CHAPTER III.

1830.

FROM year to year, as Irving proceeded further on his course, the tide of thought and emotion had been hitherto rising with a noble and natural progress. He had now reached almost to the culmination of that wonderful and splendid development. Everything he had uttered or set forth with the authority of his name had been worthy the loftiest mood of human intellect, and had given dignity and force to the high position he assumed as a teacher and ambassador of God. All his discoveries and openings up of truth had operated only, so far as his own mind was concerned, to the heightening of every divine conception, and to the increase and intensification of the divine love in his heart. But another chapter of life had commenced for the great preacher. That a man whose thoughts were sublimated so far out of the usual way, and whose mental vision was so vivid as to elevate everything he clearly perceived entirely out of the region of compromise into that of absolute verity, should have gone on so long without coming in contact at some point with the restrictions of authority, is more wonderful than that the com

monly orthodox understanding, long jealous of a fervour and force which it could not comprehend, should at length set up a barrier of sullen resistance against his advances. The conflict had fairly set in when the year 1830 commenced. No longer the politico-religious journalists of London, no longer stray adventurers into the world of controversy, but the authorised religious periodicals of his own country, and the divines of his mother-Church, were now rising against him; and while the storm gathered, another cloud arose upon the firmament - another cloud to most of the spectators who watched the progress of this wonderful tragedy; but to Irving himself another light, still more beautiful and glorious than those which had already flushed his horizon with the warmest illuminations of gratitude and love. Since that summerday of 1828 when he preached at Row, and agreed with Mr. Alexander Scott to come to his assistance in London, and work with him entirely unfettered by any pledge as to doctrine, that gentleman had been his close companion and fellow-workman ;—and naturally had not occupied that place without an influence proportionate to his great powers. Mr. Scott, like many others both in that day and this, entertained the belief that the supernatural powers once bestowed upon the Church were not merely the phenomena of one miraculous age, but an inheritance of which she ought to have possession as surely and richly now as in the days of the Apostles. A similar idea had already, in a kind of grand prophetic reverie, crossed the mind of Irving. So far back as 1828, he himself

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says he had become convinced that the spiritual gifts so largely bestowed upon the apostolic age of Christianity were not exceptional, or for one period alone, but belonged to the Church of all ages, and had only been kept in abeyance by the absence of faith. Yet with the lofty reasonableness and moderation of genius, even when treading in a sphere beyond reason, Irving concluded that these unclaimed and unexercised supernatural endowments, which had died out of use so long, would be restored only at the time of the Second Advent, in the miraculous reign, of which they would form a fitting adjunct. Mr. Scott's stronger convictions upon this subject quickened the germ of faith which thus lingered in his friend's heart. "He was at that time my fellow-labourer in the National Scotch Church," writes Irving some time afterwards, in his narrative of the Facts connected with recent Manifestations of Spiritual Gifts, published in Fraser's Magazine for January, 1832

"And as we went out and in together he used often to signify to me his conviction that the spiritual gifts ought still to be exercised in the Church; that we are at liberty, and indeed bound, to pray for them as being baptized into the assurance of the gift of the Holy Ghost,' as well as of repentance and remission of sins.' . . . Though I could make no answer to this, and it is altogether unanswerable, I continued still very little moved to seek myself or to stir up my people to seek these spiritual treasures. Yet I went forward to contend and to instruct whenever the subject came before me in my public ministrations of reading and preaching the Word, that the Holy Ghost ought to be manifested among us all, the same as ever He was in any one of the primitive Churches."

The influence of Mr. Scott's opinions did not end here. His arguments operated still more effectually in another quarter, as Irving goes on to describe :—

"Being called down to Scotland upon some occasion,” continues Irving, "and residing for a while at his father's house, which is in the heart of that district of Scotland upon which the light of Mr. Campbell's ministry had arisen, he was led to open his mind to some of the godly people in these parts, and, among others, to a young woman who was at that time lying ill of a consumption, from which afterwards, when brought to the very door of death, she was raised up instantaneously by the mighty hand of God. Being a woman of a very fixed and constant spirit, he was not able, with all his power of statement and argument, which is unequalled by that of any man I have ever met with, to convince her of the distinction between regeneration and baptism with the Holy Ghost; and when he could not prevail he left her with a solemn charge to read over the Acts of the Apostles with that distinction in her mind, and to beware how she rashly rejected what he believed to be the truth of God. By this young woman it was that God, not many months after, did restore the gift of speaking with tongues and prophesying to the Church."

This incident connects the history together in its several parts with wonderful consistence and coherence. The preaching of Mr. Campbell of Row, which had stirred the whole countryside with its warm and singleminded proclamation of an uncomplicated gospel; the proceedings against him*, then going on before

The report of these presbyterial proceedings, being the trial of this saintly and admirable man for heresy, by his Presbytery, in the very centre of the district which had been instructed and influenced by him, with its full testimony of witnesses for and against the orthodoxy of the reverend "defender,"-witnesses of all descriptions, ploughmen, farmers, small shopkeepers, Dunbartonshire

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the ecclesiastical courts, which quickened the tradesmen and labourers of Clydesdale into a convocation of learned doctors deep in metaphysics and theology; the repeated apparition of Irving,—then, perhaps, the most striking individual figure in his generation, and who spread excitement and interest around him whereever he went had combined to raise to a very high degree of fervour and vividness the religious feeling of that district. Several humble persons in the locality had become illustrious over its whole extent by the singular piety of their lives, piety of an ecstatic, absorbing kind, such as in the Catholic Church would have brought about canonization; and which, indeed, does everywhere confer a spiritual local rank equal to canonization. Such was Isabella Campbell of Fernicarry, a youthful saint who had died not long before in an odour of sanctity which no conventual virgin ever surpassed, and whose life had been published with immense local circulation by Mr. Story, of Rosneath. It is unnecessary to describe more fully the singular condition of mind into which the entire district seems to have been rapt at this special period, since it has already been done with fuller knowledge and more

lairds is perhaps one of the most singular records ever printed; each man of all these miscellaneous individuals being evidently, not only in his own estimation, but in that of the Presbytery, a competent informant on a nice point of doctrine; and their testimony of the different senses in which they had understood their minister's sermons, and their opinions thereupon, being gravely received as influencing the important question of a clergyman's character and position in the Church. Nowhere but in Scotland could such a body of evidence be brought together.