a strange and strong love, and it was her greatest earthly desire to have seen you. There is something so uncommon in this that it seems to me to point the way that you should love her children, and do for their sakes what she longed to do for your mother's child. Therefore, my dear Isabella, do write Miss L, and strengthen her, and invite her when she can be spared to come and spend some time with us. Be careful of yourself and the little boy-the dear, dear little boy, my greatest earthly hope and joy-for you are not another, but myself—my better and dearer half. I pray the Lord to bless you, and be instead of a friend and husband and father to you in my absence. Let not your backwardness hinder you from family prayers night and morning.

My

"I hope I shall find time to write to Margaret, our beloved sister, to whom I have much that is affectionate to communicate, and something that may be instructive. . . . . ... Forget me not to Mary*, over whom I take more than a master's authority, feeling for her all the guardianship of a parent, which she may be pleased to permit me in... brotherly and pastoral love to the elders of the flock. Say to Thomas, the moralist, that I love him at a distance as much as at hand-I think sometimes full better, as they say in Annandale. To my Isabella I say all in one word, that I desire and seek to love her as Christ loved the Church. "Your most affectionate husband,

" EDWARD IRVING.”

Another brief letter follows from Liverpool, where he also preached for the encouragement and strengthening of the Scotch Church already in existence there. It is naturally to his wife that his letters are now chiefly addressed, and the result is, as will be shortly shown, as wonderful a revelation of heart and thoughts as one human creature ever made to another. By this time the natural course of events seems to have withdrawn him in a great degree from regular correspondence with his

* One of his servants.

friends in Scotland-a change which his marriage, and all the revolutions which had taken place in his life, as well as the full occupation of his time, and the perpetually increasing calls made upon it, rendered inevitable. His affections were unchanged, but it was no longer possible to keep up the expression of them. The new friends who multiplied around him were of a kind to make a deep impression upon a mind which was influenced more or less by all whom it held in high regard. We have already quoted his warm expressions of esteem and affection for Mr. Basil Montagu and his wife. To Coleridge he had also owned his still higher obligations. Another friend, whom his friends consider to have had no small influence on Irving, was the Rev. W. Vaughan, of Leicester, an English clergyman, who is supposed, I cannot say with what truth, to have been mainly instrumental in leading him to some views which he afterwards expressed. His distinguished countryman, Carlyle, referred to with playful affection in the letter we have just quoted, not then resident in London, was his occasional guest and close friend. Good David Wilkie, and his biographer, Allan Cunningham, were of the less elevated home society, which again connected itself with the lowest homely levels by visitors and petitioners from Glasgow and Annandale. In this wide circle the preacher moved with all the joyousness of his nature, never, however, leaving it possible for any man to forget that his special character was that of a servant of God. The light talk then indulged in by magazines, breaks involuntarily into pathos and seriousness, in the allusions made in Fraser's Magazine, years after, to this early summer of his career.

"IN GOD HE LIVED AND MOVED.”

219

The laughing philosophers, over their wine, grow suddenly grave as they speak of the one among them who was not as other men :-"In God he lived, and moved, and had his being," says this witness, impressed from among the lighter regions of life and literature to bear testimony; "no act was done but in prayer; every blessing was received with thanksgiving to God; every friend was dismissed with a parting benediction." The man who could thus make his character apparent to the wits of his day must have lived a life unequivocal and not to be mistaken.

It was while living in the full exercise of all those charities, happy in the new household and the firstborn child, that he worked at the missionary oration, the history of which I have already told. Apart from the ordinary comments upon and wonderings over the stream of fashion which still flowed towards Hatton Garden, this oration was, for that year, the only visible disturbing element in his life.

CHAPTER X.

1825.

In the beginning of the year 1825,—a year for ever to be remembered in Edward Irving's life, and which, indeed, so touching, and solemn, and pathetic are all the records of its later part, I could almost wish contained no common events, but only the apotheosis of love and grief accomplished in it,- he was, notwithstanding the sad failure and discomfiture of the London Missionary Society, in its employment of his services, requested to preach for the Continental Society on a similar occasion. This Society was held up and maintained from its commencement by the nervous strength of Henry Drummond, a man already known to the preacher, over whose later course he was to exercise so great an influence. Irving, remembering the past, was slow to undertake this new commission, becoming aware, I do not doubt, that his thoughts often ran in channels so distinct from those of other men, that it was dangerous to be chosen as the mouthpiece of a large and varied body. He consented at last, however; and, true to his unfailing conscientious desire to bring out of the depths of Scripture all the light which he could perceive it to throw upon the subject in hand, his discourse naturally came to be upon prophecy. I say

IRVING'S INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF PROPHECY. 221

naturally, because, in the evangelization of the Continent, all the mystic impersonations of the Apocalypse, -the scarlet woman on her seven hills, the ten-horned beast, all the prophetic personages of that dread undeveloped drama,—are necessarily involved. The manner in which Irving's attention had been, some short time before, specially directed to the study of prophecy, is however too interesting and characteristic to be passed without more particular notice. Several years before, Mr. Hatley Frere, one of the most sedulous of those prophetical students who were beginning to make themselves known here and there over the country, had propounded a new scheme of interpretation, for which, up to this time, he had been unable to secure the ear of the religious public. Not less confident in the truth of his scheme that nobody shared his belief in it, Mr. Frere cherished the conviction that if he could but meet some man of candid and open mind, of popularity sufficient to gain a hearing, to whom he could privately explain and open up his system, its success was certain. When Irving, all ingenuous and ready to be taught, was suddenly brought in contact with him, the student of prophecy identified him by an instant intuition." Here is the man!" he exclaimed to himself; and with all the eagerness of a discoverer, who seeks a voice by which to utter what he has found out, he addressed himself to the task of convincing the candid and generous soul which could condemn nothing unheard. He disclosed to his patient hearer all those details to which the public ear declined to listen; and the result was that Mr. Frere gained a disciple and expositor; and that an influence fatal to his future leisure, and