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EDWARD IRVING 207
Edinburgh (November i7th, 1842), which put fresh vigour into those who dreaded the unknown future. It was from the Psalms, again, that the seceding ministers, on the day of the formal separation, drew courage and hope. On May i8th, 1843, Chalmers presided as moderator over the meeting in Tanfield Hall. A heavy thundercloud darkened the building. But as Chalmers gave out the Psalm (xliii.) to be sung, beginning at the 3rd verse, " 0 send out Thy light and Thy truth, that they may lead me," the cloud parted; the sun poured forth ; the sombre shade became dazzling light.
During two years of Chalmers' ministry in Glasgow (1819-22), he had for his curate Edward Irving, one of the strangest and most pathetic figures in the ecclesiastical history of the last century the lover of Jane Welsh, the friend of Thomas Carlyle, and the founder of a Church.
In 1822, Irving began to preach at a little chapel in Hatton Garden. Like Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. The most brilliant members of London society crowded to hear him ; the mystic eloquence and prophetic outpourings of this impassioned Cameronian were a new sensation ; his splendid figure, sonorous voice, and noble features heightened the magnetism that he exercised; fashion fell at his feet. Flattery intoxicated him. He could not endure neglect, and singularity succeeded to singularity. A wave of religious enthusiasm had swept over the country, its tide setting strongly in one particular direction. In the horrors of the French Revolution, in the rise and fall of Napoleon, men saw the fulfilment of Divine prophecies. With senses alert and strained, they watched for signs of the impending end of the world. Poets and painters sought their inspiration in Apocalyptic visions. The current swepti Irving from his feet. Hour after hour, he expounded to listening crowds his theories of the Second Advent, his prophecies of " the Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty." In 1831, the '< unknown tongues " were for the first time heard in his church at Regent Square, and henceforward they became frequent, if not habitual, occur- rences.
In April 1832, the trustees of the Regent Square church removed him from the pulpit, though the bulk of his congre- gation followed him to Gray's Inn Road. He was still a minister of the Church of Scotland; but in March 1833, he was deposed from his ministry by the Presbytery of Annan. The tribunal before which he appeared, consisted of homely old men half ministers, half sheep-farmers summoned from their rural manses to determine delicate questions of theo- logical orthodoxy. Hours passed in the speeches of the accusers, and in the defence of the most eloquent and brilliant preacher of the day. The trial began at noon. It was dark when Irving was pronounced by the Presbyters to be guilty of heresy. Before the moderator delivered sentence ot depo- sition, in a scene of strange excitement, Irving left the dimly lighted church, in which he had been baptized and ordained, crying to the crowd that obstructed his passage, "Stand forth! Stand forth! What! will ye not obey the voice of the Holy Ghost ? As many as will obey the voice of the Holy Ghost, let them depart." He was at least spared the pain of hearing himself cast out by the Church which disowned his service. "I sang in my heart," he says, " ' Blessed be the Lord, Who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth,'" (Ps. cxxiv., verse 5).
Irving returned to London to find himself forbidden to administer the Sacraments, for the act of deposition was a judicial act, depriving him of his authority as a minister. Though he was re-ordained by the apostles of his own Church, he never recovered from the blow. He accepted it with a humility which was the more touching from his confidence in his extraordinary powers. But his heart was broken. Slowly his life ebbed from him. His faith in his mission was unshaken; he believed in it with all the fervour and strength of his soul, and toiled still to gain for it the ear of the world ; but in vain. In September 1834, he left London a dying man. Riding through Shropshire and Wales, and visiting his scattered congregations as he went, he reached Liverpool. In his touching letters to his wife are messages to his little daughter, Maggie, sent in the simply-told stories that he gleaned on his way. When other comforts had failed, and fame had fled, he clung still to his Bi'ble, and made the Psalms his constant companions. "How in the night seasons," he writes on October i2th, " the Psalms have been my conso- lations against the faintings of flesh and spirit."
