Pulpit orator and philanthropist; son of a banker; born at Brechin, Forfarshire, Scotland, July 12, 1803; graduated at the University of Edinburgh; studied medicine in Paris; was settled at Arbirlot, in his native county, in 1830; in 1837 removed to Old Grey Friars church in Edinburgh, and in 1840 to St. John’s, a new church built for him in the same city; in 1843 took a prominent part in the establishment of the Free Church; encouraged the building of manses; became in 1847 the “Apostle” of the Ragged School system; was moderator of the General Assembly in 1862; was compelled to give up public speaking in 1864, when he began to edit The Sunday Magazine (Edinburgh and London). He was an earnest philanthropist and social reformer, and a very brilliant orator. Among his humanitarian publications may be named “A Plea for Ragged Schools” (Edinburgh, 1847); “A Plea on Behalf of Drunkards” (1850); “The City, its Sins and Sorrows” (1857). He published also “The Gospel in Ezekiel” (1855); “Christ and the Inheritance of the Saints” (1858); and “The Way to Life” (1862). Died at St. Leonard’s, Fifeshire, Feb. 24, 1873. His sons issued his “Autobiography and Memoir” in 1874 and 1875 (2 vols., London).

Personal

  Practical and natural; passionate without vehemence; with perfect self-possession, and always generous and devoted, he is a very powerful preacher. His language and accent are very Scotch, but nothing can be less vulgar; and his gesture (which seems as unthought-about as a child’s) is the most graceful I have ever seen in any public speaker. He deals in the broad expository Ovidian page, and is comprehended and felt by the poor woman on the steps of the pulpit as thoroughly as by the strangers who are attracted solely by his eloquence. Everything he does glows with a frank, gallant warm-heartedness, rendered more delightful by a boyish simplicity of air and style.

  At 2 [P.M.] I went to Free St. John’s. Strangers (how truly I comprehend the term!) are admitted only after the first singing. I found myself waiting in a basement with about five hundred others. At length I was dragged through a narrow passage, and found myself in a very hot overcrowded house, near the pulpit. Dr. Guthrie was praying. He preached from Isaiah xliv. 22—“Return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee.” It was fifty minutes, but they passed like nothing. I was instantly struck by his strong likeness to Dr. John H. Rice. If you remember him you have perfectly the type of man he is; but then it is Dr. Rice with an impetuous freedom of motion, a play of ductile and speaking features, and an overflowing unction of passion and compassion which would carry home even one of my sermons; conceive what it is with his exuberant diction and poetic imagery. The best of all is, it was honey from the comb, dropping, dropping, in effusive gospel beseeching. I cannot think Whitefield surpassed him in this. You know while you listen to his mighty voice, broken with sorrow, that he is overwhelmed with the “love of the Spirit.” He has a colleague, and preaches only in the afternoon. As to manner, it is his own, but in general like Duff’s, with as much motion, but more significant, and less grotesque, though still ungraceful. His English, moreover, is not spoiled so much. The audience was rapt and melting. It was just like his book, all application, and he rose to his height in the first sentence…. Dr. Guthrie is the link between Evangelical religion and the aristocracy. People of all sects go. Nobility coming down from London and stopping here, cannot pass without hearing him. They are willing to pay any sum for pews, in order to secure an occasional hearing. Dr. G. called on me, and was very cordial.

  Perhaps it is not too much to say, that Dr. Guthrie is the greatest living preacher in Scotland. And yet, until recently, he was comparatively unknown in America. At the present time, however, it is quite the reverse…. His popularity is very great, the poor, to a great extent, flocking to his ministry, and the congregations often reaching fifteen hundred hearers. A frequent hearer describes his appearance on entering the pulpit as calm and dignified. On the street, careless in his personal appearance, and apparently uninteresting, the dull look is now gone; the dark eye is gleaming, speakingly, from under an ample forehead, and the countenance kindles with animation and earnest affection. Though possessing a voice of varied modulations there is nothing in his gesture, nothing in his speech, at all attractive. His hand at first often grasps the collar of his coat; he moves slowly backward and forward, and leans at times over the pulpit, speaking in a mellow north-country accent, with great ease and fluency, but in the plainest and most idiomatic Saxon. In the matter the attraction lies; his preaching resembling more a conversation than a sermon, each hearer feeling as if it were directed to him.

