"'Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all."
It was no easy matter to get him from home and away from his books. But
once off, he always enjoyed himself,--especially in his visits to
Thornliebank, Busby, Crofthead, Biggar, and Melrose. He was very fond of
preaching on these occasions, and his services were always peculiarly
impressive. He spoke more slowly and with less vehemence than in his own
pulpit, and, as I often told him, with all the more effect. When driving
about Biggar, or in the neighborhood of Langrig, he was full of the
past, showing how keenly, with all his outward reserve, he had observed
and felt. He had a quite peculiar interest in his three flocks, keeping
his eye on all their members, through long years of absence.
His love for his people and for his "body" was a special love; and his
knowledge of the Secession, through all its many divisions and
unions,--his knowledge, not only of its public history, with its immense
controversial and occasional literature, but of the lives and
peculiarities of its ministers,--was of the most minute and curious
kind. He loved all mankind, and specially such as were of "the household
of faith;" and he longed for the time when, as there was one Shepherd,
there would be but one sheepfold; but he gloried in being not only a
Seceder, but Burgher; and he often said, that take them all in all, he
knew no body of professing Christians in any country or in any time,
worthier of all honor than that which was founded by the Four Brethren,
not only as God-fearing, God-serving men, but as members of civil
society; men who on every occasion were found on the side of liberty and
order, truth and justice. He used to say he believed there was hardly a
Tory in the Synod, and that no one but He whose service is perfect
freedom, knew the public good done, and the public evil averted, by the
lives and the principles, and when need was, by the votes of such men,
all of whom were in the working classes, or in the lower half of the
middle. The great Whig leaders knew this, and could always depend on the
Seceders.
There is no worthy portrait of my father in his prime. I believe no man
was ever more victimized in the way of being asked to "sit;" indeed, it
was probably from so many of them being of this kind, that the
opportunity of securing a really good one was lost. The best--the one
portrait of his habitual expression--is Mr. Harvey's, done for Mr. Crum
of Busby: it was taken when he was failing, but it is an excellent
likeness as well as a noble picture; such a picture as one would buy
without knowing anything of the subject. So true it is, that imaginative
painters, men gifted and accustomed to render their own ideal
conceptions in form and color, grasp and impress on their canvas the
features of real men more to the quick, more faithfully as to the
central qualities of the man, than professed portrait painters.
Steell's bust is beautiful, but it is wanting in expression. Slater's,
though rude, is better. Angus Fletcher's has much of his air, but is too
much like a Grecian God. There is a miniature by Mrs. Robertson of
London, belonging to my sister, Mrs. Young, which I always liked, though
more like a gay, brilliant French Abbe, than the Seceder minister of
Rose Street, as he then was. It gives, however, more of his exquisite
brightness and spirit, the dancing light in his dark eyes, and his
smile, when pleased and desiring to please, than any other. I have a
drawing by Mr. Harvey, done from my father for his picture of the
Minister's Visit, which I value very much, as giving the force and
depth, the _momentum_, so to speak, of his serious look. He is sitting
in a cottar's house, reading the Bible to an old bedridden woman, the
farm servants gathered round to get his word.
Mungo Burton painted a good portrait which my brother William has; from
his being drawn in a black neckcloth, and standing, he looks as he
sometimes did, more like a member of Parliament than a clergyman. The
print from this is good and very scarce. Of photographs, I like D. O.
Hill's best, in which he is represented as shaking hands with the
(invisible) Free Church--it is full of his earnest, cordial power; that
by Tunny, from which the beautiful engraving by Lumb Stocks in the
Memoir was taken, is very like what he was about a year and a half
before his death. All the other portraits, as far as I can remember, are
worthless and worse, missing entirely the true expression. He was very
difficult to take, partly because he was so full of what may be called
spiritual beauty, evanescent, ever changing, and requiring the highest
kind of genius to fix it; and partly from his own fault, for he thought
it was necessary to be lively, or rather to try to be so to his
volunteering artist, and the consequence was, his giving them, as his
habitual expression, one which was rare, and in this particular case
more made than born.
The time when I would have liked his look to have been perpetuated, was
that of all others the least likely, or indeed possible;--it was, when
after administering the Sacrament to his people, and having solemnized
every one, and been himself profoundly moved by that Divine, everlasting
memorial, he left the elders' seat and returned to the pulpit, and after
giving out the psalm, sat down wearied and satisfied, filled with devout
gratitude to his Master--his face pale, and his dark eyes looking out
upon us all, his whole countenance radiant and subdued. Any likeness of
him in this state, more like that of the proto-martyr, when his face was
as that of an angel, than anything I ever beheld, would have made one
feel what it is so impossible otherwise to convey,--the mingled
sweetness, dignity, and beauty of his face. When it was winter, and the
church darkening, and the lights at the pulpit were lighted so as to
fall upon his face and throw the rest of the vast assemblage into deeper
shadow, the effect of his countenance was something never to forget.
He was more a man of power than of genius in the ordinary sense. His
imagination was not a primary power; it was not originative, though in a
quite uncommon degree receptive, having the capacity of realizing the
imaginations of others, and through them bodying forth the unseen. When
exalted and urged by the understanding, and heated by the affections, it
burst out with great force, but always as servant, not master. But if he
had no one faculty that might be, to use the loose words of common
speech, original, he was so as a whole,--such a man as stood alone. No
one ever mistook his look, or would, had they been blind, have mistaken
his voice or words, for those of any one else, or any one else's for
his.
His mental characteristics, if I may venture on such ground, were
clearness and vigor, intensity, fervor,[26] concentration, penetration,
and perseverance,--more of depth than width.[27] The moral conditions
under which he lived were the love, the pursuit, and the practice of
truth in everything; strength and depth, rather than external warmth of
affection; fidelity to principles and to friends. He used often to speak
of the moral obligation laid upon every man to _think truly_, as well as
to speak and act truly, and said that much intellectual demoralization
and ruin resulted from neglecting this. He was absolutely tolerant of
all difference of opinion, so that it was sincere; and this was all the
more remarkable from his being the opposite of an indifferentist, being
very strong in his own convictions, holding them keenly, even
passionately, while from the structure of his mind, he was somehow
deficient in comprehending, much less of sympathizing with the opinions
of men who greatly differed from him. This made his homage to entire
freedom of thought all the more genuine and rare. In the region of
theological thought he was scientific, systematic, and authoritative,
rather than philosophical and speculative. He held so strongly that the
Christian religion was mainly a religion of facts, that he perhaps
allowed too little to its also being a philosophy that was ready to
meet, out of its own essence and its ever unfolding powers, any new form
of unbelief, disbelief, or misbelief, and must front itself to them as
they moved up.
[26] This earnestness of nature pervaded all his exercises. A man
of great capacity and culture, with a head like Benjamin
Franklin's, an avowed unbeliever in Christianity, came every
Sunday afternoon, for many years, to hear him. I remember
his look well, as if interested, but not impressed. He was
often asked by his friends why he went when he didn't
believe one word of what he heard. "Neither I do, but I like
to hear and to see a man earnest once a week, about
anything." It is related of David Hume, that having heard my
great-grandfather preach, he said, "That's the man for me,
he means what he says, he speaks as if Jesus Christ was at
his elbow."
[27] The following note from the pen to which we owe "St. Paul's
Thorn in the Flesh" is admirable, both for its reference to
my father, and its own beauty and truth.
"One instance of his imperfect discernment of associations
of thought that were not of a purely logical character was
afforded, we used to think, by the decided and almost
contemptuous manner in which he always rejected the theory
of what is called the double interpretation of prophecy.
