friends went out into the cold March night, without waiting to hear the solemn sentence of deposition by which the Presbytery took away from him the office which eleven years before they had conferred, pronouncing him no longer a minister or member of the Church of Scotland. He remained a few weeks in Scotland, preaching out of doors to thousands of excited listeners, and then, taking a solemn farewell of his friends and kinsfolk, he returned to London.

He was received, not as a martyr who had borne a good teştimony, but by an interdict of the prophets "in the power," forbidding him to exercise his function as "angel" of the church, and degrading him to the post of "deacon," the lowest in their ministry. It would be curious to know who were the men that passed this sentence. But Irving bowed his lofty head, and for weeks sat silent. Then came a new utterance, "by the concurrent action in manifested supernatural power both of prophet and apostle," reappointing him as "angel" of the flock, and Mr. Cardale, the "apostle," laid his hands upon the head of Edward Irving in new ordination. But his great public work was done. His functions were circumscribed by the obscure "prophets " and " apostles," who took it upon themselves to check, thwart, and control him. They sent him hither and thither, upon this mission and that, for months; and at length, in September of 1832, the last autumn which he was to see, - they ordered him to go to Scotland, "in the power," to do some great prophetic work. The strong man who twelve years before had come up to London was now but a shadow of his former self. Hardly forty-two, he was an old man. The giant form was bent; the once raven hair was as white as snow; the mighty voice was weak and faltering. Perhaps the prophets sent him away, hoping that a visit to his native land would restore his wasted. powers.

He set off by devious ways, sending back almost day by day tender notes to his wife and children, - hopeful at first. The rides for he went on horseback-seemed to recruit his wasted strength; his pulse, fevered by excitement, had fallen to a hundred. Soon, however, came a change; restlessness and fever set in; "the Lord made vain the remedies

of man." By the middle of October he had reached Liverpool, worn out and exhausted, and wrote to his wife to come to him. She obeyed the call, and hastened to join him. Together they proceeded to Glasgow in the stormy October, in obedience to the mission laid upon him, though physicians assured him that his only chance of life was to spend the winter in a southern climate. But the mission was, he believed, appointed of God, and He would give him strength to accomplish it. It was to establish an "Apostolic Church" in Glasgow, where his small band of disciples had found a little place for worship. For a few weeks his gaunt form is visible in the streets, or in the little assembly of his disciples. Then strength fails, and he takes to his bed, stricken with death, as all believe but himself and his faithful wife, who still trust that the miraculous power which raised Mary Campbell from her sick-bed will be put forth in his behalf.

But the supreme hour approached, and even his wife abandoned hope. Irving grew delirious. Now he thought himself in his London congregation; now, counselling the members of his flock. Once he was heard murmuring to himself sonorous syllables in a tongue unknown to those who watched beside him. Could it be that now the gift in which he so faithfully believed, though it had never been vouchsafed to him, was to be bestowed? Were the words of that unknown tongue the precursor of the miraculous healing that was to restore him to health and vigor? Doctor Martin, the father of his wife, bent down his head to catch those mysterious sounds. But it was no unknown language that came from those pale lips. It was the Hebrew measures of the twenty-third Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Feebler and feebler waned the tide of life.. Then a last debate seemed to spring up in that soul which was so soon to be with its Maker.

"They heard him," says his biographer, " murmuring to himself in inarticulate argument, confusedly struggling in his weakness to account for this visible death which at last his human faculties could no longer refuse to believe in,—perhaps touched with ineffable trouble that his Master had seemed to fail of his word and promise. At last that self-argument came to a sublime conclusion in a trust more strong

than life or death. As the gloomy December Sunday sank into the night shadows, his last audible words on earth fell from his pale lips. 'The last thing like a sentence we could make out was, "If I die, I die unto the Lord. Amen." And so, at the wintry midnight hour which ended that last Sabbath on earth, the last bonds of mortal trouble dropped asunder, and the saint and martyr entered into the rest of his Lord."

They buried Irving with solemn pomp in the crypt of the magnificent Cathedral of Glasgow. Most of the clergy of the city followed him to the grave, forgetting in that solemn hour that he had just been excommunicated from their body, remembering only the worth and piety of the man. It seemed that his work had perished before him. The great and noble, "the men who hold the world in their hands," to whom he had preached righteousness and the judgment to come, had gone on in their old way. He had unrolled the solemn scroll of prophecy, but the consummation which he had educed had not come to pass. The doctrine of the oneness of his Lord and Master with the humanity which he had come to redeem, the doctrine which was to him the centre and life of the Christian faith, had been solemnly condemned by the Church of his love, and for maintaining it he had been excommunicated and deposed on the very spot where he had been baptized and ordained. The new "Apostolic Church" which had gathered around him had been given up to babbling "prophets" and feeble "apostles.' To him had been vouchsafed none of those miraculous gifts which he believed to be the heritage of the Church, held in abeyance only on account of its want of faith; and some of those in whose claims to the possession of these gifts he had most implicitly trusted, had publicly acknowledged that they had been the dupes of evil spirits or of their own eager imaginations. To himself, as he lay dying on that winter Sabbath evening, his life must have seemed a failure, saving only for the sublime conclusion that he had been honest and faithful to the light given him, so that, "living or dying, he was the Lord's."

