SCOTTISH
MINISTERIAL
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MINISTERIAL
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SCOTTISH MINISTERIAL
MINIATURES.
1
"As men, as Christians, too, renowned,
And manly preachers."
BURNS.
·
Watson, Ines, Elizabeth Saphia (Fletcher)
SCOTTISH
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES
11
BY
DEAS CROMARTY chemba
London
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCII.
1
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
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1-17-38
CONTENTS.
PROFESSORS.
I. PRINCIPAL BROWN
II. PRINCIPAL CAIRD
III. PRINCIPAL CAIRNS
IV. PROFESSOR CANDLISH
V. PROFESSOR COWAN
VI. PROFESSOR A. B. Davidson
VII. PROFESSOR MARCUS DODS
VIII. PROFESSOR DRUMMOND
IX. PROFESSOR FERGUSON
X. PROFESSOR IVERACH
XI. PROFESSOR ORR
XII. PRINCIPAL RAINY
XIII. PROFESSOR SALMOND
XIV. PRINCIPAL SIMON
XV. DR. THOMAS SMITH
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PAGE
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69
vi
CONTENTS.
MINISTERS IN CHARGES.
I. DR. AIRD.
II. DR. ANGUS
III. REV. David BeATT.
IV. DR. BLACK
V. REV. ARMSTRONG BLACK
VI. DR. A. K. H. BoYD
VII. REV. ROBERT CAMPBELL
VIII. DR. COLIN CAMPBELL
IX. DR. CONNEL
X. DR. Cooper
•
XI. REV. JAMES DENNEY
XII. DR. Drummond
XIII. REV. JOHN DUNCAN
XIV. DR. FERGUSON
XV. REV. JOHN GLASSE.
XVI. REV. JOHN HUNTER
XVII. DR. HUTTON
·
XVIII. REV. CHARLES JERDAN
XIX. REV. G. H. KNIGHT
XX. DR. MARSHALL LANG
XXI. REV. MURDOCH M'ASKILL
XXII. REV. GEORGE MACDONALD
XXIII. DR. M'GREGOR
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CONTENTS.
vii
XXIV. DR. DONALD MACLEOD
XXV. REV. JOHN MACPHERSON
XXVI. REV. DAVID MACRAE
XXVII. DR. MACMILLAN
XXVIII. DR. MAIR
XXIX. REV. BENJAMIN MARTIN
XXX. DR. MITFORD MITCHELL
XXXI. REV. A. B. MORRIS
XXXII. REV. HUGH MORRISON
XXXIII. DR. OLIVER
XXXIV. REV. W. W. PEYTON
XXXV. REV. JOHN ROBERTSON
XXXVI. DR. ROBSON
XXXVII. REV. GEORGE ADAM SMITH
XXXVIII. REV. JOHN SMITH
XXXIX. DR. WALTER C. SMITH
•
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XL. DR. JAMES STALKER .
XLI. REV. JAMES STARK
XLII. DR. ANDREW THOMSON
XLIII. DR. TULLOCH
XLIV. DR. WARDROP
XLV. DR. WHITELAW.
XLVI. DR. ALEXANDER WHYTE
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SCOTTISH MINISTERS.
+
I.
PROFESSORS.
I
I.
PRINCIPAL BROWN.
UNDE
NDER a shaded light and against
a massive stone wall, a dim space
overhead, the face has all its effect. In
profile, a piece from the antique, full of
noble inquiry and discipline; in front
view, the head of a Scottish philosopher,
simple, sagacious and kindly, none the
less learned. Cut in plain lines out of
mother stone, it has been chiselled and
cleared, heightened and softened, until
we have a perfect cameo of a gracious
old scholar, wearing the fine ivory tint
of pure age and lighted with sweet
blue eyes. The pose upon the rounded
shoulders adds another touch of modest
Here is
dignity and long experience.
3
4
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
one who has lived in two ages, served
both, honoured both, and is not weary
yet, but with undimmed eyes looks from
the known to the unknown, from the
accomplished to the unforeseen, stands
waiting a third world of knowledge and
duty. A sculptor once said, "Give me,
for my art, the head of an old man who
has lived a good life: there is nothing
so fine." I recall that saying as I look
at the old man standing there between
light and shadow. An indescribable
trueness of nature makes atmosphere
about him, and that large upper lip,
when you see the full face, tells you of
the radicalism which hates pretence in
any region, and will neither deny its
own worth nor yours. There is here
a sanity of intelligence that continues
from what was the noblest element of
an elder world. Dr. Brown knows the
sinning human heart by insight, as he
knows the faithful aspiring heart by ex-
perience, and on the sinner as upon the
PRINCIPAL BROWN.
5
believer he lays the true and tender
hand of a thoroughly humane teacher.
One feels often, with admiration, the
fearless, delicate realism of touch,
quality of a nature at once plain, strong
and sincere. In Dr. Brown's company
who would not be an evangelical? It
is the only thing. "The sinners of
Palestine had no theology of Christ;
they didn't need it." He who says this,
with organ-notes of voice rising and fall-
ing, has certainly a regard for theology;
we all know that, and do not suspect
him of having parted company with old
friends and co-witnesses. Yet we know,
too, how he steps alongside the young
men, turning upon them his wise, calm
look. Quick and firm goes the step
upon the streets of the northern city
after ninety pilgrim years, and if the
face looks as though it might any day
melt into the spiritual life, it is none
the less alive with the homely vigour
of our Scots granite and moss. You
6
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
should see Dr. Brown as I saw him once,
sitting close under a pulpit, with hand
bent to ear, and calm, clear eyes fixed
upon a young man of gentle voice and
cultivated air, a true son of the present
day, who was and was not a pupil of
the patient master sitting below. One
longed to throw upon a tablet and pre-
serve those two heads, the hazel and the
silver, in their contrast and their sugges-
tion. When Dr. Brown is preaching
the young men have many things to
notice. There is a flash now and then
in the eyes, and the hand falls sharply
as in past days it often did; the
convinced reasoner is in evidence, and
the father of a family full of kindly
patience; with these the Puritan man
of counsel who has seen the world and
has culture at command. We know the
race; each one had his own fingers and
wore the accepted theology as a weapon
added to a robust person, not as a mask,
certainly not as a burden. They lived
PRINCIPAL BROWN.
7
in a world they belonged to and under-
stood. That gives strength and keeps
life sound at the heart; it gives us old
men like Principal Brown, of whom
none can say or dream what Arnold
mournfully dreamt of the race he
represented-
"Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born."
No; the convinced and humane Puritan
does not whimper. With him a vanish-
ing world lives into and vitalises one
just waiting to be born:-
"Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh speed those years!
But while we wait allow our tears."
In his eye
That is not our veteran.
no fear, in his voice no alas! He has
humour, he has faith and the Lutheran
spirit. The living God will continue to
8
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
1
have a living world. The age is born,
it cries, it does not see clearly, it knows
not the earth, nor the heaven; but it is
God's age and Christ's; it is redeemed
with blood.
II.
PRINCIPAL CAIRD.
TH
HERE are times when one thinks
Dr. Caird the very apostle for the
age, and other times when one cannot
make out what it is he is preaching.
But at no time is it possible to think of
him save with great respect and warm
admiration. A more engaging figure
does not move upon the northern stage.
Four persons at least compose the
Principal. The spare short man, with
abundant falling grey hair and the head
like a fine bust, is at once a parish
minister and a literary free-thinker, a
university professor and a metaphysical
weaver, with a glimmer all through of
the poet and each of them is a Scots-
9
10
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
T
*--
:
Lond
man. Only in a country where the
intellectual life has long had its root
among a high-minded peasantry, could
such a figure emerge. Only as son of
a race to whom religion had been for
centuries the highest form of culture
and the exercise of every human faculty,
while daily bread was wrung out of
stony fields, could Dr. Caird be what he
is, man of letters, philosopher and poet,
and yet look as if he had risen from
the loom to lecture. This home-spun
aristocracy is the true thing; it is full
of charm, and among many examples
Dr. Caird is not the least fascinating.
Suppose him in the pulpit of a parish
church. He impresses you from the
first moment. The head is large for
the rest of the frame; it gives massive-
ness and nobility. The face is without
beard and strongly cut, the brow high
and straight, the eyes full with clear-cut
lids. It is the face of an imaginative and
a most informed student.
His manner
PRINCIPAL CAIRD.
II
is quite the northern pulpit style:
reading with steady emphasis which
mounts up to fervour and something of
the flail. He has the simplicity of the
most careful knowledge, the gleams that
strike only from the surface of a full
lake. Poetry has given him of her
wistfulness, Philosophy of her dignity,
Religion of her glow and hope. He has
a fine art of words, a fine wish to touch
the conscience. The eloquence becomes
imposing, and you listen as in a burst
of organ recital for the gathering of
melody into a final crash of chords that
shall carry the ear. Does it come, or
only a skilful interesting process of
stops and octaves, with delicate swell of
Vox Humana breathing through and
concluding? It is no ordinary work,-
it is music and persuasion; he handles
the instrument as a master: can it be
that in seeking harmony he has lost the
keynote and the motif? As the music.
ceases, one recalls men who could have
་
.4
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MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
\
made heaven and earth draw together.
They were not so disengaged, not so
brooding, yet they naturally pierced the
empyrean our Principal dreams of.
Puritanism is often not disengaged
enough; she is often stolid, she wears.
the camel-hair garment and feeds on the
locust of the wilderness: for reward, her
power is her own, and no Hellenist can
take it. Dr. Caird is half a Puritan,
but the Hellene comes in. He has been
much in company with Goethe and
Arnold. One may say that he has just
missed being a poet such as Arnold but
with more warmth.. Do these spirits
help a preacher to convert sinners and
build up believers ?
Man is "a poor struggler." He needs
to know why Duty is imperative, why
Love is best, why he may hope in the
face of Death; he needs to feel certain
that once there was a Resurrection
morning in the place of tombs. He has
to be mastered by his teachers and also
PRINCIPAL CAIRD.
13
set free by them, else he will not over-
come. Dr. Caird is on the holy mount;
he has entered into the cloud and has
said, “Master, it is good to be here."
The religious consciousness is to him
the highest term of knowledge. God is
for him, as for the humblest Puritan of
our forefathers, the God of creation,
providence and redemption, in whom
are hidden all the treasures of wisdom
and love; and the life of man consists
in the love of this Holy, the service of
this True God. Is it not enough?
It is not. Puritanism will have the
soul, and the soul cries out for the risen
and redeeming Christ. The Master
descends the mount. Below there is
one possessed with an evil spirit, who
must be called out of darkness into
personal life.
III.
PRINCIPAL CAIRNS.
To
what shall we liken him, and
with what may he be compared?
Say, the stone cut out of the mountain.
without hands; only, think of it as a
stone that lives and rolls by a force in
itself and proper to a mass. Certainly,
nothing must be thought of that is fitful,
jerky, trifling, or other than vitally im-
pelled. It is a prose poem; a piece of
Gothic building, fine, firm, and aspiring,
rising course by course from the earth in-
to the heavenly spaces. No other of our
churchmen so well represented the old
Scottish element that produced Carlyle
for its maximum fruit and has given a
hundred other men of living force to the
14
PRINCIPAL 15
CIPAL
CAIRNS.
world.
Homeliness marks the race; a
fine, soft ruggedness of the rock and the
yellow broom, and the wide green hill-
side. Dr. Cairns sprang of the same
soil as the immortal Dumfriesshire pea-
sants; in the make and physique of him
he was the whinstone builder, acute, firm,
cautious, with a composed energy of
devising and doing which never loses
breath. Absolutely, there was nothing
vague, uncertain, or nervous here, but
some of the power with none of the
temperament of genius. One supposes
that long ago, by the instinct of a
strong man, John Cairns understood
what he might achieve, and did always
quietly know it to be achieved, up to
a certain point. Although in the matter
of published books his doings were far
below the line of power, his life, his
character, himself as a whole, have been
a vital element in the period just closing,
and no history of it can be written
without his name. More of the ana-
16
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
lytical, and philosophy might have had
another Scottish son; a tinge or two
of the restlessness so pungent in the
Carlyle blood, and literature might have
despoiled the church. But the solid
strong-bedded nature belonged to Cal-
vinistic evangelicalism by birth and
training, and was infused with the Cal-
vinist passion for synthesis. Dr. Cairns
was one of those who must reconcile, and
must do it in the deeps, where thought
calls to thought. The Scottish intellect.
demands large groundwork and im-
mense vistas. Nothing parochial, no-
thing feudal pleases it. Detached from
the schools, as in Carlyle, it makes theo-
logia viatoris for itself, and wanders on
through the immensities. But this was
never John Cairns.
He belonged to the
Church, to the Evangelical Alliance, to
any and every synod of the reformed
faith. Nevertheless, one of his chief
marks was a refusal to be hedged in by
the limits of school and creed. He
G
PRINCIPAL CAIRNS.
17
demanded the grand and sublime of an
omnipresent, omniscient Godhead. His
personal bearing, his rhythmic mode of
utterance, his choice of subjects for
thought, were significant of the mind
and temper. As a preacher he at first
allowed the hearer to be somewhat indif-
ferent. The man of intellectual quality
was in evidence; robust thinker, careful
student, fellow of Christendom, not of
a parish; nevertheless, for half a ser-
mon there might be no particular hint
of the speaker's human power or of
his extensive resources. He seemed to
take man on the old familiar ground;
to be stating, with full ability, the usual
case. But he went forward. There
was a slow, strong beating up from the
levels, a mounting movement of speech
and thought, and he began to master
us. He was holding fast to the risen
and redeeming Christ. Upon that
centre of all things he advanced with
gathering energy and singular, abrupt,
2
18
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
1
swelling cadences of speech. In the
God-man he found synthesis for reason,
object for action. The horizon was illi-
mitable for clear, coherent life. With
that long flail sweep of the arm the
voice also swept on. Its tones were
very memorable, very marked.
Of
charm, properly speaking, there was
none in voice or discourse; yet the
man John Cairns held us by a spell
that grew with the years and we seem
to have lost a host with him, though
he fought no battles for us. Half the
magic lay in homeliness—he was SO
much our own; the other half in spirit-
ual persuasions. His mind never sought
freedom; his heart went out into a large
place, and whenever he spoke the wide
air of Christian faith lay about him.
The wonderfulness, not of abstract
truth but of redemptive grace, absorbed
his soul, and the shadows of time and
earth were as though they were not.
IV.
PROFESSOR CANDLISH.
HE name strikes out of a past
already ancient to the throng in
the streets of Glasgow. It is just fifty-
one years since the heart-searching day
of Marnoch and the solemn strife in
a country kirk beyond the Grampians.
How many thought of it on the 21st of
last January? How many-how few-
care to remember the eloquence and
activity of Candlish and the rest, who
held council and fought battles and led
a host, and were so keenly alive in it
all, so conscious of adding a new great
day to the mighty days of Scotland?
Some there are bearing the honoured
names of that time, and others who had
THE
K
19
20
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
their youth in the following decades;
some remember if only because of
fathers and mothers gone, and home.
memories dearer than aught else. And
these may be seen at times making
their way to a church where one is to
preach who recalls an epoch that is
ready to vanish away.
So it was on a Sabbath day of last
summer. Two persons at least, each a
stranger to the other, walked a few
miles of a hot road to "hear" Professor
Candlish. What thoughts were in the
mind of one I only guess. He had
bright brown eyes, and a something,
half memory, half expectation, hung in
them as he walked and as he sat listen-
ing. Doubtless in his youth the work
of the elder Dr. Candlish was a new
and vivid memory. The other pilgrim
glanced at him now and then, and
always the brown eyes were fixed upon
our preacher with their silent inquiry.
We had, that day, a plain exegetical
{
PROFESSOR CANDLISH.
21
discourse selected for a special occasion.
Neither in the preacher's look nor in
his communication was there anything
of fiery eloquence. A theological posi-
tion was assumed, made to bear on the
conscience for well-doing, not fought
for. He read, or seemed to read closely,
in a class-room manner, nose over book
and an occasional wave of the hand for
action. Face and figure always count,
in some way. In this case they suggest
the counsellor, the man of law and
deliberative advice, not the army leader.
The frame is moderate, the head long
and narrow-a polished cylinder of facts
and considerations-the eyes open
narrowly in folds of pale flesh, the large
under lip moves on the firmness of the
upper, and the voice emerges but dully
for the most part, though it can achieve
a thrust. Dr. Candlish recalls in appear-
ance not his father, but James Candlish,
his grandfather, and with some physical
appear to have come certain me

22
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
habits and tendencies, not those of the
father. Here all the outward indica-
tions are professorial, and the sermon
accords. One speaks who is used to
careful regard and does not fear, but he
will have it, who has to instruct and
care for men's souls, but not by way
of alarm or rushing attack, or anything
extreme. Dr. Candlish gives one the
impression of having much to think of,
and desiring to reach as far as possible
a combination. He does not make any
show, but there is cohesion, literary
reference, a glint of subdued humour
in the by-going, and always an air of
ability for more than is presently done.
We knew, of course, and the preacher
knew, his lineage and his position. We
remembered that he has gauged the
time, scen what lics before us, and
judicially entered upon creed revision.
His eyes open now and then with a
dark keenness that surprises. Alto-
her, one acknowledges a man be-

PROFESSOR CANDLISH.
23
longing to college and Assembly, and
having there his leadership, proper to
a time not at all that of Marnoch and
Strathbogie.
Oh, the old battles, and oh, the new!
.
1
¿
D
V.
PROFESSOR COWAN.
THE
HE minister has not perished to
make the professor. He was too
deeply graven on Dr. Cowan to dis-
appear under a succeeding impression.
A man who has preached and guided
a congregation and visited about city
streets for many years does not easily
lose the habits and instincts of that time.
He may have found it a severe time,
but it has made otium cum dignitate
not altogether so possible to him as he
may have once fancied. He has per-
haps borne the student heart with some
pain in the midst of discouraging routine
and many hindrances; now he finds
that the man of church courts and
24
PROFESSOR COWAN.
25
affairs, the man of guiding habit, is with
the holder of a professor's chair; the
two, half friends, half enemies, have to
go together still. Had they separated,
it might have proved that one or other
of the two ought never to have existed;
on the contrary, it might have proved
to a nicety that one was the seed-flower
of the other, its natural preparation.
There are always two ways of looking
at things. Here, at all events, is one
who was an active, popular city minister,
and is still a shepherd and preacher at
large for the church to which he belongs.
Doubtless, from first to last the task is
a pretty hard one, and may well plant
those deep little lines in the brow and
pale the hair. Dr. Cowan never looked
indolent or unconcerned, and he has no
such air now. Something seems to be
with him that means care and anxiety.
In truth, these are difficult times for the
Elishas upon whom has descended the
mantle of Tulloch. Their work is not
26
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
easy. Nor is it easy to be a professor,
either within or without university walls.
Where the Parliamentary Commission.
does not come the excited pupil lieth
in wait. "Academic calm"; that, for
ecclesiastical tutors at least, is a thing
of the past. And it seems a pity that
a man of Dr. Cowan's natural gentleness
and quiet scholarship should be wearied
in the arena where so many lives to-day
are passed. All are not made for it,
and though one takes his share there,
quite vigorously, an on-looker may feel
that he would be better out of the dust
and the dunts. This is not the preacher,
however. In that capacity Dr. Cowan
is pretty much himself. Mildness of
voice, a friendly earnestness of manner
that warms to the point of an appeal,
are tokens of a religious mind giving
itself to the edification of men and
women. The discharge of duty in
family and society is insisted on with
knowledge of the problems involved,
PROFESSOR COWAN.
27
and if the outline of a sermon be simple,
unpretentious, the handling shows a man
of culture as well as an observer of
society. His theology-if the scribe
may be allowed to surmise-seems to
be much like that which characterises
Anglicans who are neither High nor
Broad nor distinctly Low, a moderate.
practical orthodoxy.
VI.
PROFESSOR A. B. DAVIDSON.
E all know the commandments,
"W and if commandments were all
we needed why was He in the world?"
Very simple, that word. Yes; but
has it not the depth of a full stream?
One who waits upon Dr. A. B. David-
son's teaching soon gets to know when
a thing of this sort is coming, and ever
after the seemingly simple words have
in them a gentle keenness of utterance,
and remind one of a look, acute and
restrained, under a full benign forehead,
a setting together of thin lips and a
little pulse in a spare cheek. Did you
hear him say that? Then you felt, with
a thrill, the reality of Evangelicalism,
how it is a living tone and temper, as
28
PROFESSOR A. B. DAVIDSON.
29
true, as deeply vital as you ever dreamed
it to be. One does not forget a thrill
like this. A moment of spiritual reas-
surance has been felt, quiet, unexpected,
vital. Why was He in the world?
One must wait upon Dr. Davidson.
He will give drop after drop from a full
cup, and each is a tonic, but you are to
be in no hurry, nor may you dare to
think of requiring any glitter or gaud
of service. The water itself is not that
which you came for? Those who did
come for it only may get more than
they expected. We are brought to the
highlands of Evangelicalism, and find
them the heights of thought, of learning,
of humanity. Fences, little plots of cab-
bage ground, preserves of hothouse fruit,
are all left below; you have come up
here with God and the soul into a calm,
clear light. The world lies away to the
horizon and beyond, a world of divine.
realism and grand spiritual drama. The
preacher looks about, a little air of
30
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
eagerness is visible, he shuts his eyes
and his mouth, and a living piece of
thought slides out with an odd subtle
charm and a keen simplicity. He has
prayed that we may have "new views
and distant prospects of that which is
possible to be attained." We have
them, in those flashes which remain
with the soul. Why gleams so mild
and simple should strike a land that
is very far off we can hardly say; but
we know that we have caught glimpses
and felt a wind upon our brows. For
those who count no pains lost in the
pursuit of the knowledge of life, there
are pregnant sentences in which word is
fitted to thought and thought is arranged
to be understood, if you will consider of
things. There is no rhetoric at all; it
would be most unbecoming here; but
there are occasional dramatic touches, an
abiding lucidity that means fine humour,
and moments when the preacher draws
those rare tears that spring where truth
PROFESSOR A. B. DAVIDSON.
31
is touched in her secret fountain. To
show you how this is done is impossible.
Such moments make themselves when
spirit meets spirit in the upper spaces,
and God is "nearer than breathing."
What went ye out for to see? A
scribe ? There be many of them in
courtly places. A vendor of charms?
Ye will find them under domes and
steeples. But what went ye out for to
see? A preacher; and we found him.
Behold, they that speak loudly and say
nothing are in many tabernacles.
One Sabbath day two elegant tailors'
models went along the street. They
had "heard" Dr. Davidson; so, with a
difference, had I. Said one to the other,
"Davidson gets worse and worse," and
the other agreeing that he certainly did,
the two conveyed their elegance to some
dinner-table in a square or crescent.
What went ye out for to hear? I
heard of God and Christ, and the soul of
man, and my heart was moved within me.
VII.
DR. MARCUS DODS.
DR
R. DODS has always done honour
to his office and his own soul. He
has never affronted the ministry nor the
church with facile talk. An odd notion
prevails in some quarters that he is a
harum-scarum, splashy kind of being,
who lives to startle quieter persons.
He is "well known," people say; and
this is how they know him. The por-
trait is even less recognisable than
Cromwell's done by a Royalist of the
Restoration, or Knox's by a Saturday
Review hand. That sober, solid, obser-
vant man, a dangerous rider after the
hounds of speculation! It is oddly
impossible. There is positively nothing
32
DR. MARCUS DODS.
33
▾
of the typical heretic or lover of heresy
to be seen about Marcus Dods. He
is emphatically the reverse, in every
quality that lies at all open to view.
Riding to hounds, indeed! Say, rather,
a botanist on foot, well prepared by long
study of species, genera and "sports,"
and apt to distinguish where you may
see no points of difference; or to classify
where you may see too much difference.
It is not an affair of dash and view-
halloo, this, but of solid, quiet work,
indoors and out, on a man's own feet
and with his own eyes. Heretics now-
adays are mostly plagiarists; there is
left nothing new under the sun for a
man or a Mrs. Ward to invent. The
last possibility was exhausted about four
years ago, and even Sir Edwin Arnold
cannot find a path never trodden before.
But Dr. Dods is himself, and has done
something of his own. It is nothing
startling, of course, being his; and per-
haps the people who have the queer
در
-
34
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
portraits of him don't understand that
these objects will not at all match the
work which the real Dr. Dods has ac-
complished. They are good folks; just
as good as he; and if they would read,
say, his volume on Genesis through,
carefully, they could not fail to perceive
a different face from that which haunts
them, and to hear a voice such as they
are quite used to hear. Dr. Dods is
really the wise servant of the parable
who set himself from early days to
employ the talents committed to him,
and who by diligent use has come to
have more. The Erasmus volume shows
the man and his strength. The best
work in that book was done when he
was waiting to become a minister.