This, of course, is not the place to discuss whether he was
absolutely right or wrong in his opinion. The subject,
however, is one of somewhat curious interest, and it has
also a strictly literary as well as a theological aspect,
and what we have to say about it shall relate exclusively to
the former. When Dr. Brown then said, as he was accustomed
in his strong way to do, that 'if prophecy was capable of
two senses, it was impossible it could have any sense at
all,' it is plain, we think, that he forgot the specific
character of prophetic literature, viz., its being in the
highest degree poetic. Now every one knows that poetry of a
very elevated cast almost invariably possesses great
breadth, variety, we may say multiplicity of meaning. Its
very excellence consists in its being capable of two, three,
or many meanings and applications. Take, for example, these
familiar lines in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream:'--
'Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But either it was different in blood,
Or else misgraffed in respect of years,
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up;
So quick bright things come to confusion.'
We remember once quoting these lines to a lady, and being
rather taken aback by her remark, 'They are very beautiful,
but I don't, think they are true.' We really had forgot for
the moment the straightforward, matter-of-fact sense of
which they are capable, and were not adverting to the
possibility of their being understood to mean that--nothing
but love-crosses are going, and that no tolerable amount of
comfort or happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial,
or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent
student of Shakspeare's, however, will at once feel that the
poet's mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he
starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in
the disenchantment to which all lofty imaginations are
liable, the disappointment to which all extravagant earthly
hopes and wishes are doomed. This, in fact, is distinctly
expressed in the last line, and in this sense alone can the
words he regarded as at all touching or impressive. Sudden
expansions and transitions of thought, then, are nothing
more than what is common to all poetry; and when we find the
Hebrew bards, in their prophetic songs, mingling in the
closest conjunction the anticipations of the glories of
Solomon's reign, or the happy prospects of a return from
Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah's
advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect
accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not
to perplex even the most unimaginative student of the
Bible."
With devotional feeling--with everything that showed reverence and godly
fear--he cordialized wherever and in whomsoever it was found,--Pagan or
Christian, Romanist or Protestant, bond or free; and while he disliked,
and had indeed a positive antipathy to intellectual mysticism, he had a
great knowledge of and relish for such writers as Dr. Henry More,
Culverwel, Scougall, Madame Guyon, whom (besides their other qualities)
I may perhaps be allowed to call affectionate mystics, and for such
poets as Herbert and Vaughan, whose poetry was pious, and their piety
poetic. As I have said, he was perhaps too impatient of all obscure
thinking, from not considering that on certain subjects, necessarily in
their substance, and on the skirts of all subjects, obscurity and
vagueness, difficulty and uncertainty, are inherent, and must therefore
appear in their treatment. Men who rejoiced in making clear things
obscure, and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, and spoke
with some contempt of those who were original merely from their standing
on their heads, and tall from walking upon stilts. As you have truly
said, his character mellowed and toned down in his later years, without
in any way losing its own individuality, and its clear, vigorous,
unflinching perception of and addiction to principles.
His affectionate ways with his students were often very curious: he
contrived to get at their hearts, and find out all their family and
local specialities, in a sort of short-hand way, and he never forgot
them in afterlife; and watching him with them at tea, speaking his mind
freely and often jocularly upon all sorts of subjects, one got a glimpse
of that union of opposites which made him so much what he was--he gave
out far more liberally to them the riches of his learning and the deep
thoughts of his heart, than he ever did among his full-grown brethren.
It was like the flush of an Arctic summer, blossoming all over, out of
and into the stillness, the loneliness, and the chill rigor of winter.
Though authoritative in his class without any effort, he was indulgent
to everything but conceit, slovenliness of mind and body, irreverence,
and above all handling the Word of God deceitfully. On one occasion a
student having delivered in the Hall a discourse tinged with
Arminianism, he said, "That may be the gospel according to Dr.
Macknight, or the gospel according to Dr. Taylor of Norwich, but it is
not the gospel according to the Apostle Paul; and if I thought the
sentiments expressed were his own, if I had not thought he has taken his
thoughts from commentators without carefully considering them, I would
think it my duty to him and to the church to make him no longer a
student of divinity here." He was often unconsciously severe, from his
saying exactly what he felt. On a student's ending his discourse, his
only criticism was, "The strongest characteristic of this discourse is
weakness," and feeling that this was really all he had to say, he ended.
A young gentleman on very good terms with himself, stood up to pray with
his hands in his pockets, and among other things he put up a petition he
might "be delivered from the fear of man, which bringeth a snare;" my
father's only remark was that there was part of his prayer which seemed
to be granted before it was asked. But he was always unwilling to
criticize prayer, feeling it to be too sacred, and, as it were, beyond
his province, except to deliver the true principles of all prayer, which
he used to say were admirably given in the _Shorter Catechism_--"Prayer
is an offering up of the desires of the heart to God, for things
agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ; with confession of our
sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies."
For the "heroic" old man of Haddington my father had a peculiar
reverence, as indeed we all have--as well we may. He was our king, the
founder of our dynasty: we dated from him, and he was "hedged"
accordingly by a certain sacredness or "divinity." I well remember with
what surprise and pride I found myself asked by a blacksmith's wife in
a remote hamlet among the hop-gardens of Kent, if I was "the son of the
Self-interpreting Bible." I possess, as an heirloom, the New Testament
which my father fondly regarded as the one his grandfather, when a herd
laddie, got from the Professor who heard him ask for it, and promised
him it if he could read a verse; and he has in his beautiful small hand
written in it what follows: "He (John Brown of Haddington) had now
acquired so much of Greek as encouraged him to hope that he might at
length be prepared to reap the richest of all rewards which classical
learning could confer on him, the capacity of reading in the original
tongue the blessed New Testament of our Lord and Saviour. Full of this
hope, he became anxious to possess a copy of the invaluable volume. One
night, having committed the charge of his sheep to a companion, he set
out on a midnight journey to St. Andrews, a distance of twenty-four
miles. He reached his destination in the morning, and went to the
bookseller's shop asking for a copy of the Greek New Testament. The
master of the shop, surprised at such a request from a shepherd boy,
was disposed to make game of him. Some of the professors coming into
the shop questioned the lad about his employment and studies. After
hearing his tale, one of them desired the bookseller to bring the
volume. He did so, and drawing it down, said, 'Boy, read this, and you
shall have it for nothing.' The boy did so, acquitted himself to the
admiration of his judges, and carried off his Testament, and when the
evening arrived, was studying it in the midst of his flock on the braes
of Abernethy."--_Memoir of Rev. John Brown of Haddington_, by Rev. J.
B. Patterson.
"There is reason to believe _this_ is the New Testament referred
to. The name on the opposite page was written on the fly-leaf.
It is obviously the writing of a boy, and bears a resemblance to
Mr. Brown's handwriting in mature life. It is imperfect, wanting
a great part of the Gospel of Matthew. The autograph at the end
is that of his son, Thomas, when a youth at college, afterwards
Rev. Dr. Thomas Brown of Dalkeith.--J. B."
I doubt not my father regarded this little worn old book, the sword of
the Spirit which his ancestor so nobly won, and wore, and warred with,
with not less honest veneration and pride than does his dear friend
James Douglas of Cavers the Percy pennon borne away at Otterbourne. When
I read, in Uncle William's admirable Life of his father, his own simple
story of his early life--his loss of father and mother before he was
eleven, his discovering (as true a _discovery_ as Dr. Young's of the
characters of the Rosetta stone, or Rawlinson's of the cuneiform
letters) the Greek characters, his defence of himself against the
astonishing and base charge of getting his learning from the devil (that
shrewd personage would not have employed him on the Greek Testament),
his eager, indomitable study, his running miles to and back again to
hear a sermon after folding his sheep at noon, his keeping his family
creditably on never more than L50, and for long on L40 a year, giving
largely in charity, and never wanting, as he said, "lying money"--when
I think of all this, I feel what a strong, independent, manly nature he
must have had. We all know his saintly character, his devotion to
learning, and to the work of preaching and teaching; but he seems to
have been, like most complete men, full of humor and keen wit. Some of
his _snell_ sayings are still remembered. A lad of an excitable
temperament waited on him, and informed him he wished to be a preacher
of the gospel. My great-grandfather, finding him as weak in intellect as
he was strong in conceit, advised him to continue in his present
vocation. The young man said, "But I wish to preach and glorify God."
