Dr. Guthrie
“rflHE Henry Clay of the pulpit!” exclaimed
our friend H, as he moved out
through the crowded vestibule of Dr. Guthrie’s church on a bright September morning of last year. He had sat for nearly an hour, entranced under the spell of the first living orator of North Britain. He had listened to that rich melody of Scotticized English, flowing from a soul on fire, through lips touched with the live coal of heaven’s own inspiration. There was something in the tall, long-armed figure of the preacher — in his latitude of mouth and expanse of brow — that reminded our friend of the great Kentuckian in his glory; there was still more in the magnetism of the man — holding, bewitching, electrifying all auditors: and so the comparison grew stronger at every moment. Guthrie resembles Clay in something more than physique. He has the same emotional power, and the same oratorical tact, with a stroDger memory, and a more varied and choice phraseology than the silvertongued Kentuckian ever possessed. Since Chalmers went up to his reward, Scotland has had no pulpit orator who can attract and hold such congregations of intellectual piety as Thomas Guthrie. Not so erudite as Candlish [nor so uncouth either], not so classical as Caird, not so able in Church economics as Cunningham, he yet possesses a range of pulpit power beyond either of those remarkable men. In pathos he is unrivalled. During the delivery of the celebrated discourses on the “Sins and Sorrows of Great Cities,” tears stole down over hard “canny” Scotch visages from eyes unused to wTeep. The lecture on “Ragged Schools” — pronounced in London four years ago — contains passages that stir the fount of tears like the most pathetic scenes depicted by Gough in his marvellous dramatic efforts.
This intensity of emotion and rare fluency of speech — which make Guthrie so effective in the pulpit — place him in the front rank of living platformers. At one moment his audience are convulsed with laughter under his broad, riotous fun; in the next they are hushed into a breathholding by the fine touches of his delicate pathos. Guthrie has what is essential to all platform success — enthusiastic downrightness. He feels nothing, expresses nothing “by halves.1’ He is whole-souled, outspoken, brave, sanguine, and uncompromising. More than all, he is that rara avis — a Calvinistic reformer. Stiff as John Knox in his theology, he is as large and liberal as the present Lord Shaftesbury in his philanthropy. One of the few eminent Scotch divines who has opened his lips for teetotalism (instead of opening them for the wine-glass, like too many of his predecessors) — one of the earliest battlers for “non-intrusion” — a ready spokesman for anti-slavery, mechanics’ schools, and shoe-black brigades, he yet builds up all his plans and arguments for humanitarian reform on a firm, stout Calvinistic basis. His doctrines are the doctrines of Geneva; his ethics are the ethics of Exeter Hall. In this respect he is a representative man, rearing on the old foundations of total depravity and justification by faith, the practical, opendoored asylums for human guilt and woe; the practical realization of human recovery. There is room in our own land for more of this wise and winsome Christian charity. The only way to save the precious interests of freedom and temperance from final ruin, is to rescue them from the hands of Pelagian philanthropists and scolding freethinkers, and commit them to men who recognize in the Divine Redeemer the world’s underlying hope of salvation.
Thomas Guthrie is in the vigor of a ripe threescore — having been born in the opening year of this century. His native town is Brechin, a thrifty town of linen-manufacture, not far from the river Esk. Among the hills of Forfarshire, in view of the tempestuous North Sea, he spent his boyhood. One of his most famous parishioners, and most intimate friends, the world-known Hugh Miller, was born at Cromarty, on the coast of the same “mare Germanicum.” Guthrie and Miller were bosom friends, co-workers in the Free Kirk movement, and sympathetic in their passion for outdoor life and nature’s kindly face. In his early life, Guthrie gave himself to a course of medical study, so that like Richard Baxter and the late missionary Scudder, he can
194 ^r- Guthrie, of Edinburgh.
prescribe for the ailments of both soul and body. After a medical course at Paris, and a theological course at Edinburgh, he was ordained over the parish of Arbirlot in Forfarshire.
From his rustic flock, Guthrie was invited to Old Grayfriars church in the Scottish Athens; and until this hour those modern Athenians, who love nothing so much “as either to hear or to tell some new thing,” find no such delight as in listening to “Gooth-rie.” His church is as thronged as Spurgeon’s. Admittance is granted by ticket; and our friend, the late Dr. Alexander, told us that he once nearly lost his coat from his back in the pressure of the suffocating crowd. The edifice is not large; nay, it is a burning shame that Edinburgh has not reared for her most eloquent orator such a house as Brooklyn has built for Beecher, and London is rearing for the young Whitfield of Surrey Hall. “Why don’t you give your minister a bigger church?” inquired an American of one of Guthrie’s parishioners. uAh!” replied the calculating Scotchman, “what if Dr. Goothrie should die; and then what ‘na would we do wi’ it?” This same question often presents itself to us when we hear of the mammoth Coliseum that is projected for the blazing “star” on Brooklyn Heights.
To the same seething crowd, Dr. Guthrie preaches his earnest, and picturesque, and soul-melting discourses every Lord’s day. The leaves of the Bible flutter back and forth — as if a little breeze swept through the house — whenever the preacher makes a Scripture quotation. All eyes are rivetted on the tall, awkward athlete, who is dealing his tremendous strokes from the pulpit. All ears are open to catch the lowest notes of his pathetic undertones. All hearts sway to the touch of the divinely inspired magician.
He preaches Christ. This is the secret of his oratory — the glory of his ministry. When pleading with broken utterances for the neglected and besotted outcast, he sets forth Jesus as the Saviour of the poor, whom all “the common people heard gladly.” When expounding the visions of Ezekiel, he detects in many a prophetic line the trace of Jesus’ coming footstep. When pouring the thunder of his argument for a Free Kirk and a free pulpit, he is on fire with holy loyalty, for he is denying the claims of arrogant “Caesar” to rule the Church, and he is insisting that “there is another king, one Jesus.” It is to Jesus, the author and finisher of faith, that the ejes of all the breathless assembly are pointed; none other name is heard before that name of Him who saves His people from their sins.
Such is Thomas Guthrie in his splendid maturity of sixty. May that melodious voice — a score of years hence — still be heard, in no faltering tones, pkeaching Jesus!