But no words can express my thankfulness to God that He placed me at the outset of my ministry in that village. My dear uncle had laboured there for more than forty years. In his day there were none of the new plans for evangelisation; the high-pressure system had not yet dawned. He had worked hard with parochial work, and he had faithfully preached the old-fashioned Gospel. There was no particular brilliancy about him; his sermons were not equal to his character, but they were like himself, full of Christ, and he and his most remarkable wife lived such a life of Christian holiness in the midst of those rough fishermen, that the late Rev. Henry Blunt once told me that he considered Mr. Francis Cunningham and Mr. Haldane Stewart to be the two holiest men he had ever met with in his life. And what did I find in that village? I found large congregations of fishermen and their families; but more than that, I went diligently about from house to house, and was soon acquainted with every house in the parish, and there I saw unmistakable evidences of the blessing that had rested upon my uncle’s ministry. There were noble men among the fishermen, nobly working for God and for the cause of truth, and there were refined and well-instructed women in the different homes, many of whom had been brought up in those schools. There was a most marked and unmistakable difference between the converted and the unconverted, so that it was impossible for a young man to go from house to house without seeing with his own eyes the manifest results of a faithful Evangelical ministry. I have no words to express what the benefit was to myself. I learnt in that village what I was to expect, as well as what I was to do. I saw in Mrs. Cunningham the most beautiful example of a clergyman’s wife, and I saw in numbers of young women of the parish the conspicuous evidence of God’s blessing on her work amongst them. There were amongst those men fine, noble, rough, powerful fellows—men who, till Mr. Cunningham went there, had been living without God in the world, but now devout consistent believers, and splendid men for dashing through the surf to save life from shipwreck, knowing not what fear was, yet who would kneel together in devout Communion at the Table of the Lord. I never can forget one fearful snow-storm accompanied by a heavy gale. Two of these true men, Nath Colby and Robert Peck, brought in their boats through the gale, wet, cold, and half-frozen, but there I saw them at the service on the Thursday evening, drinking in the Word of Life, and evidently regarding it as their greatest pleasure to be able to be present on that occasion.