Ireland, with a caprice not unusual to solitary and discontented men, to solace his vexed spirit with a lonely journey, and blow his disappointment away by the free winds and open air of an unknown scene-a very admirable and wise remedy, as most people have learned nowadays. This journey was interrupted by a call into the battle where he longed to be. With out delay, the eager young man returned to ascertain in downright and plain simplicity whether the Glasgow congregation, among whom Dr Chalmers desired his assistance, would tolerate his ministrations. "I will preach to them if you think fit," said the sincere giant," but if they bear with my preaching, they will be the first people who have borne with it.” The honest citizens of St Mungo were, however, wiser than he gave them credit for. They were not "so far left to themselves" as to reject one of the greatest orators of their age, even in the bud-and Irving began his true work, and opened his eager mouth at last.

He was the "assistant minister" of the congregation of which Dr Chalmers was the head-in other words, he was simply the curate, holding just such a place as a young man in deacon's orders holds in the Church of England; the difference is merely a difference of words words which, like everything else in Presbyterian diction, are held to represent a severe and strict "principle." And here Irving had reached at length to that interval of real discipleship and willing service which his previous experience wanted. He chafed no longer at unworthy voices, burned no longer over his own silence, but combined a quaint acknowledgment of his former unpopularity, "this congregation is almost the first in which our preaching was tolerated," and of the moderate degree of appreciation which he had still attained, "we know that our imperfections have not been hid from your eyes, and that they have alienated some from our ministry"-an acknowledgment which would be humorous and odd, but for its evident most grave and simple sincerity -with the most affectionate enthusiasm, and love for his work and his

leader. He tells the story himself with the ingenuous fulness of his nature, in the dedication of his first published work, which is inscribed to Dr Chalmers, his "honoured friend," in these words :

hear one of my discourses when I had "I thank God, who directed you to land for solitary travel in foreign parts. made up my mind to leave my native That dispensation brought me acquainted with your good and tender-hearted nature, whose splendid accomplishments I knew already-and you now live in the memory of my heart more than my admiration. While I laboured as your assistant, my labours were never weary, they were never enough to express my thankfulness to God for having associated me with such a man, and my affection to the man with whom I was The Lord be

associated.

with you and your household, and render unto you manifold for the blessings which you have rendered unto me. I could say much about these Orations which I dedicate to you; but I will not mingle with any literary or theological discussion this pure tribute of gratitude and affection, which I render to you before the world as I have already done into your private ear."

He lived and worked in Glasgow for three years, in such a noble graceful subordination as genius delights to pay to genius; but still feeling upon his big heart the cramp of local position and limit, kept dreaming in his study by himself over that mission of the Christian knight-errant, which Nature, with instinctive wisdom, kept still suggesting in his solitary ear. We are much tempted to show by his own words what manner of mission that was which attracted the mind and imagination of Irving: it was not such a mission as modern preachers use it was, we fear, a grand impossible imagination, only to be conceived in minds heroical and of an antique-apostolic strain; but the very singularity and impracticable nature of the thought makes it suitable to Irving, and helps to show the entire unity, simplicity, and sincerity of all his projects and ideas. A missionary, in his conception, was not a man either to be paid or commanded by vulgar committees and commonplace_combinations of religious men. "Up, up with the stature

of this character!" cried the preacher, gazing abroad over the blank of dismayed yet entranced faces which looked to hear a plea for a society, and seeing, instead of that, only the old enthusiast imagination of his own glorious youth; "it is high as heaven; its head is above the clouds which hide the face of heaven from earth

born men. Though none of those who at present respectably bear the honours of the name come near to it, still let it stand, that, being ever in their eye, they may approach it more and more near. Though none of this generation can bear the palm of it away, some of our children may. And though none of our children should reach it nearer than their fathers, some of our children's children may." And the great optimist hurries on in his own breathless conception of a man who went forth without scrip or purse, without sword or cloak-forth to take what was set before him, as the first disciples did -to pass from one city to another as the first disciples passed, and to have for his pay and reward souls saved and kingdoms won, but nothing less nor more. Such was the missionary office over which he pondered as he sat retired from the busy work of the Glasgow parish; where still he had not found the freedom for which his soul yearned; and once more, amid these thoughts and projects, he was summoned to a work as urgent, and more near. "Well," he writes, "do I remember the morning, when, as I sat in my lonely apartment meditating the uncertainties of a preacher's calling, and revolving in my mind purposes of missionary work, this stranger stepped in upon my musing, and opened to me the commission with which he had been charged." This commission was a request that he would preach to the poor remnant of a congregation which hung together in the Caledonian Chapel in London, in Hatton Garden, wherever that unknown locality may be. There were fifty seatholders, and a little nucleus of that old fashion of Scotch churchmen who are not common in our days-absolute, positive, high-handed Presbyterians, who kept the discouraged little community afloat somehow by sheer persist