"My young friend, a man may glorify God making broom besoms; stick to
your trade, and glorify God by your walk and conversation."
The late Dr. Husband of Dunfermline called on him when he was preparing
to set out for Gifford, and was beginning to ask him some questions as
to the place grace held in the Divine economy. "Come away wi' me, and
I'll expound that; but when I'm speaking, look you after my feet." They
got upon a rough bit of common, and the eager and full-minded old man
was in the midst of his unfolding the Divine scheme, and his student was
drinking in his words, and forgetting _his_ part of the bargain. His
master stumbled and fell, and getting up, somewhat sharply said, "James,
the grace o' God can do much, but it canna gi'e a man common sense;"
which is as good theology as sense.
A scoffing blacksmith seeing him jogging up to a house near the smithy
on his pony, which was halting, said to him, "Mr. Brown, ye're in the
Scripture line the day--'the legs o' the lame are not equal.'" "So is a
parable in the mouth of a fool."
On his coming to Haddington, there was one man who held out against his
"call." Mr. Brown meeting him when they could not avoid each other, the
non-content said, "Ye see, sir, I canna say what I dinna think, and I
think ye're ower young and inexperienced for this charge." "So I think
too, David, _but it would never do for you and me to gang in the face o'
the hale congregation!_"
The following is a singular illustration of the prevailing dark and
severe tone of the religious teaching of that time, and also of its
strength:--A poor old woman, of great worth and excellent understanding,
in whose conversation Mr. Brown took much pleasure, was on her
death-bed. Wishing to try her faith, he said to her, "Janet, what would
you say if, after all He has done for you, God should let you drop into
hell?" "E'en's (even as) he likes; if he does, _He'll lose mair than
I'll do_." There is something not less than sublime in this reply.
Than my grandfather and "Uncle Ebenezer," no two brothers could be more
different in nature or more united in affection. My grandfather was a
man of great natural good sense, well read and well knowledged, easy but
not indolent, never overflowing but never empty, homely but dignified,
and fuller of love to all sentient creatures than any other human being
I ever knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, Oscar and Livia: why
so named is a secret I have lost; perhaps it was an Ossianic union of
the Roman with the Gael. Oscar was a broad-nosed, manly, rather
_brusque_ husband, who used to snort when angry, and bite too; Livia was
a thin-faced, meek, and I fear, deceitfullish wife, who could smile, and
then bite. One evening I had lifted both these worthies, by the ears of
course, and was taking them from their clover to their beds, when my
grandfather, who had been walking out in the cool of the evening, met
me. I had just kissed the two creatures, out of mingled love to them,
and pleasure at having caught them without much trouble. He took me by
the chin, and kissed me, and then _Oscar and Livia_! Wonderful man, I
thought, and still think! doubtless he had seen me in my private
fondness, and wished to please me.
He was forever doing good in his quiet yet earnest way. Not only on
Sunday when he preached solid gospel sermons, full of quaint familiar
expressions, such as I fear few of my readers could take up, full of
solemn, affectionate, appeals, full of his own simplicity and love, the
Monday also found him ready with his every-day gospel. If he met a
drover from Lochaber who had crossed the Campsie Hills, and was making
across Carnwath Moor to the Calstane Slap, and thence into England by
the drove-rode, he accosted him with a friendly smile,--gave him a
reasonable tract, and dropped into him some words of Divine truth. He
was thus _continually_ doing good. Go where he might, he had his message
to every one; to a servant lass, to a poor wanderer on the bleak
streets, to gentle and simple--he flowed forever _pleno rivo_.
Uncle Ebenezer, on the other hand, flowed _per saltum_; he was always
good and saintly, but he was great once a week; six days he brooded over
his message, was silent, withdrawn, self-involved; on the Sabbath, that
downcast, almost timid man, who shunned men, the instant he was in the
pulpit, stood up a son of thunder. Such a voice! such a piercing eye!
such an inevitable forefinger, held out trembling with the terrors of
the Lord; such a power of asking questions and letting them fall deep
into the hearts of his hearers, and then answering them himself, with an
"ah, sirs!" that thrilled and quivered from him to them.
I remember his astonishing us all with a sudden burst. It was a sermon
upon the apparent _plus_ of evil in this world, and he had driven
himself and us all to despair--so much sin, so much misery--when, taking
advantage of the chapter he had read, the account of the uproar at
Ephesus in the Theatre, he said, "Ah, sirs! what if some of the men who,
for 'about the space of two hours,' cried out, 'Great is Diana of the
Ephesians,' have for the space of eighteen hundred years and more been
crying day and night, 'Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God
Almighty; just and true are all thy ways, thou King of saints; who shall
not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy.'"
You have doubtless heard of the story of Lord Brougham going to hear
him. It is very characteristic, and as I had it from Mrs. Cuninghame,
who was present, I may be allowed to tell it. Brougham and Denman were
on a visit to James Stuart of Dunearn, about the time of the Queen's
trial. They had asked Stuart where they should go to church; he said he
would take them to a Seceder minister at Inverkeithing. They went, and
as Mr. Stuart had described the saintly old man, Brougham said he would
like to be introduced to him, and arriving before service time, Mr.
Stuart called, and left a message that some gentlemen wished to see him.
The answer was that "Maister" Brown saw nobody before divine worship. He
then sent in Brougham and Denman's names. "Mr. Brown's compliments to
Mr. Stuart, and he sees nobody before sermon," and in a few minutes out
came the stooping shy old man, and passed them, unconscious of their
presence. They sat in the front gallery, and he preached a faithful
sermon, full of fire and of native force. They came away greatly moved,
and each wrote to Lord Jeffrey to lose not a week in coming to hear the
greatest natural orator they had ever heard. Jeffrey came next Sunday,
and often after declared he never heard such words, such a sacred,
untaught gift of speech. Nothing was more beautiful than my father's
admiration and emotion when listening to his uncle's rapt passages, or
than his childlike faith in my father's exegetical prowess. He used to
have a list of difficult passages ready for "my nephew," and the moment
the oracle gave a decision, the old man asked him to repeat it, and then
took a permanent note of it, and would assuredly preach it some day with
his own proper unction and power. One story of him I must give; my
father, who heard it not long before his own death, was delighted with
it, and for some days repeated it to every one. Uncle Ebenezer, with all
his mildness and general complaisance, was, like most of the Browns,
_tenax propositi_, firm to obstinacy. He had established a week-day
sermon at the North Ferry, about two miles from his own town,
Inverkeithing. It was, I think, on the Tuesdays. It was winter, and a
wild, drifting, and dangerous day; his daughters--his wife was
dead--besought him not to go; he smiled vaguely, but continued getting
into his big-coat. Nothing would stay him, and away he and the pony
stumbled through the dumb and blinding snow. He was half-way on his
journey, and had got into the sermon he was going to preach, and was
utterly insensible to the outward storm: his pony getting its feet
_balled_, staggered about, and at last upset his master and himself into
the ditch at the road-side. The feeble, heedless, rapt old man might
have perished there, had not some carters, bringing up whisky casks from
the Ferry, seen the catastrophe, and rushed up, raising him, and
_dichtin'_ him, with much commiseration and blunt speech--"Puir auld
man, what brocht ye here in sic a day?" There they were, a rough crew,
surrounding the saintly man, some putting on his hat, sorting and
cheering him, and others knocking the balls off the pony's feet, and
stuffing them with grease. He was most polite and grateful, and one of
these cordial ruffians having pierced a cask, brought him a horn of
whisky, and said, "Tak that, it'll hearten ye." He took the horn, and
bowing to them, said, "Sirs, let us give thanks!" and there, by the
road-side, in the drift and storm, with these wild fellows, he asked a
blessing on it, and for his kind deliverers, and took a tasting of the
horn. The men cried like children. They lifted him on his pony, one
going with him, and when the rest arrived in Inverkeithing, they
repeated the story to everybody, and broke down in tears whenever they
came to the blessing. "And to think o' askin' a blessin' on a tass o'
whisky!" Next Presbytery day, after the ordinary business was over, he
rose up--he seldom spoke--and said, "Moderator, I have something
personal to myself to say. I have often said, that real kindness belongs
only to true Christians, but"--and then he told the story of these men;
"but more true kindness I never experienced than from these lads. They
may have had the grace of God, I don't know; but I never mean again to
be so _positive_ in speaking of this matter."
