Not Manton, but Goodwin, and Alexander Whyte

[Wayne]

My apologies to Pastor Hyde on another thread for raising his hopes of some good reading about Alexander Whyte's appreciation for the works of Thomas Manton.

My faulty memory! It was instead Thomas Goodwin whose work so captivated Rev. Whyte. But perhaps there is an example here with Whyte that others might emulate!

"On opening the Witness newspaper one propitious morning my eye fell on the announcement of a new edition of Thomas Goodwin's works. I entered my name at once as a subscriber to the series, and not long after the first volume of Goodwin's Works came into my hands. And I will here say with simple truth that his Works have never been out of my hands down to this day. In those far-off years I read my Goodwin every Sabbath morning and every Sabbath night. Goodwin was my every Sabbath-day meat and my every Sabbath-day drink...
..."During my succeeding years as a student, and as a young minister, I carried about a volume of Goodwin with me wherever I went. I read him in railway carriages and on steamboats. I read him at home and abroad. I read him on my holidays among the Scottish Grampians and among the Swiss Alps. I carried his volumes about with me till they fell out of their original cloth binding, and till I got my bookbinder to put them into his best morocco. I have read no author so much or so often."
One reason why the cloth binding of Goodwin's Works gave way under the strain of incessant use is not mentioned in this passage. Much of Whyte's time during these four years was spent in preparing the index which appeared in 1866 in the twelfth and last volume of this edition--a labour in which he received some assistance from one or two friends, but which was in the main his own. There is an Index of Texts, with almost exactly ten thousand entries, and a full Subject Index, which bears witness by its uniformity of plan and execution to the work of a single and most painstaking hand. The latter is, indeed, almost unique in its elaboration : it affords a conspectus of Goodwin's thought, and many of his aphorisms are transcribed in full. Its preparation wrought both the style and matter of the great Puritan's thinking into the very fibre of his apt and devoted pupil's mind. One might, indeed, gain no mean understanding of Goodwin simply by the study of this masterly summary of his many discursive works.

An excerpt from G.F. Barbour's Life of Alexander Whyte, pp. 82, 117-118.