  His preaching had already (1835) the characteristics which afterwards made him so marked a man, and made him what I was accustomed to call him, “the pictorial preacher of the age.”… His preparation for the pulpit was conscientiously careful. Possessed of a ready power of speech, he could have extemporised a sermon at any time, and thus saved himself much labour. But during all the seven years he was in Arbirlot, I believe he never entered the pulpit without having his discourse written and committed…. He was already the most popular minister by far in the district, though as yet scarcely known beyond it. In all the surrounding country parishes, when he preached at the week-day service in connection with the dispensation of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the whole people rushed to hear him; and, in Arbroath, where he often preached on the Sabbath evenings after officiating at home during the day, the churches were crowded to excess. Some hard men thought that his discourses were not very logical; some finical men and women regarded his Forfarshire pronunciation as very broad and his illustrations rather vivid; but they all went to hear him, because they got their hearts warmed.

  The remains were conveyed from St. Leonards to Edinburgh, on Wednesday morning, and interred on Friday, the 28th of February. Unless when Dr. Chalmers and Sir James Simpson were carried to the grave, Edinburgh had seen no such funeral in this generation. The magistrates in their robes of office, and various other public bodies, clergymen of every Protestant denomination in Scotland, representatives of the Wesleyan Methodists from England, and of the Waldensian Church from Italy, passed to the Grange Cemetery through a living vista of 30,000 spectators. But the most touching feature in all the procession was the presence of 230 children from the Original Ragged Schools, many of whom might truly have said, as one little girl of their number was overheard to tell, “He was all the father I ever knew.”

  I knew him well by sight,—a man over six feet two inches, with genial face, the favorite of the working-men, and much more catholic in his sympathies than the men who were associated with him in the ministry.

  Of Dr. Guthrie in private, those who, like the present writer, were honoured with his friendship and had much intercourse with him, cannot speak too highly. The high-toned Christian always was seen, the delightful companion, and the faithful friend. His friendship was very remarkable. His genuine interest in those whom he loved, and in all their concerns; the pains he took to advance their interests; the care he showed not to hurt their feelings; his forbearance, his generosity, his warmth and tenderness, must always live in the remembrance of those that were much about him.

  On Monday February 24, Dr. Guthrie died. He had for a while been laid aside from preaching: but everybody remembered what he had been; and one felt it was a light put out, and a link to the old times broken. When he published his sermons, he could not publish the charm of his presence and manner: and they are disappointing, like those of Chalmers and Caird. But it was not the pathos of a common “popular preacher” that made the tears run down Mr. Thackeray’s cheeks. And Guthrie had the gift of so saying a thing with not much in it, that it brought the tears to your eyes, straight. He was as great in humour as in pathos.

  The Professor [Blackie] had chosen Dr. Guthrie to be his pastor in ordinary, and sat Sunday after Sunday in a corner of the big square pew sacred to the elders and to distinguished worshippers—just under the pulpit, where the tall Doctor spake rousing words that moved and swayed the crowd beneath him. For his eloquence—full of emotion, of simile, of elevation, of conviction, vibrating with love of nature and of man,—Professor Blackie chose him, and because his large sympathy refused all channels dug by sect, and flowed out into the broad stream whose waters God has designed for the refreshing of all mankind. The plaid, the thick stick, the low-crowned hat, the brown wig worn for some years, the finely cut profile, the devout attitude in prayer, the close attention, were all familiar to the congregation of Free St. John’s during the latter half of Dr. Guthrie’s ministry.

