"A well of love it may be deep,
I trust it is, and never dry;
What matter, though its waters sleep
In silence and obscurity?"
The expression of his affection was more like the shock of a Leyden jar,
than the continuous current of a galvanic circle.
There was, as I have said, a permanent chill given by my mother's death,
to what may be called the outer surface of his nature, and we at home
felt it much. The blood was thrown in upon the centre, and went forth in
energetic and victorious work, in searching the Scriptures and saving
souls; but his social faculty never recovered that shock! it was
blighted; he was always desiring to be alone and at his work. A stranger
who saw him for a short time, bright, animated, full of earnest and
cordial talk, pleasing and being pleased, the life of the company, was
apt to think how delightful he must always be,--and so he was; but these
times of bright talk were like angels' visits; and he smiled with
peculiar benignity on his retiring guest, as if blessing him not the
less for leaving him to himself. I question if there ever lived a man so
much in the midst of men, and in the midst of his own children,[20] in
whom the silences, as Mr. Carlyle would say, were so predominant. Every
Sabbath he spoke out of the abundance of his heart, his whole mind; he
was then communicative and frank enough: all the week, before and after,
he would not unwillingly have never opened his mouth. Of many people we
may say that their mouth is always open except when it is shut; of him
that his mouth was always shut except when it was opened. Every one must
have been struck with the seeming inconsistency of his occasional
brilliant, happy, energetic talk, and his habitual silentness--his
difficulty in getting anything to say. But, as I have already said, what
we lost, the world and the church gained.
[20] He gave us all the education we got at Biggar.
When travelling he was always in high spirits and full of anecdote and
fun. Indeed I knew more of his inner history in this _one_ way, than
during years of living with him. I recollect his taking me with him to
Glasgow when I must have been about fourteen; we breakfasted in "_The
Ram's Horn Tavern_" and I felt a new respect for him at his commanding
the waiters. He talked a great deal during our short tour, and often
have I desired to recall the many things he told me of his early life,
and of his own religious crises, my mother's death, his fear of his own
death, and all this intermingled with the drollest stories of his boy
and student life.
We went to Paisley and dined, I well remember, we two alone, and, as I
thought, magnificently, in a great apartment in "_The Saracen's Head_,"
at the end of which was the county ball-room. We had come across from
Dunoon and landed in a small boat at the _Water Neb_ along with Mrs. Dr.
Hall, a character Sir Walter or Galt would have made immortal. My father
with characteristic ardor took an oar, for the first time in his life,
and I believe for the last, to help the old boatman on the Cart, and
wishing to do something decided, missed the water, and went back head
over heels to the immense enjoyment of Mrs. Hall, who said, "Less pith,
and mair to the purpose, my man." She didn't let the joke die out.
Another time--it was when his second marriage was fixed on, to our great
happiness and his--I had just taken my degree of M. D., and he took
Isabella, William, and myself to Moffat. By a curious felicity we got
into Miss Geddes' lodgings, where the village circulating library was
kept, the whole of which we aver he read in ten days. I never saw him so
happy, so open and full of mirth, reading to us, and reciting the poetry
of his youth. On these rare but delightful occasions he was fond of
exhibiting, when asked, his powers of rapid speaking, in which he might
have rivalled old Matthews or his son. His favorite feat was repeating
"Says I to my Lord, quo' I--what for will ye no grund ma barley-meal
mouter-free, says I to my Lord, quo' I, says I, I says." He was
brilliant upon the final, "I says." Another _chef-d'oeuvre_ was, "On
Tintock tap there is a mist, and in the mist there is a kist (a chest),
and in the kist there is a cap (a wooden bowl), and in the cap there is
a drap, tak' up the cap, and sup the drap, and set the cap on Tintock
tap." This he could say, if I mistake not, five times without drawing
breath. It was a favorite passage this, and he often threatened to treat
it exegetically; laughing heartily when I said, in that case, he would
not have great trouble with the _context_, which in others cost him a
good deal.
His manners to ladies, and indeed to all women, was that of a courtly
gentleman; they could be romantic in their _empressement_ and devotion,
and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, or Ariosto's knights and the
Paladins of old, must have looked and moved as he did. He had great
pleasure in the company of high-bred, refined thoughtful women; and he
had a peculiar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary mournfulness
of women, and with all in their lot connected with the fruit of that
forbidden tree--their loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and their
pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to their children. I think I
hear him reading the words, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that
she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea" (as if it
was the next thing to impossible), "she may forget, yet will not I
forget thee." Indeed, to a man who saw so little of, and said so little
to his own children, perhaps it may be _because_ of all this, his
sympathy for mothers under loss of children, his real suffering for
their suffering, not only endeared him to them as their minister, their
consoler, and gave him opportunities of dropping in divine and saving
truth and comfort, when the heart was full and soft, tender, and at his
mercy, but it brought out in his only loss of this kind, the mingled
depth, tenderness, and also the peremptoriness of his nature.
