"I will-I will," exclaimed Waife; and snatching at his hat and staff"Come-come! But Sophy should not learn that you have been herethat I have gone away with you; it might set her thinking, dreaming, hoping-all to end in greater sorrow." He bustled out of the room to caution the old woman, and to write a few hasty lines to Sophy

herself-assuring her, on his most solemn honour, that he was not now flying from her to resume his vagrant life-that, without fail, please Heaven, he would return that night or the next day.

In a few minutes he reopened the room-door, beckoning silently to Lionel, and then stole into the quiet lane with quick steps.

A GREAT preacher is a peculiar and unusual development of nature. It is hard to prevail upon people to confess, in this age, that there is anything which cannot be learned-yet few will be bold enough to place this among the list of acquirable faculties. An orator must be born, like a poet; and even the limited circle of natural orators shrinks into proportions more contracted still, when we specify the manner of the oration. A great preacher requires additional gifts independent of the mere oratorical gift. While his influence lasts, it is such an influence as is possessed perhaps by no other development of genius and of all the endowments of human nature, this is perhaps the rarest. Great command of language, and great skill in putting it together, are powers of literature as well as oratory; and the charm of voice and gesture are common to the actor and the mime as well as to the public speaker. When you add the two together, the result is a Burke or a Macaulay-a splendid, cold-blooded, dazzling mechanism of speech, so perfect in itself that it fills and satisfies the ear, and is independent of all other results-the voice of a charmer, to which the dullest cannot choose but listen. But these endowments will not make a great preacher of the highest fashion of that order of man. It lies in the nature of true oratory to produce this satisfaction and fulness of ear alike and mind. The buzz of applause is but the natural relief of that enthusiastic consciousness of something complete and unimprovable, with which we listen to those full liquid resonant sentences

which thrill us with a pleasure perhaps more perfect in its kind than any other intellectual enjoyment. Music does not approach it, for the very soul of music is wistful-and there is no other art in which we

cannot find something to be improved. There never was poem nor picture which did not leave something desirable unaccomplished, even in the consciousness of its devoutest admirer; but the great orator charms his audience by the most perfect and faultless expression of human art. If the speech is improvable, it is no longer oratory; and the natural result of its perfection is, that the audience, excited to the highest point by that brilliant completeness, rest upon it, and stand still there, in a pause of admiring satisfaction, acquiescence, and content. Friends can but glory in the thought that all opposition is silenced; enemies themselves, being human, can but hold their breath with the universal sentiment. A great oration defeats reason and every mundane faculty-makes an end of argument-fills, as with a meal, the hungry public appetite, which is so seldom content, and reduces the world to a condition of sudden calm and momentary unanimity, which no other exercise of power has a chance to bring.

Few human things share this attribute of perfection. Is this so perfect, one wonders, because we shall have less need for this mortal tool of language in the other world?

The effect of preaching is, and is meant to be, different. It is not the ineffable applause of an audience, satisfied and delighted to the highest

extent of which it is capable, but a stir and tumult of new-awakened thought, a crowd of hasty, restless, eager suggestions, which surge around the great preacher, who has suddenly arrested the world. Content is the last thing in the world which this fashion of oratory engenders. The highest aim of the pulpit is to bring all men, in the first place, to such a noble discontent as will stir them to the deepest and most radical of revolutions. The end of preaching is something to be believed, something to be acted upon, something to do. It has a practical application and purpose, which reaches beyond the range of oratory; and whereas the gift of the orator, as bearing upon matters less important, may be exercised with a certain degree of calmness, and on a moderate amount of conviction, the preacher who has a right to be called great, must first throw himself into his vocation with such a fervour and inspiration, that it is at risk of mind and balance, at risk of the very greatness he is winning, that he exercises his prodigious power. He who would arrest the careless world in the midst of its occupations; he who would compel the multitude to pause and listen; he who would startle the everyday quiet by instant proclamation of that divine Might and Majesty-that awe and terror of death, that glory and solemnity of life unseen-which are nigh to every one of us, must first be so penetrated with the truth he speaks, so confident that what he speaks is startling, terrible, glorious, and of importance beyond all words, that the burden of his prophecy becomes well-nigh the tenure by which he holds his reason and his life. This is not the development of eloquence, staid and dignified, which commands bishoprics and presidential chairs; it is not a gift necessary for the common nourishment of the church; but it is the temper and mood of the old prophets-the cry of one who cometh from the wilderness - the special arbitrary voice calling out from one age to another that world-wide report, with which these sentinels answer each other across the heads of a hundred generations, and which is not, and never will be while this

world remains as it is, an "All's well."