There you find his natural bent, his
real quality as a writer and thinker.
Let me say, frankly, that I find them
a literary bent and quality; yet, mark,
he is more at home with the ecclesias-
tical leaders of whom he treats than
DR. MARCUS DODS.
35
with Erasmus the man of letters. This
is significant. While his habit is
literary his prepossessions and interests
are of the Protestant church, and he has
seen something which he believes him-
self called to attempt for his Church
and for Scotland's ancient faith. With
Puritan seriousness and Scottish tena-
city he has held to his task, and un-
doubtedly not in vain. Few men have.
made more of opportunity up to the
measure of natural power. To name
and define his effort is perhaps not
easy. To put any English writer and
preacher beside the northern one, by
way of comparison, migth only mislead.
Our Professor is a casuist; we may call
him a director. He is a home product,
and not an echo of the Germans. He
aims at guiding men, not at settling
texts. A dangerous Radical? Not at
all. A Scottish preacher and expounder,
evangelical, solid, painstaking, who when
he seems most bold is very cautious,
36
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
and who is as much a son of the Free
Church as Mr. M'Askill or Mr. Balfour.
We may disagree with him often. It
would be very wrong not to, for his touch
upon delicate points has been known
to fail. But he is still a man and a
brother.
VIII.
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND.
TIM
IME runs on. It is now some
years from the day when Henry
Drummond stepped ashore to find him-
self a famous man, by means of, shall
we say? the Spectator and-others. We
know, for he has told us himself, how
relieved he was that day. A load was
lifted from his mind, perhaps his con-
science even. To publish one's first
book is an exciting business; to com-
bine with that the promulgation of an
unsuspected scientific law must needs
make a man feel himself a Prometheus
singular in the world of mortals. But,
at the same time, to give Christianity
a new language, new basis and line!
-
37
38
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
That, indeed, was an enterprise over
which Prometheus might well grow
hot and cold. It is much to Mr.
Drummond's credit that he felt anxious
about the matter, and thankful to find
our discerning, learned Spectator look-
ing quite bland and happy for once.
The good Spectator seldom gets through
a lengthy review with so little rubbing
of glasses and sticking of them upon the
nose as it spent over "Natural Law
in the Spiritual World."
No young
of
man, revolutionising the world
thought, could have expected so much
credit with great editors. And then
Mr. Drummond never looks anxious.
Tremor, uncertainty, concern for effects.
do not show on his face or in his bear-
ing. Every one now knows the serene
look and impressive quietness of manner,
and they tend to make us think of a
scientific student, thoroughly at ease
with Nature and her designs, and deeply
aware that She, Ayesha, will have her
-
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND.
39
way. A stranger, judging the judgment
of mere appearances, might easily sup-
pose Mr. Drummond indifferent to
results and consequences. It is useful,
therefore, to have that little confession
as to the relief he felt when he found
himself not branded as a meddling fool,
not derided as a quack, not ignored and
left to the stern weeding out of natural
law, but a prophet and oracle utter-
ing deep sayings to a listening world.
There could hardly be anything more
dramatic than this. One would will-
ingly endure the preparatory labour,
the deeps of doubt, the wrestling with
Huxley, Tyndall, and others, the haunt-
ing questions of the brain, for such a
conclusion. Many men have gone to
Africa and wandered in her forests,
but most of them have had to be
content with seeing strange pigmies
there; they could not return to find
themselves singular giants of renown
leading the world to a new faith.
-
40
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
Remarks upon Mr. Drummond's writing
and preaching are as little called for
as criticism on the weather. He is with
us, and most people think they know
him and his writings.
Much might,
of course, be said on this as on the
other topic named, but to what purpose?
Plainly, few men have come into a more
notable inheritance of "gift" than this
one. He has everything an apostle
might crave to have and never reach,—
grace, skill, music, a magician's art of
weaving and winding and keeping the
heart enthralled. The age wanted a
thousand things, and, above all, a variety
in the way of a prophet. It was taken
captive by its own feelings presented
in singular combination, a piece of itself
made more charming than any one.
could have expected. So, Professor
Drummond has repeated, in a new style,
among the multitudes of the closing
nineteenth century, a success that seemed
to belong to past times and very dif-
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND.
4t
ferent epochs. Every artist, says Louis
Stevenson, has fallen in love with a
star. That must be quite as true of
every prophet. What star has drawn
our professor ?
IX.
PROFESSOR FERGUSON, EVANGELI-
CAL UNION CHURCH.
YES;
ES; you are right: the emotional
group of preachers is the one in
which you find the successor of Dr.
Morison. But you understand that the
group is a major division, including
many others. For instance, there used
to be a pocket-handkerchief standard.
Men who belonged to that got out their
own handkerchiefs at "thirdly under the
first head," and went on taking them.
out at due intervals; while the hearers
were expected to follow suit, and did it
usually. But the emotional order over-
spreads this minor school, and it is
another standard in which one places
42
PROFESSOR FERGUSON.
43
Dr. Ferguson. You remember the day
you first heard him? He took you
somewhat unawares. A dark, rather
heavy figure went up to the pulpit and,
with head sunk forward upon breast,
a deep voice, half buried, gave out a
psalm. The idea you had of him
required to be rapidly revised, did it
not? It seemed to you that an English
Baptist of the Eastern counties had
come, instead of the Scotsman. Prayer
and reading issued forth as it were from
confinement; with the sermon he ap-
peared likely to be at one with the
desk rather than the congregation. All
the time, however, an air of capacity
and power breathed from him; the
thrust of a hand into the bosom or
folding of the arms across, the hang of
the dark head, were evidently the
actions of a man long used to bending
over notes and considering in the
moment of delivery how to use them
best. When he lifted himself to make
44
MÍNISTERİAL MINIATURES.
pleasant and pointed delivery, he took
you. The reserve of the beginning
made it more interesting when the
speaker raised head and shoulders and
looked about as a man wide awake to
material and opportunity. Dr. Ferguson
is never out of touch with the congrega-
tion; he has from the first his sense of
an experience, with them, in matters
common to humanity. The texture of
a discourse largely consists of those
domestic and commercial things we all
know of, and there is a frequent resort
to broad sarcastic touches which light
on high and low, learned societies, kings,
and bailie bodies. What is called illus-
tration he uses a good deal and with
uncommon, romantic skill, introducing
little bits of story, which are a different
thing from the conventional anecdote.
Then, as you have certainly noticed, he
has a knack of dropping a brief sen-
tence right to the point of one's heart
experience that particular day and hour
PROFESSOR FERGUSON.
45
>
Wonderful hits may be made by one
who so draws the bow at a venture;
and the heart remembers the archer.
Nor does Dr. Ferguson lose form in
colouring. He likes plenty of surface
plan to work upon; and he has been
known to impress a long "outline
upon hearers who had very little head
for it. He has his weak points, you
suppose? Naturally. Successful play-
ing upon certain strings means a repeti-
tion of effects, and the effects per se may
not make themselves always or with
every one. I know you could mention
the great preacher in whose school our
minister has graduated; but you need.
not. It is one of the best; and Dr.
Ferguson is a disciple by his own
powers. He is a vigorous preacher of
the histrionic order hearers will always
love, and there can be no doubt that as
a professor he will give a good account.
of himself,
"}
X.
PROFESSOR IVERACH.
A
SECRET breathes from this man
when he faces you in the pulpit.
It is a something of race, character,
training and influences answered to. It
is at once piquant and strong, kindly
and acute, a blend of faculties that are
often quite apart. To begin with, you
know him as a close reasoner, a professor
of apologetics who justifies his office by
the force and information of his attack
upon modern atheism, his knowledge of
modern questions. A well-equipped
logician and careful student; that is
how you know him. Yet it is by no
means the first of the impressions made.
by the preacher. It will come out after
46
PROFESSOR IVERACH,
47
a while; at first there is no atmosphere.
of the class-room, save in the robust
easiness of manner and of clear state-
ment born of long practice and very
agreeable.
The resources and energy
of a hard-working thinker bear fruit of
plain rational discourse, shot through
with knowledge, yet adapted to simple
ears and common experiences. Arrows
are always flying among the audience.
"I'll advise you," he says, and interjects
quickly, "if you'll take advice." A
glance, shrewd and pleasant, out of clear
dark-gray wide-open eyes conveys a
hint of human perversity and humorous
patience with it. There is always a
gleam in the eyes; latent awhile, it
shoots forth with some ironic reference,
and recalls the author of much virile
Puritan apologetic. Dr. Iverach uses
humane sarcasm freely, and strikes out
side-lights of that kind very effectively
from a piece of Scripture story. You
are not likely to forget these points;
48
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
they will recur with the story or the
experience he treated. All through he
is the skilful reasoner, Scottish every
bit, and of a type not too common; he
is also the skilful preacher, contending
for the "broadly human" way of deal-
ing, and possessed of many striking
qualities; among them, that best of all,
enjoyment in preaching. This moralist
loves dealing with men. The whole
affair is full of character, and he is
happiest when he has a long platform
to patrol and can move from side to
side, looking into the assembly and
dropping sentences, now quietly, now
with resonant firmness, out of an iron-
grey beard. The well-filled frame helps
the whole effect with its indication of
manly powers. Altogether, what is it,
the secret of the personality? Is it not
that Highland and Lowland contribute
each their own gift, marked, fruitful,
helpful to each other? Professor Iverach
is a realist, with the Celtic perfervidum;
PROFESSOR IVERACH.
49
he analyses, but to the exhaustion of
humbug, not of honest human emotion.
As a preacher he engages himself less
in delving underneath things than in
clearing away rubbish, and exciting a
will to the work of building: that work
being ours as much as his. Those
people who are never impressed until
they see the sweat roll off the speaker's
face will, of course, find Dr. Iverach's
fires too well stoked and not crackly
enough. But some are not afraid to
call him one of the best practical ex-
pository preachers in Scotland. As a
professor he will surely be claimed by
Edinburgh or Glasgow ere long and
set more in the midst of the throng
of thought where his gifts and posses-
sions may find full use.
4
XI.
PROFESSOR ORR, EDINBURGH.
DR.
R. JAMES ORR, once of Glasgow
and late of Hawick, is a typical
figure. Big and burly, robust and
broad-shouldered, he is in all outward
points and presentments just the sort
of man the ecclesiastical king delights
to honour. In any church, under any
banner, such a man comes to his own,
every bit of it. The type is a con-
quering one elsewhere. In law courts
the slight pale men with the mild faces
stand about doors and look on; the
eminent pleader who talks to my lord
with his hands behind him or in his
pockets is almost sure to be a good
weight, a solid, large-boned fellow whose
50
PROFESSOR ORR, EDINBURGH.
51
capacity for "working early and late
has brought him to "what ye see," as
Mrs. Carlyle used to say. It is the
same with doctors, and, in fact, if you
will only ignore the exceptions, you will
find it the same everywhere. Ingenious.
tracts have been written to prove that
a really great man cannot weigh more
than ten stone nor measure more than
five feet four. He dies before he is
thirty, and never, never looks like a
consumer of animal food. So say the
tracts. Law courts, college chairs, and
pulpits tell quite another story. · Mr.
Dishart is not a type, and the tracts
are-tracts, things made to be left upon
good people. If you would tread on
high places you must have muscles, feet,
and a head too well-packed to swim.
And how shall people know that you
have these ? Faith, in such matters,
cometh by hearing and by sight; the
hearing of a resonant voice and broad
steps, the sight of a large-fronted head
•
15
52
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
strongly shaped. Dr. Orr has physical
ability and the mental outfit which
corresponds. His community has made
no mistake. He has done in his own
way all that the race of him has done
and he is good for all which may be
expected from such a man. It is a
steady labour of achievement, this rise
from the ordinary ministry to the pro-
fessor's chair and the opportunities of
the scholar's life. "The election ob-
tained it." Yes, and lawfully, according
to the order and scheme of things.
Scotsmen have a wonderful knack of
knowing what they want in given cir-
cumstances, and of taking it. Amongst
many ministers and a reasonable number
of scholars they have taken Dr. Orr
to teach church history and guide the
students of a restless, critical generation
of U.P.'s. He has won his company,
and will lead it vigorously. Those who
dislike mysticism and viewiness may be
well content; voluntaries are said to be
C
PROFESSOR ORR, EDINBURGH.
53
sure of their man; heresy will not
make off with him, and he should not
be easily dismayed or overborne by
the John Addies of the future. In
short, Dr. Orr is a strong, competent
son of that school which has ever been
well represented in all the professions
and has given to the world not a few
eminent lawyers, doctors, teachers, and
statesmen. His church had the right
to believe that he would make an ex-
cellent professor, and the belief is being
justified.
-
XII.
PRINCIPAL RAINY.
THE
HE finished leader, ecclesiastic, one
might almost say, by chance,
though none the less by nature now,
after years of exercise. There is, cer-
tainly, nothing heterogeneous about Dr.
Rainy. Physique and mind correspond;
faculties lie together and do not cross.
Outwardly, the Principal has a look of
one or two distinguished men of past
days, but in them was a good deal of
the lion, and there is none in him.
Lion is all taken out; moderator and
counsellor put.in. That well-filled, well-
carried figure, that clear-cut, classic,
attentive face, that air of composed in-
formation and ability for every affair in
54
PRINCIPAL RAINY.
55
hand-are they not, purely, the marks
of the Edinburgh man of counsel,
whether Lord of Session, W. S., or
churchman? It is quite easy to think
of Dr. Rainy as either judge or lawyer,
and impossible not to think of him as
a statesman long in office, long favoured
and trusted by Her Majesty, and let
off easily in the cruel pages of Punch.
To some observers he is in every point
such a man; the look, the voice, the
mental character alike suggest this form
of leadership. As Prime Minister Dr.
Rainy would have been remarkable for
Coalition Cabinets, and as leader of the
House of Commons he would have
stood without a rival. I have seen him
in a moment of no great consequence,
yet one in which it was possible either
to forget or defy. Dr. Rainy did not
despise the moment, as many able men
would; neither did he show that he
thought much of it. Yet he neither
forgot nor defied; rapidly, coolly, the
56
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
line to take was seen, the mind dealt
with the elements of the little situation
and with itself, in relation thereto. A
few words were spoken with perfect
composure—and who should say they
were words not previously intended, or
words of design? They were a mere
phrase, and the chief business of the
occasion went forward. Not till after-
wards did one perceive the swift, quiet
tact, the trained certainty of movement,
the mental operations involved in the
speaking of some dozen words. It was
an example and a revelation. The
secret? Attention, collectedness. Close
regard to the opinions of men, unre-
mitting care, and a nature without
nervousness: in these characteristics the
success lies-and in the Free Church
day which needs precisely such a leader.
Dr. Rainy is not an idealist. That
which makes literature does not engage
him, nor show his ability. He is the
leader of a church, and of men as they
PRINCIPAL RAINY.
57
are in and of that church. To this
leadership he gives all the care and all
the tact of an observant recollected
mind. Many threads run through the
cord he holds as steersman. He knows
them all by the feel, never confuses
them, never tries experiments such as
one has seen a distinguished neighbour
of his try. One purpose rules: the
boat must and shall be steered, the
cord shall be kept round and firm. No.
such thing for him as coming safe to
land on spars and broken pieces of the
vessel. He forgets nothing, dares no-
thing. Take him as a speaker on any
occasion; his power is in the care with
which he is clearly vague in a most
collected way and stands always steady,
one step in front, making his hearers
quite sure that they know on what they
they are invited to rest. One or two
main facts are selected out of all that
offer themselves, and these are made
so sure that upon them action must
58
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
be taken. The skill with which this
is done is often masterly. Humour is
too dangerous an arm to be employed.
Paradoxes, besides requiring too much
attention, are unsafe. Dr. Rainy is
often called subtle. I prefer to say that
the faculty of putting the case to the
jury so as to command a verdict has
been largely bestowed upon him and is
fully used. More than most reasoners
he knows how to use the negative
method to secure a positive result, and
in that way has won some brilliant
victories. Dr. Rainy comes late in a
long succession-the church leaders of
Christendom, prelate, legate, and pres-
byter writ large. They are strong,
acute men, and are never found missing
the target while they hit the white.
The Church commands them, and for
her stately sake they command others.
"The flower," says George Macdonald,
"is deeper than the root."
XIII.
PROFESSOR SALMOND, ABERDEEN.
HROUGH and through the pro-
THROUGH
fessor-so one feels, in contact
with him. Physically-that comes first
-there is a figure of middle height and
size, a narrow pale face, dark hair and
beard, the latter straight cut from the
corners of a thin-lipped, straight mouth;
a style which crosses the natural lines of
a countenance. The eyes are dark be-
hind spectacles, and seem to belong to
them. In the look, generally, one sees
the close student, calm, unemotional,
but touched with the sharpness of a con-
tinual hunt among shelves and pa
I don't mean that in the least
Dr. Salmond has the air c
59

60
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
chasing knowledge. Quite the contrary.
He possesses knowledge, has it on hand,
ready for use, a sort of condensed ex-
tract. The natural man (he who is
neither a professor nor a minister) must
regard this quintessence of learning with
awc and wonder. How it ever got
within one cranium, not, after all, bigger
than most well-made heads, here is a
marvel! How it can be so thoroughly
prepared and ready for usc, is another.
And Dr. Salmond is very well prepared.
Quict accuracy is one of his points. He
is particularly neat, precise, and recol-
lected. We all know him as an editor
of this and that serics of thcological
books, besides a Review and what not.
Sometimes cditors would appear to
have been picked up loose about some
printer's premises. At other times-
that is now and then-they were evi-
ntly made in heaven and sent down
rainbow. It is no compliment to
Salmond is found in
t Dr.
mag

PROFESSOR SALMOND, ABERDEEN. 61
neither category.
He belongs to a
third, and is worthy of all respect there,
being, indeed, a born editor in his own
rank. As a lecturer, I don't pretend to
describe him, and even Mr. Barrie can
be found out when he draws upon the
reminiscences of other fellows. But I
have heard Dr. Salmond preach and
about his preaching several points may
be noted, in all respect. First, he is a
good man, dutiful, sincere, well-toned,
and while he speaks you feel this at
the back of the utterance, giving it
cffect. The regular lecturing manner is
with him and his eyes for ever fall to
the desk, to be recalled to the audience
in a glance. There is no passion what-
ever, and you may call him dry when
you and he happen to be ill-met; but
if you do, it will be borne in upon you
some day that there are kinds of dry-
ness and that a scholar has always
something to say and an art of sayi
it, though he may have just the

62
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
voice good for reading one to sleep in
a gray class-room about four o'clock of
an afternoon. Dr. Salmond is certainly
quiet, but he has a simple, unaffected,
very true style of his own which is
good and pleasing. The lines of
thought are those of leading orthodox
commentators, used pretty much as the
preachers of thirty years ago used them,
but in view, of course, of changes in
commentators themselves. The whole
is between lights, as it were, and has
the pleasantness of that for one's mental
and physical senses. You may think of
something else if you like; the speaker
will not deforce your mind. His voice
while it reaches every corner makes no
noise, nor any surprising moves; and
the remark applies to matter of dis-
course. Like all lecturers, he has a way
of stating a "problem," and then, for
answer, something which to him, the
clar, is a fair and proper answer,
ordinary mind may fail alto-

PROFESSOR SALMOND, ABERDEEN. 63
gether to get "the hang" of it, let alone
the weight. But whenever Dr. Salmond
preaches, you have an Instruction, as
our Catholic friends say-a sound, well-
prepared Instruction from an equipped
and steady teacher who has no appetite
for the fanciful. The parish minister,
the bishop, such as there are in his
city, he is not in any sense. The
student of character and human gift
finds much interest in tracing the dif-
ferences between men who may take
one view of the world, teach one theo-
logy, and spring from one stock.
"There are diversities of operations, but
one Spirit."
XIV.
PRINCIPAL SIMON, EDINBURGH.
D
R. SIMON is made up on no con-
ventional pattern for principal or
professor. He does not distribute the
dust of learning as he goes, nor exhibit
the severe form of the cyclopædia.
Personally, the head of Congregational
divinity in Scotland has the look of
an experienced pastor, conversant with
affairs, used to varied activities, and
practically interested in a flock. He
does not look his age, either in eye or
frame, and he may be said not to look
his particular office. This is meant
quite respectfully. Why should a man
announce in every gesture or in the lack
of gesture, in every look or want of
64
PRINCIPAL SIMON, EDINBURGH. 65
look, that he has come to fit one certain
corner and could be noways fitted into
another? It may be a mark of genius,
certainly, Nature having poured her
stuff just so into such a mould and said,
"I change not, here." And we must
then thankfully take it as it comes. Dr.
Simon, however, does not come in that
manner. He has had the benefit of
much out-door exercise, so to speak;
I mean exercise in the world and in
other places than a library, and the
result is plain to be seen. We find him
a bright, neat, alert personality, a man
who carries knowledge of books within
a portable knowledge of men and their
ways. Coming upon him in the middle
of a Scottish city one feels the English-
man, with an accent of his own, physical
and mental; and it is easy to guess
what part of the southern kingdom
produced him. But, as we all know,
some of the most operative minds in
a country may be those that have come
m
66
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
to it fresh from a kindred, not alien
region; and between Lowland Scot
and Lowland Englishman what is the
difference? Taking Dr. Simon mainly
as a preacher, he strikes the Scottish
note in his clear, easy sense, his in-
structed and thoroughly practical way
of handling points, and his natural habit
of dramatic gesture. He has the case
of one long practised in speaking and
a judicious liveliness never degenerating
to screams, or gymnastics, or such other
bodily display as people with cars and
cyes learn to dread. Now and then his
use of vernacular may displease those
who love the Eliphaz style of discourse;
but certainly it gives point, and sound
criticism of life expressed in this way is
very memorable. The Principal is a
man who has a liking for metaphysics,
for his own part, but is resolute, as a
preacher, to achieve the practically
useful and compel the man from the
street to understand the chief point in
PRINCIPAL SIMON, EDINBURGH.
67
((
hand. "To pick yourself up: that is
what you have to do, my friend," is an
expression that will surely get him!
If "fast," as they say, he is warned with
plain irony that "the fast man is the
slowest creature in the world." Again,
does anybody say he "must live"? Not
at all; no man is obliged to live on
this planet; the thing needful is to
do what is right. The lover of a
shrewd Saxon saying finds much to
relish. The preacher employs with
effect a current phrase, a current scien-
tific fact, and his idealism is kept
in strict control. In fact, one could
wish this to have more rein now and
then that one might see where it could.
go to; but then critical questions might
emerge." Briefly, if you want a
Savonarola prophesying in a rage,
Principal Simon is not your man. He
is busy doing something else, which he
can do, well and briskly. We have here
one who pretends to no Mesopotamia
68
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
but addresses himself in pleasant direct-
ness to the chief end of preaching.
Congregationalism has its own genius,
in which the foregoing is an element,
and he would be a rash Presbyterian
who durst say the Congregational
genius was played out. Neither its
logic nor its method has yet ended.
its task, and small as the plant is in
Scotland it has more than the right of
existence. That is not settled by the
number of students in a college, nor the
number of members in a church, nor
the number and size of ecclesiastical
wheels and pulleys.
XV.
DR. THOMAS SMITH, EDINBURGH.
PROFESSOR of Evangelistic Theo-
logy in New College, Edinburgh,
and Ex-Moderator of Assembly, Dr.
Smith has been on the ministerial roll
for fifty-two years. As a minister he
is only one year after Dr. Andrew
Bonar; he is two years earlier than
Dr. Aird, who preceded him in the
Moderator's chair. It is clear that he
did not come unduly to this honourable
notice and place, and he certainly did.
not fail of right on other grounds. The
old word scholar has grown to so large
a meaning that some who might have
worn it handsomely a generation ago
may now hardly think of it as theirs;
it requires so much filling up. What
69
70
MINISTËRIAL MINIATURES.
must a man not know before he can
be defined by a title used for Lightfoot,
Döllinger, and Cairns? Nevertheless,
it may be given even to some whose
brains are not encyclopædias. It is a
temper, no less than a store, and the
temper may be strong in a man whose
opportunities of gain have been small.
Now I take Dr. Smith to have some
of the good old-fashioned scholarliness.
What he has been as a professor we need
not meddle with. His subject is a limited
one, the convicting power of theology.
