Robert Murray M'Cheyne was a nineteenth-century preacher known not only for his powerful preaching but for his personal holiness, and the second is usually praised without being explained.

Jordan Stone examines the force behind it: M'Cheyne's love for and communion with Christ. He prayed for holiness, preached for it and pursued it because he understood it to be the mature expression of love to Christ, and that order of things is what makes the book more than a devotional portrait. His unrelenting passion for piety is meant to convict the reader, not impress him.