But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and a great preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer. A great writer is not a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes. It is not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work. Our greatest authors have all written little books. Job is a small book, so is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle to the Romans, so is the _Confessions_, so is the _Comedy_, so is the _Imitation_, so are the _Pilgrim_ and the _Grace Abounding_, and though William Guthrie's small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our day. You will all find out your own favourite books according to your own talents and tastes. My calling a book great is nothing to you. But it may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what two men like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, in the nineteenth, said about William Guthrie's one little book. Said John Owen, drawing a little gilt copy of _The Great Interest_ out of his pocket, 'That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that ever wrote. His book is my _vade mecum_. I carry it always with me. I have written several folios, but there is more divinity in this little book than in them all.' Believe John Owen. Believe all that he says about Guthrie's _Saving Interest_; but do not believe what he says about his own maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his _Person and Glory of Christ_, his _Holy Spirit_, his _Spiritual-mindedness_, and his _Mortification, Dominion, and Indwelling of Sin_. Then hear Dr. Chalmers: 'I am on the eve of finishing Guthrie, which I think is the best book I ever read.' After you have read it, if you ever do, the likelihood is that you will feel as if somehow you had not read the right book when you remember what Owen and Chalmers have said about it. Yes, you have read the right enough book; but the right book has not yet got in you the right reader. There are not many readers abroad like Dr. John Owen and Dr. Thomas Chalmers.