192 A SIMPLE PRESBYTER. his arrival in London had the Scotch preacher won the friendship of many, not specially open to members of his profession and church, and made himself a centre of personal beneficences not to be counted. If ever pride can be justified, Edward Irving might have been justified in a passing thrill of that exultation when he brought his wife from the quiet manse which all along had looked on and watched his career, not sure how far its daughter's future was safe in the hands of a man so often foiled, yet so unsubduable, to place her in a position and society which few clergymen of his church have ever attained, and indeed which few men in any church, however titled or dignified, could equal. The peculiarity of his position lay in the fact that this singular elevation belonged to himself, and not to his rank, which was not susceptible of change. That his influence was extended a thousand-fold, with little addition to his means, and none to his station, and that while he moved among men of the highest intellect and position, neither his transcendent popularity nor his acknowledged genius ever changed that primitive standing-ground of priest and pastor which he always held with primitive tenacity. The charm of that conjunction is one which the most worldly mind of man cannot refuse to appreciate; and perhaps it is only on the members of a church which owns no possibility of promotion, that such a delicate and visionary though real rank could by common verdict be bestowed. CHAPTER IX. 1824. THE year 1824 began with no diminution of those incessant labours. It is wonderful how a man of so great a frame, and of out-of-door tendencies so strong and long cherished, should have been able to bear, as Irving did, confinement in one of the most town-like and closely-inhabited regions of London. In Pentonville, indeed, faint breaths of country air might at that period be supposed to breathe along the tidy, genteel streets; but in Bloomsbury, where many of Irving's friends resided, or in the dusty ranges of Holborn, where his church was, no such refreshment can have been practicable. Nor had the Presbyterian minister any relief from curates, or assistance of any kind. His entire pulpit services-and, according to his own confession, his sermons averaged an hour and a quarter in length — his -his prayers, as much exercises of the intellect as of the heart, came from his own lips and mind, unaided by the intervention of any other man; and besides his literary labours, and the incessant demands which his great reputation brought upon him, he had all the pastoral cares of his own large congregation to attend to, and was ready at the call of the sick, the friendless, and the stranger, whensoever they addressed him. That 194 FAILURE OF HEALTH. this overwhelming amount of work, combined as it was with all the excitement inseparable from the position of a popular preacher — a preacher so popular as to have his church besieged every day it was opened -should tell upon his strength, was to be expected; and accordingly we find him writing in the following terms to Mr. Collins of Glasgow, the publisher, who had taken a large share in Dr. Chalmers's parochial work in St. John's, and was one of Irving's steady friends. Some time before he had undertaken to write a preface to a new edition of the works of Bernard Gilpin, which is the matter referred to :-- "7 Middleton Terrace, 24th February, 1824. 'MY DEAR MR. COLLINS,-I pray you not for a moment to imagine that I have any other intention, so long as God gives me strength, than to fulfil my promise faithfully. I am at present worked beyond my strength, and you know that is not inconsiderable. My head! my head! I may say with the Shunamite's child. If I care not for it, the world will soon cease to care for me and I for the world. If you saw me many a night unable to pray with my wife, and forced to have recourse to forms of prayer, you would at once discover what hath caused my delay. I have no resource if I throw myself up, and a thousand enemies wait for my stumbling and fall. "I am now better, and this week had set to rise at six o'clock and finish it, but I have not been able. Next week Į shall make the attempt again and again, till I succeed; for upon no account, and for no sake, will I touch or undertake aught until I have fulfilled my promise in respect to Gilpin. But one thing I will say, that I must not be content with the preface of a sermon or patches of a sermon. The subject is too important too many eyes are upon me-and the interests of religion are too much inwarped in certain places with my character and writing, that I should not do my best. "The Lord bless you and all his true servants. "Your faithful friend, DETERMINATION TO DO HIS WORK THOROUGHLY. 195 This conscientious determination to do nothing imperfectly is, amid all the exaltation and excitement of Irving's position, no small testimony to his steadiness and devout modesty. Adulation had not been able to convince him that his name was sufficient to give credit to careless writing, nor had the vehement and glowing genius, now fully enfranchised and acknowledged, learned to consider itself independent of industry and painstaking labours. He had learned what criticism awaited everything he wrote; and even while he retaliated manfully, was doubtless warned in minor matters by the storm just then passing over, which had been raised by his former publication. His next point of contact with the astonished and critical world, which watched for a false step on his part, and was ready to pounce upon anything, from an imperfect or complicated metaphor to an unsound doctrine, occurred in the May of this year, when he had been selected to preach one of the anniversary sermons of the London Missionary Society. The invitation to do this was presumed to be a compliment to Irving, and voucher of his popularity, as well as a prudent enlistment of the "highest talent," to give attraction to the yearly solemnity of the Society. Had the London committee been wise they would scarcely have chosen so daring and original an orator to celebrate their anniversary; since Irving was exactly the man whose opinions or sentiments on such a topic were not to be rashly predicated. The preliminaries of this discourse, as afterwards described by himself, were not such as generally usher in a missionary sermon. Instead of reading up the records of the society, and making care 196 PREPARES TO WRITE A MISSIONARY SOCIETY ORATION ful note of the causes for congratulation and humility, as it would have been correct to have done-instead of laying up materials for a glowing account of its progress and panegyric upon its missionaries, Irving's preparations ran in the following extraordinary channel: "Having been requested by the London Missionary Society," he writes, "to preach upon the occasion of their last anniversary, I willingly complied, without much thought of what I was undertaking; but when I came to reflect upon the sacredness and importance of the cause given into my hands, and the dignity of the audience before which I had to discourse, it seemed to my conscience that I had undertaken a duty full of peril and responsibility, for which I ought to prepare myself with every preparation of the mind and of the spirit. To this end, retiring into the quiet and peaceful country, among a society of men devoted to every good and charitable work, I searched the Scriptures in secret; and in their pious companies conversed of the convictions which were secretly brought to my mind concerning the missionary work. And thus, not without much prayer to God and selfdevotion, I meditated those things which I delivered in public before the reverend and pious men who had honoured me with so great a trust." It may easily be supposed that a discourse, thus premeditated and composed by a man whose youth was full of missionary projects, such as no practical nineteenth century judgment could designate otherwise than as the wildest romance, was not likely to come to such a sermon as should content the London or any other Missionary Society. It was not an exposition of the character of a missionary, as apprehended by an heroic mind, capable of the labours it described, which had been either wished or requested. But the directors of the Society, having rashly tackled with a man occupied, not with their most laudable pursuits and interests, but |