There being a great demand for the several books that are printed under Mr. Binning’s name, it was judged proper to undertake a new and correct impression of them in one volume. This being done, the publishers were much concerned to have the life of such an useful and eminent minister of Christ written, in justice to his memory, and his great services in the work of the gospel, that it might go along with this impression. We living now at so great distance from the time wherein he made a figure in the world, must be at a considerable loss in giving an exact and particular relation. However, his pious and exemplary life may in some measure be known from his writings; and for this end, a great many bright passages might be gathered out of them, which would raise his character highly in the eyes of all good men; for the Rev. Mr. Robert M’Ward, minister in Glasgow, observed, “That his life was his sermons put in print, by which means they who did forget what he had said in the pulpit, by seeing what he did in his conversation might remember what they had forgot; he lived as he spoke, and spoke as he lived.” All due pains have been taken to procure proper materials, and good vouchers of the following narration. Some few things are learned from the prefaces prefixed to his several pieces, by worthy and able divines, who revised and published them; more accounts of him were furnished by persons of great credit, on whose veracity we can safely rely. But the most remarkable passages in his life are happily preserved, in a letter written by Mr. M’Ward,(87) to the Rev. Mr. James Coleman,(88) sometime minister at Sluys in Flanders. The writer of his life must in the entry confess that his part is so small, that he can scarce assume any thing to himself, but the procuring the materials from others, the copying out of those things that were of any moment, and disposing them in the best and most natural order he could think of; having studied the strictness of a severe historian, without helping out things with his invention or setting them off by a rhetorical style of language. Nay, all that is contained in Mr. M. Ward’s large letter concerning him, is told almost in his very words with a little variation of the order wherein he had placed the same, omitting the many long digressions on several subjects which that worthy person judged fit to insist upon, taking occasion from what he had noticed concerning Mr. Binning to enlarge on the same.