I have said he was no swordsman, but he was a heavy shot; he fired off his ball, compact, weighty, the maximum of substance in the minimum of bulk; he put in double charge, pointed the muzzle, and fired, with what force and sharpness we all remember. If it hit, good; if not, all he could do was to load again, with the same ball, and in the same direction. You must come to him to be shot, at least you must stand still, for he had a want of mobility of mind in great questions. He could not stalk about the field like a sharp-shooter; his was a great sixty-eight pounder, and it was not much of a swivel. Thus it was that he rather dropped into the minds of others his authoritative assertions, and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, a word from him would settle a long discussion. He would, after lively, easy talk with his next neighbour, set him up to make a speech, which was conclusive. But on great questions he must move forward his great gun with much solemnity and effort, partly from his desire to say as much of the truth at once as he could, partly from the natural concentration and rapidity of his mind in action, as distinguished from his slowness when incubating, or in the process of thought,—and partly from a sort of self-consciousness—I might almost call it a compound of pride and nervous diffidence—which seldom left him. He desired to say it so that it might never need to be said again or otherwise by himself, or any one else.
This strong personality, along with a prevailing love to be alone, and dwell with thoughts rather than with thinkers, pervaded his entire character. His religion was deeply personal, * not only as affecting himself, but as due to a personal God, and presented through the sacrifice and intercession of the God-man; and it was perhaps owing to his "conversation" being so habitually in heaven—his social and affectionate desires filling themselves continually from "all the fulness of God," through living faith and love—that he the less felt the need of giving and receiving human affection. I never knew any man who lived more truly under the power, and sometimes under the shadow of the world to come. This world had to him little reality except as leading to the next; little interest, except as the time of probation and sentence. A child brought to him to be baptized was in his mind, and in his words, "a young immortal to be educated for eternity;" a birth was the beginning of what was never to end; sin—his own and that of the race—was to him, as it must be to all men who can think, the great mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it—of its exceeding sinfulness—haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were, fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to the objective reality of his religion—that it was founded upon fact. It was not the polestar he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it was the sea-worthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made existence—the being obliged to continue to be—a doubtful privilege.
* In his own words, "A personal Deity is the soul of Natural
Religion; a personal Saviour—the real living Christ—is the
soul of Revealed Religion."
When oppressed with this feeling,—"the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next,—I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines:—
"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariots hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity."
His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead—made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves—Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melanchthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume, * Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men,—with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them—would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men. **
* David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; "It's all there, if you will think it out."