Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
I do not usually publish two blog posts in such quick succession, but I was reading an essay by the younger Thomas McCrie and came across a very odd quotation from Robert Baillie's letters, which I then checked in the source cited. Baillie opposed the ordination of Andrew Gray and also had a problem with the style of preaching adopted by Gray, Hugh Binning, and Robert Leighton:
... His voice is not yet so good as to be heard by diverse. He has the new guise of preaching, which Mr. Hew Binning and Mr. Robert Leighton began, contemning the ordinary way of exponing and dividing a text, of railing doctrines and uses; but runs out in a discourse on some common head, in a high, romancing, unscriptural style, tickling the ear for the present, and moving the affections in some, but leaving, as he confesses, little or nought to the memory and understanding. ...
For the full quote, see Robert Baillie’s strictures on the preaching of Andrew Gray, Hugh Binning and Robert Leighton.
Why was Baillie making this issue a hill on which to die?
... His voice is not yet so good as to be heard by diverse. He has the new guise of preaching, which Mr. Hew Binning and Mr. Robert Leighton began, contemning the ordinary way of exponing and dividing a text, of railing doctrines and uses; but runs out in a discourse on some common head, in a high, romancing, unscriptural style, tickling the ear for the present, and moving the affections in some, but leaving, as he confesses, little or nought to the memory and understanding. ...
For the full quote, see Robert Baillie’s strictures on the preaching of Andrew Gray, Hugh Binning and Robert Leighton.
Why was Baillie making this issue a hill on which to die?