In the case of the death of little Maggie--a child the very image of
himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a
keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must
cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first
garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age--this peculiar
meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden
illness, malignant sore throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to
my father as a flower he had the sole keeping of: and his joy in her
wild mirth, his watching her childish moods of sadness, as if a shadow
came over her young heaven, were themselves something to watch. Her
delicate life made no struggle with disease; it as it were declined to
stay on such conditions. She therefore sunk at once and without much
pain, her soul quick and unclouded, and her little forefinger playing to
the last with my father's silvery curls, her eyes trying in vain to
brighten his:--
"Thou wert a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not fitted to be trailed along the soiling earth;
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."
His distress, his anguish at this stroke, was not only intense, it was
in its essence permanent; he went mourning and looking for her all his
days; but after she was dead, that resolved will compacted him in an
instant. It was on a Sabbath morning she died, and he was all day at
church, not many yards from where lay her little corpse alone in the
house. His colleague preached in the forenoon, and in the afternoon he
took his turn, saying before beginning his discourse:--"It has pleased
the Father of Lights to darken one of the lights of my dwelling--had the
child lived I would have remained with her, but now I have thought it
right to arise and come into the house of the Lord and worship." Such
violence to one part of his nature by that in it which was supreme,
injured him: it was like pulling up on the instant an express train; the
whole inner organization is minutely, though it may be invisibly hurt;
its molecular constitution damaged by the cruel stress and strain. Such
things are not right; they are a cruelty and injustice and injury from
the soul to the body, its faithful slave, and they bring down, as in his
case they too truly did, their own certain and specific retribution. A
man who did not feel keenly might have preached; a man whose whole
nature was torn, shattered, and astonished as his was, had in a high
sense _no right_ so to use himself; and when too late he opened his eyes
to this. It was part of our old Scottish severe unsparing
character--calm to coldness outside, burning to fierceness, tender to
agony within.
I was saying how much my father enjoyed women's company. He liked to
look on them, and watch them, listening[21] to their keen, unconnected,
and unreasoning, but not unreasonable talk. Men's argument, or rather
arguing, and above all debating, he disliked. He had no turn for it. He
was not combative, much less contentious. He was, however, warlike.
Anything that he could destroy, any falsehood or injustice, he made for,
not to discuss, but to expose and kill. He could not fence with his mind
much less with his tongue, and had no love for the exploits of a nimble
dialectic. He had no readiness either in thought or word for this; his
way was slowly to _think out_ a subject, to get it well "bottomed," as
Locke would say; he was not careful as to recording the steps he took in
their order, but the spirit of his mind was logical, as must be that of
all minds who seek and find truth, for logic is nothing else than the
arithmetic of thought; having therefore _thought it out_, he proceeded
to put it into formal expression. This he did so as never again to undo
it. His mind seemed to want the wheels by which this is done, _vestigia
nulla retrorsum_, and having stereotyped it, he was never weary of it;
it never lost its life and freshness to him, and he delivered it as
emphatically thirty years after it had been cast, as the first hour of
its existence.
[21] One day my mother, and her only sister, Agnes--married to
James Aitken of Cullands, a man before his class and his
time, for long the only Whig and Seceder laird in
Peeblesshire, and with whom my father shared the _Edinburgh
Review_ from its beginning--the two sisters who were, the
one to the other, as Martha was to Mary, sat talking of
their household doings; my aunt was great upon some things
she could do; my father looked up from his book, and said,
"There is one thing, Mrs. Aitken, you cannot do--you cannot
turn the heel of a stocking;" and he was right, he had
noticed her make over this "kittle" turn to her mother.
I have said he was no swordsman, but he was a heavy shot; he fired off
his ball, compact, weighty, the _maximum_ of substance in the _minimum_
of bulk; he put in double charge, pointed the muzzle, and fired, with
what force and sharpness we all remember. If it hit, good; if not, all
he could do was to load again, with the same ball, and in the same
direction. You must come to him to be shot, at least you must stand
still, for he had a want of mobility of mind in great questions. He
could not stalk about the field like a sharp-shooter; his was a great
sixty-eight pounder, and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that
he rather dropped into the minds of others his authoritative assertions,
and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and
cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they
were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With
all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great
questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick,
_snell_ remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too
unexpected, like lightning--flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church
Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, a word from him
would settle a long discussion. He would, after lively, easy talk with
his next neighbor, set _him_ up to make a speech which was conclusive.
But on great questions he must move forward his great gun with much
solemnity and effort, partly from his desire to say as much of the truth
at once as he could, partly from the natural concentration and rapidity
of his mind in action, as distinguished from his slowness when
_incubating_, or in the process of thought,--and partly from a sort of
self-consciousness--I might almost call it a compound of pride and
nervous diffidence--which seldom left him. He desired to say it so that
it might never need to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any one
else.
