06. SEVERAL SERMONS UPON THE MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECTS OF PRACTICAL RELIGION

SEVERAL SERMONS UPON THE MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECTS OF PRACTICAL RELIGION
First Published in 1760. From the preface appended to the original edition of the following Sermons it appears that they were transcribed by the editor, who only mentions his place of residence, Brousterland in Lanarkshire, from a much larger collection of manuscript discourses in his possession. He states that they were found "in a folio and quarto volume, bound up with the greatest part of his (Binning’s) printed works," that they appeared "not to be any way inferior to the discourses which the world have been favoured with," that "a good number of them are copied from his own papers by Mr. Robert M’Ward, his friend, with marginal notes, as an index or contents of the heads of his discourses," and that "the sermons written in another hand are corrected by him with the same useful marginal indexes." He mentions the texts and titles of a considerable number of other discourses and expositions which he had carefully transcribed; and adds, that these "volumes were many years concealed in the library of John Graham, a pious and learned man, much abstracted from the world, who was a near relation of Mr. M’Ward’s. In a Life of Mr. Binning, written by the late Rev. John Brown of Whitburn, and published first in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor of July 1823, and afterwards, in 1828, as a preface to a small volume of selections from his writings, the possessor of the above manuscripts was invited to declare himself, in order that steps might be taken for securing their publication. It does not appear, however, that they were in consequence brought to light.