and startled the guardians of orthodoxy to a defence of the old creeds.

Two Scotch preachers, Mr. Erskine, of Linlathen, and Mr. Campbell, of Row, had adopted singular views of the efficacy of the Atonement, teaching that Christ by his death bad redeemed the race; that salvation was not problematical, becoming real to the individual soul only by faith and conversion, but an actual fact, already accomplished for the whole human family. The doctrine, when carried to its logical results, involved the ultimate salvation of all mankind, but these ministers did not present it in that form; they regarded it as a ground of appeal to all, to accept the universal proffer of love which God makes to his creatures. Mr. Campbell came to London to confer with Irving on this new view, and Irving, without hesitation, adopted it, as the complement to his view of the Incarnation: that Christ "took пр fallen manhood into his divine person, in order to prove the grace and the might of Godhead in redeeming it."

Naturally connected with these opinions, was his belief in baptismal regeneration, adopted at an earlier day. In writing to his wife, after the birth of their first child, he says, "Adopt not the base notion into which many parents fall, of waiting for a full conversion, and new birth, but regard that as fully promised to us from the beginning, and let all your prayers, desires, words and thoughts towards the child proceed accordingly. For I think we are all grown virtually adult Baptists, whatever we be professedly, in that we take no comfort or encouragement out of the Sacrament" (p. 174). Dr. Bushnell was anticipated by a quarter of a century in his theory of Christian Nurture.

These views, however, though departing widely from the general faith of the Scotch church, did not expose him to ecclesiastical censure, and it was not till he had become an advocate of the Spirit's continued presence in the church by the miraculous gifts of healing, and prophecy, and tongues, that he fell under the ban. He formed an intimate friendship with a Mr. Alexander Scott, a man of great mental power, but regulated by no sound judgment, and was induced by him to expect a

This soon

revelation of the Spirit's miraculous power. appeared, as they supposed, in the North of Scotland. Mary Campbell, a girl of saintly character, and an invalid, given up by her physicians, when praying with a sister and another female friend, suddenly began to speak in a strange tongue. On the other side of the Clyde lived a MacDonald family, noted for their piety. A daughter on a sick bed seemed one day to be enjoying supernatural influences, and was supposed to be dying, but when her brother James, a man of staid character, came home to dinner, she said she had been praying for the miraculous gift of the Spirit to him at that time. He walked to the window, and calmly said: "I have it now," and walking back to the bed, took his sister by the hand, saying: "Isay unto thee arise and walk." She obeyed, and was from that time cured. He at once wrote to Mary Campbell the same words, and without visiting her at all, the command was effectual, and the invalid, given over to die, was well from that hour.

When the facts were reported to Irving he did not doubt that the Spirit's return to the church had commenced, and began to pray and expect similar appearances among his own people. They soon came as expected, and came too to cheer him at a time of great despondency. The General Assembly, in 1831, by several of its measures caused him great grief. It condemned Mr. Campbell, of Row, whose cause he had espoused, for heresy; it revoked the ordination of Mr. Scott, his bosom friend; it remanded to the Presbytery the appeal of Mr. Maclean, who had been refused by that Presbytery presentation to a church, for heresy on the Incarnation, because he agreed with Mr. Irving. Mr. Irving himself, too, had been summoned for trial before the London Presbytery for the same heresy, but he had cut short the proceedings, by denying its jurisdiction, in which his own church unanimously supported him. And now the Assembly dealt him a blow, by authorizing any Presbytery within whose bounds he should come to preach, to institute inquiries into his orthodoxy.

At this crisis the so-called gifts of the Spirit began to

appear. Special morning meetings had been appointed to pray for them, and they came as desired. Irving said significantly to objectors: "Will you dishonor God by affirming that when his people ask for bread, He will give them a stone?" That one idea neutralized all possibility of calm investigation into their nature and origin. Members of the church began to speak with strange tongues, after some days of prophecy, and to work miraculous cures. Irving's heart overflowed with gladness. He believed the last days had come, and the Saviour in person was near at hand. But he was still cautious in keeping the gifts within proper bounds. He would not suffer the regular order of Sabbath service to be disturbed, nor even the stated devotional meetings of the week. But the prophets rebuked him for quenching the Spirit. Females, wrought into frenzy, cried out in the Sabbath services, and then rushed from the house because forbidden to speak. He yielded to such signs, and announced that the prophets must obey the will of the Spirit, and speak whenever bidden. The Regent Square Church became little better than a bedlam. Crowds flocked thither to witness the strange scenes, and his sermons were interrupted by utterances quite as senseless as the utterances of spiritual mediums in our day. It seems incredible that intelligent men could have been deluded into a belief of the Spirit's presence in such confusion, and in such frivolous messages. The following specimen is one of the best of them, from the ablest man among the inspired throng, Mr. Drummond, a member of Parliament, and gifted with a keen intellect :

