and religion exalted and purified them. His powers were all on so large a scale, the motive forces in him, so to speak, were so strong and so rapid, that, without religion, he might have been overbearing or domineering. But nothing of this leaven remained in him after his conversion; he was ever kind, gentle, and, even to a great extent, yielding. From early life he was noted for frankness and cordiality; and among his college friends, as in after life, he was deemed the soul of honour. The same elements of character which, under the guidance of the Divine Spirit, made him so active and zealous for the welfare of mankind at large, were also fruitful of kindness and blessing to those immediately around him. His domestic relations were of the happiest kind, and he was most happy in enjoying them. His grief for the loss of his first wife was that penetrating and yet long-enduring sorrow of which none but fine natures are capable; and yet it was never weak or morbid in its manifestations. He thus describes her in a beautiful paragraph in the Preface to his Travels :

"I remained more than a year in Paris, deriving no benefit from the best medical advice which that capital afforded, and hovering continually upon the borders of the grave. I was accompanied, however, by a beloved and honoured wife, herself in the vigour and bloom of health, and every way fitted to be the minister of the richest earthly blessings which it has pleased God to confer upon me. Rarely endowed with the talent of doing good and communicating happiness, and a bright example of the conjugal virtues-patient, indefatigable, and inventive; full of cheerfulness, and hope, and courage, and faith, she was the angel of my sick-room, who watched by my restless pillow day and night during these dreary months, anticipating and satisfying the wants of my situation with a skill and untiring assiduity which strong affection alone can inspire and sustain. It is not surprising, perhaps, that, under the divine blessing upon auspices so benign, I passed successfully through this trying crisis."-Life, vol. i, pp. 217, 218.

One of his letters soon after reveals tenderly the character of his grief, and at the same time exhibits the depth and tenderness of his own nature, telling his friends at home that his absence in Europe would now be prolonged, and that he should "wander a little longer among strangers," because he could not bear the condolence of friends.

A man of such qualities could not but be an admirable social companion. Dr. Olin's generous affections were a magnet of such powerful attraction that none came within the sphere of its influence without obeying the charm. Men and women of all classes, and of all degrees of culture, old and young, alike yielded to the fascinations of his manner and to the tenderness of his heart. Like Dr. Johnson, he aimed to keep his friendships ever in repair by forming new associates, wherever he could find suitable ones, especially among

the young. "Young men," he said, "are less worldly, more frank and fearless, and, as a class, they are more intelligent and of larger views. To keep up communication with the warmest hearts postpones the coming of the chills of selfishness, caution, and superannuation." Among his friends he was unreserved and even playful; yet never at the sacrifice, even in the slightest degree, of the commanding dignity which was natural to him. He was not a man of wit, in the full sense of the word; but with humour, springing from a warm and sympathizing heart, and, in its genial manifestations, seizing upon the feelings of others with a kind attraction, he was largely endowed. We should be glad to cite some of the abundant illustrations of this quality which the volumes before us afford; but our limits forbid.

The intellect of Dr. Olin was of the highest class. His printed works, though they are full of original thinking, and display to very great advantage the massive qualities of his mind, are yet an inadequate exhibition of his powers. Like Coleridge, he could only be judged of by those who knew him personally. He never had health enough to do full justice to his powers in writing on any subject; for many years he was almost a stranger to books; and even continuous thinking was interdicted. To minute scholarship, therefore, he could lay no claim; but a broad and deep foundation had been laid in the severe studies of his youth and earlier manhood; and, when in college, as we have seen, he was head and shoulders above his fellows. Dr. Bates remarks that even at that early age "his perceptive faculties were ready, acute, and far-seeing; his reflective powers strong, sound, and severe. His powers of discrimination and analysis were wonderful. Indeed, the several faculties of his giant mind seemed to be developed together, and cultivated with great equality, so as to exhibit a beautiful symmetry of intellectual character." In spite of physical weakness, his mental forces were always robust; indeed vigour, rather than elegance, was the characteristic quality of his mind. When he was able to read, he gave himself to the study mainly of the English writers marked by strong common-sense: with books of poetry and fancy he meddled very little. Butler's Analogy was always one of his hand-books. In late years he greatly affected John Foster, in whose rugged strength and force he found qualities eminently congenial to his own; so, too, he sympathized thoroughly with Thomas Arnold, with whom he had many points in common. It is quite characteristic of him, moreover, that he could not tolerate Thomas Carlyle-except for his Cromwell; the attraction there, by the law of affinities, being the stern, rough honesty of the Puritan soldier. But through

out his life he was a thinker, rather than a student of books; and there were few subjects of theology, education, or social science, on which he had not thought profoundly, and come to fixed conclusions from which he could not be shaken. Though he never pursued extensively what is commonly called speculative philosophy, he had yet thoroughly mastered the fundamental laws of human thought, which underlie all true philosophy; and in these grooves, so to speak, his mind worked, in the examination of the problems of life as they came up. On most of the profound topics of society, in regard to which the generality of men-even cultivated men-never get beyond the sphere of mere opinion, and so are never strongly fixed in any view, he dwelt in the sphere of thought, and his convictions had thus steadfast foundations whereon to rest. His writings of all classes-sermons, lectures, travels-abound in philosophical insight, as well as in practical wisdom. Had he chosen to devote himself to philosophical studies, strictly so called, he would doubtless have illuminated the history of the human mind. Eminently healthy in its action, his intellect was yet eminently acute and penetrating; he had a wonderful sort of intuition, if such it may be called, into all forms of human thought and knowledge. His judgment, always acting according to settled laws, was so habitually profound, that on subjects of an ethical, political, or religious character, his a priori views were of more value than most other men's judgments upon the largest collection of facts would be. With such qualities of mind and heart, it is not wonderful that Dr. Olin was preeminent as a preacher. Within the year of his conversion he began to preach; and his very first essays were triumphs. "Never," says Dr. Wightman, "had so powerful a preacher burst with so sudden a splendour and so tremendous an effect upon the Church." Nor was this a temporary brilliancy. Olin was no meteor, but a light shining brighter and brighter to the end. The biography contains testimonies from all sorts of people-clergymen, lawyers, students-and from all parts of the country, North, South, and Middle, and all the witnesses unite, in substance, in the declaration that he was the "greatest preacher they had ever heard." Repeated accounts are given of his preaching for two hours or more, and keeping his hearers, the while, not merely unconscious of the flight of time, but all tremulous with excitement and bathed in tears. Nay, far greater effects are recorded of his preaching than these:-the overthrow of bitter and long-cherished prejudices; the clearing up of sceptical doubts and difficulties from honest minds, and the sudden flashing of conviction into dishonest ones; the humbling of proud, ambitious, and worldly-minded men 050