At Liverpool he took ship and sailed for Glasgow. The end was near. For a few weeks he was able to preach, though, at forty-two, his gaunt gigantic frame bore all the marks of age and weakness. His face was wasted, his hair white, his voice broken, his eyes restless and unquiet. As November drew to its close, his feebleness increased, till it was evident that his life was rapidly passing away. His mind began to wander. Those who watched at his bedside could not understand the broken utterances spoken in an unknown tongue by his faltering voice. But at last it was found that he was repeating to himself in Hebrew, Psalm xxiii., ft The Lord is my Shepherd." It was with something like its old power that the dying voice swelled as it uttered the glorious conviction, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." The last articulate words that fell from his lips were, " If I die, I die unto the Lord. Amen." And with these he passed away at midnight on December Jth, 1834.
LOCKE AND HUMBOLDT 209
Nor is the love of the Psalter confined to those who, in their different ways, and often in bitter opposition, have defended the truths of Christianity. It comprehends, also, many of those who have stood in the forefront of the scientific attack. A vast change has passed over the spirit of the conflict. The combatants no longer fight for victory ; both sides respect the convictions of the other ; both contend for truth, and learn to welcome it, from whatever source derived. Experience has proved, not only that scientific enthusiasm can raise men to heights of the purest morality, of the most absolute disinter- estedness and most austere self-denial, but also that the scientific attitude is not incompatible with religious aspirations or religious convictions. To some men, faith is far harder of attainment than to others; to some, in their profound sincerity of mind, it may even be almost impossible. Yet, probably, few champions of science, driven to take their stand on a point of Nothing in the agnostic abyss of Nothing, have not longed, at some moments of their lives, that their feet were firmly planted on the Rock.
John Locke lived the last fourteen years of his life at Oates, in Essex, an inmate of the house of Sir Francis Masham. In his seventy-third year, his strength failed him fast, and he knew that his end was near. On October a8th, 1704, Lady Masham was reading the psalms for the day, "low, while he was dressing." He asked her to read them aloud, and it was while he was listening to the words, that the stroke of death fell upon him. In the Psalms, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) recognised an epitome of scientific progress, a summary of the laws which govern the universe. "A single psalm, the io4th," he writes, "may be said to present a picture of the entire Cosmos .. . We are astonished to see, within the compass of a poem of such small dimension, the universe, the heavens and the earth, thus drawn with a few grand strokes."
Similar is the testimony of Maine de Biran (1766-1824), whom Cousin called one of the greatest of French meta- physicians. He had lived through all the storms of the French Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration. A soldier, a politician, an administrator, he had played his part in political life. Yet it was as a solitary thinker, a keen observer of himself, a deep student of the facts of his inner consciousness, that his chief work was done. In his Journal he lays bare the mental stages by which he passed from the guidance of Condillac to that ofFenelon, from the self-interest of the one to the self-sacrifice of the other. The rapid changes in all around him forced upon his mind the need of some fixed, immutable point of support. He could not hold, with his first master, that man receives, through the channels of the senses alone, all the elements of his moral and intellectual nature. Such a theory brought him nothing permanent, and" no repose. For a time he wavered between the creed of the Stoic and that of the Christian: but gradually Marcus Aurelius yielded to the teaching of the Bible, the Pensees of Pascal, the Imitation of Christ, the CEuvres Spirituelles of Fenelon. Biran became a believer in Christianity. In a philosophical work, on which he was engaged at the time of his death, Nouveaux Essais d'Anthropologie, a work which gave a new impulse to the spiritual school of philosophy in France, he distinguishes three stages in the moral growth of man. The first stage is animal, governed by instincts and passions. The second is human, when the will and reason triumph over the merely animal nature. The third is spiritual, when the will itself submits to, and is absorbed in, the guidance of the Divine Spirit. If the second stage is characterised by effort, the essence of the third is love. The second is the ideal of the Stoic; the third of the Christian. The great change in his life took place about 1818. In his Pensees for March 28th, to April ist, in that year, he comments on verse 28 of Psalm cxix.; " the Word that can make me live, will not come from me nor from my will, nor yet from anything that I hear or collect from without." In this conviction he presses forward on his new road. It is religion alone that can help a man to change his nature: it alone gives him, as he says, " the wings of the dove." Without this aid, man would weary of the struggle; and he asks for help, in the words of Psalm vi., verse 2, " Have mercy upon me, 0 Lord, for I am weak." The last entry in his Diary, May i7th, 1824, made when he already felt the rapid approach of his fatal illness, is a comment on Psalm xxxviii., verse 7: " In my weakness, and in my moral and physical discomfort, I cry aloud upon my cross, * Have mercy upon me, 0 Lord, for I am weak. My loins are filled with a sore disease; and there is no whole part in my body.' Woe," he says, "to the man who is alone. Unhappy too is the man, however powerful his intellect, or however great his human wisdom, who is not sustained by a strength and a wisdom higher than his own. The true wisdom, the true strength, consists in feeling the support of God. If he has not this, woe to him, for he is alone! The Stoic stands alone. The Christian walks in God's presence and with God, through this world and the next."
