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food-that there has sprung up a strong inexpressible yearning to hear the living Gospel-that he is recognised as a faithful and right preacher, who delivers his message with the whole force and energy of his soul, who speaks only what he inwardly believes, who realizes that his fellowmen have the same needs, desires, sins, temptations, as he has, who strives to be more a helper and teacher, less a dogmatist and master, quickening the hearts of others just in proportion as he himself presses nearer to the heart of Jesus.

utterance of loose thoughts, he is neither | time is passing when these dry husks can true to sin, to his calling, nor to himself. be offered from the pulpit for nutritious He must feel that he has a holy, blessed, solemn message, and he must let that thought possess him. He must speak from the heart of what he knows in the heart, and then he will speak to the heart. This will help him to the highest rhetoric. Nay, more: it will give clearness and unity to his thoughts, it will give him a keener perception of the true and the false, it will enable him to seize the inner bond which links one truth to another, and binds them all to the living Godman, Christ Jesus. Without this, his logic will lie on him like heavy fetters, and by no tricks of rhetoric will he stir the deep feelings of his fellows. There must be a great and true heart, where there is a great and true preacher. And in that, beyond everything else, lay the secret of Mr. Robertson's influence. His sermons show evidence enough of acute logical power. His analysis is exquisite in its subtleness and delicacy. He has a clear, penetrative intellect, which carries light with it into the thickest darkness. But what we feel most in him is not this. It is that a brother man is speaking to us as brother men, that we are listening, not to the measured words of a calm, cool thinker, but to the passionate, deep-toned voice of an earnest, human soul. It is not the omniscience, the infinite wisdom, the sublime perfection, of our blessed Lord that draw us in penitence and love to his feet. It is the sympathy for us, His fellow-feeling, His readiness to mix with us and put Himself on our level. It is the living touch of His warm, human heart that opens the frozen springs of ours. And if it is thus with the greatest Teacher of all, those who come after Him must be great just as in this they follow His example.

Mr. Robertson is pre-eminently a preacher of the present time. There is a freedom and boldness of thought now, of which our fathers knew nothing, which would have filled them with alarm had they foreseen it. The temper of the age, the tone of its literature, of society, of our own minds, is one of eager searching inquiry. Life is clothed with an earnestness that it had not before. The young man standing on its threshold is beset by a thousand bewildering doubts. He passes out of the early faith of his home, and the wide world lies before him with a note of interrogation written over it all. The problem of existence is for him yet unsolved. Questions of the deepest import rise in his mind, they demand and must have an answer. No doubt the transition period from youth to manhood is always one of thought, speculation, question, doubt. But, in a superficial age like the last century, this period meets with no sympathy and no response. Only the surface-waters of the soul are troubled. Then there is a dead, stagnant calm; and those to whom this troubling of the waters might have been like life from the dead, yield to the shalWordy warfare over the evidences- low worldliness of all around them; behighflown panegyrics on virtue, and the come as hollow as the world, the pulpit, royal family-learned discussion about the men of letters, even the professed mint, and anise, and cummin-violent men of thought. In our day it is differwrestling with heresies, known only to ent. Everywhere inquiry is busy, restthe ecclesiastical antiquary-excellent less, anxious. It is stimulated, perhaps, moral sentiments in irreproachable, unduly. We cannot hide from it, nor though perhaps rather tedious English- from the strange new thoughts it brings let us thankfully bless God that the into our minds. It is the spiritual atej

mosphere we breathe. Nor is it confined | of a destiny, there comes a strange and

nameless dread, a horrible feeling of insecurity, which gives the consciousness the abyss for something that is mightier of a want, and forces us to feel out into than flesh and blood to lean upon."

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How faithful, again, is the sketch that follows:

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to our period of life. It seizes the old as well as the young. Its touch is contagious; it is felt in some way by all. Mr. Robertson met this tendency with the wisdom and faith of a true disciple of Christ. He did not strive to crush and stifle it. He did not stand like a jailor, "There is a moment in every true life ready to clap irons on the mind that ven--to some it comes very early-when the tures to think for itself. He did not hold the truth under lock and key, as a jealous man might hold his wife, fearful lest she should escape him. He had confidence in it; above all, in Him who is the truth; and he knew that it is only compatible with the fullest liberty of thought, that its nature is to be free, and to make us free. He knew that, when men are most deeply moved, there will be storms of doubt, "sweeping over them like a desolation;" sad questionings of the present, of the future, of themselves, of their teachers, of God; suspicion, darkness, perhaps scepticism, when the old things have passed away, and the new have not yet taken their place. He remembered there had been such a time to himself. He came, with ready, fullest sympathy, to the help of those who were striving sorely for light, faith, and peace. He came, too, not only with the willingness, but with the power to enter into the mental struggle of others, with the patience and humility he had gained from his own experience, with a keen instinct, by which he discovered the secret, perhaps still unconscious doubts and longings of the soul. We might quote many passages in illustration of this, but we can only afford space for one or two. Take, for example, his analysis of Jacob's feelings, on that eventful night when he stood alone at Peniel :

