down into detached fragments, or will wish that he had substituted a dry detail of disjointed particulars for his powerful and impassioned appeals to the understanding and feelings of his auditors. Few will wish that he had discussed all his texts in the way he has handled 1 Tim. i. 5.(55) The presbytery of Glasgow prescribed to him this text as the subject of one of his probationary discourses. That is the reason, probably, that his sermons upon it are composed upon a different plan from his others, and more in accordance with the conventional mode of the day. Although Binning held the doctrine of predestination, in what the enemies of that scriptural doctrine consider its most repulsive form, being, like Samuel Rutherford, and David Dickson, the author of Therapeutica Sacia, and many other eminent divines of that time, a supralapsarian, he was far from exacting in others a rigid conformity to his particular opinions. It is impossible not to admire the Christian spirit that dictated the following passage in one of his sermons, “If we search the scriptures, we shall find that they do not entertain us with many and subtile discourses of God’s nature, and decrees, and properties, nor do they insist upon the many perplexed questions that are made concerning Christ and his offices, about which so many volumes are spun out, to the infinite distinction of the Christian world. They do not pretend to satisfy your curiosity, but to edify your souls, and therefore they hold out God in Christ, as clothed with all his relations to mankind, in all those plain and easy properties, that concern us everlastingly,—his justice, mercy, grace, patience, love, holiness, and such like. Now, hence I gather, that the true knowledge of God consists not in the comprehension of all the conclusions that are deduced, and controversies that are discussed anent these things, but rather, in the serious and solid apprehension of God, as he hath relation to us, and consequently in order and reference to the moving of our hearts, to love, and adore, and reverence him, for he is holden out only in those garments that are fit to move and affect our hearts. A man may know all these things, and yet not know God himself, for to know him, cannot be abstracted from loving him.”(56)