When he was on a missionary tour in the north, he one morning met a band
of Highland shearers on their way to the harvest; he asked them to stop
and hear the word of God. They said they could not, as they had their
wages to work for. He offered them what they said they would lose; to
this they agreed, and he paid them, and closing his eyes engaged in
prayer; when he had ended, he looked up, and his congregation had
vanished! His shrewd brother Thomas, to whom he complained of this
faithlessness, said, "Eben, the next time ye pay folk to hear you
preach, keep your eyes open, and pay them when you are done." I
remember, on another occasion, in Bristo Church, with an immense
audience, he had been going over the Scripture accounts of great sinners
repenting and turning to God, repeating their names, from Manasseh
onwards. He seemed to have closed the record, when, fixing his eyes on
the end of the central passage, he called out abruptly, "I see a man!"
Every one looked to that point,--"I see a man of Tarsus; and he says,
Make mention of me!" It must not be supposed that the discourses of
"Uncle Ebenezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were
unwritten or extempore; they were carefully composed and written
out,--only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly
when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered--they came
on him again.
The Rev. John Belfrage, M. D., had more power over my father's actions
and his relations to the world, than any other of his friends: over his
thoughts and convictions proper, not much,--few living men had, and even
among the mighty dead, he called no man master. He used to say that the
three master intellects devoted to the study of divine truth since the
apostles, were Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards; but that even
they were only _primi inter pares_,--this by the bye.
On all that concerned his outward life as a public teacher, as a father,
and as a member of society, he consulted Dr. Belfrage, and was swayed
greatly by his judgment, as, for instance, the choice of a profession
for myself, his second marriage, etc. He knew him to be his true friend,
and not only wise and honest, but preeminently a man of affairs, _capax
rerum_. Dr. Belfrage was a great man _in posse_, if ever I saw one,--"a
village Hampden." Greatness was of his essence; nothing paltry, nothing
secondary, nothing untrue. Large in body, large and handsome in face,
lofty in manner to his equals or superiors;[28] homely, familiar,
cordial with the young and the poor,--I never met with a more truly
royal nature--more native and endued to rule, guide, and benefit
mankind. He was forever scheming for the good of others, and chiefly in
the way of helping them to help themselves. From a curious want of
ambition--his desire for advancement was for that of his friends, not
for his own, and here he was ambitious and zealous enough,--from
non-concentration of his faculties in early life, and from an affection
of the heart which ultimately killed him--it was too big for his body,
and, under the relentless hydrostatic law, at last shattered the
tabernacle it moved, like a steam-engine too powerful for the vessel it
finds itself in,--his mental heart also was too big for his
happiness,--from these causes, along with a love for gardening, which
was a passion, and an inherited competency, which took away what John
Hunter calls "the stimulus of necessity," you may understand how this
remarkable man--instead of being a Prime Minister, a Lord Chancellor, or
a Dr. Gregory, a George Stephenson, or likeliest of all, a John Howard,
without some of his weaknesses, lived and died minister of the small
congregation of Slateford, near Edinburgh. It is also true that he was a
physician, and an energetic and successful one, and got rid of some of
his love of doing good to and managing human beings in this way; he was
also an oracle in his district, to whom many had the wisdom to go to
take as well as ask advice, and who was never weary of entering into the
most minute details, and taking endless pains, being like Dr. Chalmers a
strong believer in "the power of littles." It would be out of place,
though it would be not uninteresting, to tell how this great resident
power--this strong will and authority, this capacious, clear, and
beneficent intellect--dwelt in its petty sphere, like an oak in a
flower-pot; but I cannot help recalling that signal act of friendship
and of power in the matter of my father's translation from Rose Street
to Broughton Place, to which you have referred.
[28] On one occasion, Mr. Hall of Kelso, an excellent but very
odd man, in whom the _ego_ was very strong, and who, if he
had been a Spaniard, would, to adopt Coleridge's story, have
taken off or touched his hat whenever he spoke of himself,
met Dr. Belfrage in the lobby of the Synod, and drawing
himself up as he passed, he muttered, "high and michty!"
"There's a pair of us, Mr. Hall."
It was one of the turning-points of my father's history. Dr. Belfrage,
though seldom a speaker in the public courts of his church, was always
watchful of the interests of the people and of his friends. On the Rose
Street question he had from the beginning formed a strong opinion. My
father had made his statement, indicating his leaning, but leaving
himself absolutely in the hands of the Synod. There was some speaking,
all on one side, and for a time the Synod seemed to incline to be
absolute, and refuse the call of Broughton Place. The house was
everywhere crowded, and breathless with interest, my father sitting
motionless, anxious, and pale, prepared to submit without a word, but
retaining his own mind; everything looked like a unanimous decision for
Rose Street, when Dr. Belfrage rose up and came forward into the
"passage," and with his first sentence and look, took possession of the
house. He stated, with clear and simple argument, the truth and reason
of the case; and then having fixed himself there, he took up the
personal interests and feelings of his friend, and putting before them
what they were about to do in sending back my father, closed with a
burst of indignant appeal--"I ask you now, not as Christians, I ask you
as gentlemen, are you prepared to do this?" Every one felt it was
settled, and so it was. My father never forgot this great act of his
friend.
This remarkable man, inferior to my father in learning, in intensity, in
compactness and in power of--so to speak--_focussing_ himself,--admiring
his keen eloquence, his devotedness to his sacred art, rejoicing in his
fame, jealous of his honor--was, by reason of his own massive
understanding, his warm and great heart, and his instinctive knowledge
of men, my father's most valued friend, for he knew best and most of
what my father knew least; and on his death, my father said he felt
himself thus far unprotected and unsafe. He died at Rothesay of
hypertrophy of the heart. I had the sad privilege of being with him to
the last; and any nobler spectacle of tender, generous affection, high
courage, child-like submission to the Supreme Will, and of magnanimity
in its true sense, I do not again expect to see. On the morning of his
death he said to me, "John, come and tell me honestly how this is to
end; tell me the last symptoms in their sequence." I knew the man, and
was honest, and told him all I knew. "Is there any chance of stupor or
delirium?" "I think not. Death (to take Bichat's division) will begin at
the heart itself, and you will die conscious." "I am glad of that. It
was Samuel Johnson, wasn't it, who wished not to die unconscious, that
he might enter the eternal world with his mind unclouded; but you know,
John, that was physiological nonsense. We leave the brain, and all this
ruined body, behind; but I would like to be in my senses when I take my
last look of this wonderful world," looking across the still sea towards
the Argyllshire hills, lying in the light of sunrise, "and of my
friends--of you," fixing his eyes on a faithful friend and myself. And
it was so; in less than an hour he was dead, sitting erect in his
chair--his disease had for weeks prevented him from lying down,--all the
dignity, simplicity, and benignity of its master resting upon, and, as
it were, supporting that "ruin," which he had left.