"It was one of those moments in existence when a crisis is before us, to which great and pregnant issues are linked when all has been done that foresight can devise, and the hour of action being past, the instant of reaction has come. Then the soul is left passive and helpless, gazing face to face upon the anticipated and dreadful moment which is slowly moving on. It is in these hours that, having gone through in imagination the whole circle of our resources, and found them nothing, and ourselves powerless, as in the hands

old routine of duty is not large enoughwhen the parental roof seems too low, because the Infinite above is arching over the soul-when the old formulas in creeds, row, and they must either be thrown catechisms, and articles, seem to be naraside or else transformed into living and breathing realities when the earthly father's authority is being superseded by the claims of a Father in Heaven. *** "You may detect the approach of that moment in the young man or the young woman by the awakened spirit of inquiry: by a certain restlessness of look, and an eager earnestness of tone: by the devouring study of all kinds of books: by the inquirer is asking the truth of the the waning of your own influence, while doctors and teachers in the vast Temple of the world: by a certain opinionativeness, which is austere and disagreeable enough: but the austerest moment of the fruit's taste is that in which it is passing from greenness into ripeness. If you wait in patience, the sour will become sweet. Rightly looked at, that opinionativeness is more truly anguish: the fearful solitude of feeling the insecurity of is real, and forms of social and religious all that is human; the discovery that life existence hollow. The old moorings are torn away, and the soul is drifting, drifting, drifting, very often without compass, except the guidance of an unseen hand, into the vast infinite of God."t

And how true is such a passage as this:

"There are times when hands touch ours, but only send an icy chill of unsympathizing indifference to the heart: when eyes gaze into ours, but with a glazed look which cannot read into the bottom of our souls: when words pass

from our lips, but only come back as an echo reverberated without reply through a dreary solitude: when the multitu le throng and press us, and we cannot say, as Christ said, 'Somebody hath touched me:' for the contact has been not between

Sermon iii. Jacob's Wrestling-p. 42. + Sermon xv, The Loneliness of Christ-pp. 268-9.

soul and soul, but only between form and which can only be true in the religion of form."* the man. We force into their lips the And this close observation, this pro-language which describes the wrestling found acquaintance with the workings of the soul with God. It is twenty years of his own mind, he carries with him into too soon. God, in His awfulness, the his wise views of life, which have a com- soul-how can they know that yet, bethought of mystery which scathes the prehensiveness and insight rare in our fore they have got the thews and sinews day, and tempered with a practical wis- of the man's heart to master such a dom as uncommon. thought? They know nothing yet-they ought to know nothing yet, of God but as they ought to see nothing yet but heaven the Father who is around their bedsopened, and angels ascending and descending." *

It would be well for their children, if parents would think seriously over these pregnant words :

It is needless to point out the beauty, fidelity, and ripe knowledge of life which characterize this extract :

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"Our early innocence is nothing more than ignorance of evil. Christian life is not a retaining of that ignorance of evil: nor even a returning of it again. We lose our mere negative sinlessness. We put on our firm manly holiness. Human "There is a marvellous prodigality innocence is not to know evil. Christian with which we throw away our present saintliness is to know evil and good, and happiness when we are young, which beprefer good. It is possible for a parent, longs to those who feel that they are rich with over-fastidious refinement, to pro- in happiness, and never expect to be long the duration of this innocence un- bankrupts. It almost seems one of the naturally. He may lock up his library, signatures of our immortality, that we and prevent the entrance to forbidden squander time as if there were a dim books; he may exercise a jealous cen- consciousness that we are in possession of sorship over every book and every coman eternity of it; but as we arrive at midpanion that comes into the house;-hedle age, it is the tendency of man to look may remove the public journal from the · It is the solemn thought table, lest an eye may chance to rest upon connected with middle age that life's last the contaminating portion of its pages; business is begun in earnest ; and it is but he has only put off the evil hour. He then, midway between the cradle and the has sent into the world a young man of grave, that a man begins to look back and eighteen or twenty, ignorant as a child marvel, with a kind of remorseful feeling, of evil, but not innocent as an angel who that he let the days of youth go by so halfabhors the evil."t enjoyed. It is the pensive autumn feeling,-it is the sensation of half sadness that we experience when the longest day of the year is past, and every day that follows is shorter, and the lights fainter, and the feebler shadows tell that nature is hastening with gigantic footsteps to her winter grave. So does man look back upon his youth. When the first grey hairs become visible,-when the unwelcome truth fastens itself upon the mind, that a man is no longer going up the hill, but down, and that the sun is already westering, he looks back on things behind. Now this is a natural feeling, but is it the high Christian tone of feeling? In the spirit of this verse, we may assuredly answer, No. We who have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, what have we to do with things past? When we were children we thought as children. But now there lies before us manhood, with its earnest work: and then old age, and then the grave, and then home. And so manhood in the Christian life is a better thing than