"Ah! be ye warned! be ye warned! Ye have been warned. The Lord hath prepared for you a table, but it is table in the presence of your enemies. Ah! look you well to it! The city shall be builded-ah! every jot, every piece of the edifice. Be faithful each under his load, each under his load, but see that ye build with one hand, and with a weapon in the other. Look to it, look to it, ye have been warned. Ah! Sanballat, Sanballat, Sanballat; the Horonite, the Moabite, the Ammonite! Ah, confederate, confederate, confederate with the Horonite. Ah! look ye to it, look ye to it."

Mr. Drummond would have been ashamed of such balderdash in his princely home at Albury, and it seems little less than impious to ascribe it to the Holy Spirit.

But Irving accepted all the manifestations as the direct agency of God, and now began the tragical part of his career. His trustees and elders were to a man opposed to these new developments, and would not consent to have the order of Divine service disturbed by them. They remonstrated with their pastor, still almost idolized, but in vain. They then carried the case to that London Presbytery whose authority a little before they had disowned, and gained a decision that the control of the house vested in the trustees, and Mr. Irving must vacate it. It was a hard stroke to leave the house built for him, harder yet to part from the brethren he loved. The family and kindred of his wife, connected with the church had no sympathy with the new revelations; scarcely a Scotchman of all those who made this National Church their home, and had cherished a clanish pride in the fame of the pastor, clung to him in the present crisis. But he was not one to hesitate between duty to God and affection for brethren after the flesh; and he went out from the church where he had ministered, with an unfaltering faith, like Abraham's, not knowing whither he went. Preaching was resumed in a hall occupied also by Tom Paine's disciples; was continued to great crowds in the streets and outskirts of the city, until at last a more convenient home was found in a kind of chapel in Newman street, part of which served as a dwelling for his family.

A new affliction was added to his accumulated troubles. The Presbytery of Annan, by which he had been ordained, summoned him to answer to the charge of heresy, with a view to revoking his ordination. He replied with a burst of indignation against the General Assembly, saying he was able henceforth to make no relationship to it, "but that of open and avowed enmity." He answered, however to their call, and made a defence of wonderful ingenuity and eloquence, but to no effect. The Presbytery were unanimous for his deposition, and the Moderator was about to proceed to the solemn duty of revoking the ordination once conferred, having called on

Ye cannot pray! How can Christ, whom ye deny? Ye Flee! flee!" Great confu

the senior member to offer prayer, when a voice was heard ringing through the church: " Arise! depart! Arise! depart! Flee ye out, flee ye out of her! ye pray? How can ye pray to cannot pray. Depart! depart! sion followed, when the voice was found to proceed from Rev. Mr. Dow, a friend of Irving's, and a prophet under the new dispensation. He arose and left the house, and Mr. Irving followed, exclaiming with great vehemence: "Stand forth, stand forth! What, will ye not obey the voice of the Holy Ghost? As many as will obey the voice of the Holy Ghost, let them depart." The doors closed on him, and his connection with the Church of Scotland, so long loved and honored, was henceforth at an end.

But the lowest abyss had not yet been reached. On his return to London, the prophets of the New Church, for whom he had made such sacrifices, and who were not worthy to loose his shoe latchets, lifted up the hand against him. They professed to have received a direct revelation to depose him from his office as angel in the church, to forbid him the exercise of priestly functions, and to withhold authority for administering the sacraments, or even to preach in public. The heroic man who had withstood without fear the Presbyteries of London and Aunan, and charged them with fighting against God, who had denounced the General Assembly for denying the love of the Father, the humanity of the Son, and the gifts of the Spirit, had no answer to make to these new petty tormentors. He bowed his head to the unlooked-for blow, and covered his face. For weeks he sat silent, while the unfledged prophets and preachers attempted their strange flights of oratory. Other tried friends forsook him, Mr. Campbell, whose views of the Atonement he had eloquently defended, would not accept the new dispensation. Alexander Scott, who had first induced him to look for the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, flatly denied that the Spirit had any share in the extraordinary doings at Newman St.; Mr. Baxter, the most gifted among the inspired speakers with tongues, and a chief apostle in the new dispensation, recanted his faith, and declared the whole work a delusion of the devil.