No wonder that the world tried, in its foolish way, to explain the mystery of his life. The easiest solution was to pronounce him crazed, first by popular applause, then by its withdrawal. We can hardly wonder that Carlyle, writing just

after Irving's death, should have given faith to this idea. He has since grown wiser. Not many months ago, Milburn, the American "Blind Preacher," visited Carlyle. Something brought up the name of the friend of his early days. "My poor friend Irving," he exclaimed, bursting out into sublime monologue, "men thought him daft; but he was dazed. I have heard that the eagle becomes blind in gazing with unveiled eye upon the sun. Thus Irving tried to do what no man may do and live, to gaze full in the face of the brightness of the Deity, and so blindness fell upon him.”

It was fit that the life of Edward Irving should be written by one so tender and reverent as his present biographer.

"So far," she says in conclusion, "as these volumes present the man himself, with his imperfections breaking tenderly into his natural grandeur, always indivisible, and moving in a profound unity of nature through such proof of all sorrows as falls to the lot of few, I do not fear that his own words and ways are not enough to clear the holy and religious memory of Edward Irving of many a cloud of misapprehension and censure of levity; and so far as I have helped this, I have done my task. He died in the prime and bloom of his days, without, so far as his last writings leave any trace, either decadence of intellect or lowering of thought; and left, so far as by much inquiry I have been able to find out, neither an enemy nor a wrong behind him. No shadow of unkindness obscures the sunshine on that grave which in old days would have been a shrine of pilgrims. The pious care of his nephew has emblazoned the narrow Norman lancet over him with a John Baptist, austere herald of the cross and advent; but a tenderer radiance of human light than that which encircled the solitary out of his desert lingers about that resting-place. There lies a man who trusted God to extremity, and believed in all Divine communications with truth as absolute as any patriarch or prophet; to whom mean thoughts and unbelieving hearts were the only things miraculous and out of nature; who desired to know nothing in heaven or earth, neither comfort, nor peace, nor rest, nor any consolation, but the will and the work of his Master, whom he loved,-yet to whose arms children clung with instinctive trust, and to whose heart no soul in trouble ever appealed in vain. He was laid in his grave in the December of 1834,- a lifetime since; but scarce any man who knew him can yet name, without a softened voice and a dimmed eye, the name of Edward Irving,- true friend and tender heart, - martyr and saint."

ART. II. A Grammar of the Greek Language. By WILLIAM EDWARD JELF, B. D., late Student and Censor of Christ Church. Third Edition, enlarged and improved; with an additional Index to the Constructions of the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles. Vol. I. — Accidence. Vol. II. Syntax. Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker. 1861. 8vo. pp. xxxiv., 483, 700.

THERE is no greater mistake than the idea that grammatical science has been stationary during the last quarter of a century. The fact is, very few departments of knowledge can show a more satisfactory progress. When we consider the large place that is given to grammatical training in the education of youth in every enlightened country, we shall certainly not be disposed to underrate the importance of every step by which the grammars of the two classic tongues (upon which that training is chiefly based) are raised to a higher position as scientific treatises, and are changed from mere collections of isolated facts to philosophic expositions of the laws of human thought as it finds expression in language.

Many, who have noticed this progress chiefly in the additional length, and too often additional obscurity, of elementary school-books, have even regretted the change, and have sighed for the old days of Adams's Latin Grammar and the Gloucester Greek Grammar. We sympathize with this feeling so far as to believe that the cause of classical education would be decidedly advanced by carefully prepared elementary grammars, containing only the briefest and clearest statement of fundamental principles. Such works need not be larger than the discarded text-books just mentioned, which would include all that the beginner ought to commit to memory. They must, of course, be much fuller in the etymology and the earlier chapters, which exercise the memory chiefly, than in the syntax, which exercises the reasoning powers, and needs practice for a proper comprehension of its rules. These, however, should be mere skeletons of the larger grammars, to which the more advanced student must look for an answer to the numerous questions that constantly arise in his reading NO. 197.

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