"The awful feelings about Life and God are not those which characterize our earlier years. It is quite natural that, in the first espousals of the soul in its freshness to God, bright and hopeful feelings should be the predominant or the only ones. Joy marks, and ought to mark, early religion. Nay, by God's merciful arrangement, even sin is not that crushing thing in early life which it sometimes becomes in later years, when we mourn not so much a calculable number of sinful acts, as a deep, pervading sinfulness. Remorse does not corrode with its evil power then. Forgiveness is not only granted, but consciously and joyfully felt. It is as life matures that the weight of life, the burden of this unintelligible world, and the mystery of the hidden God, are felt.

"A vast amount of insincerity is produced by mistaking this. We expect in the religion of the child the experience

Sermon xv. The Loneliness of Christ. p. 262. + Sermon iv. Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past-pp. 70-1.

332

⚫ Sermon iii. Jacob's Wrestling-pp. 44-5.

attention to the vast: sympathy by His condescension to the small.”*

boyhood, because it is a riper thing; and old age ought to be a brighter, and a calmer, and a more serene thing than "The spirit of Judaism is separationmanhood. There is a second youth for that of Christianity is permeation. To man, better and holier than his first, if separate the evil from the good was the he will look on and not back. There is aim and work of Judaism:-to sever one a peculiar simplicity of heart and a nation from all other nations; certain touching singleness of purpose in Chris- meats from all other meats; certain days tian old age, which has ripened gradually from other days.* On the conand not fitfully. It is then that to the trary, Christianity is permeation-it perwisdom of the serpent is added the harm-meates all evil with good-it aims at overlessness of the dove; it is then that to coming evil by good-it desires to transthe firmness of manhood is joined almost fuse the spirit of the day of rest into all the gentleness of womanhood; it is then other days, and to spread the holiness of that the somewhat austere and sour one nation over all the world. To saturcharacter of growing strength, moral and ate life with God, and the world with intellectual, mellows into the rich ripe- Heaven, that is the genius of Christianness of an old age, made sweet and ity."† tolerant by experience; it is then that man returns to first principles. There comes a love more pure and deep than the boy could ever feel; there comes a conviction, with a strength beyond that which the boy could ever know, that the earliest lesson of life is infinite, Christ is all in all."'*

We have already alluded to the power which Mr. Robertson possesses in no ordinary measure, of discerning the true, and separating it from the false; the power by which he seizes not only the strong contrast between them, but their inward essential opposition, no matter how disguised.

"Judaism," for instance, he remarks,† "began from law or obligation to a holy person: Roman religion began from obedience to a mere will. Judaism ended in Christianity; whose central principle is joyful surrender to one whose name is Love. The religion of Rome ended among the nobler, as Cato and the Antonines, in the fatalism of a sublime but loveless stoicism, whose essential spirit is submission to a destiny, among the ordinary men, in mere zeal for the state, more or less earthly. It stiffened into stoicism or degenerated into public spirit."

Nor is this logical power less remarkable in the characteristic differences by which he distinguishes systems and things.

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Superstition is the refuge of a sceptical spirit, which has a heart too devout to dare to be sceptical. Men tremble at new theories, new views, the spread of infidelity: and they think to fortify themselves against these by multiplying the sanctities which they reverence. But all this will not do. Superstition cannot do the work of faith, and give repose or monies-it is not by speaking of holy peace. It is not by multiplying cerethings, low with bated breath-it is not by intrenching the soul behind the infal libility of a church, or the infallibility of the words and sentences of a book—it is not by shutting out inquiry, and resenting every investigation as profane, that you can arrest the progress of infidelity. Faith, not superstition, is the remedy. There is a grand Fearlessness in Faith. He who in his heart of hearts reverences the Good-the True-the Holy; that is, reverences God,-does not tremble at the apparent success of attacks upon the outworks of his faith. They may shake those who rested on those outworksthey do not move him whose soul reposes on the truth itself."