That would seem to resolve itself into
a branch of practical training, for which
Dr. Smith has some distinct qualifica-
tions. He may be judged from his
preaching; it, always, in some degree,
reveals the nature. He is very simple
in the pulpit; a spare old man with
white hair, dark blue eyes and a pleasant
voice, speaking easily, plainly, out of a
lengthy experience, and continuing a
testimony which long ago became part
DR. THOMAS SMITH, EDINBURGH. 71
of himself. That is about all, a familiar
talk on the old points, warming to
appeal and ending with manifesto, still
fervent after all the repetition, still con-
vinced in face of all the changes. Sup-
pose you have changed too; suppose
you feel sharply that we cannot always
live on the Disruption, or see the world
quite as M'Cheyne saw it; suppose you
want an acknowledgment that critics.
have spoken and left echoes; yet you
can feel the interest and the worth of
the testimony the men of the M'Cheyne
age are continuing with clear eyes and
firm lips. Besides, consider how often
the minister of fifty years has seen the
tide ebb from supernaturalism and flow
again; how often he has seen it blown
upon strange coasts and broken among
rocks of lie and fraud. He may be al-
lowed an obstinate faith in the return
of this tide upon the shore where he
stands. Since it comes back from every
swell of materialism to some creek and
72
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
channel of curious belief, will it not also.
sweep back from the critical and analytic
to the unquestioning and receptive?
He waits for the human mind to confess
that Inspiration has a real meaning.
And Dr. Smith, for his part, repre-
sents a school common to all the
churches, a practised, knowable, well-
mannered school. He has none of the
peculiarities of utterance which come.
quaintly from some we could name.
He does not at once proclaim himself.
of a certain age and party, nor, as a
speaker, has he any of those tricks
which make a man too memorable.
There is grace in the bearing, kindliness
in the look, an easy, unaffected, cosmo-
politan air, and with these a corre-
sponding effect of knowledge.
Dr.
Smith has the laws of the world and
the ways of men in view, and he has
judgment. He is not given to cheap
anecdotes or rickety illustrations, so far
as I know him. The examples he freely
DR. THOMAS SMITH, EDINBURGH. 73
takes from human labour and skill are
usually well chosen and sound. With
sense and competent touch he can make
use of science or whatever he needs to
illustrate the scheme of salvation. There
is no great wind catching us from space
to space; but the romance of faith is
ever present as an atmosphere, and
supernaturalism is not the least afraid
of itself. Perhaps in his prime he was
more stringent than now. With his
quick speech there comes reminder of
more vehement action, the swinging
energy of a fervent evangelist. But one
finds here a gentlemanly tone, a refine-
ment not always in evidence in a cham-
pion of evangelicalism. Dr. Smith
leaves this very distinctly as a mark of
himself. His figure is with me that of
a good and sensible man drawing to
the close of an honourable testimony,
and possessed of that certainty which
the older theology may well count, so
far, its own prize.
S
II.
MINISTERS IN CHARGES.
9
75
I.
DR. AIRD, BRECHIN.
A
GOOD presence, on the graceful
side of proportion, abundance of
silver hair, large blue eyes looking wist-
fully upon the world, as from a place
apart but not withdrawn; that, out-
wardly, is Dr. Aird, minister of an old
protesting or, as they say in England,
Nonconformist community in the old
If I am not
little city of Brechin.
mistaken, he has been there all his
ministerial life, and without being buried
-for Brechin is a sort of "hub," and
keeps its own fire-he has known the
life which, already, so few know and
fewer still desire. Is it not pleasant,
in some points, to have had a whole
77
78
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
existence for some thirty or forty years,
to have worked in one study, books
always on the same shelves, to have
preached in one church till the pulpit
has become a vesture, to have shared
the experiences of two generations, or
even three, in the same streets and
cottages, and sent forth into the world
young men and women whose grand-
parents “signed the call"? This min-
istry of the small town and the quiet
years has been the portion of Dr. Aird,
and he has given to it the grace of
character, the modest dignity, the un-
assuming scholarship that have made
such lives a heart of culture and moral
strength to our northern land. In his
case there is a hush as it were of the
whole man, a something gently sup-
pressed. He has not yet come to his
own, but will-in the large space and
free air beyond these low fields of earth.
Two notes are felt in him, mild restraint
and a gallantry of Christian temper.
DR. AIRD, BRECHIN.
79
These run through the preaching and
the life. Here is one who continually
exerts himself but makes no fight, in
the blunt ordinary sense of the term.
He is interested in the doings of men,
and could have given advice worth
having from a front bench of Synod;
but he is never seen there. He has
thoughts of his own in religion and
philosophy, but has allowed the con-
tinual engagements of weekly duty to
fill his time. That he could have won
attention with the pen is not doubted
by any of his friends; he has the
enquiring Scottish disposition, and no
man better loves a long free talk over
the study fire. As a preacher he comes
out of a generation that assigned paths
to pulpit discussion, and for the most
part Dr. Aird follows those paths-but
with indications. His voice has
make some effort in second:
mation of the mind
have a pleading s

80
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
By
hangs about us all, more or less, as
we move through time, and there is a
chastened eagerness in the whole bear-
ing. He is unaffectedly deeply religious,
and the teaching is catholic, without
any show, lucid, simple and sympathetic.
He reads his sermons with the frequent
gesture of the old school, and a look
now and then over the gallery as though
to the far-off solution of the human
problem. We hear of "the ceaseless
act of faith" which must inter-penetrate
the continual act of life, and are made
scnsible of the "sure and certain hope"
that gives glory to our sadness. A
nameless charm accompanies Dr. Aird.
Some one has written humorously of
the pleasantness of being one of the
less-read authors, meaning the authors
who deserve large and secure fit audi-
He, for his part, professes to scc
fate sweeter and every way
han mere spread popu-
authors, he says,

ncc.
DR. AIRD, BRECHIN.
81
are loved more tenderly, loved by their
own kith and kin, loved with taste and
understanding. That, at least, may
pass for a rendering of what he says.
An excellent bit of comment might be
done, in the same vein, as to the less
known preachers and ministers of re-
ligion, those authors who publish quietly
every week, each to his circle. In this
particular hour of time it is good to
consider what a man may lose by being
a popular success, by finding early the
road from Galilee to Jerusalem and
being added with much applause to the
Sanhedrin. Certes, he will lose some-
thing.
6
II.
DR. ANGUS, ARBROATH.
IF
F you met Dr. Angus travelling
abroad-and you may be sure he
does travel in various directions-you
would certainly take him for a dean or
canon of the fair and opulent Anglican
church. For nothing less could you
take him until in speech and by certain
indications he gave you the origin of
a manner and style which you would
then confess, after all, not southern but
quite Scottish. Compare Dr. Angus
with A. K. H. B. on the one hand, with,
let us say, Dr. Black or Dr. Drummond,
of his own church, on the other, and
He has
you will see what is meant.
just the air of the university and cathe-
dral man; well informed, but not the
82
DR. ANGUS, ARBROATH.
83
least pedantic; well placed, but on terms
with all agreeable or honest folk; cleri-
cal, but a man no less, and a fisher
to boot. A minister is allowed to fish,
I believe, but "fither or no" Dr. Angus
will not sacrifice rod and line to Mrs.
Grundy. He is no respecter of that
person, and if he reminds you of an
English cleric it is certainly not of any
Trollope pattern. A more agreeable
companion one could hardly find for
a summer day on a burn or a winter
evening by a fire. A half-pensive cheer-
fulness hangs about him and he touches.
things with the easy jesting that is never
inconvenient. Then, if he has done any-
thing for you-which is very likely-
he does not afterwards look as if you
had wished to steal his purse, but rather
has an air of regret, of wishing to serve
you better. All this is comfortable. It
is the sort of thing for which a man is
loved by poor and struggling persons.
Go to obscure labouring people for the
84
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
personal character of any man-minister,
manufacturer, or doctor. Speak his
name and see what comes into their
eyes. Dr. Angus need not fear who
goes into Arbroath applying this test.
As a churchman he is nowhere, not
caring for the rough-and-tumble of
courts and large assemblies. He is one
of the D.D.s who are never seen haunt-
ing the clerks' table at Synod time,
though, when occasion demanded, he
has been known to make a stirring
speech, and he is certainly not without
definite opinions as to church affairs.
In town matters it is much the same.
He is willing to give service, as on a
School Board, but not to furnish matter
for newspaper rebuke and exhortation.
The vigour with which-not in the south,
surely?-some brethren have maintained
local heat is quite beyond Dr. Angus.
As a preacher he keeps the same
urbane, moderate way, studying to ex-
hibit simple catholic truth in good
I
+
·
DR. ANGUS, ARBROATH.
85
chaste English, such as one may gain.
from a study of the older religious
writers. Jeremy Taylor is a favourite,
for example. Dr. Angus belongs to the
school of those who are apt in such
matters, and very seldom make any
mistake. In no kind of choice do they
ever fall to the forced, the noisy or the
common. Having a sure position
socially and ecclesiastically, they occupy
it with calmness. Being men of the
world as well as men of religion, they
hold their Christian faith also in calm-
ness, avoiding all fads and fanatics, and
quietly getting a ray or two at least of
any new light. Ministers as such are
doubtless a most unnecessary race of
men, and shall one day be improved off
the face of poor priest-ridden Scotland.
Meantime, some of them, it must be
allowed, are excellent examples of sense,
and what the Greeks knew as civility.
The leading mark of Dr. Angus is an
infusion of this Attic sense,
III.
THE REV. DAVID BEATT,
ABERDEEN.
IT
T is twenty-five years since Mr. Beatt
-if we may be allowed the phrases
of agriculture—entered upon a croft in
Belmont Street, and began to farm. He
found but the nucleus of a congregation
and has himself built up the influential
company now worshipping in Belmont
Street with him. One of Gilfillan's
youths, he did credit to his origin by
literary taste and humorous insight.
From the first, like a Mr. Vincent
known to fame, he was "a hit "; unlike
Mr. Vincent, he "understood a connec-
tion, and human nature in general," and
took the trouble to water and weed
86
REV. DAVID BEATT, ABERDEEN. 87
what he sowed. Then, Tozer is an un-
known quantity in the northern city.
There the boys know more of what
goes to the ministry" than, in the
south, aldermen do. If a man persuades
Aberdeen to respect him, he may be
quite easy as to his qualifications. It
is needless, therefore, to insist on the
fact that Belmont Street attracted
people, and that whom it got it usually
kept. Mr. Beatt found an opportunity,
and his own gifts enlarged it. He took
with him to his ministerial charge some
of the qualities of the older race of
clergymen, along with a manner of
preaching not of the old and familiar
sort. Gilfillan was not a man to help
in turning out professional shoddy of
any sort, nor was the U.P. Hall a pro-
ducer of weaklings. Mr. Beatt has in
him the salt that is never found alone,
preserving itself and nothing else. The
little "holding" grew to a large one,
a handsome church was built, men of
((
88
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
standing in the city became pillars, and
some of them continue to this day and
are known of as far as Westminster.
It has needed more than one gift and
more than a year's labour. If anybody
thinks a congregation can be maintained
by wagging the head in a pulpit, by a
course of soirées, or even by pastoral
visitation in season and out of season,
he had better try the business for him-
self. Even in Scotland, when the cen-
tury was younger, ministers have needed
gumption and grace as well as learning.
Even in Aberdeen, which some believe
to be the heaven below of Presbyterian
clergymen, it is possible for them to feel
through the attained the unattainable.
Speaking seriously, it must be so in all
places under the sun. On the outward
side of things we see what a man a
congregation has realised; on the inner
side, the more of spiritual life there is
the less can a minister, a people, be
content. Perhaps the best thing any
REV. DAVID BEATT, ABERDEEN. 89
of us does for the rest is to feed the
wistful desire for some one better,
stronger, wiser than we ever manage
to be. Mr. Beatt would not ask to be
separated from so general a criticism.
But he has his share of manly endow-
ment. He is a shrewd flock-master,
knows the sheep by name and nature,
and does not exhaust his sense of the
lively in telling stories, as some worthy
men painfully do. He has the gift of
enlivening both conversation and busi-
ness with seasonable anecdote and is
provided with the salt of humour. This,
well and sensibly kept in hand, is a main
feature and the value of it is plain. It
makes Mr. Beatt a genial and interesting
friend as well as an esteemed minister.
-
*
IV.
DR. BLACK, GLASGOW.
IF
F Dr. Black belonged to either of
the denominations within which the
Queen's chaplains are chosen, he would
very likely be one of that distinguished
little company, and, as one of them, he
would, I am sure, be not the least accept-
able to Her Majesty. Various qualities
meet in him, and they are of a kind fitted
to blend and produce a whole. Some
men's capabilities seem too much for
them; heavier cargo than the boat can
well carry.
It is not so with the
minister of Wellington Street United
Presbyterian church. Alike by appear-
ance, manner, tone of discourse, he
exhibits, both as preacher and pastor,
all the marks of a city minister, in a
90
DR. BLACK, GLASGOW.
91
combination impressive and graceful.
It is purely Scottish, and yet, one thinks,
Dr. Black would be much appreciated
in London and would give but few
points to any rector or canon of them
all. In the pulpit he is accomplished
and serious, out of it accomplished and
pleasant, and always a man of tact and
observancy and good breeding, with a
face and figure that express these things,
and a grave, low-pitched voice that
makes the r's roll softly through dis-
course. Chastened eloquence is a phrase
quite suitable to his preaching, and the
northern seriousness of him is touched
with northern sweetness. So far as I
hear, he is not a conspicuous presbytery
or Synod man; I should be surprised if
told that he is; it does not seem his sort
of operation, that. Perhaps he knows a
West-end congregation better than any
other sort. At any rate, as a ruler he is
used to the directing of ample resources,
not to the cking out of scanty ones,
92
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
The place makes the minister, while the
minister makes the place, and Dr. Black
has no look of having had to evolve
bricks without straw. At the same
time, the offensively prosperous air is
never felt about him; he is too good.
a man and too much of a gentleman
to think of thanking the Lord that he
is not as other ministers-East-end or
small-town men. No; we observe in
him the pensiveness of one who finds
the human problem agitating within
polished walls and present at luxurious
tables; one who is not aware of any
reason for expecting salvation to come by
way of universal pile carpets and carven
oak. Yet, again, there is the sweetness
spoken of, no accidie. It would be intc-
resting to compare Dr. Black with a
neighbour and ex-moderator; both are
emphatically men of culture, both seek
to edification, using their gifts and graces
for that rather than mere pleasing; both
have, in somewhat different tone, a dis-
DR. BLACK, GLASGOW.
93
tinct ring of their church. But com-
parisons are what they are; and the two
men have very different aspects at some
points. One may say, without any
comparing, that Dr. Black has a fine
pleasant elegance of his own, which is
now almost an old-world quality, and
that he tends to be diffuse as one who
lays out a full plan and likes to com-
plete it before ending. The public,
however, is apt not to care one rap
for a minister's pride in his sermon.
It thinks chiefly of its own taste-and
spine. As a rule, Dr. Black is not
given to any sort of bang; but if one
of the great names of Scottish inde-
pendence, either in thought or action,
comes up, their brother awakes in him.
Straightway the Scot flashes out and the
mild grey face kindles in a flush. Trust
him, he will never disavow the heather.
I can
even imagine the moment in
which he might shout "Hurrah for
a conquering spiritual idea.
})
V.
THE REV. ARMSTRONG BLACK,
EDINBURGH.
I
ONCE heard Mr. Black preach from
a very special text, one of those that
have magic in them, and glimmer like
an opal with iridescent meanings, now
of joy, now of warning. I myself have
seen, betimes, things in that text, golden
and green as the May earth, and pallid
as a winter moon or the creeping marsh
mist; things of life and triumph, and
others more grim than death. If, on
that Sabbath morning, when he gave
out in my hearing this verse of magic,
Mr. Black had spoiled it But the
supposition is ungracious and must not
be made. Mr. Black is emphatically
94
REV. ARMSTRONG BLACK, EDINBURGH. 95
one of those preachers who do not
spoil texts, and I have no fear of ever
finding him a mangler of a beautiful
living word.
Some men do that: you
feel as if you had seen a dog pounce
upon a bird. The minister of Palmer-
ston Place, however, is an artist and
in his own range one may be sure of
him. There are plenty of men who
can splash-on canvas, or on paper, or
without "the paper "--but the artistic
temper and touch are just the reverse
of that; to have these is to have the
skill that makes handling a revelation.
Mentally speaking, Mr. Black has the
tapering fingers that do delicate work,
and the calm waiting sight that gathers
up an impression truly from the material
around. His sermons are more or less
of poems, not merely because he has
an ear for euphony and seeks carefully
for the right form of expression, but
as much because of the kind of thing
said and the general character of the
96
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
utterance. A delicate ingenuity is one
of his qualities, and, as a woman would
say, he preaches very nicely. The
phrase is indeed quite appropriate if
you take it in the old and right sense.
Nice, Mr. Black is, both in his selection
of topic and in his treatment. One
cannot imagine him saying what is
outré, or any way rude, or wanting in
the Hellenic sense. Urbanity and har-
mony characterise him, and with these
a well-bred love of the picturesque. He
is a tall, large-framed man, with that
soft darkness of colour and eye which
are of Celtic origin and the outward
aspect gives no untrue hint as to the
inward traits. The voice corresponds.
It is pleasantly impressive and makes
the sermon into a poetic recitation, dig-
nified and serious. One may hear now
and then a firm saying directed against
lies and liars, but it is always said with
a certain air; the preacher does not
excite himself nor excite his hearers.
:
REV. ARMSTRONG BLAČK.
97
He is the very opposite of Mr. Dishart,
and will never discover how much dust
lurks in a pulpit cushion. As for the
new criticism, modern exegesis, and the
Germans, he knows about them, that is
certain, well enough; and what is better
-he knows the Bible, feels the drift of
men's minds, and moves in a region not
that of fashionable fads. He has seen
the steep that is above morality and
the charity that is above union; and
if you want cultivated, serene, graceful
preaching, you will get it where Mr.
Black fills the pulpit.
7
1
VI.
DR. A. K. H. BOYD.
WE
ELL, you have heard A. K. H. B.?
It is an experience to be gone
over afterwards. Seldom does a dis-
tinguished man, whose writing one has
long known the taste of, so well answer
to the invisible photograph, the some-
thing unshaped as photographs are un-
coloured. Dr. Boyd does not startle.
That good figure, that accomplished
bald head sparsely fringed with white,
that clean-shaven face with the aquiline
touch and the keen eyes under brows
yet dark; they are all just the right
thing, and the voice is singularly appro-
priate. "The country parson "-ay, ay;
and the satirist of Holofernes too;
98
DR. A. K. H. BOYD.
99
and the St. Andrews parish minister;
and the friend of Oxford dons; and
the rest. In two minutes you could
declare that you have always known
him. He is a glorified parish minister,
if one may say so, but, of course, with
differences. His dictionary, for one
thing, is certainly not that used by
the old man; it is, as we know, very
modern, the dictionary of well-bred,
easy, drawing-room conversation. Col-
loquialisms of a certain kind are plenti-
ful, given in a certain tone. It comes
quite natural to imagine the speaker a
Dean of Winchester or Wells, a dean
of society and Hochma wisdom, and
many acquaintances. When once this
has occurred, it sticks with you; security
and ease quite like those of the well-
placed Anglican appear; you think of
Thames and Cam rather than of “going
doon the watter." At the same time,
no one can speak that phrase more to
the manner than Dr. Boyd. He says
✔
100
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
(C
pore" and " pore souls in a most
southern accent, but again he says.
"ye" like Carlyle himself, and quotes
our whinstone Zeus as only a Scot can.
Then he wears spectacles, like any “orra
body," and rubs them clean (no pince-
nez here), and one would not be at all
surprised if a red silk pocket-handker-
chief came out. He is "lively," too, as
northern preachers are expected to be,
waving his hands about and pushing
back the gown from them; and the
moderator of a free and equal assembly
is in evidence. "I tell ye what I've
seen and grieved over." It is said with
emphasis, even a rap on the desk, but
in criticism, not the heat of reform.
Dr. Boyd naturally escapes the perfervi-
dum air. He holds the mirror up to
folly and malice, and the glass reflects
keenly; "some folks" look
در
every bit
Ecclesiastical and
as ugly as they are.
other "pushers," too; if satire slew, none
of them would be left; but Dr. Boyd
DR. A. K. H. BOYD.
IOI
CC
has not the dream of changing Ethiopian
skins; though he clenches the fist while
he describes" the drawing of a great and
good man" in church courts, the tones
of his voice keep the cool clearness of
parlour talk. Dr. Boyd knows the world
very well. Could one question a single
word or accent? He exposes the stupid-
ity of many habits we indulge; he says
we" pretty often, too, and likes to make
a little play upon one's feelings. It is
the acutest, liveliest worldly wisdom, with
a soupçon of Father Faber to give it the
more fascination. Perhaps that sort of
thing has little comfort for most of us;
perhaps it is little of a cordial for weak
wills and "sunk, self-weary man"; but
why should you demand medical attend-
ance from a particularly clever, affable
nicely old-fashioned and new-fashioned
Dean? Be wise and well-bred, and let
yourself relish a thing extremely well
done. Possibly when the speaker has
bent to right and left of the pulpit, with

102 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
an emphatic admonition to be "very
humble" and "very thankful," you may
feel as if green Chartreuse had been in
your mouth, or another preparation not
used by simple folk. But in society
they like these things; and a good deal
goes to the making of them, though to
you or me they be unaccustomed bever-
age at church. As for that, Dr. Boyd
professes to give truth, not comfort.

į
VII.
REV. ROBERT CAMPBELL.
SOME
OME men's success hastens before
them; others find it, perhaps, after
many days, as they go along; for others
it is always in the rear of their own
doing and merit. Mr. Campbell belongs
to a happy middle order. He was born
to be "a success" some time, somewhere,
but very likely he had no thought,
during earlier experiments in England,
that the place of destiny for him was
the East-end of Glasgow. His gifts
must have seemed, to himself and his
friends, quite of the sort for one, at least,
of the other fields in which he used
them before Calton seized him and he
it. Still, all the time, that grey and
:
103
104
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
•
gaunt mass of city was the appointed
place where preparation was to ripen
into visible, large clusters. It would
help some men mightily to know that
their Calton awaited them, even a good
way off. Doubtless it does, or the Book
of Job would not be in the canon of
Scripture, nor the last two chapters of
Revelation. But there are many "late
patches of ground, many poor summers,
and men grow tired of re-sowing their
turnips and turning over the hay after
the showers. To hear of "methods"
does not help much, for methods are
sure in the end to mean just as much or
as little as the men who use them; and,
besides, there is no method yet known
for altering the nature of soil and
climate. "It's all an affair of personal.
charm," you say. Well, perhaps it is.
There are persons who can magnetise
others just with a word, a bit smile, a
grasp of the hand. God made them so ;
and if you can't do that you can do
""
REV. ROBERT CAMPBELL.
105
something else, let us hope. You will
know that Mr. Campbell is one of the
magnetisers, if you have ever sat talking
with him over the evening fire, or been
in the way of meeting him round dingy
east-wind corners of the city. The
texture of his character is bright and
sweet; he does not "jock wi' deeficulty,'
nor find his fellow-creatures too heavy
a weight, either for the man or the
minister. There is a gleam of poet
gaiety, a look, at times, of exuberant
vitality, even of youth, after the toil of
years; and, with these, soberer threads
are interwoven. You find good sense,
the sturdiness of a man, the tender
gravity of one who has been a day and
a night in the deep with death. For Mr.
Campbell, as for each of us, the needful
bit of fennel has been thrown into the
amber cup and the vividness of life
touched to something deeper than any
success could infuse. Like everyone
else, too, who has done the thing, he can
106
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
$
testify that to reap a harvest means
harder work than losing one. To have
the right word for each of a thousand
people requires more than an easy luck
of manner, more than any personal
charm," though it be as real as Mr.
Campbell's.
(C

VIII.
DR. COLIN CAMPBELL.
THE
Τ
HE minister of the first parish,
Dundee, and successor to Dr.
Watson, has an excellent position which
he adorns with suitable gifts. He is
every inch the city minister, one may
say the dignitary. If there were canon-
ries going in Scotland he would be on
the way to one; he has earned what
Scotland has to give—the chief degree
of his own university, at any rate.
Culture has made him a gentleman and
nature too; a nature with a Highland
touch in it. He never suggests the
homespun out of which many a notable
Scotsman is formed. A look of mental
aristocracy belongs to him and an air,
107
108
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
pre-occupied, apparently reserved, not
altogether of the surrounding world.
This is merely appearance-the result
very much of dark eyes and hair and
a certain glance. Wearing no beard, a
comparative look of youth mingles with
the rest. But as I understand he is
not at all a man withdrawn from affairs,
or a parish minister indifferent to the
parish. Some keenness, indeed, there
is at points, they say; the idealism felt
in the look comes out as criticism of
society and its ways. The Celtic
nature has always a sense of worlds
not realised. As a preacher, however,
Dr. Campbell has been formed under
Principal Caird, and of that accom-
plished, fascinating master he is an
apt scholar. Something within him
answered to the Principal's love of
sacred eloquence. He has learnt easily
the large, sympathetic style, the care
for humane impressiveness, the artistic
use of the voice. Standing erect and
DR. COLIN CAMPBELL.