The gift of preaching, in its widest and most general sense, is, let us be grateful for our privileges, the most universally diffused of all gifts. Happy is that man who has not experienced its special development in his own immediate and closest surroundings, and who has yet to discover the remarkable fact, that it is the thing of all others for which his wife, his father, his mother, possibly even the urchin at his knee, is most perfectly qualified. We all preach, con amore, to the extreme extent of our chance; it is the one faculty common to mankind. Honest people, who are contracted by the limits of a private possibility, take it out in revenge, as is natural, upon their friends; and anybody who ever has exercised the gift in public, is but too willing to repeat it on every feasible opportunity: but in this wide and general sense, we are grieved to say, the power of preaching is less popular and welcome than it ought to be. We are pleased to exercise it ourselves, but not to furnish material for the exercise, nor to receive it with due and becoming humility; so that it is impossible to deny that the word has become a synonym for a very unattractive necessity of life. And we are not sure that the general bulk of authorised preachers throw much light upon the matter, or improve in a high degree the regard in which we hold it. Men taken from all classes and complexions of mind, and placed in a position which largely enhances the natural human proclivity towards moral addresses and good advice, stand on their little bit of platform everywhere, most ready, and sometimes urgent, to tell us all that we have to do. We give them that respect which the very name of God's service is enough to secure in this country; but it is undeniable that

we

are not always seized upon, shaken out of our common lethargy, and recalled to thoughts of our real object and destination, by the ministrations of our authorised teachers. Perhaps the whole machinery of the churches has become too absolute and regular for all the exigencies of this variable and changeful human

ity; perhaps an extraordinary occasional office-the ministry of a wandering apostle-might be of more advantage than we are apt to suppose anything so opposite to ordinary rule and decorum could be. At all events, it is true that preaching generally is tinctured with dulness to a very large extent, and that people do not go to church, except in special in stances, with very lively expectations of what they are to hear there; while at the same time it remains certain that no art of human skill, or inspiration of human genius, has ever startled the world into such a universal excitement as this gift of preaching, in the hands of a man to whom Providence had given the mastery of its extraordinary power.

It is not easy to pronounce upon the kind of qualities which make great preachers. They have been, like other great men, of different character and different temperament throughout the different ages of the world. The one thing needful is that the speaker be possessed to the utmost extent of his capacity with the message which he bears to the world-that he be too much absorbed in this to take time for the small dishonesties of eloquence -that he be beyond thought of effect, of reputation, of prudence, of the common barriers which limit common men-but that with a spontaneous flood and overflow he give forth what is in him in that unfailing confidence of response, sympathy, and comprehension, which all great men have. It needs not that he should be wise or always rightthese are qualities of quite another kind; perhaps it is even impossible that the full swell of a merely mortal voice should reach its height of sound at any time without a certain mixture of error; but it is certain that he who stands fearing and trembling over his words, and hesitates to say what he thinks, will, right or not, never be a great preacher. The man who is, does not take time to think what style of preaching his shall be-he does not make up his mind to address the intellectual, or the sentimental, or the imaginative; and the secret of his power is not, in the first place, the manner or the form, the

diction or the argument, which he uses-but the force and fulness with which he pours forth what is in him— a glorious storm of reproof, of discontent, of longing, of hope, sorrow, rejoicing, exultation, the voice and passion of a man, the praise and demonstration of God.

It is not the calm of the pulpit, heaven knows-the calm of the pulpit drives us asleep, exasperates our everyday toils and sufferings with platitudes and placidities, coaxes our superficial sympathies, appeals to our feelings as if men had time to have feelings in these hard labouring days, when everybody runs to and fro, and knowledge and sadness grow upon the burdened world; but the great preacher ventures to go into his pulpit a complete man, with all his natural griefs and loads upon him, not a whit less or more than God has laden him withal, and under the yoke, like us all, speaks, to us all, all that is in his heart. It is thus alone that one man rules over a thousand, that the common limitations of space and number vanish, that the heart of the crowd is pricked with sudden consciousness of all it wants and has not—of all it has, and makes no thanksgiving for: such was the effect wrought some thirty years ago upon the curious crowds of London, by the extraordinary man whose name stands at the head of this page.

