lad's ear and heart till they grew at last to the climax and cadence of his own grand sentences, we cannot tell; though to our own thinking the stormy Solway echoes continually through the preposterous, intolerable, magnificent chant of his great countryman. But at least Irving's genius, like Carlyle's, betrays the inspiration of his district. It is stormy, hilly, irregular, full of the swell and passion of nature-the climaxes and choruses in which all natural music abounds.

These were deepened by the associations which belonged to that scene and landscape. To strangers accustomed to more impressive ecclesiastical services, the forms of the Church of Scotland are bald and meagre; but it needs to be a child in a Scottish church-loving household, to know what a romance and enthusiasm may be gathered around this grave and simple worship. All the more because it is unimaginative, the fervid imagination builds upon that austere superstructure of doctrine and faith; and it is no marvel to the young Presbyterian, inexperienced and heroical, that peasant "confessors" should have died by the score for that which the world calls freedom of worship and religious liberty, but which the Scottish ecclesiastic, not choosing these terms, names more abstrusely "the Headship of Christ." This distinction is worthy to be considered when one looks at the character of such a man as Irving. It seems to lie at the very foundation at once of his greatness and his errors. Destitute of those imaginative accessories which catch the lighter wing of fancy as it soars, the Church of Scotland has little protection against the grave, fervent, prophet imagination which avenges itself upon her simplicity by carrying to a wild extreme the spirituality which she prizes. The outside world, when it has regarded with anything beyond a passing curiosity the singular and eventful course of ecclesiastical history in Scotland, has ever attributed to the external and visible cause the struggles which it saw. The Covenanters suffered for religious liberty-the Seceders, of a recent date, for the democratic principle

that ministers should be chosen by the people. So the public generally supposes; but put the question to one of the sufferers, and he will scout your explanation. Neither for democratic rule, nor liberty of worship

for "the Headship of Christ!" This is the idea with which all the graver spirits of the Presbyterian community identify the martyrdoms of their fathers; and this is the principle with which the disrupted portion of the Scottish Church justifies its own sacrifice. That the Church is an absolutely-constitutioned kingdom over which Christ reigns-that the Synods and Assemblies of that Church are guilty of high treason if they acknowledge any other authority there but that of their sole King and Head-and that the sway of that claborate ecclesiastical polity, with all its legal forms and courts of appeal, is absolute, because it is Christ's appointment, and bears the rule under Him

is the leading idea of Presbyterian church government; an idea great in the abstract, but dangerous enough in the hands of common men, and capable of being misconstrued into the basis of a vulgar papacy. But we confess it is not very easy to convey the living power and influence of this thought as it did exist, and does exist, to persons unacquainted with these hereditary principles of the Scotch Church. Nothing is so common as the idea that the Church of Scotland is the most democratic of all corporations; but so far as principle and intention go, nothing can be more mistaken the democracy and the religious liberty come by the way-secondary matters; whereas the principle is that of the highest and most positive of monarchical institutions. The great historian of those troubled times, when the last Stuart reigned, and when "the persecution" was at its height, can understand no more of this fountain-head of Presbyterian resistance than to set down the refusal of the poor girl who, drowning on the sands of Wigtown, would not say "God save the King," as an amazing and altogether unintelligible example of bigotry and the doctrine of reprobation! What chance, then, have we to convey a better idea to

our excellent reader, who perhaps is not so able as Lord Macaulay? But the boys in Annandale who were in training for the ministry-the lads who heard these martyr-tales till their young blood boiled as with a present and personal tyranny-the theological shepherds on the hills, and ploughmen-elders in the furrow, not only understood, but believed, and were ready to dare as much again in the fervour of their hearts. This strong national unanimous assertion of a principle quite beyond demonstration-of a dominion totally invisible, and of the spirit, yet extending an absolute and formal authority over everyday matters and objects-and the fact that religious liberty and personal freedom of faith are always kept secondary and subservient, rather accidents of blessing which have befallen the true servants of the King than things for which they have fought at first hand-is a thing which should never be lost sight of in the consideration of Scottish religious character, and which, above all others, is of importance to the character of Irving, a sublimated type and revelation of the deeper thoughts and dangers common to all impassioned men.