109
"}
restrained he infuses every polished
sentence with the wish to persuade.
His sermons are built upon the Cairdian
hypothesis of the universe, and must
be over the head of that average
hearer who likes either the old scheme
of doctrine (which Dr. Campbell will
never give him) or an easy talk "calico-
printed with anecdote," which also he
will never get. This preacher appeals
more to educated and over-educated
persons than to the man in the street.
Yet though such an one may not follow
him in his literary and refined search
for a catholic basis of religion, he ought
to feel and be impressed by the sincere
religious feeling that breathes in all.
The modern man of culture is evident;
but so is the preacher, anxious to edify
and convert. There is a vein of good
sense, too. Dr. Campbell often says
excellent things, opposing foolish pedan-
tries of the day with a wise, well-
informed catholicity and speaking on
CC
IIO
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
reverent faith.
behalf of God as a man should, with
He is so agreeable in
his whole manner that one is inclined
to forbear penetrating criticism. It is
not his way to take off his coat, either
in delivery or mode of thought. He is
a man of the time, distilling the creed
into a religion of human brotherhood
and divine pity. If the Cairdian hypo-
thesis of the universe is not yours-and
it certainly is not mine-you may desire
something more than Reverence and
Sympathy, but you will continue to like
Dr. Campbell; you will find him in-
formed, clear, impressive; a man of
high character and purpose. He has
the needful gifts for preaching and may
yet startle his world with a resonant cry
upon the evils of the day. Dr. Campbell
has published, lately, a small book
packed with work and with suggestions.
He has taken great pains and his theory
will have to be considered. I cannot
imagine that it will stand criticism or
DR. COLIN CAMPBELL.
III
that he will force his interpretation of
Luke, on either side. But the volume
has all the interest of a new and daring
construction.
IX.
DR. CONNEL.
DE
R. CONNEL will not deny that
he belongs to the Wide Church
school. At least, if he does, it will be
because the term, as a term, is unsatis-
factory in some way. It must stand,
however, for want of a better, and one
must hasten to add that, in his case,
Wide Church means a good deal of
Puritanism along with fine culture of
a modern sort. He mingles Liberalism
and a regard for old ways, old forms
and manners. He offers no points to
the
newspaper reporter in search of
piquant heresy; and the people who
pine for Sunday museums and cricket.
112
DR. CONNEL.
113
have no friend in him. They traverse
all his habits of mind, no less than his
principles. Dr. Connel is a Conservative
on many sides; the old way of life is
dear to him. He would fain have it go
as it did when he was a boy in a Seces-
sion manse. Some of his friends have
a notion that, for all his modernness, he
would rather like to re-establish fast-
days and "tokens" and old-fashioned
communions; even, perhaps, to banish
the organ from the church and put
away the cushions. This, however, is
a rude guess.
What is evident is that
the small, finished man, dark haired and
handsomely smooth a-top, with a fine.
aquiline cast of face, is at once a scholar
and a gentleman. He would be quite
in place in any circle of eminent Uni-
versity men; yet the well-bred air of
knowledge and soft dignity is infused
with the clear readiness of the Non-
conformist minister. Dr. Connel can
preach easily, eloquently; he can make
....")
114
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
an effective popular speech. Of course,
he has too much quality to be always
the same person, and, perhaps, if you
first meet him in some other place than
the pulpit, certain points of the minister
might a little surprise. Or, "otherwise,"
as Herbert Spencer delights to say, if
you met Dr. Connel first in the pulpit,
contact by the study fire might reveal
unexpected dells and glades of the
mind. There is no incongruity, how-
ever, nothing hidden away in secret
mental drawers; you soon feel a blend-
ing atmosphere, in which new and old
become an engaging whole of personal-
ity. Dr. Connel remains untouched by
that ultra-fashionable disorder, cacoethes
scribendi. He does not even seem to be
convinced that it is one of the things
a person is bound to "take." But he
has his own way of communicating, and
there is in it no show whatever. His
congregation has given to the denomina-
tion men for both home and foreign
G
DR. CONNEL.
115
work, and these may be called the sons
of the manse. Dr. Connel might well
do more, but he has contented himself
with a quiet task, and the Church has
paid him, as she invariably does pay
such a man, with her royal indifference.
Let those whose names rule in the call
market remember some of the names
never quoted there; let those who
"lead" look at some of the men who
go quietly in the ranks. Yet his friends
have an idea that some year they will
salute Dr. Connel as Moderator of the
United Presbyterian Synod,
"
X.
DR COOPER.
D
R. COOPER is a good deal talked
of, and perhaps more for small
matters than for those of importance.
Putting seats in Drum's Aisle and hold-
ing daily service there, got him “into
the papers"; but to this and like novel-
ties people are used now, and some
are more than used. Other excursions,
decidedly more significant, Dr. Cooper
makes, and in some of them finds Pres-
byterian elders and managers blocking
the road; a certain amount of liturgy
and ritual can be digested, especially for
the sake of a popular minister; but even
such an one is not allowed to march too
obviously, too quickly away from the
Reformation. It remains, however, that
when papers and elders have ceased to
116
DR. COOPER.
117
protest a resolute propagandist may still
be dropping, here, there, everywhere,
the most important seed. Debarred
from a point or two of ritual, he may
still make a pulpit and class-room the
vessels of a doctrine which, received,
carries with it all ritual, all priestdom
and sacramentarianism. He speaks of
"the blessed Mary," and his object is to
promote reverence. He suggests that
we make too little use of clerical help
in solving our cases of conscience or
relieving our hearts of their burdens—
and one is left to guess what the mild
suggestion may cover. The catholicism
of the East church Aberdeen is different
from that of the West, though one tower
joins the two. The ministers are quite
different men, the preaching is different,
the basis and aim of action is different.
At a glance Dr. Cooper suggests the
English High churchman. Shaven face,
small eyes under a flat brow, head
inclining to one side and often bent
1
118 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
forward, an air of watchful reserve: in
England these are often seen. But Dr.
Cooper has the shrewdness and kindli-
ness of a man along with the marks of
an ecclesiastic; he shows a sincerity and
earnestness of nature which command
respect. Whatever he teaches he first
believes without wavering, and he has
all the power of a believer. It is not
easy to make sacramentarian dogma
and history into popular preaching, and
people don't say much about the ser-
They are not metaphysical at
all, as Scottish hearers understand meta-
physics. On the other hand, they are
most certainly not Hochma essays, eva-
porating theology into general good
feeling and "a sort of a something."
Supernaturalism and plenty of it, with a
serious interest in the human soul and
all its sinful and sorry experience; that
is what you get under the arches of the
East church, above the crypt where
Roman mass used to be said. It is all
mons.
•
DR. COOPER.
119
reverent, full of religious feeling; you
know that the minister is a pious and
devoted man.
There are moments in a
discourse when his face fills with devout
feeling and the usual reserved impressive-
ness deepens into emotion. No pretence.
here that the world does not need con-
verting; no air of worldly surrender.
Yet, for a religious man, there must,
one would think, be difficulty in the task
of proving why ritual is binding if, as he
allows, it is not, in the last resort, the
saving thing. An interesting antithesis
of this sort glimmers in Dr. Cooper.
He performs no priestly act without
enduing himself in gown and hood and
-Geneva bands. It is a little mixed,
but that is a matter of no importance
except to the people who write for the
Church Times, and a few others. What
does matter is the question of the priest.
What does the Zeit Geist say of him?
Where does he stand in evolution ?
•
XI.
REV. JAMES DENNEY, B.D.
I'
F report does not belie him, Mr.
Denney some few years ago com-
mitted a pamphlet. He has now written
a book.
The pamphlet showed a pretty
turn for controversy, a sharp humour,
a large well-informed mind. The book
is exegetical, the plan of it restrains.
controversy, and the author would seem
to have restrained himself, as one who
can do such and such a thing, but leaves
it meantime. Then there is preaching,
another form of manifestation. Do we
find the same man in all three? I
think we do, though the study hearth
of a winter evening may be the best
place of meeting. There a special friend.
120
REV. JAMES DENNEY, B.D. 121
may enter those avenues of the mind to
which no printed page gives access.
There is nothing effusive about Mr.
Denney, and he needs to be well known.
At the same time there is nothing ob-
scure; his intentions are not far to seek,
as the saying is. He has much of the
guided steadiness which makes a suc-
cessful student and a clear, effective
teacher. Resolution, collectedness, a
consciousness of equipment are his salient
features, and there is a quiet finality of
tone. That is to say, Mr. Denney is a
professor in posse. He seems born to
investigate, collate, extract the value
and sense of studies, and communicate
these in a clear, rational manner, with
easy firmness of touch. As he stands.
in the pulpit, slim, dark-haired, atten-
tive, making, as he speaks, a little lift
of the eyebrows over the spectacles,
one is irresistibly reminded of a skilful
working engineer, one of those men who
know every bit of a great propelling
122 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
•
construction as they know their own
fingers; go through it and about it with
sure, deft movements that excite one's
admiration, and can, when necessary,
take down and then put together again
the whole affair with calm sustained
interest and unfaltering certainty, with
skill, too, in making the ignorant by-
stander aware of what he sees. Such
a workman, precisely, is Mr. Denney
when dealing with the fine strong mass
of New Testament exegesis before a
general audience. And he could do
better still for a class, for those with
some knowledge of the work in hand.
Then there would be flashes of the con-
versational, a play of the teacher's in-
dividuality. He has more than one
excellent quality of an instructor. The
first is veracity of utterance; a special
and agreeable air of truthfulness distils
from him. Another is the intention to
reach a clear sight of things essential by
as straight a road as possible. The
REV. JAMES DENNEY, B.D. 123
effects of the popular speaker are not
his-colour, picturesque grouping and
the atmosphere of light and shade. Yet
the decision and sanity, the firm balanced
step over difficult places, have their
charm, though it be a quiet one, and
betimes a phrase comes with biting
point in a light, clear tone, singularly
effective. Mr. Denney has never im-
agined himself an agnostic, or struggling
for a spar of creed in a critical sea. In
these waters where so many sink, and
others with painful effort keep afloat,
he goes with steady movement, risking
nothing and fearing nothing, sure of
the laws that are for a man and for
truth. He admirably represents the
younger Free Church, athletic and in
good training, with a heart to believe all
that the prophets have spoken, and that
power to impress which fair and honest
internal judgment gives. I should say
that he would deal in a most persuading
and pleasant way with young souls
124
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES:
reaching out to the light, and would be
sure to make them see, as he himself
sees, that “there is nothing in the uni-
verse to compare with the Christ life for
Reality."
XII
((
DR. DRUMMOND.
THE
HE quality of such a man as the
minister of Belhaven has many
elements not to be represented by
merely putting down this or that adjec-
tive; and one thing is a choosing of
the right path-the way he can follow
with dignity and effectiveness. That
is quite easy, you say. Then why do
some people never manage it? When
one sees a man so clearly achieving
himself, deserving so well the terms
accomplished," "eloquent," and also
"business-like," depend upon it he has
the art without which a born genius
wastes and wanders. The world loves
to see practical and well-applied ability;
125
126
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
and the world is quite right. One
should find out whether he was created
to solve mysteries, or busy himself with
"isms”; and, if he has no faculty that
way, let him take another. Every
preacher is not bound to be a casuist.
It is good to have what is good after
its own kind, unforced, though careful.
And, looking for the first time at Dr.
Drummond, one knows what to expect.
The bodily presence is strong; the
rounded, bald head and full beard give
dignity; under brows almost shaggy the
eyes look out firmly; the voice answers
to the rest, and beneath urbanity there.
is something of heat. It is not mere.
finish, by any means, people find at Bel-
haven, though the minister is, perhaps,
one of the best examples in Scotland
of ornate style. He is concerned for
the evangelic doctrine, as well as for the
phrase polished in form and delivery.
He knows there are plenty of rich,
pious sinners about and he desires to
DR. DRUMMOND.
127
get at them. In this temper he makes
allusions to art and literature; not
abstrusely, yet as one who speaks to
those who expect cultured preaching
and can follow skilful richness of allu-
sion. Now there is a quotation from
one of the Fathers; now a noble sen-
tence from a seventeenth century divine;
again verses from George Herbert, or,
more rarely, Tennyson. Dr. Drummond
knows by instinct the effect of Eliza-
bethan English delivered with the
measured fulness of a fine and elabor-
ately trained voice; and to hear him
give, “Come, people; Aaron's drest,” is
something to remember. He has been
known to deprecate the praise of being
a teacher, in any special sense, and as
to theology his preaching follows an
acknowledged path; but nothing would
displease him more than to be taken
for a mere rhetorician in the pulpit.
He is eloquent, he is finished-and
more. His manner,
manner, perfected and
128
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
impressive, is the body of pastoral de-
sign, of an earnest wish to convert the
ungodly and careless. It confirms so
strongly what is said as to give it new
power with the hearer and leave it in
his consciousness, a piece of moral
teaching, religious warning, and literary
effect, all blent. After the manner of
the fathers, though in a tone more
modern than theirs, Dr. Drummond
delivers the gospel message. He makes
a firm individual mark upon the hearer,
even while he takes care to avoid every-
thing rash and unverified. There is a
thrust in his full emphatic voice, and
with it the gift of speaking pathetically ;
one which always commands, and all
the more when it is held in due restraint
as here.
Dr. Drummond, you see, has variety
and more than one power of attraction.
As a
churchman he shows no little
ability, and the following years will
see him more and more an influence
•
DR. DRUMMOND.
129
in the synod. In rendering a report
or asking instructions from that demo-
cratic body he is seen to be distinctly
the United Presbyterian minister.
London, it is said, demands the best,
and it once had Dr. Drummond; but
the true Scotsman is easily captured
again by his own land.
·
9
XIII.
REV. JOHN DUNCAN.
HE
E cannot be mistaken. One cha-
racter is graven on face and figure
—that of the Scottish Radical and non-
intrusionist.
It is felt in every feature
and indication: in the severe lines of
the face, the keen directness of the sunk
eyes, the sweetness of the visiting smile,
the spare frame with its tone of girded
energy. Nothing here of the society
cleric of any denomination, nothing of
the world ecclesiastic, but much of the
Puritan, something-in appearance and
otherwise of the Covenanter; though,
to be sure, the Chairman of the Congre-
gational Union does not see "the head-
ship of Christ as Henderson, of
""
130
REV. JOHN DUNCAN.
131
Leuchars, saw it. He might have been
a Covenanter, though. There is the
stuff, somewhat differently fired. Mr.
Duncan springs of a soil half granite
and half peat, which gives a keen, strin-
gent, inappeasable flame of spirit-life,
wonderfully tenacious and wonderfully
blent. He is simple, yet he knows; he
is unaffected, full of appetite for action,
yet possessing the dignity and, one may
guess, the pride of his race (Puritans,
mind you, are never “ 'umble"). Like
the rest of them, he has a passion for
doing things, as you may see from the
quick out-going of his fine slender hands
at the turn of a sentence. They give a
rapid suggestive hint of the doing that
is to follow thought, and the tones of
the voice have their own suggestion as
to this. Somewhat broad and very
quick, they are full of firm purpose.
You are to think, but not to get time for
dreaming; you are to go round about
things and know what you are after;
132
MINISTERIAL MINIATURĖS.
you are to start from first principles,
well ascertained, strongly held; you are
to keep your eyes open and cherish no
illusions and be attentive to subjects of
“immediate practical importance." Few
persons, I imagine, have less patience
with your "pensive enthusiast perched
on a hill" than the laborious minister of
the Shiprow, in Aberdeen. He is a
realist by nature; the spirit-flame, keen
and steady, burns out of the sods of the
hill. It is not transcendental. Mr.
Duncan is no mystic, nor do I take him
for an optimist. Though his fancy may
have its occasional flight, the starting
point and the return are in the region
of man's daily sin and sorrow and need
He is an evangelical grubber-up of dark
roots and planter of homesteads in the
open; a man who has made raids
against the common, ugly, brute foes of
the race and has good knowledge of the
whole business of fighting them. He
cannot possibly expect them to be soon.
REV. JOHN DUNCAN.
133
or easily destroyed, and, therefore, you
may sometimes find him speaking under
a sense of prolonged battle, immemorial
disturbance. But, again, he has fought
too well not to be a man of deep faith;
he is too resolute not to feel in the
working together of all things the reso-
lution of the Most High and of His
Son.
Mr. Duncan has gone upon crusade
with his own lawful weapons; other
men with theirs. He has the fortune
to see a day which admires the work to
which his life has been given; with
others it may be quite different. One
mistress of souls-Philosophy, who must
be wooed and wedded in the desert-
is not his. Literature he has not fol-
lowed. Mr. Stark, his neighbour, takes
her toil and her vows. Let each man
do honour to the call and prophecy of
his fellow. And let no one doubt that
Mr. Duncan is a man singularly true,
sincere, without guile,
-
XIV.
I
DR. FERGUSON, QUEEN'S PARK.
THE minister and the edifice go well
together. The latter is almost a
singular example of what art can do for
Protestantism, and there is about Dr.
Ferguson's personal appearance a some-
thing which harmonises with the blended
colouring, the severe underlines, the
mystical half-shadows of the place. It
is a modernised Egyptian temple, and
no one would think of going there for
slight magazine articles flavoured with
absinthe verse, or small novelettes with
showy titles. Perhaps in the large con-
gregation there are a few who would not
live in the philosophic Egypt; perhaps
at times the baser-minded crave an
/
134
DR. FERGUSON, QUEEN'S PARK. 135
anecdote. But every one born a prophet
has to go his own way.
Dr. Ferguson is at once a Puritan
logician and a Puritan mystic. The
combination is quite possible—in Scot-
land. In all he says one feels a deep
sense of æonial mysteries and a keen
search for ultimate truth. The vital
conflict of faith is ever in his ear and
in his soul, the scholar's thirst for cate-
gories of knowledge and first principles.
He tacitly demands, at the outset, that
you give him your whole mind. If you
do not, the calm manner and somewhat
light voice use no force, and when, later,
the Scottish heat flashes through and
the weight of a pure, unfettered argu-
ment bears down, you will be startled
to find that you have lost not an
academic lecture but a singularly fine
sermon. We are before one who is
always a preacher. And the region of
his thought is a wide, spiritualised Cal-
vinism. The throne of God, the being
136
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
of God, the Word and Spirit, Christ and
His bride the Church; these are govern-
ing ideas, and through these, by a
sweeping movement of severely abstract
yet most practical thought, we come
perpetually round upon the individual
believer and his part in the warfare of
the ages. Of the merely ornate or rhe-
torical there is not a trace. "Art for
art's sake" is no motto of Dr. Ferguson's,
yet few men have so good a style. The
right words, so far as words may serve,
always seem to come, and often with
much directness and point. The themes.
are such as a great thinker selects by
instinct, yet the treatment is wonder-
fully clear and every point is close
linked to daily experience. Many a
preacher loosely praised as “practical”
is far less so than Dr. Ferguson, who is
never for a moment aloof from the sins
and needs of the world. Follow him
as he deserves to be followed, and he
will give you, as a student, a theory of
DR. FERGUSON, QUEENS PARK. 137
knowledge—that is, of Christian truth
-by which, as a man in the world, you
can live and overcome evil. He knows
the mystics, but he knows Glasgow too.
And all his research is a duty to God
and man; it is done in the warmth and
the dignified modesty of the best Scottish
Puritanism.
Perhaps Dr. Ferguson is the most
orthodox man ever mistaken by one
Talkative for a heretic. Perhaps only
a Scottish congregation would allow
their teacher to draw them so far up
the heights of the Absolute, away from
all popular gossipings. And—to go a
little further-perhaps only Dr. Fergu-
son himself could be, as he is, a reasoner
of singular lucidity and force, a dreamer
of dreams, an orthodox, rigorous, Evan-
gelical, an enthusiastic Wide-Churchman.
In effect, we have here a man of genius,
one of the rare souls for whom there is
no law, who must go their own way up
the height. But Fergus Ferguson treads
-
138 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
no wilderness way. He is a man be-
loved of all. Unlearned and lettered,
those who differ and those who agree,
alike feel the charm.
XV.
REV. JOHN GLASSE, M.A.
MR. GLASSE, despite Socialistic
leanings, is a man who has notions
and a style of his own. A burly Teu-
tonic individualism is there, flavoured
with ironic emphasis and a liking for
analysis. With the one element is
something of another; a touch not
Teutonic, or so with a difference. The
physique, glance, manner too, in part,
irresistibly suggest a Scotsman natu-
ralised to another soil and become
Parisian ouvrier, but remembering still
the history and accent of home and
loving to turn a good Scots phrase over
a real Scots tongue. The gentleman
gives good evidence of brains, of ability
139
140
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
i
for satirical hits, and of a realistic, cool
mental habit. At the same time he
could make and mount a barricade if he
wanted to; and at such work would be
unpleasant to meet. This kind of blend
is not uncommon in Caledonia. Paris
and Edinburgh have old ties and an
old likeness at many points, and, after
all, Mr. Glasse may be said to exhibit
a native type of fused qualities. He is
very much at home in lecturing upon
the French Revolution and cognate
topics, because his mind (very Scottish
in that) enjoys a stormy piece of
history, and likes a subject, semi-
political, semi-ecclesiastical, which gives
room for somewhat grim humour and
illustrates the force of individual genius,
or fear, ΟΙ desire. That Socialist
theories should fascinate men who dis-
trust all rulers and criticise every point.
of a creed, is only what the student of
human, and Scottish, nature expects.
The present minister of Old Greyfriars
REV. JOHN GLASSE, M.A.
141
is a marked and interesting example
of opposites in solution. If one called
him a Moderate he would be offended,
for he exposes the Moderates of last
century; yet in some respects it comes
easy to classify him as a New Moderate.
His motto, on the whole, is certainly
"Pas de zèle," though he may forget it
whiles; his turn, as we have said, is
realistic and for middle ways. He has
discovered that mankind needs fixed
points for steering and that creeds have
their present usefulness no less than
their historic dignity. In short, though
he loves a "bang" now and then, and
to deal ironic clouts right and left, he
does not choose to be a mere iconoclast.
Probably he could not play that part;
things would occur to him and would
have to be considered. Also, these are
not times for pulling apart, but for con-
serving, and Mr. Glasse, having chosen
to be of a certain institution, a certain
ecclesia, is bound to care for the fabric
142
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
and its uses.
He does so with skill and
effect, and no hearer of his can have
cause to complain of the discourses
being dull, unworkmanlike, or "behind
the age." This minister is always in-
teresting, he is so emphatically himself,
slave to nothing and no one, but a
clever and vigorous personality.
XVI.
REV JOHN HUNTER.
A¹
Ta little distance there is a look of
youth, and more perhaps than any-
thing else it colours the whole of the
impression you gather. The face is
round, clean-shaven and fresh-coloured,
with dark hair coming down upon a low
brow. The eyes attract; they are large,
dark grey and full of feeling. The
mouth is such as one almost expects in
a popular preacher-strong, blunt and
emphatic, ready for utterance. In the
way of voice he is not supplied so abun-
dantly that his success can be put down
to any endowment of that sort. Unless
exerted with some effort, it comes rather
with a scrape, though for the sermon
143
144
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
keeping on a steady level of decisive
sound. When I have heard Mr. Hunter
he has "read" an oration, most carefully
arranged out of material that certainly
did not come to him in his dreams.
The style of these discourses—and, I
imagine, of all—is large, with a flush
of generous manly sentiment. The
declaiming voice has lost every Scottish
inflection and found an Anglican accent.
We might be listening to a new and
striking Broad-Churchman of the south
who had learnt from Liddon and Car-
penter at some points. Not at all points
by any means-for the Anglican never
loses sense of prelacy; yet there are
suggestions, and particularly in the cast
and delivery of sermons. Between John
Hunter the man and any Anglican lies
a broad gulf, and for my part I cannot
resist the notion that a methodised wor-
ship, with liturgical Amens and the rest,
does not well suit this man. No doubt
he loves music; that is in his nature,
REV. JOHN HUNTER.
145
*
one would say. Of poetry he can hardly
have enough. It is Tennyson here and
Tennyson there, in lines and couplets,
with Longfellow and Walter Smith and
any other that suits. His mind leans to
:
the poetic view of life: the eyes tell one
as much and in that is the secret of his
popularity. He is never afraid to be on
the side of feeling, although with clear,
even stern provisoes against nonsense.
Let us have our spiritualism, let us
believe all we can of the other life and
unseen threads woven into visible reality:
but no letters dropping from the roof,
no table-rapping, no foolish hocus-pocus.
