George Herbert Morrison was the son of a minister, born in Glasgow October 2, 1866. His mother had been reading George Herbert, the 17th century devotional poet, before his birth, hence the Christian names given to her son. Her death -- when he was barely five - made a deep impression on him and the sense of loss never left him all through his life.

He went to the University of Glasgow in 1883 and then was offered an assistant editorship under Sir James Murray, on the staff of the New English Dictionary at Oxford. This was an experience and education he would not have missed for anything, for it gave him a sense of the fitness of words and a command of the English language he could never have acquired otherwise. Years later Sir James Murray declared to Dr. Whyte that, of all his assistants, Morrison was the most methodical and the most dependable.

After fifteen months in Oxford he returned to Glasgow for his Divinity course.

In 1893 Morrison became assistant to Alexander Whyte. The fifteen months at St. George's, Edinburgh, altered his whole life. He says: "I found an ideal Scottish minister who carried my heart captive. Whatever service I have been able to render in the years that have passed, I owe it entirely to him.

"Think what it must have meant to me, a shy, raw beginner, to live for over a year in close intimacy with such a big soul. His devotion to duty, his dogged adherence to his own work, his mapped out days, his intense love of all good literature, his humility, his amazing appreciation of the most commonplace service -- these things were my school of pastoral theology."1

In 1894 he went to Thurso, in the far north of Scotland, the most northerly town on the mainland. His first sermon, "The Two Gardens -- Eden and Gethsemane," convinced the congregation that they had called a man of some ability and one whom they would never be able to hold for long. He stayed there for four years. The debt that he owed to Thurso he often declared he could never tell. It put iron into his blood.

From 1898 to 1902 he was minister of St. John's, Dundee, a large city church. "I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel." Those words of Bunyan might be taken as Morrison's motto as a young preacher to a congregation composed of men and women beset all week with their own difficulties and doubts. He believed it was a minister's duty to preach only the positive truths that had proved themselves in the experience of his own soul. It was for that reason that, while he was full abreast of the times as to biblical criticism and the advance of science on all hands, he resolutely set himself to declare to his people only the sure things of God that were the tried foundations of his own faith.

In the large Bible class after the Sunday evening service it was different. There he never shirked any doubt or difficulty that might be suggested. On one occasion he was told that a certain minister had ended a sermon on Amos with the words, "I have told you what, on the one hand, this critic says of Amos, and what, on the other hand, So-and-So holds. Next week I will tell you what I think." Morrison's comment was: "But what were the poor sheep to live on that week?" That question gives his point of view in all his preaching. At the back of his mind in all his pulpit preparation he seemed to be ever asking the question, "What is there for my people to live on?" It was for that reason that he never found himself able to use a big word or a technical term which the simplest in his audience might stumble over.