Like all true teachers, Mr. Robertson has a happy aptness of illustration, and his similes, freshly drawn from an accurate and loving study of Nature and life, are enriched with fine traits of poetic feeling. We are sorry we can quote but two instances, both from his Sermon on the Parable of the Sower; they will show how, by a few graphic touches, he invests an old and well-worn subject with a

"Remorse is the consciousness of wrong doing with no sense of love. Penitence is that same consciousness with the feeling of tenderness and gratefulness living and vivid reality. added."+ "Power is shown by God's

Sermon iv. Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past pp. 72-3

+ Sermon xii. The Roman, p. 224.
Sermon v. Triumph over Hindrances-p. 86.

Sermon x. Realizing the Second Advent

p. 176.

Sermon vi. The Shadow and the Substance of the Sabbath-pp. 99, 10.

Sermon xii. The Roman-p. 223.

"There are persons whose religion is them which he wrote for the private use all outside-it never penetrates beyond of a friend, or which were taken in shortthe intellect. They are regular at Church hand by others. Besides, we do not pay -understand the Catechism and Articles -consider the Church a most venerable so much heed to the style in which a institution-have a respect for religion— thoughtful preacher may express himself. but it never stirs the deeps of their being. If he rise above the commonplace of reliThey feel nothing in it beyond a safe- gious instruction, if he give us thoughts guard for the decencies and respectabili- and not poor empty words, all we are disties of social life; valuable as parliaments posed to require is, that he should tell and magistrates are valuable, but by no means the one awful question which fills his meaning in plain, intelligible, straightthe soul with fearful grandeur. forward English. But Mr. Robertson, judged even by his posthumous sermons, does much more. fittest that could be chosen, and they are always in the right place. His style is classical, severely pure, but never bald. He has the heart and the tongue of a poet. He shews the firmness, research, and ripeness of the scholar, without the scholar's obtrusiveness. Could any words bring out more clearly such true pictures of the varied aspects of Nature:

"Truth of life is subject to failure in such hearts in two ways-by being trodden down wheat dropped by a harvest cart upon a road lies outside. There comes a passenger first, and crushes some of it; then wheels come by-the wheel of traffic and the wheel of pleasure-crushing it grain by grain. It is trodden

down.

"The fate of religion is easily understood from the parallel fate of a single sermon. Scarcely has its last tone vibrated on the ear, when a fresh impression is given by the music which dismisses the congregation. That is succeeded by another impression, as your friend puts his arm in yours, and talks of some other matter, irrelevant, obliterating any slight seriousness which the sermon produced. Another, and another, and another-and the word is trodden down."

"Have you ever seen grain scattered on the road? The sparrow from the housetop, and the chickens from the barn, rush in, and within a minute after it has been scattered, not the shadow of a grain is left. This is the picture: not of thought crushed by degrees-but of thought dissipated, and no man can tell when or how it went. Swiftly do these winged thoughts come, when we pray, or read, or listen; in our inattentive, sauntering, wayside hours and before we can be upon our guard, the very trace of holier purposes has disappeared. In our purest moods, when we kneel to pray, or gather round the altar, down into the very Holy of Holies sweep these foul birds of the air, villain fancies, demon thoughts. The germ of life, the small seed of impression is gone-where, you know not. But it is gone.'

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As for Mr. Robertson's style, it might well be excused, were it hasty, abrupt, and somewhat rude; for the sermons which have been given to the public are not those which were spoken by him from the pulpit. They are either the notes of + Pp. 24.5.

• Pp 23-4.

His words are the

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Or take again such "fair thoughts in fair words" as these:

"Perfection is our mark: yet never will the aim be so true and steady as to strike the golden centre."

"The rest which is deep as summer

midnight, yet full of life and force as summer sunshine, the Sabbath of eternity."

And the picture of John the Baptist, when the crowd dispersed at sunset, and "left him alone in the twilight, with the infinite of darkness deepening around him, and the roll of Jordan by his side, reflecting the chaste clear stars."

Expressions, as strikingly beautiful as these we have picked up at random, are thickly scattered through the volume. He writes with wonderful nerve, force and concentration, with an intensity of feeling that compels a response. He aims directly at his mark, and the arrow

• Sermon God's Revelation of Heaven-p. 4.

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