On everything that weakens and de-
grades, be it folly of the brain, sin of the
heart, vileness of the life, he pours rebuke
and fit scorn. A certain line in the
cheek indicates a good deal and spoken
judgment is given freely. We are told
of our "blinding and deadening world-
liness," of our "fickleness" and stupid
"success talk." Though he appeals so
ΙΟ
146
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
much to "the spirit of good men in
every age," to the heart of humanity and
the implanted soul, he will not let him-
self be taken for a mere flatterer. Au
contraire, he seems rather to have a
notion of scolding, a design to lay on
with the lash of the reformer. Heaven
knows he can find reason enough! The
Clyde is not yet purified, and even
in Park Circus and along the Great
Western Road there are sinners. Let
him see what he can do! Strength to
his arm, providing he does not let good
intent and habit stale into what is known
as "trick." For his peculiar note as a
preacher, I take him to be in love, hotly,
with the ideal man, not always with the
actual Briton; to have a keen sense
of the human drama, as in history,
biography, and the course of affairs;
to aim at regulating popular instincts
which are the media of Divine guidance
and on the whole are to be trusted.
The points where, personally, I come
REV. JOHN HUNTER.
147
nearest to him are his hearty judgment
of cant and make-believe and his insist-
ence that death is a physical detail,
"God and man remaining the same.
We might differ, however, on the im-
portance of this "detail," as we certainly
do on many others. Young people
flock to Mr. Hunter, and you see bright
lads listening with the heart in the eyes
while he tells a fine story of heroism, or
impressively renders a long piece of
verse. Perhaps in all a lecture the name
of Christ is hardly mentioned, but a great
deal is pre-supposed when congregation
and preacher come together, and the
omission may be an accident.
Mr. Hunter is a vigorous and feeling
man, holding a gift of his own in no
slack hand. Underlying the rhetoric is
a blunt moral tone and an ill will to
things esteemed of many. As we know,
he was not afraid to make a hymn-book
to suit himself, and the fact has its bear-
ing. The re-shaping of theology has
"}
148
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
certainly not been committed to him,
and we say nothing here of his creed.
But does he make his creed interesting
and blend it with our human experiences?
He does.
XVII.
DR. HUTTON.
Ο
NE of the strong men of a strong
time. He always recalls a Burns
phrase to me-"thou stalk of carle
hemp." It is very evident. A clean,
dry stalk of humanity, with a simple
dignity all its own, is here. Dr. Hutton
is amongst us wearing the signs of a
race that is departing, after doing a
work not altogether to the taste of our
age.
The soil is made for us; we are
nourished and wax fat and begin to talk
of our tastes. The veterans stand in
their places; they have learned patience
in a keen school; they have the humour
of those who have dinted many a
sounding helmet in merry tourney;
149
150
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
they know how we come to have time
for lawn-tennis and international cricket.
And this hardy Scottish Puritanism has
ever had its aristocratic quality; a fine
homely elevation of temper and bearing.
You see it in Dr. Hutton, and most
so, perhaps, when he is in the pulpit.
Every bit his own master and yours
as he is on a platform, the other place
seems to hang him about with a gentler
panoply. In debate pungent and piti-
less, he would be a terror if his weapons
were held one moment for any lesser
service than the great Christian battle.
Imagine Hutton and Calderwood arrayed
each against the other for personal ends!
The edge of wit and subtle logic would
pierce to the dividing of soul and marrow,
faith and peace. But Dr. Hutton's
great powers have been spent between
the sanctuary and the altar. He has
given to a church and a contemned
spiritual doctrine what might have
served a nation and a throne. To lead
DR. HÚTTON.
151
the House of Commons would be an
easy task, one may say, to his robust
genius and gift of dramatic irony. Men
have worn stars and enjoyed great
pensions who could never have swung
the sword
"That is light in his terrible hand."
But Dr. Hutton is a minister of Christ
Jesus, and such an one neither envies
nor loses. A chief element of his
preaching is culture of the old un-
affected sort. He brings us, naturally
and easily, into a large atmosphere.
Subjects are handled with free strength
and subtle logic, with a competency of
touch and a sound humanity that
refresh the soul. Alike in prayer and
discourse we feel a simple catholicity.
Dr. Hutton belongs to a race of
preachers who went into all fields they
knew of and quietly came home laden.
They spoiled the Egyptians and said
152 MİNİSTERİAL MİNİATURES.
1
nothing about it. Then, for his own
part, he has a singular power of sugges-
tive emphasis controlled by a pastor's
instinct. The voice, with its alternate
deep tread and ironic squeak, recalls the
practised debater, as when he says, "The
gag and the shackle are not of peace,"
or alludes to Sanballat the Horonite.
The grey sturdiness and watchfulness
of the face give a sense of weight and
certainty, with something now of a
general's calm pensiveness in putting
off armour. The preaching is critical in
essence, but often takes dramatic form,
and there are moments of a subtlety
keen as you will find anywhere. Dr.
Hutton's words have the asperity some-
times of a strong rind, but the fruit
within is ripe, sound, good for health.
The orthodoxy is shrewd, and there is
acute vision for points of meaning and
the fact of a subject. Altogether, the
influence is somewhat different from
that of platform exercises and yet only
DR. HUTTON.
153
another side of the same personality
which one feels all through. Assuredly,
there are not two Dr. Huttons, nor shall
we say the pulpit shows him better than
the hall; in both you find a plain,
strong Scotsman who can give a hoof
of defiance to a foe and not forget that
he is a brother. And for all the plain-
ness, it is a man of genius we have
here, the whinstone sort, though not of
Dumfries.
-
There is a new Puritan culture, fine
and fascinating, represented by many
names, one of them but newly cut upon
a tomb in the Tummel valley. Dr.
Hutton's is of an older growth, and it,
too, has no little charm for some of us.
"Whichever way he win, he wins for worth,
For every soldier, for all true and good."
/
j
XVIII.
REV. CHARLES JERDAN, M.A., LL.B.
M
R. JERDAN is a man "sure to be.
in office some day,” as they say
of politicians, although he is outspoken
and individual enough to merit a quite
different fate. Many of the points of
an advancing man are noticeable in
him and they are the marks of a
thorough U.P.; yet he is by no means
made up on any pattern or "teep." In-
dependence of judgment characterises.
the minister of Sir Michael Street
church. He is one who can propose
a motion and think no worse of it
though it find very little support. That
is an excellent quality of temper, and
when Mr. Jerdan reaches the Clerk's
154
REV. CHARLES JERDAN, M.A., LL.B. 155
chair he will be found as fair, as clear
in thought and utterance, as frank and
brotherly as the most far-off member
of Synod could wish a clerk to be.
There is, indeed, a touch of the army
about Mr. Jerdan; his orderliness,
method, and well-developed energy are
like those of a major or colonel. He
has good hold of himself and the abili-
ties planted in him, and makes the
whole effective in the manly, self-con-
tained way of one who has surveyed the
field and the forces at disposal and
knows what he is about. Then he has
certain advantages—a sufficient pre-
sence, a look, not way-worn, but ex-
perienced and competent, a voice that
needs no lifting up to reach every
corner, and fills the ear with sufficiency
of sound, yet without any noise. People
like to batter ministers about, but they
object to seeing signs of the process
afterwards; and Mr. Jerdan, though
sensitive, is neither nervous nor shy.
156
MİNİSTERİAL MINIATURES.
An opponent can make him feel, but
not so easily make him retire. And
one is never obliged to consider whether
there are two Mr. Jerdans. In the
various parts of worship he is clear,
ready, unstrained; in the sermon there.
is thought, not abstruse, suited for plain.
direct application, and language easy,
every-day, fit to the kind of discourse.
Our preacher follows modern expositors,
and the style, the mode of handling,
remind one often of Dr. Godet. There
is a search for points of interest and
homiletic use, an adoption sometimes of
realistic modern phrases. Mr. Jerdan
adds a frequent sharp hit, for which
he "
axes no pardons" any more than
Christmas Evans did. These hits come
with a sure and prepared hand. Let
it be allowed that homiletic hints are
sometimes pursued with more resolve
than they are worth, and comparisons
occasionally over-pressed. But when a
man is in the best company the critic
REV. CHARLES JERDAN, M.A., LL.B. 157
may scarce meddle with him, and Mr.
Jerdan is never pretentious. He is
always on that level where fustian is
unknown. Reading sermons is natural
to him; he proves it his rightful way of
delivery; and no more needs be said.
Finally, as everyone knows, we have
here an open-eyed, firm-lipped " Volun-
tary" of the good old sort (long life to
them all!), and a contributor to the
theological studies of the day. The
rank altogether is honourable, and it
means industry. But Mr. Jerdan has a
distinguished example among his own
kindred.
·
XIX.
REV. G. H. KNIGHT.
ΤΗ
HE Free Church minister in Bears-
den by Glasgow is very much his
own man. He ascends the pulpit as
one who has had commission in secret
and apart. He says no say, promotes
no policy, asks no party to tell him how
a preacher is to demean himself. At
the same time, no one is more distinctly
of the Free Church, in the finer qualities
that distinguish it-devoutness, culture,
grace of thought and of religious feeling.
Mr. Knight loves the working of man's
spirit in literature; he loves no less the
evangelical strain not always parallel
with literature. Devout he is, as a son
of the Free Church, but you must ex-
clude everything bitter or suspicious
from the evangelic idea when you
158
REV. G. H. KNIGHT.
159
think of him. He is no fighter, and if
he were, the parochial would not tempt
his sword. He is an artist, blent of two
or three races, two or three influences,
and sensitive to all that is true and
lovely. The dark-clothed face has now
a weight, almost a gloom over it; now
clears in a soft comrade smile. There
is a twilight ruggedness, and again a
wistful look of sympathy and knowledge.
One has heard him speak of "Christ and
us," and with the words a gleam one does
not forget lit the fine dark grey eyes.
He is an artist full of poetic sensibilities
and care for the suggestive hints that lie
half buried in a passage of history or
a meditation. Nor may we question
closely his use of these. They are his;
he finds them, and by his own art weaves
them together, always for edification.
The voice is gravely and tenderly ex-
pressive, with gentle inflections of
humour, and when needful, an easy
vigour. It often restores to some
160 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
familiar verse the meaning which time
had almost evaporated, or to one un-
familiar gives a memorable fulness, and
in all the parts of worship is a fit organ
for an artist. Quite sufficient always, it
forces nothing. The preacher is not a
man to compel attention, to force either
himself or a hearer, though if you lend
him your regard at all he makes more
and more sure of it as a sermon pro-
ceeds. He gives you-quite simply, for
he likes it himself-a good story now
and then, but the "outline" so dear to
some is rather obscure with him. He is
by no means one who will make you
remember that or be the death of you.
And what is the chief thought—the note
he leaves with you? It is Faith. "God
will always explain Himself to those
who follow Him trustfully through life."
Neither does science trouble him, nor
realistic criticism. He escapes the dry
atmosphere of the classroom, carrying
with him spoil he has found for illustrat-
REV. G. H. KNIGHT.
161
"These
ing the ways of God to men.
poor hearts of ours shall be filled with the
love of God." If we have that, we have
more than all research and science. So
the preacher comes home to hearts. We
feel that he watches with sensitive inte-
rest the growth of the pattern in our
mingled life-a pattern One has the
secret of. The glory of being is darkened,
the heart of man knows a terrible sick-
ness; yet harmony has been thought
of, a dominant rules, mortality cherishes
a mystic word. "There is a Presence
in the lonely hills," and we have felt
what we never saw.
"The day is dark and the night
To him that would search their heart;
Only, gazing alone,
To him wild shadows are shown,
Deep under deep unknown,
And height above unknown height.
Still we say as we go-
Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know
That shall we know one day.'"
I I
XX.
DR. MARSHALL LANG.
I
WENT out one night to the Barony
church. Dr. Lang was to speak on
"Christ and the City." The subject
drew me peculiarly; for all that day
and the night before the weight of the
city had lain on soul and heart. The
roar, the sordidness, the clash of life
against life, the overbearing and the
hard triumph, the sullen submission and
fear a monster called Life tore its own
breast and ceased not. What spell
could lull its fever? Christ was there
in church and hall--or they said He
was; the organs rolled, the choirs raised
their chants, the Book was opened and
read; and "the fever called living" was
:
162
DR. MARSHALL LANG.
163
lulled but for a few hours. Ere the
following dawn the storm of it would
break afresh, the cry and the struggle,
the heat and the cold.
Was Christ indeed to be heard or felt
in the prone, heavily-breathing city?
What were these ranges of vacant
lighted windows piled above a dim
wandering hollow? Eye after eye, see-
ing nothing; and within, the city's pain
and weakness drawn to a centre, hushed
and strangely hopeful as in the old days
when He passed along the street and
His woven garment wafted virtue.
Christ and the City."—Now we are on
the edge of a broken wide-reaching
space hemmed with lights for a league
or two, and here, on our right, is a
mound and a mass of building. Not
"the plain square pile" of the old
Barony-Norman Macleod's Barony-
but a Gothic pile which opens large dim
porches and a singularly impressive line
of lofty nave in fine red stone. The
164
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
church is worth attention, and the
worship; to-night, however, it is the
minister we consider, and his sermon.
Dr. Lang strikes no discord with his
books, although the personal impression
is in some respects different from the
one gained the other way. As he
stands in his stall at the head of the
choir and after in the pulpit close by,
with a cunning light thrown upon his
figure from above, you can see the ele-
ments of attraction and feel them. A
certain part of the Celtic nature is fixed
in him; it has affinity with that of his
distinguished predecessor, but differs
in several points. One who knew Dr.
Macleod well may perhaps refuse to see
any likeness; yet to others Dr. Lang
may have come as one not unlike the
friend and counsellor of former days.
There is no bravoure here: something,
rather, of measure and deliberation.
The church roof soars upward, and
even Dr. Lang's reverberant voice has
DR. MARSHALL LANG,
165
to move steadily toward effect. It
comes out of a brown beard and a
moderate-sized figure with intonations
of the pipes, as when he says, "I am
pa-in-ed," but with no recklessness, for
he desires that we shall hear every word
and feel the intent of it. The face
above the beard is pale and of aquiline
type, with blue eyes under those clear-
cut, weighted lids that give such varying
looks of fatigue, of rapt thought, of
sensibility and feeling, and, lifted, can
give a more peremptory mood full ex-
pression. The voice falls in very effect-
ively either with the quiet insistence of
the preacher's main points-" The city
wants Christ, wants the Healer," "I
know that the city is gathered about
Christ" or with the irony and scathing
that govern other passages. There is a
good deal of the dramatic in what is
said from this pulpit and stringency
alternates with sentiment. The preacher
turns aside, looks at the floor, then to
166
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
the dim corners beyond the audience;
he lifts his finger and speaks engagingly
of something we are to remember, or
deeply of something we are to forget.
On the whole, it is realism done largely,
with less attention to details than one
finds in Dr. Lang's books, and with
more variety of emotional colour. He
is a man to whom one public discourse
more or less is no effort, no difficulty.
He selects a few things out of many
and with much skill throws them into
view, but not too rigidly, not so that
their very nature must be examined.
Take the whole for a suggestion chiefly,
as, for instance, "We need more direct
touch of the whole city with Christ."
At another time, in another place, the
way how may be shown, for Dr. Lang
is a keen parish minister and church-
man; there is no want of practi-
cality in him, nor any dimness of sight.
But to-night he does not show the way,
Society and Christ are together.". It
((
DR. MARSHALL LANG.
167
is, so far as this sermon is concerned,
loose, not carried to a demonstration,
yet he knows what he covers by the
statement. Every now and then a
picturesque bit of comparison is made,
true and memorable. The sermon falls
in with one's mood. It recalls the
streets and the great hospital above the
dene.
XXI.
REV. MURDOCH M'ASKILL.
THE
HERE are times one would not
choose for meeting Mr. M'Askill.
When he rises on a platform and gives
himself a little shake together, a lift of
the shoulders, and begins, in a certain
unmistakable accent, about innovations,
then one might well fly. He can be
terrible. The round face, so like John
Bright's, takes on the cool energy of
the tribune; in the blue eyes there is
the glint of the sword; the slight lift
of the frame is like one mounting a
war-horse. But in the pulpit everything
has a different meaning. The preacher
smiles benignly upon feeble folk and
sorrowful, he plays lightly with a
?
168
REV. MURDOCH M'ASKILL.
169
pince-nez, he soothes his voice and
chants a bardic ode of the soul's joy
and sorrow, of Christ's love and triumph.
The chant is on a few notes, there is
an easy flow of natural oratory. Mr.
M'Askill, you have heard, is "a man of
pōwhr," and you own it quite true. He
is. The powers of a passing day are
with him; the confidence and vigour
of a generation fifty years nearer the
creeds. They can both pray and preach,
these men; they possess dogma; they
feel life strongly, as a great and various
experience offering endless material to
the preacher. And pray do not imagine
them as without that culture of which
we hear so much. It may not be
German or French they have, it cer-
tainly is not Arnold or Lang; but it is
a very effective instrument, and one
who knows of such matters enjoys
seeing it in use. The preachers of this
school do not, perhaps, make one text
differ much from another in their
170 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
presentations. They do not draw Weiss
from the rock, nor give people Well-
hausen to eat like manna. One gets a
rest from these gentlemen while listen-
ing to Mr. M'Askill, who, at the same
time, is quite aware of them. And
really, if the new learning is to be
served without humour, as so often
happens, the old will still be better for
that reason, if no other. To have a
clear, sane view of the sinning, throb-
bing world is a very respectable kind
of culture, be sure; and if a preacher
speaks to purpose of the Divine order
in the world and teaches people to
stand up to their duties and trials, he
has taken his degree. What most of
us want in the pulpit is an athlete
who is not afraid of the vital struggle.
Knowledge, let us have, certainly, but
not if men are to creep out of the class-
room scarce able to bear the breeze
round a corner. Mr. M'Askill has
knowledge, but no subtlety. He works
-
REV. MURDOCH M'ASKILL.
171
out his sermons in the way of rhetorical
oration and evangelic reference to the
experience of ordinary people. Doc-
trines of Divine fore-ordination and
human trust are set forth, the triumph
of the believer and the Church is
exhibited. A sermon is often a long
ode or chant of Christ to a struggling
faithful servant. Mr. M'Askill believes
that Christianity is a great living poem
as much as a science; and his own
power is that of the bard. As for his
fighting side, and his championship . in
church courts, it is for the Free Church,
not against her, he contends. He is an
optimist by nature and will do nothing
destructive. At the same time there
are, in the troop behind him, men and
women whose souls are touched with
the shadow of the Highlands, who are
not optimists.
•
XXII.
RÈV. GEORGE MACDONALD.
I
FIND Mr. Macdonald very interest-
ing, and in more than one aspect.
To a certain extent he seems to realise
Dr. Dale's saying about men who are
unfulfilled prophecies, and that gives him
a charm all his own and includes him in
a company more attractive than almost
any other group of mortals. The charm
of the brilliant and successful persons
may not be denied for we run after
them, if so be their shadows passing by
may fall upon us. But it is better to be
an unfulfilled prophecy than an un-
prophetic fulfilment; and this Gaelic
minister in Aberdeen has got something
in him that shall yet be born. An aroma
172
REV. GEORGE MACDONALD.
173
of undeveloped blossom and fruit hangs
about him, and it is impossible to come
near without feeling spiritual growth.
The first definite remark made by a
hearer is that the preacher knows the
tragedy of the human. His prayers are a
breathing out of the deep of oppression,
scorn, grief, and pain. Patiently as the
poor and lonely endure, so does he
entreat for them, without passion. Their
burden is upon the spare shoulders of
this tall, grizzled, worn man, and he
takes it to God. There is neither wealth
nor cunning of phrase, no art at all; it
is only prayer, only the soul and the
deep under God. After prayer he reads
gutturally, with his nose to the book,
and if, after that, he announces a text of
the great order, requiring large and noble
rendering, no one who has entered his
atmosphere will expect a failure. He
will bring something out of it, you think,
and he does. Though a singular, Mr.
Macdonald is no hermit. An air of
174
MINISTERIAL MINIATURĖS.
culture and even of the world comes
with him; he knows, as he feels, more
than is ever conveyed save by a look
out of patient eyes, and by a strange.
recurrent cry amid the low guttural of
the Highland tones. The sermon is
long, and ideas flitter through it like
shadows over a wide hill-side when the
autumn day goes down. Suddenly, as
it were the fling of the pipes, comes a
wail charged with keen force and weird
entreaty. You may forget what has
been said, but you will never forget this
cry. The wild hills are in it, and the
lonely lochs under grey skies, the screigh
of the wind through the pass and among
the pines; it brings one the sob of the
forest in winter, and the fret of the
tossing stream, and the travail of the
shepherd when the snow is heaping
silent doom in the glen. It is the Gaelic
voice to the Gaelic soul; an utterance
not of schools, nor of city streets, but a
veritable sound of nature, keen, pungent,
REV. GEORGE MACDONALD.
175
vital, a voice of the drama that never
ceases to be acted. Those who hear
Mr. Macdonald preach in the old tongue
feel most of what he is and might be.
But there is something for eternity to
ripen, though a few plain people about
the city ways, and some who have been
and are Highland students, know enough
for genuine respect and sympathy. Mr.
Macdonald has the look of one whom
the world has tempted to become a
cynic but who never will be one. His
countenance bears the marring of the
Christian soldier; his frame is long, lean,
not graceful; he has fine, thin, nervous
hands, which hang before him and are
wrung while he speaks. To know him
even a little is to know a man of parts
and of inward culture, and of patient,
devout grace. He is one of those who
are sure that our Redeemer liveth and
shall stand in the latter day upon the
earth.
1
XXIII.
DR. M'GREGOR.
H
ERE is one to be admired of every
honest man. He is so honestly,
so energetically himself that all who
love a clear quantity of human talent
are very much his servants, to use a
neat old phrase. For my part, I find
him delightful, a Scotsman and son of
John Knox, every bit of him. Spare
of frame and hirpling a little as he goes
toward the sixties, he has all the keen-
ness and verve of mental youth. The
face wears a benign aspect when the
keen eyes rest for a minute under the
wide brow, but usually eyes and small
pointed beard are sharpened to some
inquiry or resolve, and the whole look
176
DR. M'GREGOR.
177
is one of eager, resolute movement
along a fixed line. The spectacles
soften a little, the pince-nez accentuates,
the voice comes firm and quick, with
R's rolling, and a frequent nasal rever-
beration well known to some of us: it
has at least a tang of the northern
gathering cry. The beard is continually
stroked when the thin ready hands have
nothing else to do, and while the con-
gregation is singing Dr. M'Gregor often
sings too, not formally but as though
he were an enthusiastic precentor; head
moves, body sways lightly to the air,
he looks over the people and his brows
lift with the glad effort of song. He is
all alive, from iron-grey hair to small
eager feet.
Homely, too, as we say. He loves
vernacular, uses it freely with much
effect, letting it fly like David's pebbles
from the sling, and having always at
command a stock of vivid, nervous
phrases which are the very thing for
12
178 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
F
popular discourse, leading, remonstrance.
To know what Dr. M'Gregor is capable
of one should hear him on a subject
that requires enforcing and driving
home. He does that with a rattle of
armour, with life and enjoyment. The
tones wind up into the nasal key, but
are seldom painful; the hand admonishes
and then comes slap down; sin and
folly are pelted with plain memorable
Saxon. “That is plain enough, surely!
It is; there can be no mistake. He
bites his points, and, if he thinks good,
will bite them over again, and if you
want to kick you can do it—either now
or afterwards. It is (in not a few
salient respects) Burns, orthodox and
preaching, pure and of the church-
militant; it is Scottish, and, therefore,
for all the biting, humane. Here is a
person the most determined opponent
can love and respect. Because he is
full of sense and humour he is in grain
kindly, bright of spirit and sincere of
""
DR. M'GREGOR.
179
heart. There are people who do not
know Dr. M'Gregor personally and who
feel that they miss a friend. He is not
always pungent in public discourse.
"If you look upon that as established
may be half ironical; not so other
touches on the wistful, renouncing, bur-
dened side of life. Here the scholar
speaks, the man of cultivated taste, of
tender and gracious feeling. Yet, again,
he enjoys life with a healthy appetite,
has found the world good, and comes to
the daily table in wise, ripe mood. Full
of experience and sagacious reflection,
he is interesting all through and never
shallow, never stupid, even where many
men find it easy to be so. Faith based
on deduction-the good Scottish method
-is his. Comprehend all? No; but
(here he gives himself a shake, pulls his
beard, looks at you)-but everything
'will be riddled out some day. A
Christian is a man not confounded by
existence, not confounded even by
})
"}
180
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
Christians of the miserable sort, though
against them and much else of the
environment he has to hurl himself.
A partisan, in church matters, Dr.
