These idiots are imperfect men, from whose minds certain faculties have been effaced, and other faculties left to exhibit themselves, all the more prominently from the circumstances of their standing so much alone. They resemble men who have lost their hands, but retain their feet, or who have lost their sight or smell, but retain their taste and hearing. But as the limbs and the senses, if they did not exist as separate parts of the frame, could not be separately lost, so in the mind itself, or in at least the organization through which the mind manifests itself, there must also be separate parts, or they would not be thus found isolated by Nature in her mutilated and abortive specimens. Those metaphysicians who deal by the mind as if it were simply a general power existing in states, must be scarce less in error than if they were to regard the senses as merely a general power existing in states, instead of recognising them as distinct, independent powers, so various often in their degree of development, that, from the full perfection of any one of them, the perfection, or even the existence, of any of the others cannot be predicated. If, for instance, it were—as some physicians hold—the same general warmth of emotive power that glows in benevolence and burns in resentment, the fierce, dangerous idiot that killed his companion, and the kindly-dispositioned Cromarty one who takes home pailfuls of water to the poor old women of the place, and parts with his own toys to its children, would, instead of thus exhibiting the opposite poles of character, at least so far resemble one another, that the vindictive fool would at times be kindly and obliging, and the benevolent one at times violent and resentful. But such is not the case: the one is never madly savage—the other never genial and kind; and so it seems legitimate to infer, that it is not a general power or energy that acts through them in different states, but two particular powers or energies, as unlike in their natures, and as capable of acting apart, as seeing and hearing. Even powers which seem to have so much in common, that the same words are sometimes made use of in reference to both, may be as distinct as smelling and tasting. We speak of the cunning workman, and we speak of the cunning man; and refer to a certain faculty of contrivance manifested in dealing with characters and affairs on the part of the one, and in dealing with certain modifications of matter on the part of the other; but so entirely different are the two faculties, and, further, so little dependent are they, in at least their first elements, on intellect, that we may find the cunning which manifests itself in affairs, existing, as in Angus, totally dissociated from mechanical skill; and, on the other hand, the cunning of the artisan, existing, as in the idiot of the Maolbuie, totally dissociated from that of the diplomatist. In short, regarding idiots as persons of fragmentary mind, in whom certain primary mental elements may be found standing out in a state of great entireness, and all the more striking in their relief from the isolation, I came to view them as bits of analysis, if I may so express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and therefore more complex character. As children learn the alphabet from cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still, that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of character, may be found separately stamped in the same way on the comparatively blank minds of the imbecile; and that the student of mental philosophy might learn from them what may be regarded as the alphabet of his science, much more truthfully than from those metaphysicians who represent mind as a power not manifested in contemporaneous and separable faculties, but as existing in consecutive states.
Cromarty had been fortunate in its parish ministers. From the death of its last curate, shortly after the Revolution, and, the consequent return of its old "outed minister," who had resigned his living for conscience' sake, twenty-eight years before, and now came to spend his evening of life with his people, it had enjoyed the services of a series of devout and popular men; and so the cause of the Establishment was particularly strong in both town and parish. At the beginning of the present century Cromarty had not its single Dissenter; and though a few of what were known as "Haldane's people" might be found in it, some eight or ten years later they failed in effecting a lodgment, and ultimately quitted it for a neighbouring town. Almost all the Dissent that has arisen in Scotland since the Revolution has been an effect of Moderatism and forced settlements; and as the place had known neither, its people continued to harbour within the Church of their fathers, nor wished to change. A vacancy had occurred in the incumbency, during my sojourn in the south, through the death of the incumbent, the respected minister of my childhood and youth; and I found, on my return, a new face in the pulpit. It was that of a remarkable man—the late Mr. Stewart of Cromarty—one of at once the most original thinkers and profound theologians I ever knew; though he has, alas! left as little mark of his exquisite talent behind him, as those sweet singers of former ages, the memory of whose enchanting notes has died, save as a doubtful echo, with the generation that heard them. I sat, with few interruptions, for sixteen years under his ministry; and for nearly twelve of these enjoyed his confidence and friendship.