I cannot end this tribute to my father's friend and mine, and my own
dear and earliest friend's father, without recording one of the most
extraordinary instances of the power of will, under the pressure of
affection, I ever witnessed or heard of. Dr. Belfrage was twice married.
His second wife was a woman of great sweetness and delicacy, not only of
mind, but, to his sorrow, of constitution. She died, after less than a
year of singular and unbroken happiness. There was no portrait of her.
He resolved there should be one; and though utterly ignorant of drawing,
he determined to do it himself. No one else could have such a perfect
image of her in his mind, and he resolved to realize this image. He got
the materials for miniature painting, and, I think, eight prepared ivory
plates. He then shut himself up from every one, and from everything, for
fourteen days, and came out of his room, wasted and feeble, with one of
the plates (the others he had used and burnt), on which was a portrait,
full of subtle likeness, and drawn and colored in a way no one could
have dreamt of, having had such an artist. I have seen it; and though I
never saw the original I felt that it must be like, as indeed every one
who knew her said it was. I do not, as I said before, know anything more
remarkable in the history of human sorrow and resolve.
I remember well that Dr. Belfrage was the first man I ever heard speak
of Free-trade in religion and in education. It was during the first
election after the Reform Bill, when Sir John Dalrymple, afterwards Lord
Stair, was canvassing the county of Mid-Lothian. They were walking in
the doctor's garden, Sir John anxious and gracious. Dr. Belfrage, like,
I believe, every other minister in his body, was a thorough-going
Liberal, what was then called a Whig; but partly from his natural sense
of humor and relish of power, and partly, I believe, for my benefit, he
was putting the Baronet through his facings with some strictness,
opening upon him startling views, and ending by asking him, "Are you,
Sir John, for free-trade in corn, free-trade in education, free-trade in
religion? I am." Sir John said, "Well, doctor, I have heard of
free-trade in corn, but never in the other two." "You'll hear of them
before ten years are gone, Sir John, or I'm mistaken."
I have said thus much of this to me memorable man, not only because he
was my father's closest and most powerful personal friend, but because
by his word he probably changed the whole future course of his life.
Devotion to his friends was one of the chief ends of his life, not
caring much for, and having in the affection of his heart a warning
against the perils and excitement of distinction and energetic public
work, he set himself far more strenuously than for any selfish object,
to promote the triumphs of those whom his acquired instinct--for he knew
a man as a shepherd knows a sheep, or "_Caveat Emptor_" a horse--picked
out as deserving them. He rests in Colinton churchyard,
"Where all that mighty heart is lying still,"--
his only child William Henry buried beside him. I the more readily pay
this tribute to Dr. Belfrage, that I owe to him the best blessing of my
professional and one of the best of my personal life--the being
apprenticed to Mr. Syme. This was his doing. With that sense of the
capacities and capabilities of other men, which was one of his gifts, he
predicted the career of this remarkable man. He used to say, "Give him
life, let him live, and I know what and where he will be thirty years
hence;" and this long before our greatest clinical teacher and wisest
surgeon, had made the public and the profession feel and acknowledge the
full weight of his worth.
Another life-long and ever strengthening friendship was that with James
Henderson, D. D., Galashiels, who survived my father only a few days.
This remarkable man, and exquisite preacher, whose intellect and worth
had for nearly fifty years glowed with a pure, steady, and ever-growing
warmth and lustre in his own region, died during the night and probably
asleep, when, like Moses, no one but his Maker was with him. He had for
years labored under that form of disease of the heart called _angina
pectoris_ (Dr. Arnold's disease), and for more than twenty years lived
as it were on the edge of instant death; but during his later years his
health had improved, though he had always to "walk softly," like one
whose next step might be into eternity. This bodily sense of peril gave
to his noble and leonine face a look of suffering and of seriousness,
and of what, in his case, we may truly call godly fear, which all must
remember. He used to say he carried his grave beside him. He came in to
my father's funeral, and took part in the services. He was much
affected, and we fear the long walk through the city to the burial-place
was too much for him; he returned home, preached a sermon on his old and
dear friend's death of surpassing beauty. The text was, "For me to live
is Christ, and to die is gain." It was, as it were, his own funeral
sermon too, and there was, besides its fervor, depth, and
heavenly-mindedness, a something in it that made his old hearers
afraid--as if it were to be the last crush of the grapes. In a letter to
me soon after the funeral, he said:--"His removal is another _memento_
to me that my own course is drawing near to its end. Nearly all of my
contemporaries and of the friends of my youth are now gone before me.
Well! I may say, in the words of your friend Vaughan--
'They are all gone to that world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory's calm, and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth cheer.'"
The evening before his death he was slightly unwell, and next morning,
not coming down as usual, was called, but did not answer; and on going
in, was found in the posture of sleep, quite dead: at some unknown hour
of the night _abiit ad plures_--he had gone over to the majority, and
joined the famous nations of the dead. _Tu vero felix non vitae tantum
claritate, sed etiam opportunitate mortis!_ dying with his lamp burning,
his passport made out for his journey; death an instant act, not a
prolonged process of months, as with his friend.
I have called Dr. Henderson a remarkable man, and an exquisite preacher;
he was both, in the strict senses of the words. He had the largest brain
I ever saw or measured. His hat had to be made for him; and his head was
great in the nobler regions; the anterior and upper were full, indeed
immense. If the base of his brain and his physical organization,
especially his circulating system, had been in proportion, he would have
been a man of formidable power, but his defective throb of the heart,
and a certain lentitude of temperament, made this impossible; and his
enormous organ of thought and feeling, being thus shut from the outlet
of active energy, became intensely _meditative_, more this than even
reflective. The consequence was, in all his thoughts an exquisiteness
and finish, a crystalline lustre, purity and concentration; but it was
the exquisiteness of a great nature. If the first edge was fine, it was
the sharp end of the wedge, the broad end of which you never reached,
but might infer. This gave _momentum_ to everything he said. He was in
the true sense what Chalmers used to call a "man of _wecht_." His mind
acted by its sheer absolute power; it seldom made an effort; it was the
hydraulic pressure, harmless, manageable, but irresistible; not the
perilous compression of steam. Therefore it was that he was untroubled
and calm, though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull;
"strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of
water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His
language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent
medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a
pebble brings out its lines and color. That lovely, and by him
much-loved river was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great,
strong, with a prevailing mild seriousness all along its course, but
clear and quiet; sometimes, as at old Melrose, turning upon itself,
reflecting, losing itself in beauty, and careless to go, deep and
inscrutable, but stealing away cheerily down to Lessudden, all the
clearer of its rest; and then again at the Trows, showing unmistakably
its power in removing obstructions and taking its own way, and chafing
nobly with the rocks, sometimes, too, like him, its silver stream rising
into sudden flood, and rolling irresistibly on its way.[29]
[29] Such an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described
by Dr. Cairns:--"At certain irregular intervals, when the
loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled,
his manner underwent a transformation which was startling,
and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new
inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice
trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a
wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and
his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing
thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession
were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he
panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed
nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of
a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises
of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections
of sacred oratory."--_Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume
of Discourses._
We question if as many carefully thought and worded, and rapidly and by
no means laboriously written sermons, were composed anywhere else in
Britain during his fifty years--every Sunday two new ones; the
composition faultless--such as Cicero or Addison would have made them,
had they been U. P. ministers; only there was always in them more soul
than body, more of the spirit than of the letter. What a contrast to the
much turbid, hot, hasty, perilous stuff of our day and preachers! The
original power and _size_ of Dr. Henderson's mind, his roominess for all
thoughts, and his still reserve, his lentitude, made, as we have said,
his expressions clear and quiet, to a degree that a coarse and careless
man, spoiled by the violence and noise of other pulpit men, might think
insipid. But let him go over the words slowly, and he would not say this
again; and let him see and feel the solemnizing, commanding power of
that large, square, leonine countenance, the broad massive frame, as of
a compressed Hercules, and the living, pure, melodious voice, powerful,
but not by reason of loudness, dropping out from his compressed lips the
words of truth, and he would not say this again. His voice had a
singular pathos in it; and those who remember his often-called-for
sermon on "The Bright and the Morning Star," can reproduce in their mind
its tones and refrain. The thoughts of such men--so rare, so apt to be
unvisited and unvalued--often bring into my mind a spring of pure water
I once saw near the top of Cairngorm; always the same, cool in summer,
keeping its few plants alive and happy with its warm breath in winter,
floods and droughts never making its pulse change; and all this because
it came from the interior heights, and was distilled by nature's own
cunning, and had taken its time--was indeed a well of living water. And
with Dr. Henderson this of the mountain holds curiously; he was retired,
but not concealed; and he was of the primary formation, he had no
_organic remains_ of other men in him; he liked and fed on all manner of
literature; knew poetry well; but it was all outside of him; his
thoughts were essentially his own.