M'Gregor certainly is; so are other men
whom one heartily respects. He is
naturally an advocate, and no less a
gentleman, exhibiting that easy citizen-
ship of the world, that old-time air of
breeding and simple refinement which
inhere in every Scotsman of quality.
He allows himself now and then a crude
saying, for the sake of effect, but his
thought is firm and well ordered within
the lines of the Westminster standards.
Once more the vigour, the raciness, the
tonic flavour of the old wine is felt.
May Dr. M'Gregor be long spared to us.
►
XXIV.
(C
DR. DONALD MACLEOD.
A
T the end of last century there
were two families residing on
opposite shores of the Sound of Mull,
in Argyllshire, their houses fronting one.
another across the blue strait which
winds in from the Atlantic. From the
windows of the manse of Mr. Macleod,
the minister of Morven, on the main-
land, could be seen the dark ruins of the
old castle of Aros, in the island of Mull,
frowning from its rocky eminence over
the bay of Salen, and behind the castle.
the house of Mr. Maxwell, chamberlain
of the Duke of Argyll and tacksman of
Aros."
So begins a book full of laughter and
pathos, of the travail of genius and the
mingled air of the Scots land, a book
ISI
182
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
one keeps on a near shelf and never
wearies of. The minister of Morven
who looked across to Aros and went
there for his wife, wished his son.
Norman to be "a Highland minister,"
and, like many another wish, this one
was fulfilled in the changing. A High-
land minister indeed was he who
marched about Glasgow as the minister
of the old Barony. The true Celtic soul
was lodged in that large rich presence,
in those ever-wistful kindling eyes.
The brother who is still with us must
have his share of the loch and the hill;
their shadow and their radiance are
in his memorial volumes; he too is a
Highland minister. Yet there is a
difference. As he comes across the
chancel of his beautiful church, facing
his people, the buirdly pastoral presence
has nothing of Norman's abandon, the
face is calmer, steadier. I think of his
grandfather, the Aros chamberlain, who
was “educated as a lawyer and became
DR. DONALD MACLEOD.
183
•?
Sheriff substitute of his native district.
He was an excellent scholar and full
of kindly humour, strict and punctual
in his habits . . . taking delight in the
ancient Border ballads of the Low
country and the songs of Burns." Dr.
Macleod, entering his pulpit, or editing
Good Words in his study, reminds one.
of this careful, exact, genial lawyer,
rather than the keen Morven orator.
His more evident qualities are those of
the Scottish man of affairs-tact, con-
sideration, ripened experience, a ready
but not buoyant humour. The face
and figure wear a serious fatherly air, a
look of composed attention. The silver
hair has no ruffle in it, the eyes are
quietly keen, though, betimes, one catches
in them the gleam of the water that is
in Fiunary. There is a large sagacious
upper lip, a sensitive under mouth; the
manner, in preaching, is easy and on
the whole gentle, yet never without a
sough of moral emphasis and a hint of
184
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
rising notes in the pleasant, firm voice.
The English-could it be other than
clear and fit? The matter, be sure,
is well examined, truly and neatly laid
out in its more important aspects; no
time is wasted, no show made; the
workmanship is so good as to seem.
quite a natural and spontaneous thing;
the doctrine is good honest Protestant-
ism, frank and vigorous, though ever
well-bred and humane. In short, Dr.
Macleod preaches like an honest gentle-
man, a cultured, simple, dignified man
of God's world. There is little or none
of the mystical, but much sense, clear
judgment, and humane feeling. He
believes in the soul opening under the
broad sky to the love of God in Christ
and growing freely, strongly in that
living light. "Love," he says, "is the
life of our moral nature and the
formative power of character," and by
Love he means a ripening principle of
life. Every question has an immediate
DR. DONALD MACLEOD.
185
plain answer in a duty which can be
done, and in the doing of which we find
our life.
As to this, Dr. Macleod
speaks earnestly and openly. Wher-
ever we are, whoever we are, the life
may be ours that comes through service
and faith. In no sense does he seek
to escape the real or pass impatiently
beyond it. It is our medium; we must
be saved in it or not at all; everywhere
it is God's Real and our probation.
This I take to be Dr. Macleod's
philosophy. Neither in himself nor in
his teaching is there anything stifled.
Yet he must know the care of life, for
he is an overseer of the flock the
burden, for he has a varied charge. As
an editor, let him be judged by the
testimony of "a rejected contributor,"
whom he kept back from a coveted.
place in a manner the most kindly,
frank, and altogether courteous, so that
ever since the rejected one has been
quite sure of Dr. Macleod's fine qualities.
XXV
REV. JOHN MACPHERSON.
THE
'HERE are many stories current of
what this minister was and did in
in his earlier days. In some points he
appeared a second M'Cheyne, and de-
scended upon the manufacturing town
of Dundee like a sudden blast from
stern and lonely hills, driving through
the streets and "roaring seaward." Sin,
judgment, pardon were and are the three
notes of his pibroch—notes of weird and
warning, tragedy and rousing, doom and
hope. He cared not how the men of
the city thought of him if they had to
remember his call. He cared not for
their regulations or customs, but held his
own way, raising a stringent, even fierce
186
REV. JOHN MACPHERSON.
187
Lament, a Gathering cry. The vigour
of it was tremendous-a real blast, keen-
ing along the hill with penetrating
decision. It was an utterance full of
a singular imaginative hardness. The
hills and lochs, the pipes and the men
who extract their soul of sound, all
belong to each other. Add the evan-
gelical revival and the flame-hearted
logic of "foreknowledge absolute," and
a preacher may well come as an Elias;
with a force men must own, whether
they like it or no. There have been
times when people did not like Mr.
Macpherson at all, but he has never
been in the way of asking a mandate;
he gives one rather. Few ministers take
and get so much of their own way as
this one. Pass from that. Consider
him as writer and as preacher. Almost
from the first word of a sermon the
strong but now worn face begins to fill
and lighten. He is superior to his
audience; his veins throb with the wine.
188
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
of the grand old testimony he is once
more to deliver; in a short time her
looks ten years younger than when he
stooped over the desk giving out a psalm.
The mode of utterance is conversational,
descriptive. The old bard gift has passed
into one of narrative-as we find in the
biographies our friend has published.
He is full of the mystery of the Evan-
gelical faith, its pillar of fire and cloud.
The most ordinary materials flow to-
gether and you have common life trans-
fused with supernatural glow and gloom.
Anything may happen; portents of
death and disaster, spirit-calls to unfore-
seen duty, sudden revelations of heaven
and hell. And all the time the setting
is a crofter's cottage on a glen-side or
a filthy wynd in the city. Men and
women of the most commonplace types
partake the tragedy of spiritual life and
see angels unawares. This, perhaps,
most in the biographical work; in the
pulpit free hitting out and a good deal of
REV. JOHN MACPHERSON.
189
severe irony. He shoots into every part
of the church—you need not sit up into
a corner thinking to escape—and with
the spoken arrow comes one of spectral
awfulness from the sunken eyes. Yet
voice and face alike soften, afterwards,
to a homely Scots phrase about “a
bundle of misery" or such-like, and you
feel a tremulous air of Divine pity breathe
round the judgment seat. The dis-
course usually has in it some bits of the
preacher's own experience which have
great force to himself, and devout fancy
plays about certain adamant points of
dogma. "D'ye believe that?" he says,
and a look like a Highland dirk is
thrown at you while the lips go to-
gether. He can give a sharp prick to
what he counts a bubble of "human
wisdom," yet there are frequent touches
of culture drawn from a good store. It
is a revival address almost every time.
he preaches, but he knows what is re-
quired for his work and you may depend
190
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
on being surprised pretty often by the
force and shrewdness given to a theology
you were perhaps resolved not to accept.
Mr. Macpherson has borne a stern testi-
mony, yet because he has a passionate
faith in certain great principles which
among us are called Calvinism, his words
come up from the depths and are spoken
in a large place.
XXVI.
REV. DAVID MACRAE.
M
R. MACRAE ranks as a minister
and takes honours as a heretic.
Perhaps there is as much, at least, of
the Sunday newspaper editor, as of
either of the other characters. At all
events, there is a good deal of the
popular-very popular-lecturer and of
the democratic politician. The United
Presbyterian Church is supposed to
have "extruded" Mr. Macrae some
years ago. That is a current fallacy.
The church could no more have got rid
of the minister of Gourock without his
own assistance, than England could
have disposed of the Stuarts if they
had not helped. A little vantage
191
192
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
ground of the kind usually possessed
by ministers and sometimes held by
kings, and Gourock might still have
had the clergyman who claims to be
successor of Gilfillan in Dundee, or
some other place might peaceably have
had him. But Mr. Macrae chose a
valorous part. He deprived himself,
by a self-denying ordinance, of every
claim save that of striking for freedom.
The rôle of heretic is too important in
his eyes to be mixed up with any other
that might weaken it. He shows an
instinct for clear dramatic representation
of the part, and gives the public no
trouble in placing him. While other
men are misunderstood alike by their
own fellows and the outside world, Mr.
Macrae stands plain and sharp, com-
prehended of all. He is a heretic about
eternal punishment and a radical about
land, and a teetotaler. What can be
simpler, more easy for the public mind
to keep in view? I advise all teachers
REV. DAVID MACRAE.
193
and politicians and writers and would-be
improvers of society to take pattern.
Never complicate things, gentlemen. If
you want to be a distinguished heretic
just say with the utmost positiveness
what you do not or will not believe,
and stop there. He who hesitates-
that is, qualifies and explains—is lost,
in this as in other matters. Begin with
that, and people say you are "misty,"
that you have "loose views"; they
won't respect you a bit. The public
likes black that is as tar and soot, white
that is as new-fallen snow in Labrador;
it hates all grey mixtures which require
eyesight and judgment. Mr. Macrae
is well versed in these matters; he gives
what is liked, what will answer. He
never deals in half tones or delicate
shades; of that unpopular thing, philo-
sophy, he is innocent, and equally so
of poetry.
He is a Voice to the
People: vox clamantis in a three-decker
lecture hall as ugly as debt, though it
13
194 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
was all paid for before the opening
day. One thing must be observed:
Mr. Macrae was not brought up in a
voluntary church for nothing, and he
makes people give who never gave
before. His church in Dundee is an
example of the energy of the Christian
spirit and the tendency of men to
conserve the institutions in which they
have been reared. It is Presbyterian
as to form, and, whatever may be said
in some quarters, the ministry is not
a despotism. People have gathered
about Mr. Macrae as a centre, believing
that freedom of utterance and clearness
of doctrinal notion is a good foundation
for a church. In that belief we shall
agree with them. We shall also agree
that their minister is a man of singular
energy and spirit, taking his own path
firmly and effectively and using all his
talents.
XXVII.
DR. MACMILLAN.
IN
N the lumpy town by the fascinating
river of mountains Dr. MacMillan
has long been a conspicuous figure, and
not there only. The Greenock people
know his well-built figure and pleasant
glance, his large agreeableness of man-
ner, his interesting sermons and lectures.
The religious world knows his name
very well as that of an author of standing
and popularity. It is about a quarter of
a century since he published the book
"Bible Teachings in Nature," which gave
him a secure place amongst those whom
the more educated of religious people
listen to and wait upon. He has not
despised or trifled with this readiness of
195
196
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
a large audience. Book after book has
issued to the same class of hearers, those
who presuppose the orthodox creed, and
wish to have it confirmed with every
new and striking circumstance. It is
not to the sceptic that Dr. MacMillan
speaks, not to the young man who has
a doubt whether there be anything to
believe save the unquestionable thing-as-
it-is of laboratory and workshop. The
graceful, interesting variety of studies.
contained in "The Ministry of Nature,"
"Two Worlds are Ours," "The Olive
Leaf," etc., are for those who wish to
practise what our author and preacher
calls "the higher divination." There is
great ingenuity and abundance in Dr.
Macmillan's work, and he has given him-
self carefully to his enterprise. His
style deserves the name; it is an easy
poetic amble which is very pleasant
alike to hear and to read, it hangs like
a becoming robe about the form of
theology and science, and they are not
DR. MACMILLAN.
197
grim under their drapery; the body of
doctrine has kindly covering. To edify
those who already receive the doctrine,
to show them how right they are in their
faith and how blessed they shall be;
this is the task undertaken. "By the
golden taches or clasps binding together
the curtains which covered it, the whole
structure was made one tabernacle and
all its parts and objects were united."
What is said of the tabernacle is true
of the writer's own method. The taches
are deftly shaped, the curtains flowered
in ample design and colour; it is all
very bright and skilful, and full of sug-
gestion along lines that are not too
difficult. And let us remember that
the lines were entered upon at a time
when many Evangelicals were either
content without science or else deliber-
ately drew back their skirts from contact.
In Scotland every one was not a disciple
of Chalmers, in England suspicion had
not so much as dawned that the religious
198 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
•
teacher would ever strike hands with the
chemist or incur loans of germs from
the biologist. And these dealings have
their peril. The detail of natural science,
its precision, its cool dogma easily take
some minds captive; they seem easily
to fasten themselves, these facts of
nature, under a deft hand. Golden
taches and purple veils, lilies and pome
granates and cherubim, it is all very
charming, and the symbolism is fact, is
it not? Knowledge and faith are made.
one, a lost harmony is restored.
That depends. Science, like fire, may
prove a terrible servant. It is dogma
or nothing; so is theology. Suppose
science calmly asserts a law which does
not in the rigorous end prove what it
was intended to prove? It is a little
awkward, that. However, no one would
choose to quarrel with Dr. Macmillan,
but rather to meet him in good will,
acknowledging the tenderness and the
gleams that infuse his teaching. Onc
DR. MACMILLAN.
199
often disagrees with him, but never in
wrath-save when he abuses one's favour-
ite tree. Let him speak of mosses and
of his wanderings on Alpine slopes, and
listening is a pleasure. So when many
human experiences are touched.
•
XXVIII.
DR. MAIR.
IN
N the United Presbyterian minister
of Morningside one feels, what is no
small attraction, that he likes his work
and does it with a steady relish. He
gives the impression of a man who feels
in himself the strength, mental and
physical, for labour, and has pleasure
in doing what is appointed. That is
not so common now-a-days as to pass
without any remark, as merely the thing
to be expected. For not every vigorous
man makes full proof of his energy, not
every earnest worker is able to carry
with cheerfulness the load of work. On
some even of the younger race the
burden of the preacher and pastor lies
200
DR. MAIR.
201
tremes.
full heavy. On a few, as we all know,
it seems not to lie at all. Now, Dr.
Mair is a happy mean between ex-
He has worked steadily, but
has not worked himself out; he writes,
but he visits too; he has a large
congregation formed under his ministry,
and has been more than spoken of for a
college chair. In the Synod his face and
voice are as well known as any man's,
and are never associated with anything
arrogant or unbrotherly on the one side,
ineffective or disheartening on the
other. There, as elsewhere, he is found
competent and cheery, with a cool,
steady kind of vigour. His published
writing is marked by the same charac-
teristics, and no less by an ability for
giving instruction, which appears very
evidently in the sermons.
His presence
manner, mode of thinking and speaking
are very much those of a head-master
--the Rector, say, of a well-known
grammar school.
As such, he would
202
MİNİSTERİAL MİNİATURES.
1
have had all under good control, parents
would have been at ease, the teaching
staff would have worked well, the pupils
have won scholarships and been found,
now, reputably scattered through those
five quarters of the globe the Scotsman
annexes to himself. Naturally, Dr.
Mair has been successful in the church,
for the demands of the one position.
correspond closely to those of the other.
Guidance is needed-a firm kindly
hand, with tact. Instruction has to be
given, the more plainly and definitely
the better. Dr. Mair is very plain.
"I think it is as clear as day, is it
not?" comes often with quick decision,
from his lips, and it is clear always.
"He reasons so well," you hear people
saying afterwards. That is true; it is
a mark. He has the teaching instinct,
the art by which one gathers, out of
the mass of things that may be known,
a certain quantity, relates it to a centre,
and conveys it to others. In preaching
DR. MAIR.
203
and other parts of a minister's work,
this means the art of teaching theology
and making it a practical affair. Dr.
Mair has studied, he knows his subjects,
but he does not show off. To be
himself, unaffectedly, to be followed.
easily along well-known lines, and yet
to have the air of research, and logic,
and philosophic enquiry-that is his
strength. Those who like the in-
tangible, the wistful, must look else-
where. He has none of the Gaelic in
his robust unemotional composition.
But every one in his own order, and
here is a man who can be trusted to
sustain his part, use all his talents,
and, to the extent of them, serve us
cheerfully.
XXIX.
REV. BENJAMIN MARTIN.
M
R. MARTIN has succeeded to an
honourable post, and comes after
one whose name will always be asso-
ciated with it. When the commons of
Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament
assembled, shall disband the disestablish-
ment committee of the United Presby-
terian Church by the one effectual
process of finishing its work; when the
long fight is over and nobody is killed,
but, on the contrary, we are all well and
hearty; then Dr. Hutton will shine in
the records. He is part of the history
and is assured of an honourable place
in our Scottish
Scottish records. Meantime
his successor is before us with perhaps
the most delicate work in hand which
204
REV. BENJAMIN MARTIN.
205
the corps has ever had to do. There
have been years of ambush and counter-
ambush, sortie and escalade and the
rest; sometimes, with a rattling charge
and summons, all seemed done. But
old-time fortresses stand much assault,
and there is still work before those who
maintain the attack. It has always
been a friendly siege, in the best in-
terests of those concerned, and the
quietness of Mr. Martin's tone does
not conceal that substantial friendliness.
He has qualities of mind and charac-
teristics which befit the hour and the
work to be done. One sees in him a
bright alertness which is not likely to
be deceived and a calm resolution that
is sure not to waver. He knows the
points of the matter in hand, takes hold
of them firmly, and sets them out with.
a clear accuracy and neatness which
proves very effective. Few men could
be less alike in most respects than
Dr. Hutton and Mr. Martin; as con-
206
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
veners of the disestablishment committee
they present a marked contrast, the
one supplementing the other and sug-
gesting how very strong a case must
be that can be stated with power and
cogency in two ways so different. Mr.
Martin has no aptness for that cavalry
charge to which the Synod hall has
often rung response and admiring
opponents have yielded the tribute of
at least a smile. The weapons of
Hutton and Oliver, darting Excaliburs,
are not his. But he has clear-tempered
steel of his own, perfectly fit for what
he desires it to effect. He is an acute,
steady, satisfying expounder of principles,
and has reason to be well content with
the contribution he has been able to
make, practically and theoretically, to
the Free Church controversy. It will
be a great day when he and his
distinguished predecessor "hang the
trumpet in the hall and study war no
more." We shall all be glad, though
REV. BENJAMIN MARTIN.
207
we recall with some human glee the
vigour and gallantry of theold campaign.
But Mr. Martin is a minister, and the
pastor and preacher in him have their
pleasant bright quality, an attraction
both outward and inward. The preacher
was trained in a school more severe
than the one just now in fashion, but
a school that softened metaphysic with
song, and Mr. Martin has a natural bias
that way.
He escapes frequently to
the poets, and a practised hearer gets
to know when a quotation is coming;
the speaker's face takes a fresh light,
the verse to which he looks throws
a gleam through his blue eyes as he
turns to it. The effect is fine when a
noble piece from Milton strikes down the
calm passage of discourse. Like some
other men, this one finds expository
teaching most impressive, and he has
had his successes in that line. A good
man, gentle and clear-sighted, Mr. Martin
engages the esteem of all who know him.
XXX.
DR. MITFORD MITCHELL.
THE
HE West Church, Aberdeen, is a
favourite with many. It is a plea-
sant place to drop into either morning
or evening, summer or winter. Lovers
of the picturesque enjoy the delightful
oldness of the building and lovers of
music the tasteful newness of the sing-
ing. The low-pitched cryptic aisles and
arched recesses are dim, quaint, sugges-
tive; an imaginative child must find
them utterly delightful; a nervous
grown-up, not unacquainted with head-
ache, might choose to worship here for
the sake of the dim nooks and cool
shadows, the soothing peacefulness that
comes of being half hidden behind an
208
DR. MITFORD MITCHELL.
209
arch, part lost to the choir and even
to the minister, in the dullest seat of
"believers' corner," where folk live by
faith, not by sight. It is all very
pleasant for those who easily get too
much of sound and light. And the
effect is pretty complete. There is no
go-as-you-please about the West Church.
A Queen's chaplain ought to manage
well and Dr. Mitchell is a ruler in his
own domain. Quite independent, as to
money matters, of any possible congre-
gation, he uses the power to have things
well done and the people co-operate
heartily. The wheels of the coach are
well oiled, the coachman is an excellent
and admired whip, so there is none of
that discontent which is the chief virtue
of some congregations. The atmo-
sphere, as we have said, is calm, cool,
catholic, agreeable, and the box-pulpit,
hitched on to a side gallery in a quaint
and singular way, has an occupant who
fits the place. Since he appears side-
4
14
210
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
ways to many of the flock, it is well that
he has a good profile; he has also a
good presence in robes, a voice that
carries well, a manner collected and
capable. Now and then during service
he takes stock of the worshippers with
rapid glances here and there under
the vaulted roof, and if any one pre-
sumes to go out during the sermon, exit
has to be made in a full pause. The
minister goes to distinguished granaries
for the kernels he deals out on Sabbaths,
and certainly they ought to be respected.
Comparing them, as they arrive week
by week, we may scarcely venture to
say from what school Dr. Mitchell
names himself. He rebukes dissent
and rationalism, speaks confidently as
to "self-effacement," and gives pretty
hard rubs to "the subtle ecclesiastical
leader" and other assuming bodies.
The sermons, we may
may observe, are
closely read; and yet Mr. Mitchell is
a very successful minister. Some ritual
DR. MITFORD MITCHELL.
211
seems proper, both to the man and the
Queen's chaplain, but the present "use"
of the West Church is rather mixed, the
Creed coming in as a prayer between
collects and the Lord's Prayer being
said by the minister alone. The
reverent tone which is the fine part of
ritual marks the worship throughout.
In these details Dr. Mitchell's character
makes itself felt, his care for the old
ecclesiastical institution in which he
sustains a conspicuous post. Naturally,
this institution looms through every
text and gives a colour to the kernels.
of grain dispensed from the pulpit. But
reflective and well-bottomed radicals are
not afraid of a colour, or a little mixing
up of things; and Dr. Mitchell's art
includes that of touching rather than
pursuing.
XXXI.
REV. A. B. MORRIS.
M
R. MORRIS has more than one
feature of an effective minister,
a minister who stands "broad-based
upon the people's will," preaching to
an Independent congregation. At the
same time, he does not (to the occa-
sional hearer) seem peculiarly Congre-
gationalist. Points of appearance and
manner give a general rather than a
denominational idea. Some men, upon
the shortest acquaintance, force one, as
it were, to name their ecclesiastical habi-
tation. They are "Auld Kirk," or they
are Free; they are Wesleyan or "In-
dependent." You know, almost as soon
as you have looked at them, which it is,
212
REV. A. B. MORRIS.
213
and they give you no reason whatever to
Now, Mr. Morris
You might hear
reconsider the point.
is not one of these.
him preach and pray and might go
home without knowing what fold you
had been in. That may seem "invidious'
-so many things do when they are read
through spectacles, blue, green, or yellow!
It carries no meaning, however, beyond
the plain fact and whatever the fact is
worth for good. The minister of Albany-
street Church has a well-marked style,
and places himself in a school one knows.
very well, but it is a school spread among
all churches and taking little of the
colour singular to any of them. As a
man he shows distinct characteristics.
and will not get mixed up in your memory
with any one else. One observes, after
hearing him preach, that he might easily
have sent one home thankful to have
the ears released. His voice comes at
first with a steady volume that suggests
roaring, but abstains from it, and behind
་
")
214
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
:
his voice he stands composed and cheer-
ful, with a man's consideration for timid
and nervous people. The matter of dis-
course is, usually, such as all can follow
and find profit in. Theology is in view
always, and the leading facts of human
nature. There is a steady endeavour to
account for sin and progress, mercy and
judgment. Mr. Morris knows the use-
fulness of the repeated phrase and where
to go for sound suggestions. His voice
and figure give full effect to what he
says, and there is a workmanlike air
about the whole. It climbs no strange
height, but it treads without hesitation
where we know the ground. Like many
preachers now, this one speaks often of
happiness, but he does so with some
discrimination and would not be mis-
"Man
understood as to that matter.
has had the power of marring himself;
he has had it and he has used it." A
sentence of this sort comes with deliber-
ate emphasis and pointed admonition,
REV. JOHN ROBERTSON.
