things, and your faithfulness in holding it up to the view of your friends, together with the delicate skill and consummate grace with which you express it in words, and embody it in acts-these things, my dear and honored friends, working insensibly during several years' continuance of a very intimate friendship and very confidential interchange of thought and feeling, have, I perceive, produced in me many of those views of men and things which are expressed in the following discourse concerning that question of the several soils into which the seed of truth is cast."

Such were the influences by which he was surrounded in London during the first eight years of his ministry there, and there could have been none more favorable to his intellectual and spiritual growth. Some reviewers have fancied that he lost the healthful tone of his mind by excluding himself from general society, and becoming the centre of a narrow coterie of admirers. Never was there a more groundless charge. He touched society at every point, and saw every phase of life. At Highgate, he was thrown into the brilliant circle that was wont to gather there around the "the old man eloquent," the endless flow of whose discourse, rich in learning and wisdom and prophetic excursions of the imagination, drew to it for delight or instruction, every variety of talent and every form of character. Charles Lamb,* and Godwin, and Hazlitt; and of the younger men of the day, Talfourd, and Maurice, and Stuart Mill, and Trench, were amongst those whom Irving was likely to meet with at the home of his revered teacher. Talfourd names him amongst "Lamb's dead companions," with Allan Cunningham, and Cary (translator of Dante), and Hood. He certainly had free access to the highest intellectual and literary society of London, where he could (to say the least) have found no fuel for fanaticism.

At Albury, the hospitable country residence of his friend,

narrow.

*The following anecdote of Lamb, which we believe has never been published, we give merely as showing that the range of Mr. Irving's acquaintance was not As they two were walking together on their way to Coleridge, where they were to meet the Smiths (Horace and his brother, the authors of the Re jected Addresses), Lamb kept constantly saying, drawing back as he spoke, with a shuddering motion, "I hate those men, I hate those men." At length Irving said, "Why, Charles what makes you hate those men ?" "I don't know them, I never saw them," was the quick reply.

Mr. Henry Drummond, he was brought to the acquaintance of a very different class-clergymen and religious laymen of the Church of England-some of them of great biblical and theological learning, faithful and zealous pastors, members of Parliament, officers of the Army and Navy, and men in other high social positions, who were drawn together by their common interest in the prophetic Scriptures. Of one of these meetings he thus speaks in a letter to his wife:

"We are not without some diversities of opinion upon most subjects, especially as to the Millennial blessedness, which was handled yesterday. Lord Mandeville and Mr. Dodsworth take a view of it different from me, rating the condition of men in flesh higher than I do, and excluding death. I desire to think humbly, and reverently to inquire upon a subject so high. Mr. Dow has great self-possession and freedom among so many strangers. Mr. Borthwick is very penetrating and lively, but Scotch all over in his manner of dealing with that infidel way of intellectualizing divine truth which came from Scotland. I myself have too much of it. Mr. Tudor is very learned, modest, and devout. Lord Mandeville is truly sublime and soul-subduing in the views he presents. I observed a curious thing, that while he was reading a paper on Christ's office of Judgment in the Millennium, everybody's pen stood still, as if they felt it a desecration to do anything but listen. Mr. Drummond says that if I and Dodsworth had been joined together, we would have made a Pope Gregory the Great-he to furnish the popish qual ity, not me." p. 360.

This little glimpse into one of the Albury conferences, taken in connection with the passages of his life we have already given, shows how many-sided was Mr. Irving's intercourse with society, and that if he fell into unsound ways of thinking, and erratic courses of conduct, it was not for want of knowledge of men and sympathy with them.

At the time to which we have now arrived, he united in himself, without being able perfectly to reconcile them, the most varied religious elements. He was a Protestant in his strong individuality (the personal being as strongly developed in him as in Martin Luther); in his abhorrence of Romish superstitions and errors and tyranny; in his appreciation of the fullness of the Gospel, and of the power of the Cross of Christ; and in his strong assertion of the Will of the Father, and of His eternal, all embracing purpose in His Son. He had recovered, also, the great truth of Patristic Theology, the Incarnation, the basis of all sound Christian doctrine, which

the Reformers, and their successors still more, had too much lost sight of in contending for one of its fruits, the Atonement. And in addition to the noblest features of the Reformation, and of the age of the Fathers, he was holding up with great power the hope of the primitive Church, the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in the glory of the resurrection to rule the earth in righteousness. Such was Edward Irving, when the events of which we are now to speak startled the whole Christian world.

