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes. It is
not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work. Our
greatest authors have all written little books. Job is a small book, so
is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle
to the Romans, so is the _Confessions_, so is the _Comedy_, so is the
_Imitation_, so are the _Pilgrim_ and the _Grace Abounding_, and though
William Guthrie's small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such
master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a
book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our
day. You will all find out your own favourite books according to your
own talents and tastes. My calling a book great is nothing to you. But
it may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what two
men like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, in
the nineteenth, said about William Guthrie's one little book. Said John
Owen, drawing a little gilt copy of _The Great Interest_ out of his
pocket, 'That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that ever
wrote. His book is my _vade mecum_. I carry it always with me. I have
written several folios, but there is more divinity in this little book
than in them all.' Believe John Owen. Believe all that he says about
Guthrie's _Saving Interest_; but do not believe what he says about his
own maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his _Person and
Glory of Christ_, his _Holy Spirit_, his _Spiritual-mindedness_, and his
_Mortification, Dominion, and Indwelling of Sin_. Then hear Dr.
Chalmers: 'I am on the eve of finishing Guthrie, which I think is the
best book I ever read.' After you have read it, if you ever do, the
likelihood is that you will feel as if somehow you had not read the right
book when you re