that we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as Blaise
Pascal and John Foster and William Cowper. William Guthrie knew, by his
temperament, and by his knowledge of himself and of other men, that he
was a great melancholian, and he studied how to divert himself sometimes
in order that he might not be altogether drowned with his melancholy. And
thus, maugre his melancholy, and indeed by reason of it, William Guthrie
was a great humorist. He was the life of the party on the moors, in the
manse, and in the General Assembly. But the life of the party when he
was present was always pure and noble and pious, even if it was sometimes
somewhat hilarious and boisterous. 'If a man's melancholy temperament is
sanctified,' says Rutherford in his _Covenant of Grace_, 'it becomes to
him a seat of sound mortification and of humble walking.' And that was
the happy result of all William Guthrie's melancholy; it was always
alleviated and relieved by great outbursts of good-humour; but both his
melancholy and his hilarity always ended in a humbler walk. Samuel
Rutherford confides in a letter to his old friend, Alexander Gordon, that
he knows a man who sometimes wonders to see any one laugh or sport in
this so sinful and sad life. But that was because he had embittered the
springs of laughter in himself by the wormwood sins of his youth. William
Guthrie had no such remorseful memories continually taking him by the
throat as his divinity professor had, and thus it was that with all his
melancholy he was known as the greatest humorist and the greatest
sportsman in the Scottish Kirk of his day. No doubt he sometimes felt
and confessed that his love of fun and frolic was a temptation that he
had to watch well against. In his _Saving Interest_ he speaks of some
sins that are wrought up into a man's natural humour and constitution,
and are thus as a right hand and a right eye to him. 'My merriment!' he
confessed to one who had rebuked him for it, 'I know all you would say,
and my merriment costs me many a salt tear in secret.' At the same time
this was often remarked with wonder in Guthrie, that however boisterous