With this principle, gleaned not only from theological teaching and the standards of the Church, but from every martyr's grave and glen of covenanting worship, a truth beyond question to his eager spiritthat power and authority are from Christ alone, service and devoir due to Christ alone--and that all external matters are external and secondary to that strait and close allegiance, the theocratic rule-Edward Irving set out upon his life. It is said he was cast in the strongest mould of man, a superb human creature, nobly developed, able for anything and everything, ready to be a Xavier or a Loyola as occasion called. Occasion, as it happened, called the boy to neither. For the ripening of his genius and the youth of his spirit, the calm ordinary discipline of the Scotch probationer was enough. He dropped into a school as young ministers in Scotland were wont to drop, and went out of hearing of his own irregular eccentric

Firth to gain a broader note of music from that stately flood which parts from Edinburgh and the golden Lothians the kingdom of Fife. He became a schoolmaster in Kirkcaldy while he was still a youth; and by-and-by brought to the same place and school his countryman, Thomas Carlyle. Strange blank of human nature, which holds its steady average in spite of all excitements! One does not know that anything has ever come of the Kirkcaldy boys who chanced upon such teachings; that marvellous yoke of winged steeds did not carry the chariot to its goal with shouts of triumph as one might have expected, and made little more commotion in their race than any tame couple of educational ploughers who know nothing of Pegasus. In the manse of Kirkcaldy at that period was a parish pastor of the old type of hereditary Scottish ministers, who rejoiced over and perceived the mightiness of the lads beside him; and the two young schoolmasters walked and talked with the fittest auditory that could have been provided for their youth-young daughters of the manse, as full of intelligence and apprehension as their companions were of genius-stimulating the speculations, the discussions, and the overflowing fancy of that early time, by the subtle and indescribable impulse which a woman's mingled sympathy and contradiction give to the powers and imaginations of a young man. Imagine the two big men of Annandale, with the dew upon their boyish genius, and all their future glories still unknown, and the girls, who doubtless reverenced and mocked them as girls use, witting nothing of the fame and the disaster-the good report and the bad report-the conquest and the overthrow which waited on that further way! The scene charms like a

picture; and there was not wanting either that touch of warmer interest, without which, let philosophers say what they will, the record of young life is always incomplete. Two of the four were lovers; for Irving had found his future bride in the Kirkcaldy manse.

This time was the time of the young man's preparation for all his

future work. His reading was not perhaps the fashion of reading most in use among Scotch probationers; and the long pause which he had to make before engaging at first hand in the immediate duties of ministerial work, left his eager and impassioned mind full room to consider and note the imperfections of the religious community around him.

"I have been accused," he writes at a later date, "of affecting the antiquated manner of ages and times now forgotten. The writers of those times are too much

I

forgotten, I lament, and their style of writing hath fallen much out of use; but the time is fast approaching when this stigma shall be wiped away from our prose, as it is fast departing from our poetry. I fear not to confess that Hooker, and Taylor, and Baxter, in theology Bacon, and Newton, and Locke, in philosophy, have been my companions, as Shakespeare, and Spenser, and Milton, have been in poetry. cannot learn to think as they have done, which is the gift of God; but I can teach myself to think as disinterestedly, and to express as honestly what I think and feel; which I have, in the strength of God, endeavoured to do. They are my models of men-of Englishmen and of authors. My conscience could find none so worthy, and the world hath acknowledged none worthier. They were the fountains of my English idiom; they taught me forms for expressing my feel ings; they showed me the construction of sentences, and the majestic flow of continuous discourse. Their books were to me like a concert of every sweet instrument of the soul, and heart, and strength, and mind. They seemed to think, and feel, and imagine, and reason all at once,

and the result is to take the whole man

captive in the chains of the sweetest per

suasion."