  Guthrie influenced his age and his fellow-men as much by his life as by his works. “Guthrie the Man” was found to practise in life what “Guthrie the Preacher” inculcated in precept. Had he been less sympathetic, had his broad humanity touched the sorrow-seamed existence of his fellow-men at fewer points of contact, he might have felt less call to spend and be spent so completely in the cause of ameliorating the lot of destitute and despairing brethren. But in that case he would have graven his name less deeply on the hearts of his countrymen. The intensity of his devotion to their cause was manifested by the fact that he was shattered in health at the comparatively early age of fifty-nine. To act otherwise than he did, however, would have been foreign to his nature. Besides, he would have fallen short of his own ideal of right. His lofty enthusiasm in the cause of the friendless and downtrodden prevented him from feeling aught but delight in suffering for those whom he sought to save. Literally with the price of his own life did he pay for the souls and bodies of those pariahs whom he succeeded in snatching from moral and spiritual ruin.

General

  His “Gospel in Ezekiel”—consisting of twenty sermons on texts from this old prophet, lately published and now widely circulated in this country—breathes with life and animation from beginning to end. Open sometimes to criticism in matters of interpretation, and with too little contact, or evident connection between the several parts of the discourse, each sermon is nevertheless a thing of exquisite beauty. You seem to be walking in a picture gallery; or rather in a garden of sweets, with meandering streams, and every form of animate and inanimate life surrounding you. Now you weep under the depths of the preacher’s pathos; now you are startled with some dazzling luminous sentence rolling out suddenly before you; now you are captivated with the freshness and originality of some thought, the aptness and vividness of some illustrations, or the ease and effectiveness with which some error is exploded, or some glorious doctrine unfolded; but you always arise from the perusal feeling that you have been led beside the waters of salvation, amid the flowers and fruits of paradise, and now return both delighted and enriched.

  The variety of his illustrations was immense, but he delighted most, and was most successful, in those of a nautical character. A storm at sea and a shipwreck from Guthrie were paintings never to be forgotten.

  One of the most eloquent preachers of the day was the late Dr. Guthrie, of Edinburgh; yet the reader of his sermons hardly discovers in them adequate proofs of this fact. Much of his charm lay in his illustrations, which were apt and striking as they came from his lips, but lose much of their impressiveness on paper. In listening to his vivid appeals, a metaphor dazzled you and was gone; in his printed page, you examine it coolly and carefully; it is pinned down for you like a butterfly on a card, and you can critically finger it and pick holes in it. Hence a reviewer of his published sermons, who would probably have been captivated by their delivery, complains that there is in them a great deal of illustration, and very little to illustrate; a very small army, but a most valorous noise of drums.

  Thomas Guthrie was not, like Candlish, a great debater and ecclesiastical statesman, but he was the popular orator, carrying all before him, not so much by the power of logic as by the appositeness of his illustrations, the force of his humor, and the depth of his pathos…. As a preacher, he did not so much belong to any class as he constituted a whole class by himself. Since his appearance he has had many imitators, but when he rose to fame he was, in Great Britain at least, the only one of his kind. He was not an expository preacher, neither could he be called dogmatic or doctrinal. He did not deal very liberally either in what has been termed the hortatory method. But he was what Dr. McCosh has called him, “the pictorial preacher of his age.”

  His style was florid and fluent in the highest degree, and the effect he produced upon the large audiences he gathered round him was often of the most powerful kind; but the metaphors, in which he indulged freely, and which, even in the height of his public oratory, were seen to be of the most highly differing qualities, some full of simple natural poetry, while the others were forced, extravagant and turbid, became sadly like pinchbeck and tinsel when preserved in a book. It is not an unusual effect with a popular preacher.

  These sixteen volumes, beginning with the “Gospel in Ezekiel” and ending with “Sundays Abroad,” form a valuable library in themselves of popular evangelical teaching. Of the professed, or professional, theologian there is, as I have said, no trace. The writer is simply talking face to face with his reader, even as formerly he had been face to face with his congregation—for most of the papers were originally delivered as sermons—and the result achieved is, a depth of impression rarely experienced outside the walls of a church. Space will not permit me to deal with these books in any detail. I can only add that those who have yet to read them for the first time have a rich spiritual as well as intellectual treat in store.