Here are the words of Psalm xxiii., verse 4, " Thy rod and thy staff comfort me," which consoled the dying hours of Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), "almost the only earnest man" Carlyle found in Edinburgh; a student of colossal learning, yet as original as he was erudite, who did more than any man of his time to release the reflective thought of this country from its insularity, and to bind it to all that was best in the philosophy of Greece, Germany, and France. The insuperable limitations of human knowledge were the essence of his teaching; yet it was on the mysteries which lay beyond the barrier of the Unknowable that he reposed at the moment of his death.
Here are the words which Sir James Simpson (1811-70), in his childhood at Bathgate, knew as his "Mother's Psalm." In times of anxiety and trial, and they were not infrequent in the baker's shop, Mrs Simpson used to repeat Psalm xx. in the Scottish paraphrase:
<( Jehovah hear thee in the day when trouble He doth send, And let the name of Jacob's God thee from all ill defend:
0 let Him help send from above, out of His sanctuary;
From Sion, His own holy hill, let Him give strength to thee." Etc., etc.
The memory of her character and example never faded from her son's mind. Years later, when he was already famous as the discoverer of chloroform, and at the head of his pro- fession, Simpson returned to the impressions of his childhood, and it became his highest ambition to make known to others, in public or in private, the peace which he had found in the Christian faith.
Or, lastly, may be quoted the Sonnet, suggested by Psalm xxvii., which was written by one of the ablest of modern biologists, George John Romanes:
"I ask not for Thy love, 0 Lord; the days
Can never come when anguish shall atone.
Enough for me were but Thy pity shown, To me as to the stricken sheep that strays, With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways
0 lead me back to pastures I have known
Or find me in the wilderness alone, And slay me, as the hand of mercy slays.
(< I ask not for Thy love; nor e'en as much
As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie;
But be Thou still my Shepherd still with such
Compassion as may melt and such a cry;
That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch,
And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die."
Literature has felt the same spell as that which fell upon philosophy and science. Men of letters in their lives or in their writings have acknowledged the universality of the Psalms.
To two paraphrases of the Psalms, Joseph Addison owes no inconsiderable portion of his fame. (< David," he writes in the Spectator, "has very beautifully expressed this steady reliance on God Almighty in his 23rd Psalm, which is a kind of pastoral hymn, and filled with those allusions which are usually found in that kind of writing." . . . Then follows the well-known version of Psalm xxiii., " The Lord my pasture shall prepare.".1 A month later, appeared an essay on the means of confirming human faith. It closes with the equally famous version of Psalm xix., " The spacious firmament on high."2 Throughout the English-speaking world, the two paraphrases of the Psalms are known to millions who know nothing of Sir Roger de Coverley or of Ca/o.
It was with a psalm that William Cowper, a timid, delicate, sensitive child in Dr Pitman's School at Market Street, Hertfordshire, nerved himself to endure the torture inflicted by an elder boy. "I well remember," he says, "being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress." Yet, as he sat on a bench in the schoolroom, fearing the immediate coming of his tormentor, he found in the text, "I will not fear what man doeth unto me " (Ps. cxviii., verse 6), " a degree of trust and confidence in God that would have been no disgrace to a much more experienced Christian."
In the language of the Psalms, again, he expressed the despondency which ended in his attempted suicide, and removal to a madhouse. It was a time when, to quote his own description of his state of mind,
" Man disavows, and Deity disowns me. Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me."