indignant, while meaner men carried on with lower powers the battle into which he burned to plunge, made such observations as such a man was like to make upon the fashion of the warfare in which he was most interested, and where his true vocation lay. One cannot doubt, from his own words, that Irving, voiceless, and chafing at his own unwilling silence, Sabbath, listening, and scarce able to had sat through many a monotonous contain himself, while dull and tedious voices drowsed through the hourlong sermon, in a style which no critic could dream of objecting to, and which was as different from Hooker and from Milton as it was alien to all nature; and this, too, helped to mature into its future character his vehement soul. Had he risen into immediate renown in his earlier youth, as he might have done, it is very like that a difference of development would have happened to his genius. As it was, the original independence of his theocracy gained fire and distinctness by his probation. We never see the imperfections of the existing combatant so well as when we wait breathless with eagerness to take his place, more especially should we be convinced that the place is properly, and by nature, ours. It was thus that Irving gradually unshackled himself of those curbs of custom and law which regulated tacitly the tone and thought of the preachers whom he heard, as it does of most preachers at all times; and in spite of his strong national enthusiasm, and fervent love of his mother Church, came by degrees to recognise only God, his Master, and his own mind and conscience, as the rule of what he ought to say: not that he ceased to reverence the law and polity, which was always dear to him, or disowned the authority of the Church which he served; but that his scorn of the limited range and ignoble thought of the common strain of preaching, confined, as he believed it to be, by modern rules and proprieties, not binding upon any man who was truly commissioned of God, thrust him more and more upon that isolated platform of direct responsibility-toh Master, and not to

any one beneath-which by-and-by made the great soul giddy in its solitude, and turned the natural longing for sympathy and brotherhood into a supernatural and suicidal, yet most pathetic yearning for sympathies and voices, mysterious and ecstatic, out of the unseen.

His own opinion of ordinary pulpit ministrations, formed in this time of silence, when he had to listen where in the fervour of his youth he longed to speak, he expresses fervently and boldly as soon as he has the opportunity, and always by way of explanation and apology for his own preaching, which bore a difference, and which proper persons made objections to.

"Some preachers," he writes, "are traders from port to port, following the customary and approved course; others adventure over the whole ocean of human concerns. The former are hailed by the common voice of the multitude, whose course they hold; the latter blamed as idle, often suspected of hiding deep designs, always derided as having lost all guess of the proper course. Yet of the latter class of preachers was Paul the apostle, who took lessons of none of his brethren when he went up to Jerusalem of the same class was Luther the reformer, who asked counsel of nothing but his Bible, and addressed him singlehanded to all the exigents of his time: of the same class was Calvin, the most lion-hearted of churchmen, whose independent thinking hath made him a name to live, and hath given birth to valuable systems, both of doctrine and polity. Such adventurers, under God, this age of the world seems to us especially to want. There are ministers enow to hold the flock in pasture and in safety; but where are they to make inroads upon the alien, to bring in the votaries of fashion, of literature, of sentiment, of policy, and of rank, who are content, in their sensual idolatries, to do without piety to God, and love to Him whom He hath sent ? Where are they to lift up their voice against simony, and acts of policy, and servile dependence upon the great ones of this earth, and shameful seeking of ease and pleasure, and anxious amassing of money, and the whole cohort of evil customs which are overspreading the church? Truly it is not stagers who take on the customary form of their office, and go the beaten round of duty, and then lie down content; but it is daring adventurers who shall eye from

the grand eminence of a holy and heavenly mind all the grievances which religion underlies, and all the obstacles which stay her course--and then descend, with the self-denial and faith of an apostle, to set the battle in array against them."

These same sentiments, with a still bolder note, he proclaims once more in the preface to his first publication:—

"Until the servants of the living God do pass the limits of pulpit theologies and pulpit exhortations, to take weapons region in which the life of man or his in their hand gathered out of every faculties are interested, they shall never have religion triumph and domineer in a country as beseemeth her high original, her native majesty, and her eternity of freely-bestowed well-being. To which the ministers of religion should bear their attention to be called, for until they thus acquire the password which is to convey them into every man's encampment, they speak to that man from a distance, and at disadvantage. It is but a parley; it is no conference nor treaty,

nor business-like communication. To this end they must discover new vehicles for conveying the truth as it is in Jesus into the minds of the people-poetical, historical, scientific, political, and sentimental vehicles. For in each of these regions some of the population dwell, with all their affections, who are as dear in God's sight as are others; and why they should not be come at-why means should not be taken to come at them, can any good reason be assigned? They prepare for teaching gypsies, for teaching bargemen, for teaching miners, by apprehending their ways of conceiving and estimating truth; why not prepare for teaching imaginative men, and political men, and legal men, and scientific men, who bear the world in hand? and having got the key to their several chambers of delusion and resistance, why not enter in and debate the matter with their souls, that they may be left without excuse ? Meanwhile, I think we ministers are

without excuse."

