It has been a long time since I have read much of A.W. Pink [in fact, it has also been a while since I blogged--have been extremely busy with end-of-term stuff and preparing papers for ETS]. I read his study on the sovereignty of God years ago when I was a young Christian and then soon after Iain Murray's life of Pink. Recently, a student at Toronto Baptist Seminary loaned me A.W. Pink, Letters to a Young Pastor: Letters to Rev. R. Harbach, transcribed Janice Harbach (Grandville, Michigan: The Evangelism Committee of Grandville Protestant Reformed Church, 1993). In perusing it, I noticed this on John Gill (on page 15) in the midst of comments about building a library:
“You are wise to ‘weed out’ your books—it is an expensive matter to move around a large library! John Gill is a strong Calvinist, and generally speaking, particularly good on the Epistles [of Paul], though at times he is ‘hyper’-Calvinistic—losing the ‘balance’ on the human responsibility side. He came after the Puritans. The ‘Puritan era’ was, roughly, from 1580 to 1690… Go slow in adding to your library…”