He was peculiarly a preacher for preachers, as Spenser is a poet for
poets. They felt he was a master. He published, after the entreaties of
years, a volume of sermons which has long been out of print, and which
he would never prepare for a second edition; he had much too little of
the love of fame, and though not destitute of self-reliance and
self-value, and resolved and unchangeable to obstinacy, he was not in
the least degree vain.
But you will think I am writing more about my father's friends and
myself than about him. In a certain sense we may know a man by his
friends; a man chooses his friends from harmony, not from sameness, just
as we would rather sing in parts than all sing the air. One man fits
into the mind of another not by meeting his points, but by dovetailing;
each finds in the other what he in a double sense wants. This was true
of my father's friends. Dr. Balmer was like him in much more than
perhaps any,--in love of books and lonely study, in his general views of
divine truth, and in their metaphysical and literary likings, but they
differed deeply. Dr. Balmer was serene and just rather than subtle and
profound; his was the still, translucent stream,--my father's the rapid,
and it might be deep; on the one you could safely sail, the other
hurried you on, and yet never were two men, during a long life of
intimate intercourse, more cordial.
I must close the list; one only and the best--the most endeared of them
all--Dr. Heugh. He was, in mental constitution and temper, perhaps more
unlike my father than any of the others I have mentioned. His was
essentially a practical understanding; he was a man of action, a man for
men more than for man, the curious reverse in this of my father. He
delighted in public life, had a native turn for affairs, for all that
society needs and demands,--clear-headed, ready, intrepid, adroit; with
a fine temper, but keen and honest, with an argument and a question and
a joke for every one; not disputatious, but delighting in a brisk
argument, fonder of wrestling than of fencing, but ready for action; not
much of a long shot, always keeping his eye on the immediate, the
possible, the attainable, but in all this guided by genuine principle,
and the finest honor and exactest truth. He excelled in the conduct of
public business, saw his way clear, made other men see theirs, was
forever getting the Synod out of difficulties and confusions, by some
clear, tidy, conclusive "motion;" and then his speaking, so easy and
bright and pithy, manly and gentlemanly, grave when it should be, never
when it should not--mobile, fearless, rapid, brilliant as Saladin--his
silent, pensive, impassioned and emphatic friend was more like the
lion-hearted Richard, with his heavy mace; he might miss, but let him
hit, and there needed no repetition. Each admired the other; indeed Dr.
Heugh's love of my father was quite romantic; and though they were
opposed on several great public questions, such as the Apocrypha
controversy, the Atonement question at its commencement; and though they
were both of them too keen and too honest to mince matters or be
mealy-mouthed, they never misunderstood each other, never had a shadow
of estrangement, so that our Paul and Barnabas, though their contentions
were sometimes sharp enough, never "departed asunder;" indeed they loved
each other the longer the more.
Take him all in all, as a friend, as a gentleman, as a Christian, as a
citizen, I never knew a man so thoroughly delightful as Dr. Heugh.
Others had more of this or more of that, but there was a symmetry, a
compactness, a sweetness, a true _delightfulness_ about him I can
remember in no one else. No man, with so much temptation to be heady and
high-minded, sarcastic, and managing, from his overflowing wit and
talent, was ever more natural, more honest, or more considerate, indeed
tender-hearted. He was full of animal spirits and of fun, and one of the
best wits and jokers I ever knew; and such an asker of questions, of
posers! We children had a pleasing dread of that nimble, sharp, exact
man, who made us explain and name everything. Of Scotch stories he had
as many original ones as would make a second volume for Dean Ramsay. How
well I remember the very corner of the room in Biggar manse, forty years
ago, when from him I got the first shock and relish of humor; became
conscious of mental tickling; of a word being made to carry double, and
being all the lighter of it. It is an old story now, but it was new
then; a big, perspiring countryman rushed into the Black Bull
coach-office, and holding the door, shouted, "Are yir insides a' oot?"
This was my first tasting of the flavor of a joke.
Had Dr. Heugh, instead of being the admirable clergyman he was, devoted
himself to public civil life, and gone into Parliament, he would have
taken a high place as a debater, a practical statesman and patriot. He
had many of the best qualities of Canning, and our own Premier, with
purer and higher qualities than either. There is no one our church
should be more proud of than of this beloved and excellent man, the
holiness and humility, the jealous, godly fear in whose nature was not
known fully even to his friends, till he was gone, when his private
daily self-searchings and prostrations before his Master and Judge were
for the first time made known. There are few characters, _both sides_ of
which are so unsullied, so pure, and without reproach.
I am back at Biggar at the old sacramental times; I see and hear my
grandfather, or Mr. Horne of Braehead, Mr. Leckie of Peebles, Mr. Harper
of Lanark, as inveterate in argument as he was warm in heart, Mr. Comrie
of Penicuik, with his keen, Voltaire-like face, and much of that unhappy
and unique man's wit, and sense, and perfection of expression, without
his darker and baser qualities. I can hear their hearty talk, can see
them coming and going between the meetinghouse and the _Tent_ on the
side of the burn, and then the Monday dinner, and the cheerful talk, and
the many clerical stories and pleasantries, and their going home on
their hardy little horses, Mr. Comrie leaving his curl-papers till the
next solemnity, and leaving also some joke of his own, clear and compact
as a diamond, and as cutting.
I am in Rose Street on the monthly lecture, the church crammed, passages
and pulpit stairs. Exact to a minute, James Chalmers--the old soldier
and beadle, slim, meek, but incorruptible by proffered half crowns from
ladies who thus tried to get in before the doors opened--appears, and
all the people in that long pew rise up, and he, followed by his
minister, erect and engrossed, walks in along the seat, and they
struggle up to the pulpit. We all know what he is to speak of; he looks
troubled even to distress;--it is the matter of Uriah the Hittite. He
gives out the opening verses of the 51st Psalm, and offering up a short
and abrupt prayer, which every one takes to himself, announces his
miserable and dreadful subject, _fencing_ it, as it were, in a low,
penetrating voice, daring any one of us to think an evil thought; there
was little need at that time of the warning,--he infused his own
intense, pure spirit, into us all.
