Preachers and their reputations

"When I watch the working of my own heart...this is what I am compelled to write:

I am Jonah. In the matter of my own reputation as a preacher that is. For I used to say, Let me die first before I am eclipsed by another in my pulpit and among my people.

I fought with a Jonah-like fierceness against the remotest thought of my reputation ever passing over, in my day at any rate, to another."

Alexander Whyte

Quoted in Sinclair B. Ferguson, Man Overboard! The Story of Jonah, p. 27