At once the greatest and the saddest instance in modern records of his prophetic race-a man whose merest words lift up his reader still into an atmosphere, sublimed and changed, out of the common breatha man standing so close and full at gaze upon his God, that the dazzle of that glory made motes in the common sunshine, till the great soul fell astray, and pursued the motes instead of the light. How it happens that a career so wonderful has passed without record, save of the most trifling and unworthy kind, it is very hard to tell. Every circumstance of interest unites around a man, who in himself is as perfect an example as any discrowned emperor of the fickle popular favour, which crowns and kills, and, more touching and true than any Faustus, declares the mortal weakness which accompanies all

the glory of human mind and spirit. He whose prime of strength was attended by the delicate flattery of the most delicate and noble, yet who died with a heart-break, forgotten of his worshippers, a dethroned king -he whose errors have effloresced and blossomed out into a magnitude he never dreamed of, almost hiding by the name they bear the true story of that life which dimmed its glory by their means; and there is only some tenth-rate hack of literature, or some Dissenting minister bent upon the edification and warning of his young men's society, to read this epic to the world. In the sunless splendour of that sole place in Scotland which has preserved austere and noble walls for a fit shelter to such dust, lies this apostle, whose true sphere was the world, but whom custom cramped into a span of ground too small to give him breathing-room, where his fiery soul consumed itself, and his light went out in darkness. A tragedy more noble or more pitiful has never been enacted in this great theatre of all tragic things. The world and the time, which have changed their fashion, have room now for other battles than those of arms, and know how a hero may be worsted and overthrown by means more subtle than the slaughter of hosts opposed; and we cannot but think that this age, if it paused to look upon the picture, might spare its tears from Brutus and Coriolanus, to spend them over the uncommemorated grave of Edward Irving, a soul as great, a victor as famous, and an end as moving as theirs.

This singular man was born in the end of the last century, in the little town of Annan--born of that Border country, full of ballads, full of traditions, meditative with long stretches of moorland, singing with burns and streams beyond counting, breaking forth into wistful hills, which is, perhaps, as fit a nurse for a poetic child as the grander mountain-country farther north; hills not great enough to overawe, blooming with heather here and there, otherwheres scathed and yellow as if with a fiery breath towers of defence upon high riversides, watching still, through narrow

window and arrow-slit, with the jealous eye of age, how peaceful modern men come and go unchallenged on the southern road;-solitary churchyards in unlikely silent places, some with their rude death-chapel falling into the universal grave, some undistinguished even by such a mark as that-solemn hamlets of the dead; and everywhere running rivers and tributary burns--so frequent, that it is rare to be out of hearing of some tinkle of that fairy music-winding their pleasant way among the fields and trees

"The muse a poet never fand her,

Till by himsel' he learned to wander
Adown some trotting burn's meander."

One can well suppose that Burns had this rhythmical country in his thought when he identified thus, the most poetic and dramatical of all rural rambles, the walk which is accompanied by a living, animate, and companionable stream, the very minstrel and story-teller of nature. This south country divides its heart, according to the different likings of its population, between the faint yet martial reminiscences of the old fights of the March, and those stories of the Covenanters which hang about every glen. The last are the most vivid, as is natural; and Professor Aytoun himself could win little favour for Claverhouse, and still less for the Claverhouse of the district - the "Lagg" who, in that country-side, impersonates the most diabolical ideas of persecution-among the cottages and farmhouses of Annandale, where the fervour of popular execration, and the fiery partisanship of popular sympathy, have not yielded yet to forgetfulness and time. In the little metropolis of this district, with the wan water of Annan at his father's door, and tawny Solway rushing on his banks almost within hearing, Edward Irving was born. There he shared his child's porridge with Hugh Clapperton of Africa, and learned his boy's lessons, where, some time after, another boy called Thomas Carlyle, born of that same big race and poetic country, received the like instruction; and whether the tidal swell and daily ode of the great Firth close by, rung into the