ABERDEEN, _Feb. 7, 1637_.
XCI.--_To_ MR. EPHRAIM MELVIN.
[EPHRAIM MELVIN, or MELVILLE, was first ordained minister of Queensferry, and afterwards translated to Linlithgow, where he died. His ministry was signally blessed of God for bringing many to the saving knowledge of the truth, among whom were some who afterwards became eminent ministers of the Gospel in their day. One of these was the famous Mr. James Durham of Glasgow. Happening, with his pious wife, a daughter of the laird of Duntervie, to pay a visit to her mother, also a religious woman, in Queensferry, when the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was to be observed in that place, his mother-in-law, upon the Saturday, desired him to go with her to hear sermon. Being then a stranger to true religion, he was disinclined to go, and said, with a tone of indifference, "that he had not come there to hear sermon;" but upon being pressed, to gratify his pious relative, he went. The discourse which he heard, though plain and ordinary, was delivered with an affection and earnestness that arrested the attention of Durham, and so impressed him, that on coming home he said to his mother-in-law, "Your minister preached very seriously, and I shall not need to be pressed to go to hear to-morrow." Accordingly he went, and Mr. Melvin, choosing for his text these words, "To you which believe, He is precious," 1 Peter ii. 7, opened up the preciousness of Christ with such unction and seriousness, that it proved, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the means of his conversion. In that sermon he closed with Christ, and then took his seat at the Lord's Table, though to that day he had been an absolute stranger to believing. He was accustomed afterwards to call Mr. Melvin his father, when he spoke of him or to him. On another occasion, Mr. Melvin, by a sermon which he preached at Stewarton, when a probationer and chaplain to the excellent Lady Boyd, was the instrument of converting Mr. John Stirling in the fourteenth or sixteenth year of his age--one who proved a useful minister in his day, "Some say also," remarks Wodrow, "that he was a spiritual father to Mr. John Dury of Dalmeny, a man much esteemed of in his time, as having a taking and soaring gift of preaching, much like Mr. William Guthrie's gift." When Rutherford heard of Melvin's death, he is represented to have said, "And is Ephraim dead? He was an interpreter among a thousand." (Wodrow's "Anal.," vol. iii.)]