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and were converging towards the wonderful speaker; and when he sat down, after warning each one of us to remember who it was and what it was that followed Death on the pale horse, and how alone we could escape, we all sunk back into our seats. How beautiful to our eyes did the thunderer look !— exhausted, but sweet and pure. How he poured

out his soul before his God in giving thanks for sending the Abolisher of Death! Then a short psalm, and all was ended.

We

We

"We went home quieter than we came. did not recount the foals, with their long legs and roguish eyes, and their sedate mothers; we did not speculate upon whose dog that was, and whether that was a crow or a man in the dim moor. thought of other things-that voice, that face, those great, simple, living thoughts, those floods of resistless eloquence, that piercing, shattering voice, that 'tremendous necessity.''

One knows not whether to admire more the description or the thing described; but one thing is clear, the eloquence which inspired that description, even after the lapse of the years between boyhood and middle life, must have been eloquence indeed, combining in itself the force of the torrent and the fulness of the sea.

VII.

THE PULPITS OF THE DISSENTING CHURCHES.

For the sake of clearness and continuity, we have thus far confined ourselves almost entirely to the pulpit of the Scottish Church as by law established; but now, in bringing these sketches to a close, we must devote a little attention to the representative preachers of the Dissenting denominations.

Of the smaller bodies, the oldest was that known in recent years as the Reformed Presbyterian Church. It represented the "Society Men," or "Covenanters," who never really joined the Church of the Revolution - settlement, because it had not insisted on everything that was required in the National Covenant and the Solemn League. For a considerable time this honorable remnant had no ordained ministers, but as the years went on it grew in numbers and in strength, though it never became large, and finally, about fourteen or fifteen years ago, it united, all but a very small minority, with the Free Church. But its record was excel

lent, and one at least of its ministers deserves a high place among the great preachers of Scotland.

Dr. WILLIAM SYMINGTON, born at Paisley in 1795, and educated at the University of Glasgow and the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, was ordained at Stranraer in 1819, and transferred to Glasgow in 1838, where he labored till his death in 1862. He was a man of magnificent presence, fine culture, exquisite taste, great strength of mind, and admirable common-sense. While faithfully attending to his pastoral work, he was a diligent student, and his sermons were all carefully prepared. Clear in his style, logical in his arrangement, elegant and impressive in his delivery, he drew around him men of intelligence and weight of character, and he had an influence far beyond the limits of the small denomination of which he was an ornament. His works on "The Atonement and Intercession of Jesus Christ," on "The Mediatorial Dominion of Jesus Christ," and on "Messiah the Prince," some of which have been reprinted in this country, are still valued by students of systematic theology; and his courses of monthly evening lectures on such subjects as the

history of Joseph and the Book of Daniel are still remembered for their eloquence and power by multitudes who heard them from his lips. His method of preparing these last is thus described by one of his sons: "They were the fruit of much careful premeditation not fully written out, much less read, but thoroughly studied and digested, the beginning of each sentence and references to texts being put down in neat and orderly form. Not read, certainly, for no one understood more thoroughly the true theory of preaching as a concio ad populum-an address in which the speaker is in full electric communication with his hearers. The larger writing was reduced to notes on a thin slip. These he went over again and again until his mind was familiar with the whole process of thought; by prayer his soul was brought up to the level of the Divine message he was charged to utter, and thus were secured the pellucid clearness, the obvious mastery, the unaffected unction which made his preaching so attractive and so useful."* His name may not be so familiar to you on this side of the Atlantic as those of others in the larger denom

* Biographical sketch prefixed to "Messiah the Prince." 1881.

inations, but in a day when the pulpits of Glasgow were filled by some of the ablest men of their time, he was the equal, and in one or two respects perhaps the superior, of them all. He was remarkable above most for the combination of manliness with grace which appeared both in his thinking and in his manner; and if he had been in the Established Church he would most assuredly have taken a place among the foremost leaders on the side of spiritual independence.

Another of these smaller denominations was the Original Secession Church. I need not go into the history of its formation; indeed I am not sure that I could give it with entire accuracy in every particular; but it was connected with some difference of opinion between the members of one branch of the Seceders in regard to the principle of a State Church. None of them, in practice, were Statechurchmen, but some of them, in theory, maintained that the ideal Church was a State Church, while others repudiated State-churchism as altogether and everywhere pernicious, and that led to a separation. Of this little denomination of theoretical Statechurchmen, the great man-and he was a great

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