215
"I take
alike of eye and of voice.
it," as Mr. Morris would say himself,
that he might sometimes make one
remember a debating society; but so
do many very acceptable speakers, and
it is not so marked in this case that
much need be said about it. Mr. Morris
often touches the feelings of obscure,
oppressed persons, the poor strugglers
of the world. The Bible is their book,
he tells them, "the book of the poor and
afflicted and unfortunate." The senti-
ment is never unwelcome, given with a
pleasant, firm look. On the other hand,
the preacher is careful to note that “pros-
perity is often merely on the surface."
There are touches of the army chap-
lain about Mr. Morris. That comparison
seems to meet one's sense of his bearing
and general style---a kindly chaplain
knowing the ways of young fellows'
XXXII.
REV. HUGH MORRISON,
M
R. BARBOUR'S successor in the
church of Cults is a man who
deserves attention. Coming after one.
who had many graces of culture and
fine gifts from nature, Mr. Morrison has
to stand a sharp comparison. He is
able for it, however. A living piece of
soul is lodged in him, his flame is his
own. Even passing him on a road
you would have some curiosity about
the tall, black-haired man with the
intense, dark eyes; and contact with him
in church would increase your interest.
He is a north of Ireland man, but the
type after which he has grown, while
strongly Irish, is by no means the one
familiar to popular thought. It is not
the gay, reckless, insouciant type we
216
REV. HUGH MORRISON.
217
have here, the creature whose blood is
half gas. No. The dark eyes are very
grave, the face is cut with strong, serious.
lines. There is passion and therefore
flame; it is fed by a severe logic and
burns steadily upon the hearth, although
sometimes under a "gathering" peat.
Mr. Morrison's company for a day is
worth all the leaders in all the news-
papers since ever the Irish question
"used to was." He is Ireland, he reveals
the Irish question. By what he is, even
more than by what he says, he brings you
into the atmosphere that most people
never feel for a moment, and this atmo-
sphere is the whole matter. Know it, and
you know the Irish question in its ele-
ments. The inner man has folds of
reserve, of conservatism; the public man
is outspoken, stringently radical, a re-
former along lines well known and
popular. Inside his round head is a
good thinking machine, well used to a
logical search for facts, and he expresses
218
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
!
?
himself in terse Saxon, with colour not
outrageous, not more than needed for
popular effect. As a preacher, Mr.
Morrison deals closely with the cravings
and ambitions of men and with the
sins of society. He is as practical as if
he had been born in Birmingham, and
makes little use of commentaries, learned
or devout. Though he knows about
these, he seems to prefer working up a
subject for himself by his own shrewd-
ness, annealing it at his own fire, in the
light of daily experience and informa-
tion, and striking hard at the faults
which he sees as he works. The tones
of his voice are evenly strong and full,
with a fulness foreign to Scottish cars.
Mr. Morrison stands always on his hill-
side contending for God's righteousness
out of a consciousness (more than his
own, more than personal. A long fever
of national experience charges the utter-
ance; yet, often enough, in the moment.
of dealing a blow the resonant tones
REV. HUGH MORRISON.
219
become lower, the eyes give out a gleam
of gentleness and of humour, and you
feel that the speaker's shillelagh, though
spiky, is not a cruel instrument. He
is a man amongst fellow-men and an
evangelical who remembers that God
made the world. But, surely, an unre-
pentant reformer he is, and one must
allow that the accent, mental as well as
physical, strikes now and then a shade
keener than one would have it. Some-
thing of Maurice on one side, of Fair-
bairn on another, a touch of Pater, and
another of Kingsley goes to the bettering
of a minister. Be it understood, however,
that Mr. Morrison has some history and
philosophy, as well as a manly spirit.
Moreover, he does not start questions.
which he cannot answer, but keeps
instinctively along the line that belongs.
to him. His sermons are simple in
structure, practical and reverent in tone,
and he is a Christian, which means an
carnest, truth-loving man.
XXXIII.
DR. OLIVER.
H
ERE is an athlete. We know it
by the spare, nervous frame, the
full brow knotting over keen eyes, and,
chiefly, by the mouth-thin, gathered up,
full of strong sentences. That is the
mouth of a man to whom a good argu-
ment and a speaking-place are more
than his necessary food. Give him
something to contend for, worthy of
strong sinews and wrestling skill. As a
Nonconformist and a defender of the
faith once delivered to the saints, he
has all his life been well provided with
fighting, and has not yet any occasion
to feel melancholy. And still, as ever,
he glories in being "an impenitent
220
DR. OLÍVER.
221
Nonconformist." Then, as a keen debater
ought to be, he is a humorist; he can
give and take, which is an excellent
thing in a protagonist. But he must
believe that one who hits back does so
in all respect, otherwise the black velvet
cap is set forward and a piece of edged
criticism is let fly. When he is fully
engaged with some adversary of a like
temper, in the synod or on a general
platform, his look of intense satisfaction
and well-knit energy is delightful. Who-
ever the opponent may be, if he is worthy
of the attack he must needs share the
gusto and lively vigour of it. In the
pulpit another side of this debating
power is shown, but the motive is still
the same, all is done in the atmosphere
of a rational piety, for the promotion of
a clear, convinced, spiritual faith. And
the preacher insults nothing; neither
the orthodoxy for which he contends,
nor the questioners whom he would fain
persuade; neither the mysteries that
222
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
may not be solved, nor the positions he,
as a Calvinistic thinker, would establish.
Sense rules, knowledge and sympathy
direct. Even where the hearer desires
more he is no way affronted by what
has been given him. A few will under-
stand-Dr. Oliver will know-that this
praise is above what it may seem to be.
It is not so easy to insult nothing while
strenuously maintaining a cause. For
one who finds and treads a profitable
via media, there are a hundred who
flourish amid the wreck of vain pro-
positions and defences that only fall
upon themselves. This sort of thing
does not happen to Dr. Oliver. He
knows the message given to him as a
man; and as a man he delivers it.
theology is not mine, but I like to see
what he has to say for himself," is a
phrase he may be heard using. It marks
a nature wide-awake and active, a pastor
who holds his own mind his first charge.
Doubtless he can be grim on occasion,
"His
DR. OLIVER.
223
and it would be well to be out of his
way then. But one fact suffices to show
the buoyant and genial heart. When we
see a man of years and standing in his
profession-one of the orthodox leaders
of his church—frequently the centre of
an eagerly talking band of young men,
who are not afraid to set a lance against
"the Doctor," it means that the juniors.
are engaged with a spirit as fresh as
their own. In such a case, the older
man is still, always, the most interesting
figure. He radiates the glory and
strength of battle in a fine cause; every
word, every look has the value of a life's
work and a soul's developed energy.
Such a man is never old, for the spirit
does not tire of its labour nor the heart
of its devotion. Dr. Oliver is one of
those who continue into advanced life
more and more able for the service of
the church, in defence and militant.
apology.
XXXIV.
REV. W. W. PEYTON.
To
O see Mr. Peyton is to get a new
and marked figure added to one's
inner portrait gallery. Light of step
and not over tall, with square shoulders,
a tropic skin relieved by full bushes of
whitening hair, a keen vivacity of eye.
and bearing; there, in outline, you have
him, and are sure never to lose the
impression. He goes breezily, wears hist
clothes indifferently, presents a half
foreign, half most native aspect. The
cutting of the face is purely Scottish ;
it has the clear outline, the refined
homeliness of a Scotch thinker. The
carriage of the man, though, has nothing
of student life in its alertness; the head
224
REV. W. W. PEYTON.
225
thrown well back, the dark eyes taking
note of all things. He looks like
nothing so much as a professor; but of
some out-door science, geology most
likely. He carries a bag, perhaps, and
one takes for granted that it contains
a hammer and specimens. The idea
remains with us after hearing Mr.
Peyton preach, or reading an article in
the Expositor over his name. In each
of these modes of manifestation the
same figure appears; fresh, rapid, square-
shouldered, clear-cut, with northern pine
resin and quartz about it, and some-
thing of another stuff which blends
wonderfully, and yet is quite distinct.
A Scotsman is often shy; Mr. Peyton
is not. He is self-contained, and the
accent clipping off his vivacious utter-
ances has none of the northern broad
weightiness. Its dogmatism is different,
and titillates the car pleasantly with
foreign suggestions. The voice has a
light decisiveness which corresponds.
J
15
226
MINİSTERİAL MINIATURES.
It is never deep or rough, or stringent;
the preacher attempts nothing that
would require such tones. The special
quality of him is to be very much alive,
and to attack things in his own way.
He looks, moves, speaks as if, like the
Yorkshireman, "follering another man's
opinions i'sted o' ma own wer niver to
my mind." The soul of him cannot be
content without making finds of its
own. Then, at bottom, he is a realist,
though with poetic surfaces. The re-
mark may be challenged, but there is
proof. He prepares phrases that are
sharply realistic; he repeats them, and
will not let you put them aside. First
hastening forth into the spaces of a
subject, and 'doing it" with bold
energy, he returns to make of it a tell-
ing and concrete description, a chapter
for a hand-book of the country. It is
the popularising of science, so to speak,
and cannot fail to stick in one's memory.
All is bold, free, optimistic; and there
(C
REV. W. W. PEYTON.
227
is the third chief mark of Mr. Peyton.
Perhaps he is too optimistic. Here the
poetry comes in. "Earth is a home-
land among the home-lands of the
Eternal Father. It is one of many
stations and continents of being. We
have begun a ceaseless moving." Sen-
tences like these come with the bell-
ring of a Mozart overture, and Mr.
Peyton has moments of at least some-
thing like mysticism, when, across the
fine-grained gleaming quartz, a tracery
of woven leaves falls lightly. Altogether,
we feel a mind original of movement.
He says to Nature, "We are all out on
strike; we want more wages." Το
Death, "The arrangement is necessary;
a trans-Alpine pass to another station."
To Man, "We are all artisans, not
artists, but the artist is in us." The
artist works in Mr. Peyton, and he is an
impressionist of a sort not found among
our new painters. We discover but
little of the shadow which, he says, is
228 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
always dashed in the blood of the
rationalist. Perhaps he is too epigram-
matic; the passion of the beryl lies.
within its gleaming pallor. But it is
always good to come upon a man who
has thoughts to keep the eye bright and
the step springy as he goes up into
the passes of the hills and through the
gloaming of our short, strange day;
and Mr. Peyton is, very distinctly, one
of the striking preachers of Scotland,
a man to be heard as well as read.
'
XXXV.
REV. JOHN ROBERTSON.
A
TALMAGE of our own, young
in looks and in temper, good-
humoured, confident, and capable of
something better than he has yet put
before himself as a mark.
He has very
much the appearance and demeanour
of a converted young soldier, who has
shaved off his moustache and exchanged
the whole subject-matter of a speaking
faculty which had kept the barracks
alive. The good humour is a salient
feature; so is the confidence, the air of
a country's defender. There he stands,
with fair flat hair upon a full brow, with
a mouth eager to speak and free of all
encumbrance, with a look honest and
simple and
an evident resolution
against polish, smoothness, what a Greek
229
230
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
would have called civility. We all know
by this time that John Robertson is
abominably irreverent. He is irreverent
after the manner of a soldier lad, frankly
and without compunction. The rhetoric,
too, belongs to the same type. It flows
naturally, and is often the product of
the moment-like the profanity. If the
speaker “stopped to think," as we say,
he would think to stop, and the addresses
would lose their points. These he is
resolved to make, come of pulpit decorum
what may.
"Where do we find God in
the beginning? We find Him with His
coat off, and His apron on, hard at
work." Again, "To clear the chaos of
the human heart took the sweat out of
the Almighty." These things are loath-
some; they "gar ane grue"; and the
worst of their flavour is the self-will.
He means to offend. College courses
and systematic theology seem to him
mere waste of time; he rejoices to throw
them off, and trust to quite another kind
REV. JOHN ROBERTSON.
231
of knowledge and to inspirations. At
the same time one finds in him a distinct
touch of style. His mind is open, and
gleams fall upon it; his tongue chooses
vigorous Saxon words; rough as he
often chooses to be, he is a gentleman
in grain. His voice serves him excel-
lently and is not without cadences of
gentle sweetness.
Mr. Robertson hates “the newspaper-
ing and the criticism" which he pro-
vokes; but the newspaper is a useful
mirror, and he would do well to consider
his natural face in the glass. To the
minister of the gospel as much as to
any servant the Lord says, “Ye cannot
serve two masters." The servant of God
is pledged to the True and Beautiful-
that is, to the purest Art he can attain.
Ever in his ear rings the command,
"Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless."
In the supreme art, called religion, it
232
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
is not "L'audace, l'audace, toujours
l'audace" that is the line of beauty, but
"Le travail, le travail, toujours le travail.”
Surely Mr. Robertson, after all his fire-
works, has a regard to the best judgment.
Let him guide himself; let him believe
that even churches have their merits;
let him make courses of discipline for
his native powers; let him consider
whether he can be the candid friend of
the churches and yet pose as an ultra-
orthodox leader, declaring for some of
the minuter and narrower forms of faith.
It is, on the whole, a singular attempt.
Singular too, and distasteful are certain
performances in the pulpit. I retain
some faith, however, in the fruitage of
the Scottish stock as it is found in the
Gorbals minister. He is very real, and
he makes religion a reality to the sense
of that large Glasgow audience which
desires to be animated by Christian
truth and to feel Christian fact, but has
little respect for "institutional Chris-
REV. JOHN ROBERTSON.
233
.
tianity." Rough hits, broad humour,
audacious imagery, the Bible rather than
the Church-these are the demand of
many; and with them honest sentiment,
the common emotions, a kindly touch.
John Robertson is the man. He picks
up-he throws out-he is terribly crude
and delightfully breezy; he says and
does things that should make his own
flesh creep and then tells a story full of
point and sense. He, too, like other
popular favourites, flies to poetry and
will give you, for example, "The Light
Brigade"; as seems quite natural. In
the rendering of a poetic fragment, more
perhaps than elsewhere, the natural
magic of the man is felt.
"The Master praises; what are men?
I have heard Mr. Robertson say that
in a tone which lingers like a musical
note, "The Master praises." What does
He praise? Not Sunday afternoon
theatricals,
XXXVI.
DR. ROBSON.
HE genius of the age makes large
demand upon its clergy. It re-
quires of every man that he be a bishop
and an orator. 'Tis a good deal to
exact, and yet the lay spirit is prompt
in reproach if he be not of good business
habit as well. First, it is supposed that
he loves making of sermons and can
without effort "deliver."
deliver." That is his
first, though by no means all his virtue.
From that he must proceed to "organise,"
and having learnt to guide men (and
women) through various organisations,
he must then visit. Having visited, he
may go on Boards and serve public
tables. After that, if he would be
234
DR. ROBSON.
235
perfect, he will write books, articles and
pamphlets, represent a cause or a reform,
edit something.
To be musical is a
part of his duty, and no less to have
muscles and be well known for some
outdoor exercise. Lastly, if he can
become a popular novelist that will not
be reckoned to him as unrighteousness;
not at all.
Seriously the age is very trying to
all who serve it, and some are last who
would have been nearly first fifty years
ago. Dr. Robson is one of those who
can hold their own upon this difficult
ground. He would have made an ex-
cellent bishop if he could in any way
have become an Episcopalian-an "if"
which perhaps needs apology when ap-
plied to one who is so intimately of his
own non-prelatic communion. But there
are points of a typical bishop which are
his points. His preaching has a certain
calm unaffected air of sense and the
general evangelical world and the human
236
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
relationships; it brings you into touch
with a man of good breeding and good
training, of a wholesome spirit and a
kind, firm temper. Then he has all the
air of one who likes affairs and knows
how to guide them. There is a bright
readiness of look and movement and an
attentive courtesy of manner, the marks
of one who is at his ease in dealing with
men and their ways. The great interest
of life in India as a Christian teacher
has had its effect upon his whole life,
internal as well as external.
He par-
takes India; has entered her thought
more than many who go to serve her.
One feels India and the missionary in
the busy home minister, and Dr. Robson's
volume on Hinduism is no
no tour de
plume, no prize essay or mere thesis, but
a spirited and lucid personal inquiry
into a most fascinating subject: a book
of real value. Unfortunately, there are
but few people who will read even three
hundred interesting and informing pages
DR. ROBSON.
237
on that subject. It is a good thing
for a man himself, however, to have
done such a piece of work. And the
same may be said of his book on
the Bible. He writes easily, clearly,
and with expository skill as well as
knowledge.
As a pastor he has a strong hold
upon his people, and as a presbyter his
qualities of mind and temper have
secured him the position of a man
thoroughly at home in the system to
which he belongs and easily sure of his
right. Dr. Robson was born in the
centre and has never had to assert him-
self, but he has the nature that seconds
opportunity and secures general esteem.
He cannot fear the judgment which re-
turns upon the temper and moral quality
of men.
Sweet or sour, true or warped,
touched with accidic or clear and
brotherly? We like to hear of a man
who, having done his own best for the
world in various activity, does not grudge
238
MINISTÈRÌAL MINIATUREŠ.
!
I
to welcome every honest worker, who
will frankly speak well of us if we
deserve it and bid us God-speed and
make no debt of the benison. Such an
one is Dr. John Robson, of St. Nicholas'
United Presbyterian Church, Aberdeen.
XXXVII.
REV. GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.
WHAT
HAT is the essential quality of
this attractive young preacher
and student ? In one word,-moun-
taineering. He comes out to the estrade
of his church, from the recesses behind,
as he goes from a Swiss valley to the
shoulder of a white peak which he has
resolved to climb. The step rings quick
and light, the face is all alert under
the seriousness of the brows. Frank
recognition of a task is there, verve to
do it, and the bright courage of the
undismayed heart. It is "the dew of
youth" and very charming; it is success.
and, as yet, unspoiled. The enthusiastic
mountaineer draws us with the cords of
239
240
MINISTERÍAL MINIATURES.
a man; we like to see him come forth
like that-a David comely to look upon,
thirsting to put his breast to some
Goliath height and call from it, "I have
seen. Come and see!" Thrilled him-
self with the enterprise, he thrills us
too; sympathy is established at once;
we share the hope, the movement, the
élan. Now already a good deal is done.
We are caught, and willingly caught.
The whole affair is naturally, freshly
dramatic, and creates a vivid memory.
It remains in one's consciousness as only
the enacted thing can, the thing into
which an artist has thrown his whole
nature. Of course, every public appear-
ance of Mr. Smith has not this quality
in equal measure, nor does every engage-
ment upon which he enters suit him.
Like others, he has his range, his lesser
and greater hours. The mark of the
artist is to have fine hours, striking
effects particularly his own, and by some
personal efflorescence to leave a new
REV. GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A. 241
image with you. There must be fresh-
ness of soul, there must also be gifts of
communication. Mr. Smith's organ of
voice (to mention one of these endow-
ments) is not powerful, but it is pleasant,
and he knows how to use it in prayer
and in reading. When he comes to the
sermon, on a Sabbath morning, he may
be quiet in bearing, and if the subject
is doctrinal we may find him moving
with less freedom than we expected.
But say it is evening and a bit of
Hebrew story. Then, by a strain of
chivalry in himself he discovers the
chivalry of the Bible and delights us
with it. His face opens, and he gives
himself away to the audience and the
subject. Mazzini is never far off, Prince
Bismarck may be used as an example
of piety. We might wish to consider a
point like that, but the preacher, while
he gives quite enough time to keep pace
with him, allows none for lingering.
One point and another are ahead, and
16
242
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
from each he means to get a word
picture. It is a manly expedition, with
high moral use continually, and the
preacher is himself a telling sermon.
Perhaps some of us have been up the
height before, in a rare morning of dawn
when the mist fled off and the glorious
peaks showed themselves in clear pale-
ness of wonder far away. Perhaps, too,
our climber is apt to see only the view
he has gone up for, as if you looked
from Ben Lomond for the windings of
the Forth and came down again. Still,
it is a right buoyant affair, full of pictur-
esque energy and firm faith.
Of an evening lecture Mr. Smith reads,
perhaps, almost every word, with hands
upon the side of the open desk or
behind him, while his light frame sways
a little. His hair is full and fresh, his
eye unclouded, only a little pucker in
the brows tells of student anxiety. We
feel sure that he is earnestly at work
and will not purposely become the slave
REV. GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A. 243
of his own alpenstock or forget that
after Alps come Himalayas. He be-
longs to a group well placed, and oppor-
tunity has fallen to him earlier than to
many. But, as one says, "an artist has
gone upon a pilgrimage that will last
him his life long. . . . He will always
remember that once upon a time he fell
in love with a star."
And I do not think this man will
easily content himself or learn to amble.
in a rut. A ray of the mysterious fire
is lodged in him and those who have it.
are never content, neither with them-
selves nor with the world. For a teacher
of religion, a helper of young men,
nothing is more vitally of consequence
than this courageous unrest, which keeps
heart and mind alive through all stress.
of weather.
What is said here of the man and the
preaching applies to the student and his
books.
XXXVIII.
REV. JOHN SMITH, M.A.
M
R. SMITH is tremendously pre-
sent on every occasion. What-
ever it be, big or little, he is all there
and all at once, exhorting, pleading,
declaring, as though for the first and
last time. When the black, burly, low-
statured figure bustles up the pulpit or
platform stairs-and the one occasion
is much like the other-we know what
sort of operation is on hand. So quick
a movement of an apparatus so full-
charged means something. He is like
a sturdy steamboat, off up the river
with a bang, to make the run in one
hour or burst. Such an exploit leaves
the passenger exhausted and thankful.
244
REV. JOHN SMITH, M.A.
245
He has assisted in a miracle and lives
to tell the tale. As for the engine, it
coals up and sets out for the next run ;
it is a marvel. Mr. Smith is, in truth,
no preacher for people with weak heart.
or poor lungs, and if you have nerves
you will avoid him. His ministry is
not of the soothing-syrup order. It is
impossible to speak of "sitting under'
this preacher. You may palpitate under
him, perspire under him, hold your ears
and your breath under him; but sit
peaceably-no! Does he sit while he
plans out his sermons? Hardly. They
are no products of the study chair and
the table groaning with German com-
mentaries. He does not open a matter
with careful inquiry, designed to reach
the centre and thence return; nor does
he lay out a sketch of it and then sur-
round with illustrations in order to give
a general notion of the topic. Not.at
all. The steamboat analogy serves for
his usual manner of discourse. He has
"}
-
246
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
taken in cargo, industriously, with full
care for the needs of the time; he has
seen to its quality and packed it into
the hold. With this preparation he pro-
ceeds to make voyage. There is a little
hanging about, a little survey of things
in general and perambulating of the
deck. At last, after some whistling and
hauling at the ropes, some considering
of this and that channel and port, he
suddenly moves off and dashes ahead
to a point of rhetorical impression. That
which excites his own mind is, not the
nature of any thought or fact in itself,
but the evangelic effect to be got out
of it; and this is the kind of adventure
he makes you embark upon with him.
You have no time to think of anything
else while you are in his company.
There was a time when Mr. Smith
was thought wanting in culture; that is,
in care for style and well-chosen words.
But he has changed that, and while he
still seeks and always will for stimulating
REV. JOHN SMITH, M.A.
247
effect, he has shown, in some printed
sermons of late, a great advance in
literary tone. His way of preaching
may not be yours, and you may dis-
tinctly object to going up the river with
the captain sitting on the boiler valve,
but you must admit the genuineness
of the man and his honest belief that
this is the way to impress the world.
Mr. Smith would fain convince calm
Edinburgh people that it is time to
"sacrifice their gentility to God." All
success to him! Only, as Edinburgh
will not part from its gentility in a day,
nor yet in a year, he should get off
the boiler. It is the duty of a sincere
man to stay as long as he can in this
world.
It is possible that he may be trans-
ferred to Castle Terrace and set to train
men for the ministry. He has the affec-
tions of many in the church and is said
to have resources fitting him for a chair.
One may add, then, a mild hope that
248
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
A
this change of duty, if it comes to him,
may be allowed to lessen pace without
reducing heat. His frank glow and
brotherly enthusiasm are entirely good
and pleasant.
.
XXXIX.
DR. WALTER SMITH.
IT
T is some twenty years since the
author of "Olrig Grange" began to
startle his world, and he has calmly
gone on with the operation at due
intervals, until even the Dingwall Free
Presbytery has got used to him and
never so much as thinks of arresting
his hand. Whatever they may say
about the author of "Olrig Grange"
and "Hilda," they must, one would
think, have a warm side to their brother
minister of the High Church, Edin-
burgh, the writer of "Thoughts and
Fancies for Sunday Evenings." Could
anything be more evangelical in the
best sense than the pure, graceful, earnest
249
250
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
so
piety of this little book? Seldom does.
anything "for Sunday evenings
admirably fulfil its design. The editor
of "The Poet's Bible went to Dr.