I never could press myself on the notice of superior men, however desirous of forming their acquaintance; and have, in consequence, missed opportunities innumerable of coming in friendly contact with persons whom it would be at once a pleasure and an honour to know. And so, for the first two years, or rather more, I was content to listen with profound attention to the pulpit addresses of my new minister, and to appear as a catechumen, when my turn came, at his diets of catechising. He had been struck, however, as he afterwards told me, by my sustained attention when at church; and, on making inquiry regarding me among his friends, he was informed that I was a great reader, and, it was believed, a writer of verse. And coming unwittingly out upon him one day as he was passing, when quitting my work-place for the street, he addressed me "Well, lad," he said, "it is your dinner hour: I hear I have a poet among my people?" "I doubt it much," I replied. "Well," he rejoined, "one may fall short of being a poet, and yet gain by exercising one's tastes and talents in the poetic walk. The accomplishment of verse is at least not a vulgar one." The conversation went on as we passed together along the street; and he stood for a time opposite the manse door. "I am forming," he said, "a small library for our Sabbath-school scholars and teachers: most of the books are simple enough little things; but it contains a few works of the intellectual class. Call upon me this evening that we may look over them, and you may perhaps find among them some volumes you would wish to read." I accordingly waited upon him in the evening; and we had a long conversation together. He was, I saw, curiously sounding me, and taking my measure in all directions; or, as he himself afterwards used to express it in his characteristic way, he was like a traveller who, having come unexpectedly on a dark pool in a ford, dips down his staff, to ascertain the depth of the water and the nature of the bottom. He inquired regarding my reading, and found that in the belles-lettres, especially in English literature, it was about as extensive as his own. He next inquired respecting my acquaintance with the metaphysicians. "Had I read Reid?" "Yes." "Brown?" "Yes." "Hume?" "Yes." "Ah! ha! Hume!! By the way, has he not something very ingenious about miracles? Do you remember his argument?" I stated the argument. "Ah, very ingenious—most ingenious. And how would you answer that?" I said, "I thought I could give an abstract of the reply of Campbell," and sketched in outline the reverend Doctor's argument. "And do you deem that satisfactory?" said the minister. "No, not at all," I replied. "No! no! that's not satisfactory." "But perfectly satisfactory," I rejoined, "that such is the general partiality for the better side, that the worse argument has been received as perfectly adequate for the last sixty years." The minister's face gleamed with the broad fun that entered so largely into his composition, and the conversation shifted into other channels.
From that night forward I enjoyed perhaps more of his confidence and conversation than any other man in his parish. Many an hour did he spend beside me in the churchyard, and many a quiet tea did I enjoy in the manse; and I learned to know how much solid worth and true wisdom lay under the somewhat eccentric exterior of a man who sacrificed scarce anything to the conventionalities. This, with the exception of Chalmers, sublimest of Scottish preachers—for, little as he was known, I will challenge for him that place—was a genial man, who, for the sake of a joke, would sacrifice anything save principle; but, though marvellously careless of maintaining intact the "gloss of the clerical enamel," never was there sincerity more genuine than his, or a more thorough honesty. Content to be in the right, he never thought of simulating it, and sacrificed even less than he ought to appearances. I may mention, that on coming to Edinburgh, I found the peculiar taste formed under the ministrations of Mr. Stewart most thoroughly gratified under those of Dr. Guthrie; and that in looking round the congregation, I saw, with pleasure rather than surprise, that all Mr. Stewart's people resident in Edinburgh had come to the same conclusion; for there—sitting in the Doctor's pews—they all were. Certainly in fertility of illustration, in soul-stirring, evangelistic doctrine, and in a general basis of rich humour, the resemblance between the deceased and the living minister seems complete; but genius is always unique; and while in breadth of popular power Dr. Guthrie stands alone among living preachers, I have never either heard or read argument in the analogical field that in ingenuity or originality equalled that of Mr. Stewart.