He then told the story without note or comment, only personating each
actor in the tragedy with extraordinary effect, above all, the manly,
loyal, simple-hearted soldier. I can recall the shudder of that
multitude as of one man when he read, "And it came to pass in the
morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of
Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront
of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten
and die." And then, after a long and utter silence, his exclaiming, "Is
this the man according to God's own heart? Yes, it is; we must believe
that both are true." Then came Nathan. "There were two men in one city;
the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks
and herds; but the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb"--and
all that exquisite, that divine fable--ending, like a thunder-clap, with
"Thou art the man!" Then came the retribution, so awfully exact and
thorough,--the misery of the child's death; that brief tragedy of the
brother and sister, more terrible than anything in AEschylus, in Dante,
or in Ford; then the rebellion of Absalom, with its hideous dishonor,
and his death, and the king covering his face, and crying in a loud
voice, "O my son Absalom! O Absalom! my son! my son!"--and David's
psalm, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness;
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my
transgressions,"--then closing with, "Yes; 'when lust hath conceived, it
bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
Do not err,' do not stray, do not transgress ({me planasthe}),[30] 'my
beloved brethren,' it is first 'earthly, then sensual, then devilish;'"
he shut the book, and sent us all away terrified, shaken, and humbled,
like himself.
[30] James i. 15, 16. It is plain that "do not err" should have
been in verse 15th.
I would fain say a few words on my father's last illness, or rather on
what led to it, and I wish you and others in the ministry would take to
heart, as matter of immediate religious duty, much of what I am going to
say. My father was a seven months' child, and lay, I believe, for a
fortnight in black wool, undressed, doing little but breathe and sleep,
not capable of being fed. He continued all his life slight in make, and
not robust in health, though lively, and capable of great single
efforts. His attendance upon his mother must have saddened his body as
well as his mind, and made him willing and able to endure, in spite of
his keen and ardent spirit, the sedentary life he in the main led. He
was always a very small eater, and nice in his tastes, easily put off
from his food by any notion. He therefore started on the full work of
life with a finer and more delicate mechanism than a man's ought to be,
indeed, in these respects he was much liker a woman; and being very soon
"placed," he had little travelling, and little of that tossing about the
world, which in the transition from youth to manhood, hardens the frame
as well as supples it. Though delicate, he was almost never ill. I do
not remember, till near the close of his life, his ever being in bed a
day.
From his nervous system, and his brain predominating steadily over the
rest of his body, he was habitually excessive in his professional work.
As to quantity, as to quality, as to manner and expression, he flung
away his life without stint every Sabbath-day, his sermons being
laboriously prepared, loudly mandated, and at great expense of body and
mind, and then delivered with the utmost vehemence and rapidity. He was
quite unconscious of the state he worked himself into, and of the loud
piercing voice in which he often spoke. This I frequently warned him
about, as being, I knew, injurious to himself, and often painful to his
hearers, and his answer always was, that he was utterly unaware of it;
and thus it continued to the close, and very sad it was to me who knew
the peril, and saw the coming end, to listen to his noble, rich,
persuasive, imperative appeals, and to know that the surplus of power,
if retained, would, by God's blessing, retain him, while the effect on
his people would, I am sure, not have lost, but in some respects have
gained, for much of the discourse which was shouted and sometimes
screamed at the full pitch of his keen voice, was of a kind to be better
rendered in his deep, quiet, settled tones. This, and the great length
of his public services, I knew he himself felt, when too late, had
injured him, and many a smile he had at my proposal to have a secret
sub-congregational string from him to me in the back seat, to be
authoritatively twitched when I knew he had done enough; but this string
was never pulled, even in his mind.
He went on in this expensive life, sleeping very little, and always
lightly, eating little, never walking except of necessity; little in
company, when he would have eaten more and been, by the power of social
relish, made likelier to get the full good out of his food; never
diverting his mind by any change but that of one book or subject for
another; and every time that any strong affliction came on him, as when
made twice a widower, or at his daughter's death, or from such an
outrage upon his entire nature and feelings as the Libel, then his
delicate machinery was shaken and damaged, not merely by the first
shock, but even more by that unrelenting self-command by which he
terrified his body into instant submission. Thus it was, and thus it
ever must be, if the laws of our bodily constitution, laid down by Him
who knows our frame, and from whom our substance is not hid, are set at
nought, knowingly or not--if knowingly, the act is so much the more
spiritually bad--but if not, it is still punished with the same unerring
nicety, the same commensurate meting out of the penalty, and paying "in
full tale," as makes the sun to know his time, and splits an erring
planet into fragments, driving it into space "with hideous ruin and
combustion." It is a pitiful and a sad thing to say, but if my father
had not been a prodigal in a true but very different meaning, if he had
not spent his substance, the portion of goods that fell to him, the
capital of life given him by God, in what we must believe to have been
needless and therefore preventable excess of effort, we might have had
him still with us, shining more and more, and he and they who were with
him would have been spared those two years of the valley of the shadow,
with its sharp and steady pain, its fallings away of life, its longing
for the grave, its sleepless nights and days of weariness and languor,
the full expression of which you will find nowhere but in the Psalms and
in Job.
I have said that though delicate he was never ill: this was all the
worse for him, for, odd as it may seem, many a man's life is lengthened
by a sharp illness; and this in several ways. In the first place, he is
laid up, out of the reach of all external mischief and exertion, he is
like a ship put in dock for repairs; time is gained. A brisk fever
clarifies the entire man; if it is beaten and does not beat, it is like
cleaning a chimney by setting it on fire; it is perilous but thorough.
Then the effort to throw off the disease often quickens and purifies and
corroborates the central powers of life; the flame burns more clearly;
there is a cleanness, so to speak, about all the wheels of life.
Moreover, it is a warning, and makes a man meditate on his bed, and
resolve to pull up; and it warns his friends, and likewise, if he is a
clergyman, his people, who if their minister is always with them, never
once think he can be ever anything but as able as he is.
Such a pause, such a breathing-time my father never got during that part
of his life and labors when it would have availed most, and he was an
old man in years, before he was a regular patient of any doctor. He was
during life subject to sudden headaches, affecting his memory and
eyesight, and even his speech; these attacks were, according to the
thoughtless phrase of the day, called bilious; that is, he was sick, and
was relieved by a blue pill and smart medicine. Their true seat was in
the brain; the liver suffered because the brain was ill, and sent no
nervous energy to it, or poisoned what it did send. The sharp racking
pain in the forehead was the cry of suffering from the anterior lobes,
driven by their master to distraction, and turning on him wild with
weakness and fear and anger. It was well they did cry out; in some
brains (large ones) they would have gone on dumb to sudden and utter
ruin, as in apoplexy or palsy; but he did not know, and no one told him
their true meaning, and he set about seeking for the outward cause in
some article of food, in some recent and quite inadequate cause.
He used, with a sort of odd shame and distress, to ask me why it was
that he was subjected to so much suffering from what he called the lower
and ignoble regions of his body; and I used to explain to him that he
had made them suffer by long years of neglect, and that they were now
having their revenge, and in their own way I have often found, that the
more the nervous centres are employed in those offices of thought and
feeling the most removed from material objects,--the more the nervous
energy of the entire nature is concentrated, engrossed, and used up in
such offices,--so much the more and therefore, are those organs of the
body which preside over that organic life, common to ourselves and the
lowest worm, defrauded of their necessary nervous food,--and being in
the organic and not in the animal department, and having no voice to
tell their wants or wrongs, till they wake up and annoy their neighbors
who have a voice, that is, who are sensitive to pain, they may have been
long ill before they come into the sphere of consciousness. This is the
true reason--along with want of purity and change of air, want of
exercise,[31] want of shifting the work of the body--why clergymen, men
of letters, and all men of intense mental application, are so liable to
be affected with indigestion, constipation, lumbago, and lowness of
spirits, _melancholia_--black bile. The brain may not give way for long,
because for a time the law of exercise strengthens it; it is fed high,
gets the best of everything, of blood and nervous pabulum, and then men
have a joy in the victorious work of their brain, and it has a joy of
its own, too, which deludes and misleads.
