Apart from that rugged inaccessibility of dialect (to the merely English reader) which so often marks Dr. Macdonald’s work, there is in the main theme of his best books a reason why he should not be widely popular. The one issue in which he is most passionately interested is theological. He has been to many a Moses in the speculative desert, leading to a land of promise. He has preached with a tender and persuasive fire the divine freedom of the soul, and its essential oneness with the Fatherhood of God. He has expended many beautiful faculties on this work, and his influence in the broadening and deepening of religious thought in Scotland is not to be denied. But his insistence on this great theme has naturally scared away the empty-headed and the shallow-hearted, and many also of the careless clever. There must be somewhere a fund of sincerity and of reason in the reader to whom he appeals. There is a public which is prepared to encounter thought, which can be genuinely stirred by a high intellectual passion, which is athirst indeed for that highest and best enjoyment, but it is numerically small, and the writer who deals mainly with spiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, can scarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three best books, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom. His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to a Divine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guiding Power which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able to read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide. Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more important than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly, disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It is rational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enough to find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worth while to remould and recast it. It would seem--judging by results--that Dr. Macdonald’s conception of a lyric is of something wholly spontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealed in his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in his verse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possible to read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyal man, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mind in just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies and tones the body.