Though the work accomplished by Ewing was necessarily modified and circumscribed by the fact that throughout his whole life he was fettered by a delicate bodily con stitution, he yet battled with the vices and religious perplexities and difficulties of his time in a spirit of buoyant cheerfulness. Perhaps his strength lay chiefly in the charm of his personal manner, in his fine tact, and his catholic sympathies; and these gradually secured him, not only the admiration and love of the people and clergy of his diocese, but a prominent position among the ecclesiastics of his own time, both in Scotland and England. In all theological discussions he contended for the exercise of a wide tolerance and charity, shrinking from condemning with ecclesiastical censure even opinions which he feared might be fraught with evil and danger to the church. He did not, indeed, attach much importance to mere ecclesiastical authority and organization, and was more solicitous about the inward than the outward unity of Christianity. His own theological position resembled very closely that of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, and Frederick Denison Maurice; but his relation to these theologians was rather that of a friendly sympathiser than a disciple, for his opinions were the fruit of his own meditation, and were coloured by his own idiosyncracy, and their perspective was determined by his individual stand-point. Unlike theirs, his teaching was never presented in the form of a complete and elaborate theological treatise, and its purport is only to be gathered from fragmentary publications,—letters to the newspapers, pamphlets, special sermons, essays contributed to the series of Present Day Papers, of which he was the editor, and a volume of sermons entitled Revelation considered as.Light, which he only lived to see through the press. The title of this volume may be taken as indicating the characteristic feature of his theology. He dwelt specially upon the illuminating power of Christianity as revealing the fatherhood of God, and thus “rolling back the clouds of human sin and sorrow,” so as even ultimately to “exhaust hell of its darkness.” To him each attribute of God was equally light, and therefore he did not believe that any compromise had ever been effected between them. Christ was the supreme manifestation of that light, and the Bible was but the medium of its revelation, the means for enabling it to stream in upon the soul from sources beyond the mere letter of the truths which the written word contained. One of the chief of these external sources of light, specially welcomed by Ewing, was science, to the discoveries of which he looked forward as destined to lead to the manifestation of other and higher aspects of Christianity than were yet fully realized.

Besides his strictly theological writings, Ewing is the author of the Cathedral or Abbey Church of Iona, 1865, the first part of which contains drawings and descriptive letterpress of the ruins by Messrs Bucklers, architects, Oxford, an<l the second a history of the early Celtic church and of the mission of St Columba. See Memoir tf Alexander Ewing, D.C.L.,>oy A. J. Ross, B.D., 1877.