That in which he specially excelled all the men I ever knew was the power of detecting and establishing occult resemblances. He seemed able to read off, as if by intuition—not by snatches and fragments, but as a consecutive whole—that old revelation of type and symbol which God first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to him, I have been constrained to recognise, in the evident integrity of the reading, and the profound and consistent theological system which the pictorial record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, not less powerful and convincing than the demonstrations of the other and more familiar departments of the Christian evidences. Compared with other theologians in this province, I have felt under his ministry as if, when admitted to the company of some party of modern savans employed in deciphering a hieroglyphic covered obelisk of the desert, and here successful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off fluently, and as a whole, what the others could but darkly guess at in detached and broken parts. To this singular power of tracing analogies there was added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid illustrations. In some instances a sudden stroke produced a figure that at once illuminated the subject-matter of his discourse, like the light of a lanthorn flashed hastily upon a painted wall; in others he dwelt upon an illustrative picture, finishing it with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. I remember hearing him preach, on one occasion, on the return of the Jews as a people to Him whom they had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When Joseph," he said, "shall reveal himself to his brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere measured expansiveness—finds that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the Divine nature itself. Naturally and simply, as if growing out of the subject, like a berry-covered mistletoe out of the massy trunk of an oak, there sprung up one of his more lengthened illustrations. A child bred up in the interior of the country has been brought for the first time to the sea-shore, and carried out into the middle of one of the noble firths that indent so deeply our line of coast. And, on his return, he describes to his father, with all a child's eagerness, the wonderful expansiveness of the ocean which he had seen. He went out, he tells him, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, until at length the hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then, when in mid-sea, the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long line slipped swiftly away, coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ooze below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not seen aught of its greatness: you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried you, "you would have seen no shore, and you would have found no bottom." In one rare quality of the orator Mr. Stewart stood alone among his contemporaries. Pope refers to a strange power of creating love and admiration by "just touching the brink of all we hate." And Burke, in some of his nobler passages, happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of figures so homely—nay, almost so repulsive—that the man of lower powers who ventured on their use would find them effective in but lowering his subject, and ruining his cause. I need but refer, in illustration, to the well-known figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," says the orator, "been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the last sermons I heard him preach—a discourse of singular power—was on the "Sin-offering" of the Jewish economy, as minutely described in Leviticus. He drew a picture of the slaughtered animal, foul with dust and blood, and streaming, in its impurity, to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp—its throat gashed across—its entrails laid open; a vile and horrid thing, which no one could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The description appeared too painfully vivid—its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a just taste. But the master in this difficult walk knew what he was doing. And that, he said, pointing to the strongly-coloured picture he had just completed—"And THAT IS SIN." By one stroke the intended effect was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the revolting material image to the great moral evil.
How could such a man pass from earth, and leave no trace behind him? Mainly, I believe, from two several causes. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty, and the promptings of a highly intellectual nature, to which exertion was enjoyment, led him to study much and deeply; and he poured forth viva voce his full-volumed and ever-sparkling tide of eloquent idea, as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the shade. But, strangely diffident of his own powers, he could not be made to believe that what so much impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him, was equally suited to impress and delight the intellectual many outside; or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention, not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. Further, practising but little the art of elaborate composition, and master of a spoken style more effective for the purposes of the pulpit than almost any written one, save that of Chalmers, he failed, in all his attempts in writing, to satisfy a fastidious taste, which he had suffered greatly to outgrow his ability of production. And so he failed to leave any adequate mark behind him. I find that for my stock of theological idea, not directly derived from Scripture, I stand more indebted to two Scotch theologians than to all other men of their profession and class. The one of these was Thomas Chalmers—the other, Alexander Stewart: the one a name known wherever the English language is spoken; while of the other it is only remembered, and by comparatively a few, that the impression did exist at the time of his death, that
"A mighty spirit was eclipsed—a power
Had passed from day to darkness, to whose hour
Of light no likeness was bequeathed—no name."