EVILS OF FORMALITY.

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ing in the garden, when my thoughts are fullest of our darling. But, indeed, I know not how it is, I think the last two or three days I have been thinking of him too much, and last night I dreamed he was in life, and, though drooping like a flower, giving hope of health again. He was on your knee, and I thought I caught the first sign of hope-to seize him and carry him into the fresh air, when it all vanished before me into the sad reality. Then I addressed myself to my Hebrew studies, at which I continued till I went forth to minister comfort to Mrs. H's family, with whom I worshipped, opening to them that Psalm of divine sorrow (the xlii.) where the Psalmist, in all his sorrows, sees nothing to lament but his distance and separation from the house of God, and the communion of His people. I came back at half-past eight, having several appointments with those who had not spoken to me in time, yet sought with earnestness to approach the table of the Lord. And now, more briefly and less feelingly and spiritually than I would have desired, have I set forth to you the incidents of Thursday, which to my soul hath been a day of consolation. Oh, that the Lord would break these bands of sleep-these heavy eyelids of drowsiness, my beloved wife, and awake us to the full vision of the truth and possession of the things of faith! You are now, I trust, by the mercy of God, seated beside my most honoured parents, to whom I present my dutiful affection, praying the Lord to compass them with His grace; and, oh, tell them to press inwards to the temple; not to rest, but to press onward. Exhort them from me to have no formality. Tell them that, until religion cease to be a burden, it is

nothing-till prayer cease to be a weariness, it is nothing. However difficult, and however imperfect, the spirit must still rejoice in it, after the inward man. . . If I write much longer, you will not be able to read; for there is a great combination against me-a weary hand, a heavy eye, a pen worn to the quick, a dull mind, and a late hour; and a day before me of much occupation. Therefore, farewell to all that are with you, and to all with whom you abide!

"Saturday. I thought, my dearest, to have finished this before the post, but have been taken up all the morning, till two o'clock, doing the last duties to our beloved friend, Mr. H; and having to preach tonight, I rather choose to take up the only hour that is left me in meditation for so many souls. The Lord bless you, and the house in which you dwell! I trust in the grace of God to sustain me to-morrow, and to give you a good journey.

"The Lord bless my father's house!

"Your affectionate husband,

"EDWARD IRVING."

"If you take the mail from Carlisle, you should take it only to Kattrick Bridge, or, perhaps, a stage farther. I think it is but eighteen miles from Kattrick Bridge, and the landlord seemed to me a very pleasant old man. If the time of leaving Carlisle be too soon, you could perhaps go on a stage or two the night before. The Lord direct you in all things!

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Forget not the shoes-I care not how many pairs, only pay for them; for my mother will always make herself a beggar for her children."

IRVING'S ONLY JOURNAL.

375

Thus concludes a journal which, perhaps, has no parallel in modern days. A picture so minute, yet so broad-a self-revelation so entire- a witness so wonderful of that household love, deepened by mutual suffering and sorrow, which so far transcends in its gravity and soberness the more voluble passions of youth-has never, so far as I am aware, been given to the world. It is not wonderful that over the vicissitudes of more than a quarter of a century, the scattered remnants of the family, once admitted, even in part, to the secret soul of such a man, should remember these letters with a certain tearful exultation, the traces of the departed glory; nor that the wife, to whom all were addressed, should have cherished them to the last as too sacred for common sight. This is the first and only journal of Irving's life. On various occasions afterwards, he was separated from his wife for considerable periodsbut never again produced anything like the affecting history, at which he laboured day by day and hour by hour, to cheer the mother of his dead baby, as she lay, weak and sorrowful, in the faintest hour of a woman's life, in the sad affectionate shelter of her father's house. Few men or heroes have been laid in their grave with such a memorial as envelopes the baby name of little Edward; and I think few wives will read this record without envying Isabella Irving that hour of her anguish and consolation.

CHAPTER XII.

1826, 1827.

AFTER the full and detailed personal portrait which Irving gives of himself in these journal-letters, a period of comparative silence follows. This was the silent seed-time of the exciting and exhausting years, full of conflict and struggle, upon the threshold of which he stood. The full flood of life which now carried him along was not more visible in his actual labours than it was in the eager progress of his unresting and ever-active spirit. Whether his mind had ever been content with the sober Presbyterian ideal of a democratic Church, in which the will of the people had really, if not nominally, a distinct and apparent sway, and in which the priests were subject to the perpetual criticism of a community too much disposed to argument and individual opinion to yield much veneration to their legitimate leaders, it is difficult to say; but the Scotch imagination has always found a way of escaping from those prosaic trammels. That which the outside world has distinguished as religious liberty, and recognised as the object of the many struggles in which the Church of Scotland has engaged, has never been so named or considered among the champions of that Church. Their eyes, throughout the long and eventful drama, have been fixed, not upon the freedom

THE HEADSHIP OF CHRIST.

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of individual worship, or the rights of the Christian people, but upon a much loftier, ineffable principle, often converted into an instrument of evil, yet always retaining, to some, the divinest sunshine of ideal perfection. Now-a-days, when martyrdoms are no longer possible, and heretical stakes and blocks are long ago out of fashion, it is more difficult than it once was, to idealise, out of a struggle for mere ecclesiastical authority, that conflict which, in the days of blood and violence, so many humble heroes waged for the headship of Christ. To many a Scotch confessor this doctrine has stood instead of a visible general, animating the absolute peasant-soul to so distinct a conception of Christ's honour and authority, as the object for which it contended, that the personal ardour of the conflict puzzles the calm observer, who understands as nothing but a dogma this inspiring principle. The events which made the great crisis in the existence of Scotland a struggle for her faith, drove this lofty, visionary conception into the ideal soul of the nation, where it has ever since existed, and is still appealed to, as the experience of to-day can testify. When, according to the evidence of facts, the Covenanters were fighting against the imposed liturgy and attempted episcopacy of the Charleses, they were, to their own fierce consciousness, struggling for the principle that, in the Church, Charles was nothing, and Christ all in all; nor has the sentiment failed in more recent struggles. Irving had received this national creed along with his earliest impressions: he had even received it in the still closer theocratic model well known in ancient Scotland, where God the ruler was everywhere visible, in provi