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EDWARD IRVING.

(Concluded from page 120.)

THE inevitable results followed on Irving's adhesion to this new inspira tion. After vainly remonstrating, exhorting, intreating, the London Presbytery, in the year 1832, removed Irving from his charge as minister of the Regent-square church, and closed its doors against him. The Presbytery of Annan followed suit. Reviving against him certain longsmouldering charges of heresy in reference to his views-sound, it would appear to us, as far as they went-concerning the Lord's human nature, which but for these late proceedings would doubtless have been allowed to smoulder on unheeded, they passed in the following year sentence of deposition from the ministry of the Scotch Presbyterian Church against Irving, shirking thus, as the London Presbytery before them had done, to his grief and indignation, the true question which he strove to bring to issue, viz., whether the alleged inspirations were genuine, and whether, on that hypothesis, it could behove any Christian minister to deny the Lord the privilege of speech in His own church? That the Presbyterian Church thus flung away her chance of rescuing from error her brilliant and noble-hearted son, there can be no doubt. Investigations duly conducted in a right spirit, would probably have let in light sufficient to disenchant his candid mind; but content so long to feed on husks of doctrine, on illusive schemes of extraneous salvation by imputations of righteousness and faith alone, it was perhaps too much to expect of such a church to grapple with the startling question-whether there were any kernel of Divine life within, and whether or no this were a true manifestation of it? We say this without disparagement of the many noble and earnest Christians who, far better and more living than their creeds and forms, have adorned and preserved that church from extinction; but we must not, therefore, overlook the stunting and perverting influences of creeds and doctrines false in themselves, and sure to manifest their fatal effects on inferior natures, without life and elevation in themselves to rise above the level of their professed standards; and it was among such that Irving would appear to have found his judges.

But the rescue was at hand, though from a very different quarter. Thus cut off from the church of his fathers, to which he had always clung with profound reverence and affection, Irving's faith, grieved to the very soul as he was, but less for himself than for those whom he conceived to be thus rejecting the Lord's message, neither failed nor faltered. For a time he continued his preachings, both in the open air

and in different places of assembly, from time to time employed for the purpose; and then a church was opened in Newman-street, by the congregation (partly consisting of members of his original flock, but in greater part of others who had joined him, specially attracted by the supposed new revelation) which had followed him in his expulsion from the Regent-square church. This new "Catholic Apostolic Church," with all its services and appointments, was ordered in strict conformity to the dicta of the inspired members of the congregation, to whom Irving, though not always without reluctance, invariably yielded the most implicit obedience. Still to him came no inspiration; but with a loyalty of faith truly sublime, he bowed to those he believed more favoured than himself, even to the point of abstaining at one time for months together from preaching, or taking any share in the services of the church of which he himself was the leader, the founder, and the ruling spirit. Mournful and amazed we may well suppose him to have sat there, while this ardently-prized gift showered on others was denied to him, but notwithstanding all, faithful to the last. Then in compliance with new orders, he appears to have resumed his ministerial functions.

But the incessant labours and anxieties, the wear and tear of body and mind in this life and death struggle of faith and duty against all worldly odds, had done their work on the noble physical frame he had received from nature, and the end was drawing silently nigh. Still he clung to his cherished conviction that the message of the Lord was yet awaiting him, which would call him to a special mission of prophecy and exhortation concerning the proximate appearance of the Lord on earth, which these new inspirations were by him and his followers believed to herald; and partly, it would seem, urged by the anxiety of his friends for his health, partly by directions from the inspired voices, but mainly drawn by the profound conviction that it was in Scotland his long-desired message awaited him, he left London in the September of 1834 to travel by easy stages northwards, taking some of the beautiful scenery of Wales in his way. We have met with nothing more deeply touching than the letters he wrote on this journey, principally addressed to his wife. His exquisite enjoyment of the peaceful beauties of nature as his Master's handiwork, his unflagging sympathy and zeal for the spiritual welfare of others, his struggles against, and intense sufferings under, the increasing ill-health that beset him, his unwavering conviction that these sufferings were but a trial to be fought through and overcome, and that in renewed health and strength he should yet be called to set about his Master's business,-all combine to form a picture which we can only urge our readers to turn to and study for themselves. But his

health failed more and more, and his beloved and devoted wife hastened to meet him at Glasgow, in time to cheer and brighten the last weeks of his closing earthly existence. For there, indeed, the call for which he had so ardently prayed and yearned, awaited him; but it was a call to labour in his Master's vineyard in the true spiritual life and light beyond the grave. The Divine message came indeed to him at last, but it came to break the earthly fetters which trammelled his eager soul; it came to scatter the clouds of sense that obscured his spirit's sight; and who can doubt the blessedness of his awakening to the gracious welcome-" Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord"? Mistaken he indeed was in his anticipation of the visible presence of his Lord on earth-but can we question its more than fruition, in the presence, to which he was summoned, of that Lord in heaven? And what human love or tenderness could have devised so gracious a disenchantment, so gentle an awakening from the mistake of a noble and trusting heart, as that which Love Divine had thus prepared for this way-worn but unfaltering pilgrim in the rough and thorny paths of earth?

