OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY.

SECOND SERIES.-No. 32.

THE REV. JOHN EADIE, D.D., LL.D., &c.

Professor of Biblical Literature and Exegesis in the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

Ir is with a regret which will be very widely shared, both at home and abroad, that we are obliged to introduce our biographical notice of Professor Eadie with a reference to his death, which occurred, after a brief illness, on the 3rd of June last.

John Eadie was born in the village of Alva, in Stirlingshire, on the 9th May, 1813. So far as worldly wealth is concerned, his parentage was humble. At the time of his birth his father was in advanced age; he was his mother's only child; and he had the advantage of careful early training both under her and under his first teachers.

The rudiments of education he received at the parish school of Alva; and he afterwards became a pupil in the academy of the Rev. Mr. Browning, of Tillicoultry, a village about two miles east from Alva. Mr. Browning was a noted disciplinarian, but his stern severity was accompanied with high teaching powers and far more than average scholarship. He spared not the rod, but he spoiled not the child. He has been aptly described as a man "of great, though irregularly-developed and illbalanced powers, of extensive but rather confused information, and of inflexible strength of will;" a stern disciplinarian, who "had all the faith of Solomon in the wholesome efficacy of the rod;" and who regarded the general tendency of the teaching profession at that time to abandon corporal punishment as foolishly and injuriously sentimental; and was never slow to give practical effect to his views."

It would have been interesting to have brought Mr. Browning and Dr. Thomas Arnold into contact with each other. The great Rugby schoolmaster worked on principles very different from those adopted by the pedagogue of Tillicoultry. But both were successful teachers. Probably Dr. Eadie was the 'most distinguished among Mr. Browning's

pupils. Every one knows that Dean Stanley is one of the most eminent of Dr. Arnold's scholars. It is a curious fact that the Dean and Dr. Eadie were intimate friends in later life.

From his earliest years John Eadie displayed a remarkable thirst for knowledge, and an unusually strong power of acquiring and retaining it. He had a singularly retentive memory. Scarcely anything, however trifling, escaped it. Another quality he had in perfection-the power of persistent application to study. If, as Buffon says, “Le génie n'est autre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience," Eadie was a decided genius; but more is implied in "genius" than appears in Buffon's definition.

Eadie had a special liking for classical studies, and at school his main attention was given to the Greek and Roman languages. But his reading at school was by no means confined to the daily task-work, and before entering the University he had a tolerably wide knowledge of English literature much wider than could easily be obtained in the country parts of Scotland early in this century. Libraries and newspapers were not diffused then as they are now. Shakspeare was his favourite author, and he knew by heart most of Burns's poetry. Both these writers were under the ban of the grandmothers, and even of the major part of the grandfathers, of Scottish Dissent; for in their eyes the theatre was the devil's Nous house, and Burns was one of his satanic majesty's ministers. avons changé tout cela.

He was reared in one of the straitest schools of Dissent. His father "Seceder." It would belonged to the Relief Church; his mother was a be tedious and unprofitable to give anything like a history of these sects, or to explain their distinctive tenets during the early life of Eadie. It is sufficient for our present purpose to say that his father's Church-the "Relief Church "-according to the minute by which it constituted itself, originated in 1761, and consisted then of three clergymen and three "ruling elders." These gentlemen "formed themselves into a Presbytery for the relief of Christians oppressed in their Christian privileges." From other parts of this minute, and from extraneous history, it is evident that the oppression, or supposed oppression, from which "relief" was sought, was the induction of clergymen into parishes where the parishioners did not want them. The founder of the sect was Thomas Gillespie, a man of undoubted probity and narrow-mindedness, who died in 1774, and whose memory has recently been revived in Scotland by the successful efforts of his friends to erect in Dunfermline Abbey a monument commemorating the fact that he was expelled from the National Church. We mention this as a sample of ecclesiastical rancour. Not even the grave is sacred from it. Gillespie's grave was made a battle-field between Church and Dissent. Presbyteries and Synods prayed and framed resolutions. A deputation went to London to press on the Board of Works the necessity of publicly recording the expulsion of Gillespie from the

Church, and Lord Henry Lennox intimated his consent to the placing of the proposed inscription on the monument. Cui bono?

The Secession Church, to which Eadie's mother belonged, was an older body of separatists, which left the Church of Scotland in 1733. It had not been long in existence when elements of discord appeared among its members. The result was a subdivision of the sect into the "Associate Synod" and the "General Associate Synod." In the annals of the Church this subdivision is generally known as "The Breach." "The Breach" was healed by a re-union in 1820. Dissatisfaction with the law of patronage, and differences on several doctrinal questions were the original cause of the Secession.*

We have said enough of Eadie's school life to show that his tendencies were towards a professional career. He chose the Church, and at a very early age he left Tillicoultry for the University of Glasgow, in order to qualify himself for admission to the study of divinity in the Hall of the Secession Church. His classical scholarship earned for him not a few University distinctions; and high expectations were formed of his future. He loved knowledge, however, more than honours. He never would "9 cram for an examination. But regular faithful study brought him uncoveted honours, and he left the University with the reputation of a proficient classic, and a man well read in modern literature.

From the College of Glasgow he passed to the Divinity Hall of the United Secession Church, to which his mother had belonged. Here he acquired the Hebrew language and a taste for Oriental literature which increased with the years of his life. The literature of the Bible rather than the theology of creeds was his favourite study. The higher and more searching analysis of dogma, which is characteristic of the present age, was not then attempted in Scotland. To know Calvin was to know the truth. To read Arminius was to be suspected of heterodoxy.

Immediately after leaving the Divinity Hall, and when he had scarcely attained his majority, Mr. Eadie was appointed to the charge of a congregation which had just been formed in connection with the United Secession

"The origin of many Secession congregations is traceable to causes operating anterior to the Secession itself, which causes would almost certainly, sooner or later, have produced a secession of some kind, though the one which is the subject of our remarks had not taken place. The evidence of the late Dr. Cook, of St. Andrew's, before the Committee of the House of Commons on Church Patronage, confirms this remark. Having been asked 'Whether the Secession, which actually took place in 1733, would have taken place at that time, if the question of patronage had not been one of the grounds of it?' he replied, ‘I think it exceedingly likely that it would not, at that particular time. But there might have been some other cause for it, and my opinion is that in the progress of the human mind, and in the progress of civilization, there would have been a secession, though not the particular Secession which was connected in its origin with that particular subject.""""_" Mackelvie's Annals and Statistics of the United Presbyterian Church," p. 7.