ence and determination. The church had a connection with a Caledonian Asylum which still exists, and on account of that had some stipendiary aid from the Government, and an amount of semi-royal patronage. Whether it was the prescience of a conqueror which flashed upon his mind, what battles and victories were there to be achieved, or whether it was but the necessity for an independent field of action which influenced him, Irving seized at once upon the proposal, which by no means conveyed to a common mind any remarkable promise of fame. He preached, and was found" acceptable" to the handful of people; and so strong was his impulse towards this place and work, that the condition of being able to preach in Gaelic did not discourage him for a moment. He made up his mind to proceed to the Highlands forthwith and "master their ancient tongue," an intention which he himself states as a proof of "the steadiness of purpose with which I desired to preach the Gospel in London." This waste of time, however, was not necessary condition yielded to the man; he was ordained in the church of Annan, where he had been baptised; and in 1822, thirty years old, in the prime of his youthful manhood, a bridegroom and a conqueror, came to London to his glory and his fate.

the

Within three months the fifty were fifteen hundred-a year, and all the mighty world of English modern life swelled round the pulpit of the Scottish preacher, who dared say out his heart. With wonder, with awe, with criticism-some to fall into fashionable worship of a fashionable idol -some to admire with technical and scientific admiration-some to watch with cold philosophic eye how the blood coursed in those living veins, and the heart throbbed under the fulness of its inspiration-the great glittering stream of Society poured into those walls where fifty undistinguished people had called an undistinguished Scotch probationer to preach to them. And then occurred perhaps the most wonderful spectacle that has ever been seen in this wonderful town-a sight that makes it easy to understand how

everybody rushed to the besieged doors, and great and small fell under the universal enchantment. There he stood in his pulpit, this great, ingenuous, candid, open soul, with whom it was not possible to divorce heart from mind, or affections from belief-stood there revealing himself in all the fervour of his mighty gifts, amazing a superficial world by the sight of a true human heart a-throb with all the noblest sentiments of life, breathing, beating, palpitating, before their very eyes. We cannot agree with his great compatriot, that it was but Fashion, who, " by a fatal chance," "cast her eye upon him," any more than we can agree wholly to find the root of his aberrations in the fact that Fashion, "going her idle way, forgot this man, who unhappily could not in his turn forget." The fascination was stronger than a mere caprice of the beau monde. It was nothing less than that sight of all others which moves beyond every spectacle of earth the interest of men. This man did not preach as preaching had been hitherto - he lived in his pulpit as in a gleaming lantern fitted round with microscopic lenses, through which the curious eye-in warm love and reverence-in cold science and observation-even in impertinence and vulgar wonder -could see each heart-beat, and discover how the life-breath went and came in that majestic and impassioned soul. To very few men is this self-revelation possible, even were it expedient-it was to Irving a necessity of his office. He could not, and never could, separate himself the living man from that manifestation of himself which appeared in the pulpit. Going there as everywhere else, he went complete, attired in all the fulness of his nature; and the world outside, conscious of its own veiled soul, came here to gaze, to peep, to wonder, as at a living miracle. There was nothing marvellous then in his doctrine, and his style was the noblest and most picturesque English. The piquancy of the spectacle lay in this particular, that everybody gaz ing could see how the thoughts rose, how the fire burned, how the pulses of a giant nature beat. Edward Irving in his pulpit was not a mere

preacher expounding with wonderful eloquence a sacred subject he was himself, disclosing with a noble unconscious simplicity how himself stood before his God, and how the eager course of life rushed onward still within him, impetuous, enthusiastic, sincere, aiming ever forward, seeking a perpetual progress to better things. That he might be elated by the intoxication of all that world of eyes bent upon his single look, nobody can refuse to believe; but to our own thinking it seems evident, first of all, that a more subtle influence still was at work upon him. He stood for the first time free and unconfined, with a world to teach, and God to answer to. Spurred by that thought, his high imagination, his fervid heart, his straightforward and uncompromising soul rose high with an impulse and afflatus next to inspiration. Next to it!