Smith for several pieces, but he left two
which are to my mind amongst the
best of these devout lyrics; I mean,
"Is
not this the Carpenter?" and
"Lilies." Those who know the caustic.
edge of Dr. Smith's irony, the keen-
ness of his touch upon the ills of life,
know but half of him. In this he is
strong, for Heaven gave him the seeing
eye and the probing word of analysis;
it gave him, also, what every true
surgeon has, the heart that feels while
the hand cuts. He does not except his
own constitution when he exposes the
weakness of humanity. There are
times when the touch seems hard, un-
relenting; but you should always look
at the eyes. There Humour sits-the
mingled spirit, in the pensive shadow of
its own light. What is done may give
"}
در
DR. WALTER SMITH.
251
pain, it may affront, but at least the
pain is shared by this grave, gentle
operator with the gleam in his eyes.
He does nothing in carelessness. You
cannot think that he stands apart,
wishes to separate himself, or intends
any injury to life: quite otherwise. He
has a vision of health and of power, of
energy springing from a strong vital
centre, working to an end; but the
vision is for an appointed time and it
tarries. Meanwhile, the life he has to
deal with is an unrest, a fever of new
pain aggravated by old nostrums. He
examines the patient; he sets aside
most of those who crowd the bedside ;
his own direction is one of mingled pity
and sarcasm and wistful hope. Of one
thing he is passionately sure: nothing
merely formal, nothing cold or im-
personal, a prophylactic in the fever
called Living. As fervently as any
prophet or saint of old time he cries
out for the Living God, the living Christ
252
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
of eternity. "Everywhere," he says, "is
great bewilderment."
"I do but paint a picture just to show
How cracks the old crust of Faith beneath our
feet."
Perhaps in doing this from time to time.
he has scarcely allowed certain types of
faith their true proportions or atmo-
sphere. But let us ask how it would
have been if the dramatic wit and clear
swift style, the insight and culture of
Walter Smith had been given, these
forty-two years, to the literature that
separates itself from churches. His
own fame, position in society, temporal
reward of every kind would in that
case have been immeasurably greater.
The humanitarian poet full of religion,
averse from dogma, master of his pen,
alive to the atmosphere of the present
day, would easily have taken his place in
the field where George Macdonald and
others have come to their own. But he
DR. WALTER SMITH.
253
has spent forty-two years in the com-
parative seclusion of a gospel ministry
in Edinburgh.
I wish Dr. Smith would write a
volume of Biblical "Dramatis Personæ’
such as the study of Pilate in his last
poem. That is a singularly strong, sug-
gestive piece, full of moral and religious
and historic quality. Might we not
have more?
)))
•
XL.
DR. JAMES STALKER.
A
SMALLISH figure, with a square-
ness of shoulder underneath the
draping gown, comes from a side door
and immediately, above red pulpit
cushions, appears a face that carries out
the suggestion already given. Man and
manner, there is a sturdiness and serious-
ness, painstaking, absorbed, with some
brusquerie, and again some nervousness.
The face strikes you. It is an oblong,
divided by two dark lines-the straight
and marked eye-brows, the moustache
turning iron-grey. The dark hair, also
greying, lies flat upon and away from
the head. Ill-hung but vigorous are the
mouth and jaw, and the voice corre-
254
DR. JAMES STALKER.
255
sponds. It is weighty, but not sweet;
nothing lingers in the ear, captivating
you in spite of yourself. This man takes
you as a man, more than an artist, though
he is not without touches of the latter.
He appeals to our earnestness, our sense
of life as a strenuous engagement. The
picturesque is cared for, as useful body;
the subtle is scarcely felt. We are in
contact with one who knows the common
life of man, the common battle, has had
his share in it, and would show us how
strength and peace are to be won out of
conflict and labour. "Come unto Me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest, for My yoke is
casy and My burden is light." The
discourse upon this text, which he names
"the fairest and most fragrant flower in
the whole garden of Christ," is described
in one word,-impressive. It begins
with a telling illustration, the line of
reflection is clearly marked in four
divisions, many sentences are spoken
256
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
slowly, in deep tones. As he proceeds,
one finds that the preacher's sense of
life's seriousness seems to express itself
best by way of example and aphorism.
That is a fine sentence-" The true
Christian is the very man who can least
hope to escape the battle and struggle
of life." It comes evidently from per-
sonal experience, with a nervous concen-
tration of look and utterance; like a
steady blow with a steel hammer, it
strikes a spark where it falls. Decidedly,
we have here a realist. He lives, and
would have others live, in earnest.
Something of plain artisan directness
characterises him; if one showed indif-
ference, he might hit out sharp and
strong. One who knows Dr. Stalker
is aware of an impulsive dart of speech
that may leave a dint where it lights.
A vigorous nature, in tilt at the sins of
the world, eager to serve a cause, to help
a friend, will not always measure words,
and, Dr. Stalker has none of that cool
"
DR. JAMES STALKER.
257
reserve which fatally excludes men from
the higher ranks. A good fellow has
ever a touch of the boy left in him, as a
good woman should retain something of
the girl.
In this man the touch remains
and it is the secret of his hold upon
young men. He knows their special
difficulties, their moods and needs; he
comes to them as one of their own
generation, speaking in the terms of the
day, realistically. From a teacher of his
own he adopts forms of expression such
as "John and Jesus"-not the most
happy. This sort of thing, however,
belongs to our time, and there can be
no doubt as to the picturesqueness, the
vigour, the earnest faith of Dr. Stalker's
realism. He is a true and robust
preacher along his own line. He offers
grain he has himself reaped and brought
home, and by the manly force of his own
effort appeals to the manhood of others.
Have ye seen Christ? Then why do ye
not believe?
17
258
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
Apologetics, in the technical sense, is
not at all his field. The work of the
ministry, the bringing home to the
modern conscience and faith of the
gospel facts: it is there his nature and
his acquirements find their proper use.
XLI.
REV. JAMES STARK.
WITH
WITH the congregation he has,
Mr. Stark could hardly give up
his pulpit for a secretaryship. In de-
clining to do so, he showed a right
respect for the greater office and the
possibilities of his charge. It is planted
in a central street, where it is perhaps
in the way of becoming less rich
and “influential ”—whatever that may
amount to-than deacons and statistics
approve of; but Aberdonians can still
be drawn from the ends of the city by
a preacher, or by the interest of swell-
ing the stream of church-goers along
Union-street; and Mr. Stark has more
than one of the characteristics the age
demands. He is not abstruse, he is not
doctrinal, he is not long; he has no
259
260 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
sacerdotal ways, such as the city of his
dwelling-place professes to rank as
deadly sin. Doubtless he likes his own
opinions and his own way; but as a
capable man, not as a priest. One finds
him, in his pulpit, quite the Congre-
gationalist. Something-what is it?-
alike in pastor and people, and in their
worship, announces the independent
community, organised on its own basis.
of faith, to testify of its own experi-
ence. It is a church meeting we have
entered, and even when we sing the
same hymn that Mr. Cooper is giving
out in the East Parish Church, a stone's
throw off, there is a difference of tone.
The prayers have nothing of the book
about them. The minister prays as he
preaches, in the same forms of speech,
with the same movements of the body,
only with eyes closed. They are his
own prayers, for his neighbours and
city; not little bits of Catholic collect,
graceful, literary, impersonal. What we
REV. JAMES STARK,
261
have here is something else than that,
and it has its own recommendation. It
is of the hour and the man who
ministers. Such as he and his people.
are, together, in spiritual desire and
human quality, such will the worship
be; no less, no more. Mr. Stark has
had a post offered him that demands
good business faculty, and in his pulpit
manner the platform is felt. He reads
with care for elocution and a good deal
of emphasis, the sermons being con-
gruous with what one perceives of the
speaker's nature. Logic is not a mark
of them, nor subtlety. They are de-
scriptive, and there is just that amount
of reference to science and history-
science chiefly, perhaps—which a reason-
ably good hearer appreciates. Some-
times, it may be, the link between one
statement and another is not visible,
but the statements in loco are clear and
energetic, presented too, with that feel-
ing for the dramatic which does so
-
262
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
much to make preaching differ from
lecturing. Mr. Stark is not an essayist ;
nor does he creep into a shell when he
begins to preach. His defects are his
own, not some other person's cheerfully
adopted as though they were virtues.
His merits, too, are personal. He does
not waste time serving a system or
squaring himself with some authorities.
He preaches with Monday full in view,
and the sins, temptations, struggles of
the week. It is humanity, not church-
manity; it is plain, modern, sensible,
pointed with effects of deepening voice,
measured tone, monitory glance, but
never anything official or overhead.
The Congregationalist has still some of
his original mission to discharge in a
world well stocked with priests and with
presbyters less simple than they might
be, and Mr. Stark, for his own part, has
laboured in letters as well as in the
ministry to his own credit and that of
his community.
XLII.
DR. ANDREW THOMSON.
IT
T would be very trite to say that Dr.
Thomson is quite a contrast to his
colleague, Mr. Smith. There is plenty
of room for such a remark; but those
who know the men have made it already,
and those who do not know them are
without a most striking, a unique, ex-
ample of the old and the new in juxta-
position. Broughton-place is a double
canvas, whereon you see a former gene-
ration and a present one, both admirably
painted, true each to its ideal and form,
singularly interesting “studies ❞—to use
a painter's term-both of them. A
catholic taste admires both, finds both
full of spirit and fine temper. But was
263
264
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
one of these born only some forty years
before the other? Say rather a century.
'Twas in another land, a different age.
The minister of to-day looks upon such
as Dr. Andrew Thomson-where he
finds any left to look at-with admir-
ing envy. They come down to us from
the days before the Flood; days when
ministers were ministers, and had flocks.
Then were there men of "wecht," doctors
and rabbis who spake from their places,
no man debating against them who was
not one of themselves. Of these Olym-
pians, some were debaters and took off
their coats at times, and were as mortals
even while they excelled. But others
had always the air of the senate-the
classical senate, before Irish questions
and closures. They stood in rank like.
the pines of Lochnagar, masters of them-
selves and the valley, though cities fell
and heretics rose up. They could stand
before an Assembly raging to vote, and
remember what word should come next.
DR. ANDREW THOMSON.
265
to
Alike in synod and pulpit, town house
and sick room, these men had power.
It was given to them in their generation
by the breezes and the soil. Never did
they have to be unsure of their hour or
place; never did they have to cast un-
easy glances at a convex mirror
which public criticism pointed. Their
age was for them, and they knew it.
At the same time, they came to what
they were, not merely by natural gift
favouring time, but also by "working
early and late," as saith the Carlyle
speech. Dr. Thompson, as we all know,
has sown and harvested more than one
kind of crop. It is a mistake to suppose
that ministerial toil only came in some
twenty years back along with soft felt
hats and Roman collars. It may be
strongly suspected, at least, that Dr.
Thomson has done as much work as if
he had "
broken down" a dozen times.
He has shepherded a large city charge;
he has written books; he has travelled
266
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
and visited foreign churches; he has
stood forth, a cultured, dignified leader
of the spiritual faith called Voluntaryism
these fifty years in Edinburgh and Scot-
land, and beyond, where that faith does
hard fight with Rome. Few names
represent a longer term of urbane and
informed sympathy with the brave,
beautiful struggle for life of Waldensian,
Italian, and other continental Puritans.
Andrew Thomson is one of those who
have felt that the evangelical faith, the
world over, commands the sympathy of
free men and that free men owe them-
selves to that faith.
XLIII.
DR. TULLOCH.
HAVING never heard Dr. Tulloch
preach, I went out to Maxwell
parish church one day, and, as it hap-
pened, not the best day of the year.
First, it was the middle of a Glasgow
particular-two parts soot, two parts
chemical fumes, with sleet sufficient-
one of those Sabbaths when the most
embittered sceptic might well go to
church, because churches are heated and
lighted, and within them, whatever else
ensues, one's prickling apprehensions
of bronchitis are allayed for a while.
Therefore, though the day hovered be-
tween looking up a chimney and looking
down one, I went into a good temper
as I went into a church, and continued
267
268 MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
altogether amiable until I came out
again.
Not that Dr. Tulloch requires extra
amiability. I don't mean to insinuate
anything so untrue. We all know his
dash and resources in writing; and he
is a whole man, not two slices stuck
together; it goes without saying, then,
that he is a lively preacher, equipped for
his work and bringing his talent to bear
on it. That afternoon, however, he had
to talk to-Gardeners: United Free
Gardeners, or whatever else may be the
proper name of the friendly society. It
was not, you will admit, the easiest task
in the world. I could see that he felt
the bonds of the topic, and my sympa-
thies were with him. On the whole,
I thought he came well out of it, and
I have a notion that, for my part, I
brought him out with me, pretty de-
finitely. The chief mark of the address.
was its brotherly, manly tone.
would expect, there is no
As one
priestism
DR. TULLOCH.
269
about Dr. Tulloch. He proved to be,
in style and general production of him-
self, so to speak, much what I expected.
He is an excellent example of the
journalist minister, and his personal ap-
pearance corresponds. The face gives .
the impression of being round. It has
still some of the boy look, though the
hair brushed off the temples is pre-
maturely grey. The moustache is of
to-day-a positive moustache; the eyes
open widely, and the eyebrows grow up
over them; the nose is a little aggres-
sive, and the voice is positive also and
elocutionary. Altogether, when he rises.
in the pulpit the indications are those
of a man who will put his hands into
his pockets a good deal-which, I am
bound to say, he did not do, after all.
He is entirely a man of his own time
and race, weaving literature and the
church into one effort, and using in both
the same method, the modern method.
Free criticism, wide social interests, the
270
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
democratic tone, the crowding of life
with varied effort, the look forward, not
backward, save for example and illus-
tration these are the marks. Here is
one who has grown up at the centre of
the old Scottish church and in the
midst of varied influences. Yet there
is not the least air of the superior person
about him in a few small points of
ecclesiastical usage he shows the touch
with England; but is openly enough
a northern parish minister, new style,
turning frankly to the artisan and
labourer, as a fellow son of the soil
with them, and telling them what they
may be and must not be. When I
heard him, his address showed the
ready speaker and writer, with an eye.
for points, a picturesque and flowing
pen touching things in such a way as
to move the modern sense. It was plain,
direct, forcible, the, speech of a man who
had more fancy than the occasion gave
room for. He made one pun, in a very
DR. TULLOCH.
271
suitable place, and spoke not a little
good sense in a friendly, straight way.
I would say that his mind is penetrated
with a sense of the work to be done in
the world-the need and virtue of doing
it. This gives him a real feeling with
the multitude, such as they recognise
and respond to always. In fine, Dr.
Tulloch, who is well known as a racy
penman, with a strong easy touch in
literature, and a love of all that is good
there, is also a vigorous and popular
parish minister. He knows the printing-
press will not suffice to save men, and
the largeness of his mind is seen, not
only in Catholic and humane “ sympa-
thies "—of which there are plenty going
in these days-but in something less.
common, more vital: a resolution to
speak true things, to avoid harmful
make-believes. He has real Scottish
humanity and therefore can afford to
speak clear manly words concerning the
hopes and cravings of the age.
XLIV.
DR. WARDROP.
A
"WEE bit clachan" on the edge
of Perth has the honour of having
brought up Dr. Wardrop. Not that he
was born there, or schooled there, or
anything of that sort; but, in a correct.
enough way of speaking, it may be said
he was at college there. As an intellec-
tual worker, Craigend enabled him to
become. Dr. Fairbairn has told us what
a small country charge did for him, and
it is pretty certain that Dr. Wardrop,
if he ever attains to the place he is
entitled to expect, will review the years.
in that quiet manse under the woodland
hill. There he had time not only to
find out that he had within him a certain
272
DR. WARDROP.
273
taste, but time to cherish and feed the
same. While other men wore out their
spinal marrow climbing tenement stairs
and going to meetings, Mr. Wardrop
went between a study and a church
about sizes with the manse, and his
climbing was chiefly of Moncrieff Hill,
to look at the blue Earn Hills. He has
missed the refreshment of visiting among
city closes, and fails to know by long
experience how dust and wheels help
a man to think. Craigend brought him
up quite differently from that. The city
has gifts of her own for the preacher,
gifts for which he must go to her and
stay with her, for better, for worse, for
richer or poorer, in sickness and in
health. They are all her own, not to be
had in the valleys between the hills.
The country minister pure and simple
-he whose whitewashed church is no
larger than the whitewashed rose-
covered manse, or perhaps less than
the fine villa newly built alongside-the
18
274
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
minister among the fields must forego
what his brother wins in the streets.
But one gift is his: time to be himself.
He need not shut away a taste or pursuit
of his own, as a guilty thing which no
honest soul can indulge. Now the
special taste of Dr. Wardrop was the
study of Church History. Several years
ago it was known that he mined in that
field and had packets of ore, such as a
church might need. But he has been
content to explore and gather for the
work's sake; and besides, has had a new
pastoral charge, more extended than
Craigend. Perhaps he has been too con-
tent. One or two review articles might
easily have been chapters in a book
instead of fragments. Still, as everyone.
knows, there is more where that came
from. Dr. Wardrop has "documents,"
as Mr. Brooke said; and if he is modest,
that is no sufficient reason for neglecting
him. Besides, he possesses character
and quality as a man. He is not made
DR. WARDROP.
275
"
up on a mould, but is a philosopher
of the old Scottish order-a man in-
different to show, careless of temporal
detail and finish, attentive to human.
life and its movement more than to
arrangements. And wherever Dr. War-
drop is, an honest geniality enlightens
talk and intercourse. In regard to him.
one may say with Burns, "But give
me real homely wit and I'm content."
He contents us that way.
XLV.
DR. WHITELAW.
FASE
O'
LD-FASHIONED Scottish Radi-
calism that is the stuff, and the
special personal characteristics are con-
forming. Pawky humour, shrewd prac-
tical sense, independence of temper, and
an energetic will; these are marks.
Boy and man, preacher and commenta-
tor, he has always been a stiff-backed,
hard-working, joke-loving, and fight-
loving United Presbyterian of the
old sturdy sort, which knew how to
refuse and how to hold on. Those who
know him well say that it is easy to
see what has been less developed and
partly restrained. He might, they say,
have become something else than the
276
DR. WHITELAW.
277
Kilmarnock minister and pulpit com-
mentator. He has a good head for
mathematics—the politician is strong in
him and is not used up by local efforts.
or ecclesiastical affrays. Dr. Whitelaw
strikes some people as a man who, if
he had not been born into the love of
a church, and by his own choice deliber-
ately ratified the inheritance, might have
been known more widely even than he
is, and in more stirring fields. Men
have gone from northern to southern
Universities and made their way to
Westminster, and once there have gained
new influence on native soil. Dr. White-
law might have been one of the most
notable of these. He has a plain, strong-
wearing outfit of Liberalism, a clear
head, a gift of good-humoured self-
contained speech. He could have been
trusted to hold his own and to make
strong homely thrusts at weak ribs.
"The public" is never indifferent to a
good debater, and never ungrateful to
"
278
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
a humorist. The long lean form, the
long face, and mouth full of teeth and
words, of Thomas Whitelaw would by
this time have been the property of
Punch; his incorruptible Charter prin-
ciples, though far from being the newest
fashion in Liberalism, would have secured
the respect of the voting public, which
likes to be sure of its men, and to find
them always in the same place, with the
same fists. That, however, is an un-
spoken as well as an unfulfilled prophecy;
and no one thinks of Dr. Whitelaw as
anything but successful and effective
where he is. His qualities are well
used, well applied to the work of pastor,
preacher, synod speaker, and committee-
man, and the Kilmarnock Burghs know
them also. He has done all the honour
he could to his own talent and his own
chosen sphere, and beyond the lines of
a weekly task, faithfully done, he has
sought whatever other place for develop-
ment and use there might be,
As a
DR. WHITELAW.
279
→
man he is never commonplace for a
moment, and in his pulpit work one feels
character, shrewdness, a kind, homely
spirit, and a marked power of narrative.
He is singular amongst modern com-
mentators in his taste for the story with
which he works, and shows a certain
unaffected simplicity of touch in dealing
with life and circumstance. Dr. White-
law undoubtedly possesses a gift of nar-
ration, and is a man interested in the
life of the race on this planet. His art
in making homilies and dividing texts
is known; the other gift perhaps less
So. He is not a city minister, as we say.
If he tried to be, he would spoil himself.
Nature made him honest, frank, clear-
headed, and capable, and gave him a
good heart and a resolute, industrious
will. He will never be lazy, nor affected,
nor uninteresting, nor anything that an
honest Scotsman and a Voluntary should.
be ashamed of being.
-
-
C
XLVI.
DR. ALEXANDER WHYTE.
SINCE the day when one who must
be obeyed first ordained these diva-
gations among ministers no man has
given the scribe so much trouble as
Dr. Whyte. Notes have been made,
and again, notes; the débris of them
crowd a drawer. The more attention
one gives to the subject, the more
illusory one's impressions seem to be;
it becomes baffling; and yet if there is
a definite, strongly marked figure in
Scotland you will find it in the pulpit
of Free St. George's. When it rises
before you on the plain high platform
you get a very shock of impression; it
remains with you; never can you forget
280
DR. ALEXANDER WHYTE.
281
the rigour and resolution and grip of
the whole personality as expressed in the
physique. But by what terms to com-
municate to others the idea which has
seized one? Look at him. The frame
has a lean squareness suggesting mus-
cular power, the hands are almost flesh-
less, with a bony grip on the sides of
the desk, the face has a singular strait-
ness, and severity, and pale light in
it. High straight brow, large hollow
eye-sockets, long lines of spare cheek
and thin mouth crossing each other, a
square chin, just fringed with hair; all
are marked, all convey their hints with
startling decision. The eyes lift but
seldom, the close lips hardly open, yet
after a sentence has passed they set at
the corners with finality. The voice
makes no noise, yet invades the ear
with a most definite bite of its own.
There is very little accent and not a
breath of the Celtic world-not one.
Of Donald Fraser, of Norman Macleod,
282
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
A
of George Macdonald or Louis Steven-
son, no gleam is here. It is the Teuton
you see and hear, the Evangelical
Teuton of any time since or about
1700. One thinks easily of New
England, of English Nonconformists ;
one begins to fix upon terms of com-
parison.
Not so easily will you extract the
cube root of him. He appears to some
the last of the Covenanters, "a Muckle-
wrath imperfectly tamed "-if tamed at
all. Yet Mucklewrath cared less than
nothing for the wisdom of the world,
and Dr. Whyte came early under the
persuasion that religion has a right to
all the service she can win from litera-
ture. Again, the Covenanting blood
was always at ninety degrees, and
Dr. Whyte's pulse beats with a certain
guided force. The old Covenanting
preacher was a thunderstorm, "a two-
legged whirlwind," as Kingsley said of
Synesius, a spiritual rage that brooked
१
DR. ALEXANDER WHYTE.
283
no bonds. The minister of Free St.
George's has held himself in a continual
discipline; he is tolerant in his intoler-
ance. One could well fancy him, like
Spurgeon, preferring gardeners who
were sinners and kept the garden, to
"holiness men who came late and went
early and spoilt the shrubs." A shrewd
Teuton practicality rules him; he under-
stands the world, knows how to use it.
Yet how he abuses it too!
Here you
are again with antinomy. The pictur-
esque flow of his denunciation is un-
matched in the modern pulpit. Spurgeon
was calm and broad beside this northern
deliverer of "hyper-Calvinism raw."
There is passion, after all, in his attack
upon man. It is regulated, but it would
fain scorch. Yet he who finds man so
sickening reads all the new books, he
who exhausts language in despising
human nature is the friend of young
journalists and poets, the newer students
of man and life. Another element of
284
MINISTERIAL MINIATURES.
the impressive problem called Dr. Whyte
is found in the defence of Dr. Robertson
Smith. This, it strikes me, was the
original Thrums soul in him letting fly
against man-made laws. How it blends
with the general theology one need not.
ask. The problem is interesting because
difficult. Yet as to certain points there
remains clear vision. The success here
is the success of doctrine and of travail.
First, absolute pre-suppositions concern-
ing God and man, the scheme of the
world and the soul's hope. Second, a
continual enquiry of the race, as to its
thought and action, a rigorous applica-
tion of the man's powers to his chosen
task. He has taken his stand on the
old crced and on the old regard for
diligence, for thorough mental discipline.
The Evangelicals never neglected their
minds, nor expected to save souls in
ignorance. Dr. Whyte has adopted with
moorland energy the labours of a city
minister, and his grindstone flies steadily.
DR. ALEXANDER WHYTE.
285
You have seen a lapidary at work? He
is a part of the wheel; it grinds him
and the stone. His face is set and pale.
as he strips the gem, parting with all
but the centre which he is to raise into
relief. His method passes your taste?
I can well believe it. He destroys too
much? I am sure he does. There is
I
something artificial in the whole?
think with you. But he has settled it
with himself that the saving of life is
a rigour, all through a rigour, for sinner
and saint. That is one half of truth.
It is the side Thrums naturally sees.
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