Suddenly, and to the amazement of every one, in the spring of 1830, there was in the West of Scotland an outburst of supernatural manifestation in the form of tongues, and prophesyings, and gifts of healing. It was his faith in these as the work of the Holy Ghost, and in the restoration of the ancient Ministries of the Church for which they prepared the way, that characterized the last few years of Mr. Irving's life, and led to conflicts, and sufferings, and noble endurance, which give a tragic interest to his history. The subject of spiritual gifts and ministries is too large to be entered upon here, and all that we propose to do is to state the facts as to this remarkable religious movement, only so far as may be necessary to indicate his position, and the reasons by which he vindicated it. If we shall seem to any of our readers to take them into a strange region, our reason for it is that Mr. Irving's life led through it, and cannot be understood except by a careful following of his career, step by step.

When he published his Missionary Oration, he had no expectation of any reappearance of miraculous powers, for he says in his Preface (dated January, 1825), "The miraculous endowments of all these offices have ceased, because there is no longer any occasion for them (the external healings, which were like fruit before the harvest, being superseded by the fruits of health and blessedness which the Gospel hath produced, not upon individuals, but upon nations and generations)," &c. But at the first meeting for the study of the prophetic Scriptures at Albury, in November, 1826, the Rev. J. Haldane Stewart, a clergyman of the Church of England, "mentioned the success he had had in promoting meetings for

special prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church, and for the promise of the latter rain, made in Joel," and in the discussion to which this gave rise, another person (understood to be not Mr. Irving, but Mr. Drummond) is reported to have said: "The miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased, not because they were no longer of use to the Church, but because the faith of the Church grew cold and dead. The Romish Church maintains that we Protestants have no ground whatever for saying that miracles were ever to cease, and that we can produce no warrant from Scripture for so saying. In this she is right; and if the faith and purity of the Church burned as bright now as in the days of the Apostles, she would again exhibit that light to the world." This, so far as we know, was the first expression of faith in our times by a Protestant, in the supernatural gifts of the Spirit as the permanent endowment of the Church.

Mr. Irving's attention seems to have been thus turned to the subject, for, in the second of his Homilies on Baptism, which were preached the next year (1827), we find the following:

"The other part of the dispensation of the grace of God, under which the baptized are brought, is expressed in these words, 'And ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.' By which, they say, we ought to understand, not the outward gift of power, which hath ceased, but the inward gift of sanctification and fruitfulness, which we all believe to be co-essential in the salvation of a sinner with the work of Christ itself. But for my own part, I am inclined to understand both; for I cannot find by what writ of God any part of the spiritual gift was irrevocably removed from the Church. I see, indeed, that she hath lost the power which heretofore made her terrible as an army with banners; so, also, hath she lost the bright and glorious raiment which made her fair as the moon and clear as the sun; but why she may not hope, yea, assuredly believe, to have the former, when the Lord shall see it good, as well as the latter, is what I cannot see, the one being as truly a supernatural work of God as the other."

But while from this time he held it as an abstract opinion that spiritual gifts and miraculous powers ought to be manifested in the Church, it evidently took no strong hold of his mind, and entered little into his public teachings. It was not till the report of the reappearance of the gifts in Scotland reached him several years after, that he seems to have examined the subject with his usual earnestness.

And what were the facts in regard to these manifestations?

Some of our readers will remember "Peace in Believing, a Memoir of Isabella Campbell," which was republished in this country in 1830, with a Preliminary Essay, understood to have been written by the Rev. John Wheeler, afterwards President of Burlington College. In this Memoir, frequent mention is made of an elder sister, Mary Campbell, who was the bosom companion of Isabella during most of her last sickness, in which her remarkable religious experiences gave her the reputation of a saint in all the country around. They were the daughters of a retired officer in the army, and were living at this time with their widowed mother in the secluded hamlet of Fernicarry, on the north side of the Clyde. They had both passed through long-protracted spiritual darkness and conflicts and agony, from which they had at length been brought into great peace and joy. Of Isabella, Dr. Wheeler says in his Essay: Isabella Campbell treated religion as a life. She lived in it. It was the life of her life. And she received it not from the arguments of man, nor from the opinions of men, nor from any source in man, but from God. . . . . She went about to establish no righteousness of her own, to form no notions of her own, to seek no path of her own, to lean on no strength of her own, but submitted herself to the rigteousness of God in Christ. She believed God. In that belief, she found all her wants more than supplied. Her soul was filled with peace; yea, it overflowed with love; it broke forth in joy, it shouted with thanksgiving, it continually uttered praise, it did exalt and magnify the Lord our Saviour."

Isabella died in 1827, after a very long and painful illness, during which she seemed often to be filled with the Spirit, and was impelled to speak with unusual fervor and power of utterance to those around her. It was in Mary that the first spiritual manifestations in tongues and prophecyings appeared about three years after; and it is a fact not without significance, that she should previously have had so much knowledge and experience of the highest forms of the relig ious life then known to the Church. She was thus delivered from the danger of confounding mere fervor of feeling with the supernatural actings of the Holy Ghost.