“He was an admirable preacher. In the course of the year you were sure to hear all the main doctrines of the Christian faith clearly explained, or if not formally expounded, thrown into a fuller light by some practical appeal of which he made them the foundation. When he took up a book of the New Testament, like the Acts of the Apostles, and founded on it a series of discussions, he would draw out the spirit of the narrative with great fidelity and effect, and would rise not unfrequently into real eloquence. He was amongst his flock hearing the tale of their sorrows or their joys, their mental conflicts or their bodily sufferings, and becoming thereby acquainted with all varieties of life and experience, all kinds of spiritual disease, all phases of Christian character: seeking meanwhile how to meet difficulties and soothe sorrow, and correct morbid feelings, and turn tears of sadness into smiles of joy, and thus he got together the materials for portraitures of spiritual character drawn to the life, and these he wrought into the texture of his Sunday sermon. It is difficult to imagine the help which such discourses afforded to all classes of true Christian hearers. He mixed with all sorts and conditions of men, lawyers, doctors, merchants, tradesmen, mechanics; and as he was a felicitous and ready converser, he not only threw out shrewd hints and sparkling sayings for their advantage, but gained from them a vast amount of information respecting their mode of life, their opinions and practices, their weak points and strong points, their gains and losses, their desperate anxieties and temptations, or their exhilarating successes; and with these facts from life, in his memory, he spoke in his sermons, ‘not as one that beateth the air,’ but as one who had been behind the scenes, and knew whereof he affirmed. His strokes were not delivered at random, but went straight to the mark. He could reprove, exhort, advise, comfort, as if he were himself involved every day in the whirl and wear of life. True his usual style of speech was rather Johnsonian, intermingled with forms of expression so entirely his own that you could only call them Claytonian; but those who knew him well, found that he talked very much as he preached, in rhetorically shaped sentences, with a singularly felicitous peculiarity of phrase coined in his own mind, and occasionally with a good-humoured subsidence into some pointed colloquialism which told all the more forcibly from its contrast with his ordinary mode. They felt, therefore, that what he said was thoroughly genuine, the utterance of a true man and not at all of a quack, or as he would have said, of an empiric. But whether experimental or practical, his sermons were richly and heartily evangelical, full of the very spirit of the Gospel.