Placed in Dr Cotton's asylum at St Alban's, he recovered. His joy, like his despair, is clothed in the words of the Psalms: ((The Lord is my strength and my song, and is become my salvation " (Ps. cxviii., verse 14). " I said, I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord ; He has chastened me sore, but not given me over unto death. 0 give thanks unto the Lord, for His mercy endureth for ever!" (Ps. cxviii., verses 17, i8, 29). It became his ambition to be the poet of Christianity, and the fruits remain in such hymns as, "God moves in a mysterious way," or, "Hark, my soul, it is the Lord," or, " 0 for a closer walk with God."
It is by a reference to a psalm that Boswell defends the minuteness of detail with which, throughout the most famous biography in the English language, he has noted the con- versations of Dr Johnson. He quotes from Archbishop Seeker, in whose tenth sermon there is the following passage: "Kabbi David Kimchi, a noted Jewish commentator, who lived about five hundred years ago, explains that passage in the ist Psalm, His leaf also shall not wither, from rabbins yet older than himself, thus; That even the idle talk, so he expresses it, of a good man ought to be regarded; the most superfluous things he saith are always of value."
1 Spectator, July 26th, 1712. No. 441.
2 Ibid., August 23rd, 1712. No. 465.
Of Walter Scott's familiarity with the Psalms, his novels give abundant evidence, and scraps of the Psalms were among the last words which his friends could distinguish from his lips. A tour on the Continent failed to restore his health. But, from the moment when, rounding the hill at Ladhope, he caught his first glimpse of the outline of the Eildons and of the towers of Abbotsford, he revived. Surrounded by his dogs, happy in his home, conscious and composed, he almost seemed to have hope of recovery. On July lyth, 1832, he insisted upon being taken to the study, and placed at his desk. His daughter put the pen into his hand, and he endeavoured to close his fingers upon it; but they refused their office it dropped on the paper. He sank back among his pillows, silent tears rolling down his cheek. The gallant spirit of the worn-out man had made its last effort. " Friends," said he, "don't let me expose myself get me to bed that's the only place." From this time his strength gradually declined. His mind was, for the most part, hopelessly obscured;
yet, when there was any symptom of consciousness, fragments of the Stabat Mater and the Dies Irce could sometimes be distinguished, mingled with passages from the Bible, or verses of the Psalms in the old Scottish metrical paraphrase. He died September aist, 1832.
" Half a Scot by birth," Byron spent his childish years at Aberdeen. There, from the teaching of his nurse, he gained a love and knowledge of the Bible which he never lost. Many of the Psalms, beginning with the ist and 23rd, he learned by heart. Still a mere boy, yet already subject to fits of melancholy, he found expression for his mood in a paraphrase of Psalm lv., verse 6:
<( Fain would I fly the haunts of men I seek to shun, not hate mankind.;
My breast requires the sullen glen
Whose gloom may suit a darken'd mind.
** Oh! that to me the wings were given,
Which bear the turtle to her nest! Then would I cleave the vault of Heaven, To flee away, and be at rest."
On the Psalms, as bis mother repeated them to him in the metrical version of Scotland, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shep- herd, nursed bis childish imagination, and mingled with them her tales of giants, kelpies, brownies, and other aerial creations of the fairy world. Before he knew his letters, he could say
rub them smooth by contact with conventionalities, he remained what he was, and made his life his own peculiar creation.
Outside a narrow circle of his contemporaries Fitzgerald was barely known. But few writers influenced their generation more powerfully than Ruskin and Carlyle. In the purport of their message they differed ; in their manner of delivering it, they were absolutely opposed. Yet, apart from the affection which Carlyle bore to his "eethereal" Ruskin, they had many points in common. Both urged the necessity of individuals and nations obeying the commandments of God, Carlyle in- sisting on the retribution that awaits disobedience, Ruskin emphasising the new powers that glad obedience engenders. Both loved the Psalms. " David's life and history," says Car- lyle, "as written in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and war- fare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew." As both Carlyle and Ruskin felt the power of the Psalms, so the spirit of both was Hebraic. Neither was content to be a mere intellectual thinker; both were, above all, teachers- aesthetic, moral, political teachers. Both were on fire not only to know the right, but to have the right done. They had the intense zeal for action, combined with the undoubting affirma- tion, of the ancient prophets. Both recognised the effect of a man's life on his opinions and work; both insisted on the intimate connection between the moral conditions under which a man thinks, and the external form or action in which his thought is clothed. It is this perception which gives to Car- lyle's historical writing its vivid human interest; it is on this perception that Ruskin founds his view, that only the pure in heart can interpret Nature adequately, or rise to the highest expression of truth and beauty.
