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French and Italian, and gave much attention, also, to Chemistry and Natural History; while with Thomas Carlyle and a few others, he formed a Philosophical Association for their intellectual improvement; his first essay before it being on Bible Societies, and "full of thought, ardor, and eloquence, indicating large views, and a mind prepared for high and holy enterprise." But still there was no opening for him as a preacher. At this time he burned all his old sermons, feeling within himself, no doubt, how far they came short of his powers, as well as of his ideal. But, although when he once. had an opportunity to preach, he was "very fearless, original, striking, and solemn in many of his statements, illustrations, and appeals," he remained at the close of another year without any opening in the work of the ministry to which he had solemnly and earnestly dedicated his life. It is no wonder if he began to think of missionary labor in foreign lands. "Rejected by the living," he is recorded to have said, "I conversed with the dead." His eyes turned to the East, as was natural. He thought of Persia, it is said, where the Malcoms, his countrymen, from the same vigorous soil of Annandale, were making themselves illustrious. And with grammars and alphabets, with map and history, with the silent fathers of all literature standing by, prepared himself for this old world demonstration of his allegiance and his faith."

But, just at this time, he was invited by Dr. Andrew Thomson to preach in St. George's, the most fashionable church in Edinburgh, with a hint that amongst his hearers would be Dr. Chalmers, who was then looking out for an assistant in the great work he was carrying on in Glasgow.

This, too, seemed likely to end in blank disappointment, for no message came to him, and he left Edinburgh with the purpose of bidding farewell to his native land, but at Greenock threw himself into a steamer bound for he knew not where, that he might have a short interval of rest and self-forgetfulness, before taking the final step. The steamer landed him at Belfast, where he was arrested by the authorities as a suspicious looking stranger, (some crime having filled the community with alarm), but was released through the good offices of

the Rev. Mr. Hanna, a Presbyterian minister, who took him to his house and treated him with true Irish hospitality. From Belfast he made his way, on foot, through the north of Ireland, "walking as the crow flies, finding lodgings and shelter in the wayside cottages, sharing the potatoe and the milk which formed the peasant's meal." The whole month of August was given to these aimless wanderings, but on arriving at Coleraine, he found a letter from Dr. Chalmers inviting him to meet him in Glasgow. The result was an invitation to become the Doctor's assistant in the parish of St. John's. But grateful as this must have been to him after so many disappointments, he would not accept it till he had first preached to the people. "I will preach to them if you think fit," he is reported to have said; "but if they bear with my preaching, they will be the first people who have borne with it." They did bear with it, however, (as much, it would seem, from deference to Dr. Chalmers' judgment, as from any appreciation of his powers on their own part); and in October, 1819, he entered upon the first stage of his labors as a Christian minister.

He was now twenty-seven years old, and had been for four years a licentiate; and the place to which he was thus called was a subordinate one-not that of colleague, but of assistant. He was to be simply Dr. Chalmers' helper. He was still unordained, the rules of the Scotch Church not permitting ordination till a call from a congregation had been received. He could not administer the sacraments, nor had he any recog nized place in the ecclesiastical judicatories. It was in every way a position of inferiority, in which he was to carry out the plans and fulfill the will of another, to whom alone the dignity and responsibility of the ruler's place belonged. Dr. Chalmers, too, was now in the height of his great popularity, and in the fullest development of his really splendid powers; and his assistant, whoever he might be, must be overshadowed. It is to Mr. Irving's honor, that he cheerfully accepted the place of a subordinate, and fulfilled its laborious duties with hearty willingness, and without one feeling of envy toward the man to whom. he owed spiritual obedience, and by whom his own reputation

was almost wholly eclipsed. Of this part of his life he thus beautifully speaks in his "Lectures on the Parable of the Sower":

saints' feet; to How shall we

Truly, I can

"For how otherwise shall a man be fit to be a servant of the whole Church of Christ; to minister unto the wants of the needy; to wash the bring a cup full of cold water unto the little children of the Lord? honor our Master in heaven, if we honor not our master on earth? say, from experience, it is both a sweet and an honorable thing to be a servant, and most needful to prepare one for being a master. Yea, I can say that it is sweet to lay down the cares of a master and enter into the obedience of a servant."

Would that this were the spirit of the young ministers of Christ in our own country and time! To how many of the pastors in our cities and large towns, would the labors of such an assistant as Edward Irving was to Dr. Chalmers, be an inestiinable blessing! They are over-burdened by responsibilities to which the strength of no solitary man, however herculean, is adequate; but they shrink from ambitious colleagues and assistants, who are not content to take a secondary place, and to qualify themselves for rule by first learning to obey; and so the churches are too often wholly committed, either to the feebleness of age, or to the rashness or inexperience of youth. To bring into harmonious coöperation in the Church the wisdom of long experience and the ardor of youthful zeal, is a problem which every year is making more difficult of solution.

To the work which was now devolved upon him, Mr. Irving addressed himself with his characteristic energy.