M59 v.36

at the foot of the cross; and the awakening of whole neighbourhoods and populations to a new sense of duty to God and man. Under one sermon, preached at the home of his boyhood, "thirteen persons found peace in believing;" under another, in one of the interior towns of Georgia, "scores literally rushed to the altar when he finished his discourse; the powers of the world to come had won the field-perhaps to the last man." Such accounts of the effects of his preaching abound not merely in the biography before us, but in the newspapers of the land, and in the mouths of men.

What was the secret of this power? It did not lie in excellence of manner; for his gesticulation was singular and awkward, his voice had naturally no peculiar charm, and was not well managed -in a word, his elocution, as such, was very defective. It is not to be found in any remarkable graces of style: both in speaking and writing, though always clear, correct, and strong, he was apt to be diffuse, and sometimes even heavy. His sentences are always solid, but often cumbrous. Nor can we account for the effects of his preaching by any use on his part of the arts of the rhetorician, legitimate or illegitimate; of what value soever these may be to others, they were no aids to him. You never heard from his lips, nor will you find in his writings, passages gorgeous with images and pictures like Jeremy Taylor's; he had little or none of the poetic element; an ornate and glittering style was even his abhorrence. Whether Olin were or were not an orator, was a question his hearers never asked themselves; but that he was an orator, and of the very highest class, is very certain. Wherein, then, did his power consist?

It lay chiefly, we think, in his earnestness. Life, in his view, was nothing, and worse than nothing, without Christianity. This conviction was incorporated with every fibre of his intellectual and moral nature. Religion was with him not merely a sentiment, or a prevailing belief, or an expedient, or a refuge, but a reality, a living presence, the essence, in short, of his life. His conversion to God was a surrender without reserve or stipulation; and from the hour of that change to the hour of his death, the one object of his pursuit was the glory of God. Such convictions are essential to the true Christian orator. It is the intensity of his own feelings that draws the feelings of others, and so fascinates their minds. The heart of the great Christian orator is penetrated by an intense desire for his own sanctification and for the sanctification of others; his eloquence has its roots in his own moral condition and moral sympathies. "His distinctive agency consists in giving a powerful impulse and direction to the minds of others; and he is not equal to this, unless the goal

to which he would direct them is plainly in his eye, and unless he earnestly desires to reach it himself."* It was the remark of Rufus Choate, that "Dr. Olin's preaching was characterized by the same rare combination of forcible thought and deep feeling that gave the preaching of Chalmers its great power." He was so absorbed in his subject as to lose sight of himself and of all earthly considertions in the greatness of his theme. Whatever would subserve the grand purpose of interesting his hearers in this theme-whether argument, illustration, description, or exhortation-he would introduce: for all beyond he had no solicitude, never admitting a thought however striking, or an image however graceful and pleasing, if irrelevant to his main purpose. You felt, in hearing him, from the very opening of his exordium, that a great and earnest mind was dealing with you on topics of the profoundest interest both to him and to yourself; and whether you would or no, his mighty thoughts penetrated your intellect, and his overwhelming tide of feeling carried away your heart.

"You would as soon have looked to see the waters of Niagara pause to dally with the wild flowers on the margin, as entertained the remotest suspicion that Dr. Olin was paying the least attention to the rhetorical fringes of his sentences, or putting himself or the elaborate composition of the sermon forward as an object of admiration. Indeed, you had time for nothing but to tremble while he unlocked the mysterious chambers of your heart, and let in daylight upon your dim moral perceptions; or to lay hold upon Christ as he made the way of justification by faith plain, and led you on to Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling in a path all luminous with "the light of life;" or to exult with a believer's bounding joy while he pointed out the massy structure of your Christianity, its base durable as eternity, its capital high as heaven, and lost in the splendours of God's throne."-Life, vol. i, p. 99.

It may be said that many other preachers are quite as earnest as Olin was, but yet produce little or no effect. We do not believe it. Such earnestness is one of the rarest and richest of human gifts; and when it appears, its power is irresistible: it affects all hearers with an inevitable contagion. Few men-even comparatively few pious and faithful ministers-ever bring up before their minds distinctly the great realities of time and eternity, which form the substantial themes of religion: fewer still habitually contemplate them with emotions proportioned to their tremendous importance. Now it was precisely in such conceptions and emotions that Olin was preeminent. But when this precious earnestness is combined, as it was in his case, with an intellect of imperial rank, with a comprehension of the grandest sweep, with an analytical faculty that pierced and penetrated every mystery of human passion-in short, with

Theremin, Eloquence a Virtue, p. 71.