THE 1389 METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW. JANUARY, 1863. ART. I.-EDWARD IRVING. The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church, London. Illustrated by his Journals and Correspondence. By Mrs. OLIPHANT. 8vo., pp. 627. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1862. In the volume whose title is given above the public have the first satisfactory biography of the great London preacher, and promoter of a strange fanaticism, whose name was thirty years. ago in everybody's mouth, and whose career, so strange, grotesque, solemn, and finally so sad, was the theme of the sneers of the thoughtless and of the wonder of the thoughtful. This book therefore meets and fills a confessed want. The author, Mrs. Oliphant, is favorably known in the lighter departments of literature, and here she brings the facility of writing before acquired to her more serious task, together with great faith in her subject, and the biographer's requisite amount of hero worship. Unluckily she has made the not unfrequent mistake of supposing that the biographer's office is that of the advocate rather than the judge, and so a kind of partisan aspect is given to her statements which detracts from their authority. But these are venial faults, and they would be quite satisfactorily atoned for by the cleverness of the work, if the worthiness of the subject were not a sufficient justification of all her vindi cations. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XV.-1 EDWARD IRVING was the son of a substantial tradesman of Annan, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland; born August 4, (another account says 15,) 1792. With an ambitious forethought, not unusual among his countrymen, his father determined to prepare his sons for more advanced social positions than that in which they were born. Edward was therefore educated for the ministry, and his two brothers, one older and one younger than himself, were prepared for the medical profession. Of the home life of the Irvings of Annan, where three brothers and five sisters gathered about the "cantie ingleside " of the thrifty tradesman and staunch Presbyterian, we have only the usual pictures of Scottish domestic life. The years of their childhood were those of Europe's convulsions, of which France was at once the source and center; but it may be doubted whether these things were felt in any considerable degree within the quiet household of the Annandale tanner. Traditional tales of border raids, and of Covenanters' sufferings and constancy, with the lessons of the Shorter Catechism, and the stately though simple exercises of the Kirk, seem to have been the agencies, additional to direct parental instructions, that fashioned the forming character of one who became at length a chief celebrity of his age. During the years of his age from thirteen to seventeen, ending in 1805, young Irving passed through the prescribed undergraduate studies at Edinburgh University. Less than a year after his graduation he was appointed Master of the Mathematical Academy at Haddington, which position he exchanged two years later for a similar but more eligible one at Kirkcaldy. He was then about twenty years old, and had attained to an altitude of full six feet, (his full-grown height was six feet four,) with a fine, open Scotch countenance, marred only by an ugly squinting of one eye, and generally a dignified though somewhat ungainly bearing. He was even then, and much more in after life, a figure to be looked after by strangers without contempt. About the same time that he assumed the duties of a teacher he was also entered as a student of theology at Edinburgh, agreeable to the arrangements of that institution by which divinity students are permitted to pursue their studies in private, subject to the requisite examinations and public exercises. After four years had been passed in this relation he was turned over by the university to the presbytery, to undergo a briefer but more searching "probation" before he could be admitted to the anteroom of the ministry by a license to preach. Six months later he received the required license; but he was not then ordained, as the Presbyterian Church ordains no shepherd except for a flock. This occurred in 1815, when Irving was about twenty-three years old. He had now attained the ambiguous position of a licensed preacher and candidate-a layman in fact, though often recognized as a clergyman by courtesy-and he only waited the opportunity to escape from his present occupation to that for which he had been formally designated. In this awkward interim he occasionally "exercised his gift" in the pulpits of his vicinity, now at his native Annan, when the "haill town" turned out to hear him, and the congregation was taken captive because when by his excessive gesticulations he knocked the unlucky "paper" from the Bible he proceeded with no apparent embarrassment without it; and again at Kirkcaldy, where his neighbors heard him respectfully, and found no other occasion for censure than that in his manner there was "ower much gran'ner." Three uneventful years were thus passed, during which each Sabbath found him a silently attentive listener to, . but also uncomfortably critical hearer of, the ministrations of Dr. Martin, the parish minister. He saw that while his own occasional "exercises" were tolerated rather than relished by the people, the sermons of their own minister were received with evident and unflagging interest, and he very naturally asked himself whether the decision was a just one, and also felt a consciousness of a power within himself to go beyond the unambitious efforts of the approved preacher. But no one may appeal from the public verdict who is not himself independent of the public favor, and Irving was both too good to envy his brother's good fortune, and too wise to seem to be dissatisfied at the lack of appreciation of himself. Of the spiritual qualifications of our candidate for his expected ministry no account is given us. He had been designated for that calling by his parents, apparently without much regard to his religious fitness or reference to a divine call, and their determination had been acquiesced in by himself in much the same spirit. Though always of unblamable manners, except a slight tendency to pugnacity, he had hitherto given no marked indications of any special religious experience; and though the Church of Scotland carefully insists upon a consciously recognized "conversion" as the first step in a religious life, no such crisis is recognized in his history. Of his later religious life happily there can be no doubt, but its inception and early growth are not recorded. Nine years of successful teaching at length produced weariness of the undesired occupation, and though no "call" allured him to his longed-for position, yet he resigned his chair, and was for the first time in all his life a free man. For lack of other occupation he next removed to Edinburgh, and recommenced student life at the university, reading theology, science, and general literature, with Bacon, Hooker, and Jeremy Taylor for his teachers and models of style and thought. But his heart was not in his studies. He longed to be engaged as a Christian teacher, and in his enforced inaction he now meditated a mission to interior Asia, as grand and romantic as certainly it was impracticable. The dreams of this season were destined however to produce their results, as will appear in the sequel. It was while thus waiting upon disappointments that he was induced to preach in the hearing of Dr. Chalmers, who was then desiring to procure an assistant in the great parish of St., John's, Glasgow. The sermon, notwithstanding the unfavorable circumstances of the preacher, was pronounced by a competent critic a "production of no ordinary mind;" but Chalmers said nothing, and returned home. Irving's patience now quite failed him. He therefore forwarded his easily moveable effects to Annan, and himself took ship to follow them; but by taking the wrong boat he was taken to Belfast, and so treated to an involuntary excursion, which was marked with a due mixture of Scotch and Irish adventures. Upon his return to Annan he found a letter from Chalmers inviting him to Glasgow, whither he accordingly went, and was there offered and accepted the place of assistant minister of St. John's. "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." And so began in earnest the great life-work for which he had been so long preparing, and which he had anticipated with most painful longings. A parish of ten thousand |