Glasgow," says Mrs. Oliphant, "was at this period in a very disturbed and troublous condition. Want of work and want of food had wrought their natural social effect upon the industrious classes, and the eyes of the hungry weavers and cotton-spinners were turned with spasmodic anxiety to those wild political quack remedies, the inefficacy of which no amount of experience will ever make clear to people in similar circumstances. The entire country was in a dangerous mood, palpitating throughout with deep-seated complaint and grievance, to which the starving revolutionaries in such towns as Glasgow acted only as a kind of safety-valve, preventing a worse explosion. The discontent was drawing toward its climax when Irving received his appointment as assistant to the minister of St. John's. In such a large poor parish he encountered on all sides the mutterings of the popular storm." p. 83

And again,

"It was a conjunction of many troubles, foremost among which was that sharp

touch of starvation which makes men desperate; that Want-most pertinacious and maddest of all revolutionaries, who never fails to revenge bitterly the carelessness which lets him enter our well-defended doors-he was there, wolfish and seditious, in Glasgow in the winter of 1819, plotting pikes and risings with wild dreams of that legislation never yet found out, which is to make a paradise of earth; dreams and plots which were to blurt out, so far as Scotland was concerned, in the dismal little tragi-comedy of Bonnymuir some months later, and there be made a melancholy end of. But while everybody else was prophesying horrors, it is thus that Irving, with tender domestic prefaces of kindness and congratulation, writes to his brother-in-law, Mr. Fergusson, a few months after his arrival in Glasgow:

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"You will look for Glasgow intelligence, and truly I can neither get nor give any. If I should report from my daily ministrations among the poorest class and the worst reported-of class of our population, I should deliver an opinion so favorable as it would be hardly safe for myself to deliver, lest I should be held a radical likewise. Now the truth is, I have visited in about three hundred families, and have met with the kindest welcome, and entertainment, and invitations. Nay, more, I have entered on the tender subject of their present sufferings, in which they are held so ferocious, and have found them, in general, both able and willing to entertain the religious lesson and improvement arising out of it. This may arise from the way of setting it forth, which I endeavor to make with the utmost tenderness and feeling, as well is due when you see people in the midst of nakedness and starvation."" pp. 84, 85.

With all his tenderness for the poor, and his power of putting himself on a level with them, and drawing out to him. their sympathies and affections, he had yet great dignity and solemnity of manner. When he entered any house, he pronounced on it a benediction-"Peace be to this house;" and his custom was to lay his hand on the heads of the children, and to say, "The Lord bless thee and keep thee." His pastoral labors in Glasgow, which were very abundant, occupying so much of his time as often to leave him only the Saturday for his pulpit preparations, are better described by himself in his farewell sermon on leaving St. Johns than any words of ours can do it:

"Oh, how my heart rejoices to recur to the hours I have sitten under the roofs of the people, and been made a partaker of their confidence, and a witness of the hardships they had to endure. In the scantiest and perhaps worst times with which this manufacturing city hath ever been pressed, it was my almost daily habit to make a round of their families, and uphold, what in me lay, the declining cause of God. There have I sitten, with little silver or gold of my own to bestow, with little command over the charity of others, and heard the various narratives of hardship-narratives uttered for the most part with modesty and pa

tience; oftener drawn forth with difficulty than obtruded on your ear-their wants, their misfortunes, their ill-requited labor, their hopes vanishing, their families dispersing in search of better habitations, the Scottish economy of their homes giving way before encroaching necessity; debt rather than saving their condition; bread and water their scanty fare; hard and ungrateful labor the portion of their house. All this have I often seen and listened to within'naked walls; the witness, oft the partaker, of their miserable cheer; with little or no means to relieve. Yet be it known, to the glory of God and the credit of the poor, and the encouragement of tender-hearted Christians, that such application to the heart's ailments is there in our religion, and such a hold in its promises, and such a pith of endurance in its noble examples, that when set forth by one inexperi enced tongue, with soft words and kindly tones, they did never fail to drain the heart of the sourness that calamity engenders, and sweeten it with the balm of resignation-often enlarge it with cheerful hope, sometimes swell it high with the rejoicings of a Christian triumph." p. 91.

And so he labored on for almost three years in the midst of one of the worst populations in Scotland, acquiring only a half popularity as a preacher, (it being a very common incident, Mrs. Oliphant tells us, "when it was his turn to conduct the services, that the preacher going in was met by groups coming out with disappointed looks, complaining as the reason of their departure, that its no himsel the day, ") but gaining large experience in the pastor's work, and growing into the mastery of those powers which were one day to find their true place. Such a training must have been eminently serviceable to him. It brought him into contact with a most sagacious and practical mind, for Chalmers, though also endowed, with great richness of imagination, was a man of action, shrewd and farseeing, whose highest aim was to operate on society with the existing forces, and make the most of the present order of things. He was not a great Christian philosopher, like Coleridge, but a Christian statesmen; not a man of ideas, but of expedients, who addressed himself to the social problems of the day with great practical insight and untiring energy and zeal. He accepted church and state as he found them, and sought not to reconstruct, but to meliorate. He did not go down into the deep principles which underlie all institutions, and inquire into their organic laws; nor did he ever take up the grand questions as to the future purposes of God concerning Man, but was content to apply to social evils the best remedies

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