[31] "The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even
robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of
a two years' almost total want of exercise, which it was
impossible to induce him to take.'--_Arnold's Report to the
Committee of Council on Education_, 1860.
All this happened to my father. He had no formal disease when he
died--no structural change; his sleep and his digestion would have been
quite sufficient for life even up to the last; the mechanism was entire,
but the motive-power was gone--it was expended. The silver cord was not
so much loosed as relaxed. The golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain,
the wheel at the cistern, were not so much broken as emptied and stayed.
The clock had run down before its time, and there was no one but He who
first wound it up and set it who could wind it up again; and this He
does not do, because it is His law--an express injunction from
Him--that, having measured out to his creatures each his measure of
life, and left him to the freedom of his own will and the regulation of
his reason, He also leaves him to reap as he sows.
Thus it was that my father's illness was not so much a disease as a long
death; life ebbing away, consciousness left entire, the certain issue
never out of sight. This, to a man of my father's organization--with a
keen relish for life, and its highest pleasures and energies, sensitive
to impatience, and then over-sensitive of his own impatience; cut to the
heart with the long watching and suffering of those he loved, who, after
all, could do so little for him; with a nervous system easily sunk, and
by its strong play upon his mind darkening and saddening his most
central beliefs, shaking his most solid principles, tearing and
terrifying his tenderest affections: his mind free and clear, ready for
action if it had the power, eager to be in its place in the work of the
world and of its Master, to have to spend two long years in this
ever-descending road--here was a combination of positive and negative
suffering not to be thought of even now, when it is all sunk under that
"far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."
He often spoke to me freely about his health, went into it with the
fearlessness, exactness, and persistency of his nature; and I never
witnessed, or hope to witness, anything more affecting than when, after
it had been dawning upon him, he apprehended the true secret of his
death. He was deeply humbled, felt that he had done wrong to himself, to
his people, to us all, to his faithful and long-suffering Master; and he
often said, with a dying energy lighting up his eye, and nerving his
voice and gesture, that if it pleased God to let him again speak in his
old place, he would not only proclaim again, and, he hoped, more simply
and more fully, the everlasting gospel to lost man, but proclaim also
the gospel of God to the body, the religious and Christian duty and
privilege of living in obedience to the divine laws of health. He was
delighted when I read to him, and turned to this purpose that wonderful
passage of St. Paul--"For the body is not one member, but many. If the
whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the whole were
hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every
one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And the eye cannot say
unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I
have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which
seem to be more feeble, are necessary;" summing it all up in words with
life and death in them--"That there should be no schism in the body; but
that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be
honored, all the members rejoice with it."
The lesson from all this is, Attend to your bodies, study their
structure, functions, and laws. This does not at all mean that you need
be an anatomist, or go deep into physiology, or the doctrines of
prevention and cure. Not only has each organism a resident doctor,
placed there by Him who can thus heal all our diseases; but this doctor,
if watched and waited on, informs any man or woman of ordinary sense
what things to do, and what things not to do. And I would have you, who,
I fear, not unfrequently sin in the same way, and all our ardent,
self-sacrificing young ministers, to reflect whether, after destroying
themselves and dying young, they have lost or gained. It is said that
God raises up others in our place. God gives you no title to say this.
Men--such men as I have in my mind--are valuable to God in proportion to
the time they are here. They are the older, the better, the riper and
richer, and more enriching. Nothing will make up for this absolute loss
of life. For there is something which every man who is a good workman is
gaining every year just because he is older, and this nothing can
replace. Let a man remain on his ground, say a country parish, during
half a century or more--let him be every year getting fuller and sweeter
in the knowledge of God and man, in utterance and in power--can the
power of that man for good over all his time, and especially towards its
close, be equalled by that of three or four young, and, it may be,
admirable men, who have been succeeding each other's untimely death,
during the same space of time? It is against all spiritual, as well as
all simple arithmetic, to say so.
You have spoken of my father's prayers. They were of two kinds; the one,
formal, careful, systematic, and almost stereotyped, remarkable for
fulness and compression of thought; sometimes too manifestly the result
of study, and sometimes not purely prayer, but more of the nature of a
devotional and even argumentative address; the other, as in the family,
short, simple, and varied. He used to tell of his master, Dr. Lawson,
reproving him, in his honest but fatherly way, as they were walking home
from the Hall. My father had in his prayer the words, "that through
death he might destroy him that had the power of death,--that is, the
devil." The old man, leaning on his favorite pupil, said, "John, my man,
you need not have said '_that is the devil_;' you might have been sure
that _He_ knew whom you meant." My father, in theory, held that a
mixture of formal, fixed prayer, in fact, a liturgy, along with
_extempore_ prayer, was the right thing. As you observe, many of his
passages in prayer, all who were in the habit of hearing him could
anticipate, such as "the enlightening, enlivening, sanctifying, and
comforting influences of the good Spirit," and many others. One in
especial you must remember; it was only used on very solemn occasions,
and curiously unfolds his mental peculiarities; it closed his
prayer--"And now, unto Thee, O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one
Jehovah and our God, we would--as is most meet--with the church on earth
and the church in heaven, ascribe all honor and glory, dominion and
majesty, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world
without end. Amen." Nothing could be liker him than the interjection,
"as is most meet." Sometimes his abrupt, short statements in the Synod
were very striking. On one occasion, Mr. James Morison having stated his
views as to prayer very strongly, denying that a sinner _can_ pray, my
father, turning to the Moderator, said--"Sir, let a man feel himself to
be a sinner, and, for anything the universe of creatures can do for him,
hopelessly lost,--let him feel this, sir, and let him get a glimpse of
the Saviour, and all the eloquence and argument of Mr. Morison will not
keep that man from crying out, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' That,
sir, is prayer--that is acceptable prayer."
There must be, I fear, now and then an apparent discrepancy between you
and me, especially as to the degree of mental depression which at times
overshadowed my father's nature. _You_ will understand this, and I hope
our readers will make allowance for it. Some of it is owing to my
constitutional tendency to overstate, and much of it to my having had
perhaps more frequent, and even more private, insights into this part of
his life. But such inconsistency as that I speak of--the co-existence of
a clear, firm faith, a habitual sense of God and of his infinite mercy,
the living a life of faith, as if it was in his organic and inner life,
more than in his sensational and outward--is quite compatible with that
tendency to distrust himself, that bodily darkness and mournfulness,
which at times came over him. Any one who knows "what a piece of work is
man;" how composite, how varying, how inconsistent human nature is, that
each of us are
"Some several men, all in an hour,"
--will not need to be told to expect, or how to harmonize these
differences of mood. You see this in that wonderful man, the apostle
Paul, the true typical fulness, the _humanness_, so to speak, of whose
nature comes out in such expressions of opposites as these--"By honor
and dishonor, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet
true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as
chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor,
yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things."
I cannot, and after your impressive and exact history of his last days,
I need not say anything of the close of those long years of suffering,
active and passive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help
or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind
mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant; mourning
also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all
alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever,
or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the
mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay,--dying, as
it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were
obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun
its reign--when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us
with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak--the end came; and
then, as through life, his will asserted itself supreme in death. With
that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he
deliberately composed himself, placing his body at rest, as if setting
his house in order before leaving it, and then closed his eyes and
mouth, so that his last look--the look his body carried to the grave and
faced dissolution in--was that of sweet, dignified self-possession.
I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I
never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say.
But I must end.
Yours ever affectionately,