Thomas Guthrie, a biogr. sketch [signed A.J.S.].

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Page 154 - My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me : And I give unto them eternal life ; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My father which gave them me is greater than all ; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.
Page 168 - To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd For our advantage on the bitter cross.
Page 28 - It was at my mother's knees that I first learned to pray ; that I learned to form a reverence for the Bible as the inspired word of God ; that I learned to hold the sanctity of the Sabbath ; that I learned the peculiarities of the Scottish religion ; that I learned my regard to the principles of civil and religious liberty, which have made me hate oppression, and, whether it be a pope, or a prelate, or a patron, or an ecclesiastical demagogue, resist the oppressor.
Page 60 - Some gentlemen pay their French cooks, and many merchants their clerks, a larger salary than he receives who has charge of their souls, and in whom they expect the piety of an apostle, the accomplishments of a scholar, and the manners of a gentleman. Look at my own case : it occupied me eight years to run my regular curriculum. I attended the university, as I have mentioned, for two additional years before I became a licentiate, and other five years elapsed before I obtained a presentation to a vacant...
Page 149 - ... misused or insincere. But I made up my mind at last to write what I felt, — believing that you must be accustomed to people's getting very seriously and truly attached to you, almost at first sight, and therefore would believe me. You asked me, the other evening, some kind questions about my father. He was an Edinburgh boy, and in answer to some account by me of the pleasure I had had in hearing...
Page 33 - ... his costume both on Sunday and Saturday — tall, erect, his dark crisp hair dashed with grey, walking up and down the floor of the dining-room, as was his wont, with nine children and three women servants ranged up by the walls, each in turn having a question to answer. Besides this, the younkers had to repeat portions of the Psalms which they had committed to memory, and also the texts of the day, while an elder brother, who had a powerful intellect and gigantic memory, gave a summary of the...
Page 76 - I'll just tell you what I thought. There was a great fat wife, you see, sitting in the seat before me, and thinks I, " My lad, if you set off to the kingdom of heaven with that wife on your back, my certie, you'll no
Page 156 - It it the wealth of poverty ; the refuge of affliction ; the strength of weakness ; the light of darkness. It is the oratory that gives power to the pulpit ; it is the hand that strikes down Satan, and breaks the fetters of sin; it turns the scales of fate more than the edge of the sword, the craft of statesmen, or the weight of sceptres ; it has arrested the wing of time, turned aside the very scythe of death, and discharged heaven's frowning and darkest cloud in a shower of blessings.
Page 105 - but for all that it was a bitter thing. I shall never forget the night I left that house, till I am laid in the grave. When I saw my wife and children go forth in the ' gloaming ' — when I saw them for the last time leave our own door ; and when, in the dark, I was left alone with none but my God, and when I had to take water to quench the fire on my own hearth, and put out the candle in my own house, and turn the key against myself, and my wife and my little ones, I bless God for the grace which...
Page 161 - Here he is again, said the officer, on his name being " mentioned ; everything — flogging, disgrace, imprisonment — has " been tried with him. Whereupon the sergeant stepped for" ward, and apologising for the liberty he took, said : — ' There is "one thing which has never been done with him yet, sir.

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