Such were the thoughts which Edward Irving as he sat in the grew and ripened in the mind of church of Kirkcaldy, or in other adjacent churches, listening with all

the dissatisfaction and restlessness which are like to befall the classes he described. The one reverenced voice of the excellent parish minister who received there the full honour of

his office, did not shut the young man's ears to less worthy voices. He heard the usual drowse of routine preaching; he heard the commonplace orator sailing calmly over the uncomprehended depths, and making complacent appeals to the "feelings of his hearers; and while he kept silence, his heart burned. Noting everything with an instinctive human apprehension which nothing can purchase, he learned to see what apostolic work waited a modern prophet, and how unfit were these common hands to lift the shining reins and guide the heavenly steeds, and urge forth through the very throng of the highway, in triumph and glory, the chariot of the Lord. In that quietness his work grew and shaped itself to his ambition; and his ambition took fire from the thought of that work to which no man put his hand-an ambition well worthy of such a spirit. And, doubtless, before his very eyes came gleaming forth, in charmed imaginations, crowds more brilliant and more intent, if that were possible, than those who afterward realised the prophetic fancy; and an issue more magnificent and lasting than preacher, since the Apostles, has ever made on earth. For it was no accidental and unlooked-for fortune that drew these crowds about him in afterdays; it was the big design of his heart growing into fire and eagerness as he kept silence, and looked forth on the world, and saw not, like his Master, that there was no man to help, but that most men were busied in corners, and did not discern the vast necessity which grew dark and terrible a wall which they could not penetrate-before their very steps. This perception fixed the scope of his desires; and it is impossible to read his own self-explanations without feeling that to be merely pastor of a certain congregation never entered into the intentions of Irving, but that he felt already his vocation seizing on him with the urgency of inspiration not to be denied the vocation not of a habitual edifier and consoler, the husbandman of a hedged and cultivated bit of garden, but of an apostle and prophet errant to the world-a mailed knight con

secrate and sworn to war and to conquest "such an adventurer" as he himself thereafter described, and made apparent to the common sight of men.

This silence and these thoughts could, of course, last only for a time. What might have happened to Edward Irving had he held the learned leisure of a Fellowship, happened to him in the Kirkcaldy school. There came a climax to the vigil, when it was no longer within the possibilities of human nature to be still and wait. The ripening life and unquiet thoughts broke loose from that youthful anchorage, quickened, no doubt, by the stimulation common to men in like position, of a long betrothal, and a natural anxiety to enter upon the full individual existence of maturity. Unprovided for the future, he threw himself upon the world, bent upon exercising his true vocation one way or other, though he saw no opening as to the how. He preached-but either his preaching was still chaotic and obscure, the falsetto voice of youth, or else the auditory were too much startled to appreciate its real excellences. From one cause or another, he found no favour with his contemporaries and countrymen and, failing a mission at home, began to occupy himself with thoughts of a mission among the heathen, the manner of which imagination one may learn from the discourse upon Missions preached years after, to the amazement and dismay of all concerned-which shows plainly enough that this prophet had no mind to offer himself as a stipendiary to any of the Societies, or to be held in the leash of any Exeter Hall. Ruminating this thought, and full of dreams of such journeys and labours as Paul accomplished in his days, he was led somehow-one cannot see how, for the Church bore almost such comparative rank among metropolitan churches, despite of "Presbyterian parity," as a cathedral might holdto the pulpit of St George's in Edinburgh, where the unpopular probationer had Dr Chalmers among his audience. Nothing followed for the moment. Disgusted and disappointed, and sick at heart, he dropped into a chance steamboat, and went to