To Irving's personal character it is not possible, in a brief notice like this, to do justice; we can but advert to such of its traits as, combined with the peculiarities of his early life and training, appear to us to explain his having been subsequently led away by the delusions to which he accorded such unhesitating credence. Possessed of rare natural gifts, and powers far above the common, both mental and physical, he was especially gifted with a most loving heart, a tempera ment susceptible of the most intense enthusiasm for all that to him appeared good, true, or beautiful. He appears early to have received religious impressions; and his religion was sure to be, like himself, enthusiastic. But all his early associations, all his intellectual training, so far as it possessed any religious bearing, all his theological education and studies, were Calvinistic. The ancient martyrs to his country's faith, the Puritans and Covenanters-tales and legends of whom no doubt tinged all his early religious associations-the old creeds and traditions of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, to which through life he appears to have clung with profound reverence all these were Calvinistic. His religious development, therefore, could not fail to partake intellectually of the naturalism, not to say sensualism, which is the especial characteristic of the Calvinistic faith; an intellectual sensualism, indeed, as distinguished from the grosser, but perhaps not more deadly sensualism of Rome; for the former, if less offensive, is more subtle. For the whole scheme of salvation is so laid out, on

Calvinistic principles, as to appeal to the natural-sensual intellect, by representing its operations as of that external kind of which the senses take cognisance. Man's salvation, namely, is assumed to have been bought by the literal blood of Christ shed upon the cross-not to cleanse man's sins, but to put away God's wrath-and man's individual salvation to be sealed, not by any internal change or cleansing effected by that blood, but by a mere knowing and believing that that blood was shed for him-a merely sensual knowledge and belief, in so far as it clings to an event and transaction which is historically recorded as having taken place in this external world of sense. The very righteousness of the saints is to be imputed, not imparted to them; put on to them like an outside robe, to hide their inward corruptions and deformities, not in to them, to make them pure and perfect in the image of their God and Father. The whole of salvation and redemption being thus banished from man's internal to his external world, it becomes a thing outside of him; and that faith in such a system can have any other than an externalising, which is a sensualising, influence on the religious views and perceptions of the believer, appears to us impossible.

Nor did Irving's intellect escape the bias thus to be anticipated. His heart, indeed, mourned under and strove against the barren and lifeless formalism which surrounded him; but he seems never even to have suspected that grave falses of doctrine lay at the root of this deadness of his national church. When his noble spirit, glowing with spiritual love and zeal, sought escape into a purer and freer atmosphere, yearning, as he expressed it, to make "a demonstration for a higher style of Christianity, something more magnanimous and heroical than this age affects," ("Life," &c., vol. i., p. 141.) he never appears to have dreamed that a nearer approach to pure Christian truth was needed to lead the way to a higher and purer Christianity. How should he? Had he not doubtless been bred and trained in the orthodox faith, that belief in just this creed of justification by faith alone, &c., was the sign and seal of belonging to the elect, and non-belief that of being numbered with the vessels of wrath? More subtly and securely was chain never rivetted around the neck of a hapless prisoner, than this orthodox Calvinistic creed around the consciences of its votaries. The only outlet, therefore, that remained for the restless, unsatisfied yearnings of a nature like Irving's, too large and loving to be at ease in the shackles he wore, was in the truly "orthodox" but impossible external direction for enthusiasm which his mother church permits and clings to.

The literal interpretation of prophecy, pointing to a second coming of the Lord into this natural world, is still a favourite theme with

Calvinistic writers. That the Lord's kingdom being within us, His coming in glory must necessarily be to His kingdom, and consequently an internal coming, appears never to have suggested itself to Irving. Such, indeed, are the sensualising influences alluded to, that it is very doubtful whether he, or any genuine Calvinist, would have admitted any coming" of the Lord, save into the natural world, to be a real coming at all!

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So much for the effects of false training. But in his own character there lay, no doubt, the ground in which this seed of error struck and germinated. Like most men of really great gifts, he appears, though above all the littlenesses of personal conceit and presumption, to have possessed a profound consciousness of, and confidence in, his own powers, and in some more than common lot awaiting him. What then so natural, so inevitable, as that with the dawning hope and belief in his Lord's speedy appearance on earth should spring up the conviction, that his destiny it was to be a favoured instrument in the proclamation, the inauguration of the hoped-for advent? Hence his ardent prayers and yearnings for what he, alas! deemed spiritual gifts-spiritual gifts in which the will and intellect, the spirit, in a word, of the speaker or prophet, bore no share whatever! Hence, too, it was that to those ardent prayers for "bread," as he believed, the answer given was, as he could not believe, a stone-for a stone indeed it was, a mere sensuous manifestation of Truth Divine at best, even had it been genuine, for which his prayers had arisen. But though thus intellectually led astray to hunger for that which was not bread, his heart still trusted and prayed aright-trusted in his Lord's love, prayed for his Master's spirit, his Master's presence. And this prayer, too, was granted, as we have seen, though not according to his anticipation.

We can now, moreover, see how gently and mercifully-in the obscurity and unappreciated labours of his early years, and the to him so grievous privation at a later period of the coveted inspiration showered on far less gifted natures around him-His Father's love applied the chastening discipline which was to refine and perfect into profound humility and childlike dependence on the Divine will, the redundant, almost turbulent, energy, the deep though veiled self-confidence of his natural character. He had always, we are told, a strong, perhaps an overweening, sense of the dignity of the priestly office. Who, then, can over-estimate the selfabnegation, the heroic submission to supposed Divine dictates, which enabled him to sit silently and patiently by, while in his own church, to and for which he had sacrificed everything, his place was filled, his functions performed, and his office taken by others? But thus through trial,