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ALEXANDER WHYTE
“Thomas Shepard has been one of my favourite authors ever since the year 1861 when my honoured friend Dr. Williamson of Huntly wrote my name on his own copy of the Parable of the Ten Virgins. I think I must have read Shepard quite as often as Spurgeon had read Bunyan; quite as often at any rate as Jowett had read Boswell. And I am still reading Shepard as if I had never read him before. As a proof of that take this little confidence of mine. The week before my last short holiday I had read Professor Churton Collins’s delightful paper on The Tempest that appeared in the Contemporary Review for the month of January last. And so impressed was I with the learned Professor’s paper that I took to the country with me Dr. Furness’s variorum and monumental edition of that exquisite work, promising myself a great revel over the great text and over the rich mass of explanatory and illustrative notes. But would you believe it? with such a temptation lying on my table all the time I never once opened the seductive volume. For as God would have it, as John Bunyan was wont to say, I had taken Thomas Shepard also with me and I read the Parable, and the Sound Believer, and the Sincere Convert, and the Saint’s Jewel, and the Select Cases, and the Spiritual Experiences over and over again; execrable English and all. And instead of repenting myself for my neglect of Shakespeare and his monumental editor, I came home thanking God again for His notable servant Shepard. And more than that, I came home more settled and resolved than ever to do all I can to make you know something of Shepard’s matchlessly pungent lessons in spiritual and experimental religion.”