To compare the influence of the two men would be scarcely relevant to the subject. It is, however, probably true, that Carlyle taught the thinkers, Ruskin the doers: Carlyle stimu- lated morals, Ruskin action. Carlyle's gospel of work, force, and strength supplied no additional impulses beyond those by which men of practical energy felt themselves to be already actuated; but theorists were roused by the suggestion of the advent of a leader, who, in his strength, should govern by the profoundest principles that abstract thought could for- mulate. Ruskin's influence, on the other hand, has been chiefly felt in actual life. In the presence of nature, he gave to ordinary people eyes. In aesthetic criticism, he opposed the spiritual to the sensuous theory of Art. In painting, he gave a new creed to a new school. In architecture, he stimulated the Gothic revival. In the political and social world, his in- sistance on the moral dignity and destiny of man created new standards as the tests of economic questions, and humanised the iron laws of supply and demand.
Ruskin, as soon as he was able to read with fluency, studied the Bible by his mother's side as few children were ever taught to study its pages. Among the passages that he learned by heart, were Psalms xxiii., xxxii., xc., xci., ciii., cxii., cxix., cxxxix. Of Psalm cxix. he says: "It is strange, that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my child's mind, chiefly repulsive the ngth Psalm has now become of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God."
From the Psalms might be collected, so Ruskin taught, a complete system of personal, economical, and political prudence a compendium of human life. What "Tibullus " in Jonson's Poetaster says of Virgil, Ruskin in effect says of the Psalmist's work:
(t That which he hath writ Is with such judgment labour'd, and distili'd Through all the needful uses of our lives, That could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point But he might breathe his spirit out of him."
In Our Fathers have told us, Ruskin urges that the first half of the Psalter sums up all the wisdom of society and of the individual. Psalms i., viii., xii., xiv., xv., xix., xxiii., xxiv., well studied and believed, suffice for all personal guidance;
Psalms xlviii., Ixxii., Ixxv., contain the law and the prophecy of all just government; Psalm civ. anticipates every triumph of natural science. On the Psalms is also founded much of Ruskin's aesthetic teaching. The guiding principle of Modern Painters is that glad submission to the Divine law which is the keynote to Psalm cxix. Throughout those parts of the Bible which, says Ruskin, people " are intended to make most personally their own (the Psalms), it is always the law which is spoken of with chief joy. The Psalms respecting mercy are often sorrowful, as in thought of what it cost; but those re- specting the law are always full of delight. David cannot contain himself for joy thinking of it he is never weary of its praise: ' How love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day. Thy testimonies are my delight and my counsellors ; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb'" (Ps. cxix., verse 24). By the love that inspires obedience to law, Ruskin was separ- ated from the rising school of science; by the fruits of that obedience precision, exactitude, fidelity, realism he was distinguished from the followers of the expiring romantic school of art. His own teaching was that, by the two qualities in combination, in other words, by docility and faith, men may win back the childlike heart which alone penetrates the mys- teries of nature, and regain the power of expressing the beauty and truth with which the external world reveals the Divine law.
Throughout all Ruskin's work there runs this connecting link of glad submission to the law of God. His numerous volumes, touching manifold sides of life, resemble those pious tomes of the Middle Ages into which men wove the totality of their learning and the ardour of their faith. Their design seems, and is, disordered by endless digressions; but all the lines converge on the Divine object of their love. So Ruskin's work is at once a Speculum Mundi and a Speculum Dei; it is a mirror of the world and of God in the world. Through all his books runs the golden thread of cheerful obedience to the Divine law. Especially is this true of Modern Painters, which is not only a beautiful treatise on art, but also the impassioned expression of an adoring faith. The subject is handled as it might have been treated by a mediaeval mystic, or a Franciscan poet. Still more is it conceived in the spirit of the Psalmist. As, in his exquisite prose, Ruskin interprets to the nineteenth century God's message of creation, so David sang of God's handiwork, while he shepherded his sheep on the lonely uplands of Palestine. " He who, in any way " the words are Carlyle's " shews us better than we knew before, that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not shew it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe ? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, ( a little verse of a sacred Psalm.'"