This strong personality, along with a prevailing love to be alone, and
dwell with thoughts rather than with thinkers, pervaded his entire
character. His religion was deeply personal,[22] not only as affecting
himself, but as due to a personal God, and presented through the
sacrifice and intercession of the God-man; and it was perhaps owing to
his "conversation" being so habitually in heaven--his social and
affectionate desires filling themselves continually from "all the
fulness of God," through living faith and love--that he the less felt
the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man
who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes under the shadow of
the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as
leading to the next; little interest, except as the time of probation
and sentence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and
in his words, "a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth
was the beginning of what was never to end; sin--his own and that of the
race--was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great
mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it--of its
exceeding sinfulness--haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John
Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim
thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were,
fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This
was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to
the objective reality of his religion--that it was founded upon fact. It
was not the pole-star he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it
was the seaworthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of
hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt
of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made
existence--the being obliged to continue to be--a doubtful privilege.
[22] In his own words, "A personal Deity is the soul of Natural
Religion; a personal Saviour--the real living Christ--is the
soul of Revealed Religion."
When oppressed with this feeling,--"the burden and the mystery of all
this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world
into the unchangeable and endless next,--I have heard him, with deep
feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines:--
"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariots hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity."
His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men,
as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him,
as it were, live and commune with the dead--made him intimate, not
merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but
with themselves--Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert,
Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry,
Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray,
Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[23] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander,
etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the
author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest
of men,--with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized
with them. He had thought much more about them--would have had more to
say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living
men.[24] He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held
in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number
of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of
fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Huetten's autograph on
Erasmus' beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe's (spelt How) on
the first edition of Milton's Speech on Unlicensed Printing.[25] He
began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to
his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed,
no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the
book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in
his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as
illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical
epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of
great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books,
pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body--the
Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions--but to Nonconformity
and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and
religious, in every form,--for this, after the great truths, duties, and
expectations of his faith, was the one master-passion of his
life--liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual
and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this
as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis.
For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of
letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to
his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all
risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688--the right and power
of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their
own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.
[23] David Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_ he knew thoroughly,
and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to
say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary
power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence
of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; "It's all
there, if you will think it out."
[24] This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits,
especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put
portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of
realizing their authors; and in exhibitions of pictures he
was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most
tiresome departments, the portraits, than with all else. He
was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at
collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in
his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for
the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means
include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all
_were_ his friends:--
Robert Hall--Dr. Carey--Melancthon--Calvin--Pollok--Erasmus
(very like "Uncle Ebenezer")--John Knox--Dr. Waugh--John
Milton (three all framed)--Dr. Dick--Dr. Hall--Luther
(two)--Dr. Heugh--Dr. Mitchell--Dr. Balmer--Dr.
Henderson--Dr. Wardlaw--Shakspeare (a small oil painting
which he had since ever I remember)--Dugald Stewart--Dr.
Innes--Dr. Smith, Biggar--the two Erskines and Mr.
Fisher--Dr. John Taylor of Toronto--Dr. Chalmers--Mr.
William Ellis--Rev. James Elles--J. B.
Patterson--Vinet--Archibald M'Lean--Dr. John
Erskine--Tholuck--John Pym--Gesenius--Professor
Finlayson--Richard Baxter--Dr. Lawson--Dr. Peddie (two, and
a copy of Joseph's noble bust); and they were thus all about
him for no other reason than that he liked to look at and
think of them through their countenances.
[25] In a copy of Baxter's Life and Times, which he picked up at
Maurice Ogle's shop in Glasgow, which had belonged to Anna,
Countess of Argyll, besides her autograph, there is a most
affecting and interesting note in that venerable lady's
handwriting. It occurs on the page where Baxter brings a
charge of want of veracity against her eldest and
name-daughter who was perverted to Popery. They are in a
hand tremulous with age and feeling:--"I can say w^t truth I
neuer in all my lyff did hear hir ly, and what she said, if
it was not trew, it was by others sugested to hir, as y^t
she wold embak on Wedensday. She belived she wold, bot thy
took hir, alles! from me who never did sie her mor. The
minester of Cuper, Mr. John Magill, did sie hir at Paris in
the convent. Said she was a knowing and vertuous person, and
hed retined the living principels of our relidgon, which
made him say it was good to grund young persons weel in ther
relidgion, as she was one it appired weel grunded."
The following is Lord Lindsay's letter, on seeing this
remarkable marginal note:--
EDINBURGH, DOUGLAS' HOTEL,
_26th December 1856._
MY DEAR SIR,--I owe you my sincerest thanks for your
kindness in favoring me with a sight of the volume of
Baxter's Life, which formerly belonged to my ancestrix,
Anna, Countess of Argyll. The MS. note inserted by her in it
respecting her daughter is extremely interesting. I had
always been under the impression that the daughter had died
very shortly after her removal to France, but the contrary
appears from Lady Argyll's memorandum. That memorandum
throws also a pleasing light on the later life of Lady Anna,
and forcibly illustrates the undying love and tenderness of
the aged mother, who must have been very old when she penned
it, the book having been printed as late as 1696.
I am extremely obliged to you for communicating to me this
new and very interesting information.--Believe me, my dear
Sir, your much obliged and faithful servant,