only sundered by that marvellous and melancholy hair's-breadth-that whereas the miraculous inspiration of Heaven is secured from error, the inspiration half-miraculous of genius and love-even when that love is the love of God-has no such safeguard-that even the rapidity and fervour of the wondrous race betray the mere human footstep into stumbling; and that the mortal eye, intent upon God to such an absorbing extent as this, dazzles and grows unsteady by mere effect of nature, and by the very glory of the vision becomes unable to see.

Such is the explanation which seems to us to throw most light upon the future life of Edward Irving. The old theocracy was mighty in his thoughts; he was Christ's servant, commissioned to preach to statesmen and princes the headship of Christ; and thrilling in every vein with the greatness of his prophetic burden, yet moving onward with the glory and the joy" which belongs to the poetic nature, full of delight and exhilaration in the noble exercise of his own powers, it was not singularity at which he aimed, nor original views, nor the applause of crowds. He "followed on to know the Lord," "searching what and what manner of things the Spirit of Christ which was in him did sig

nify," and eager to bring something greater and greater still out of the profound depth of the Godhead which he lived to contemplate, and preached to declare. His intoxication was not that of vulgar flattery; it was that of a man standing on the brink of possible revelation, and longing to go farther uncontent with what he knew of the ineffable and Divine Majesty-burning to anticipate heaven. While this eager 'searching after God" was still in healthy progress, the startled world came to gaze at him as at a dramatic spectacle, more marvellous and more touching than any other wonder within its knowledge. The fascination of interest with which a breathless audience watches the Somnambula, passing in her charmed sleep where waking foot would tremble to tread, scarcely deserves to be named as a shadow of that interest with which his audience watched this incomprehensible preacher passing in all his strength of manhood through those visionary regions, intent upon reaching closer to the God whom, like Moses, he longed to see. They crowded to gaze at him in that miraculous journey of his; they watched how his thoughts flowed Godward with a flood and torrent which was not to be described; they stood by spellbound while he crossed upon that trembling bridge of sublimed thought which his royal imagination conceived as the surest highway, and heard him call them onto follow with a thrill of strange emotion. He was to that generation a sign and a wonder, like the old prophets. They had seen outside men before in all circumstances, and were hard to astonish; but they were startled out of all their composure when called on to witness this progress and passion of a heart.

For some five years Irving proceeded in the full height and culmination of his genius, throwing forth, with the prodigality and exuberance of a wealth which knew no limit, orations so splendid and addresses so heart-stirring that it is hard to understand how they can have fallen into partial oblivion, and gathering audiences of the noblest, highest, and intelligent in the

VOL. LX

land to hear a Gospel which no man could accuse of error or heresy. What one has to observe in these magnificent examples of religious oratory, is, not any relaxation of the bond of doctrine, but an indescribable subliming, a swell and elevation of fervid splendour and forcible reality, which these garments of truth prove in nowise too limited to bear. It is not easy to put in words the effect of this inspiring loftiness but no one can read the Orations of Irving, or his Last Days, or indeed any of the productions of his genius during this period, without perceiving the singular afflatus, which, like the heaving of the breast and the dilating of the eye, swells in those noble sentences, and animates the brilliant monologue. They are not extravagant nor exaggerated; there is no strain after popular applause, nor grasp at novelty; but they are the utterance of a man who thinks not with his mind only, but with his heart, and puts his whole soul into every word he says. How little he desired in his own consciousnesseven at this time, the period of his greatest fame-to wear the fantastic crown of extreme popularity, or to win the public regard by novelties of doctrine, cannot be better shown than by his own words. The following passage, strangely touching and pathetic as it is when one knows the after-progress of his life, occurs in one of his sermons upon The Last Days:

"I know not, dear brethren, what you may feel with respect to this turmoil,

into which the classes of society are thrown-this unrest, which, like the evil

spirit from the Lord which troubled Saul, will not suffer us to be at peacebut for myself, I will say that I would rather, if I could, possess the sober steadfast character which, in the last age and the age before it, pertained to a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland; his grave spirit, his judicious counsel, his plain, honest, straightfor ward exposition of God's word, with all

the other characteristics of a conscientious faithful minister of Christ and pastor of His people. A year of such a life, of such an unknown and noiseless life, I feel it were more noble to possess than

to rule the ascendant of public opinion, and to ride upon unsettled waves of

2Q

this heady and high-minded generation. I will labour for it; I will find my way back to it if it be possible; and I would advise any man who hears me, as he values his own peace, to do the sameto seek quietness, to desire peace, to dwell with truth, to ensue it diligently."

This was written in 1828; yet only some couple of years thereafter the speaker had gone astray among the chaotic voices of a wild supernatural fever; but, sincere to the very core as Irving was, a more moving pre-vindication of his purity of mind and intention could not be supposed.

And we are very loth to pass this climax of his life without interposing some witness, from his own words, of that fervour and inspiration of genius which we claim for him. His works are not so commonly read that we should fear to reproduce only that which everybody knows; and to speak the truth, everybody who does know will be the better for reading again the following noble exposition of the ideal sense of humanity; which we choose, not because it is more remarkable than the general matter which surrounds it, but because it can be detached more easily from the Argument of which it forms a part. The preacher is treating that objection against Christianity which stumbles at its "sublime and inaccessible reach of virtue."

"It is the nature of man, especially of youth, which determineth the cast of future manhood, to place before him the highest patterns in that kind of excellence at which he aimeth. Human nature thirsteth for the highest and the best, not the most easily attained. The faculty of hope is ever conjuring into being some bright estate, far surpassing present possession. The faculty of fancy ever wingeth aloft into regions of ethereal beauty and romantic fiction, far beyond the boundaries of truth. There is a refined nature in man which the world satisfieth not it calls for poetry to mix up happier combinations for its use; it magnifies, it beautifies, it sublimes every form of creation and every condition of existence. Oh heavens! how the soul of man is restless and unbound; how it lusteth after greatness; how it revolveth around the sphere of perfection, but cannot enter in; how it compasseth round the seraph-guarded verge of Eden, but

cannot enter in! Our woe-begone and self-tormented poet hath so fabled it of Cain; but it is not a wicked murderer's part thus upward to soar, and sigh that he can go no higher; but it is the part of every noble faculty of the soul which God hath endowed with purity and strength above its peers. For the world is but an average product of the minds that make it up; its laws are for all those that dwell therein, not for the gifted few; its customs are covenants for the use of the many; and when it pleaseth God to create a master-spirit in any kind-a Bacon in philosophy, a Shakespeare in fancy, a Milton in poetry, a Newton in science, a Locke in sincerity and truth-they must either address average which they find established, and so bless the generations that are to come, or, like that much-to-be-pitied master of present poetry, and many other mighty spirits of this licentious day, they must rage and fret against the world, which world will dash them off, as the prominent rocks do the feeble bark which braves them, leaving to after ages monuments of reckless folly. That same world will dash them off, which, if they had have taken them into its bosom, even as come with honest, kind intentions, would other rocks of the ocean do throw their everlasting arms abroad, and take within their peaceful bays thousands of the tallest ships which sail upon the bosom of the deep. It is, I say, the nature of every faculty of the mind created greater than ordinary, to dress out a feast for that same faculty in other men, to lift up the limits of enjoyment in that direction, and plant them a little onward into the regions of unreclaimed thought. And so it came to pass that God, who possesseth every faculty in perfection, when He put His hand to the work, brought forth this perfect institution of moral conduct, in order to perfect as far as could be the moral condition and consequent enjoyment of man.

their wonderful faculties to elevate that

"If the mind from its first dawning be fed on matters of fact alone, limited to the desire of the needful, and to the hope of the attainable, never imaginative, never speculative, it will become, as the physical condition of those people who are living upon the very edge of necessity becometh, little elevated above the brutes that perish. It is illimitable knowledge still sought after, though unbounded; it is high ambition still longed after, though never reached, and soaring fancy dwelling with things unseen, that go to produce the noble specimens of the natural man. And the very same