that cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made his
master actually every day thus denounce and expose him. 'O James, man,
pardon me, pardon me. I was, I see now, too much taken up with my own
heart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest.' 'It was
that, and the like of that,' witnessed Cowie, 'that did me and my wife
more good than all my master's well-studied sermons.' The intimacy and
tenderness of the minister and his man went on deeper and grew closer,
till at the end we find Cowie reading to him at his own request the
Epistle to the Romans, and when the reader came to the passage, 'I will
have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' the listener burst into tears, and
exclaimed, 'James, James, halt there, for I have nothing but that to
lippen to.' And then, on the ladder, and before a great crowd of
Edinburgh citizens: 'I own that I am a sinner--yea, and one of the vilest
that ever made a profession of religion. My corruptions have been strong
and many, and they have made me a sinner in all things--yea, even in
following my duty. But blessed be God, who hath showed His mercy to such
a wretch, and hath revealed His Son unto me, and made me a minister of
the everlasting Gospel, and hath sealed my ministry on the hearts of not
a few of His people.' James Guthrie's ruling passion, as Cowie remarked,
was still strong in his death.

On one occasion Guthrie and some of his fellow-ministers were comparing
experiences and confessing to one another their 'predominant sins,' and
when it came to Guthrie's turn he told them that he was much too eager to
die a violent death. For, said he, I would like to die with all my wits
about me. I would not like eyesight and memory and reason and faith all
to die out on my deathbed and leave me to tumble into eternity bereft of
them all. Guthrie was greatly afraid at the thought of death, but it was
the premature death of his reason, and even of his faith, that so much
alarmed and horrified him to think of. He envied the men who kneeled