I have called Dr. Henderson a remarkable man, and an exquisite preacher; he was both, in the strict senses of the words. He had the largest brain I ever saw or measured. His hat had to be made for him; and his head was great in the nobler regions; the anterior and upper were full, indeed immense. If the base of his brain and his physical organization, especially his circulating system, had been in proportion, he would have been a man of formidable power, but his defective throb of the heart, and a certain lentitude of temperament, made this impossible; and his enormous organ of thought and feeling, being thus shut from the outlet of active energy, became intensely meditative, more this than even reflective. The consequence was, in all his thoughts an exquisiteness and finish, a crystalline lustre, purity, and concentration; but it was the exquisiteness of a great nature. If the first edge was fine, it was the sharp end of a wedge, the broad end of which you never reached, but might infer. This gave momentum to everything he said. He was in the true sense what Chalmers used to call "a man of wecht." His mind acted by its sheer absolute power; it seldom made an effort; it was the hydraulic pressure, harmless, manageable, but irresistible; not the perilous compression of steam. Therefore it was that he was untroubled and calm, though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull; "strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Indeed this element of water furnishes the best figure of his mind and its expression. His language was like the stream of his own Tweed; it was a translucent medium, only it brightened everything seen through it, as wetting a pebble brings out its lines and colour. That lovely, and by him much-loved river, was curiously like him, or he like it, gentle, great, strong, with a prevailing mild seriousness all along its course, but clear and quiet; sometimes, as at old Melrose, turning upon itself, reflecting, losing itself in beauty, and careless to go, deep and inscrutable, but stealing away cheerily down to Lessud-den, all the clearer of its rest; and then again at the Trows, showing unmistakably its power in removing obstructions and taking its own way, and chafing nobly with the rocks, sometimes, too, like him, its silver stream rising into sudden flood, and rolling irresistibly on its way. *
* Such an occasional paroxysm of eloquence is thus described
by Dr. Cairns:—"At certain irregular intervals, when the
loftier themes of the gospel ministry were to be handled,
his manner underwent a transformation which was startling,
and even electrical. He became rapt and excited as with new
inspiration; his utterance grew thick and rapid; his voice
trembled and faltered with emotion; his eye gleamed with a
wild unearthly lustre, in which his countenance shared; and
his whole frame heaved to and fro, as if each glowing
thought and vivid figure that followed in quick succession
were only a fragment of some greater revelation which he
panted to overtake. The writer of this notice has witnessed
nothing similar in any preacher, and numbers the effects of
a passage which he once heard upon the scenes and exercises
of the heavenly world among his most thrilling recollections
of sacred oratory."—Memoir prefixed to posthumous volume
of Discourses.
We question if as many carefully thought and worded, and rapidly and by no means laboriously written sermons, were composed anywhere else in Britain during his fifty years—every Sunday two new ones; the composition faultless—such as Cicero or Addison would have made them, had they been U.P. ministers; only there was always in them more soul than body, more of the spirit than of the letter. What a contrast to the much turbid, hot, hasty, perilous stuff of our day and preachers! The original power and size of Dr. Henderson's mind, his roominess for all thoughts, and his still reserve, his leni-tude, made, as we have said, his expressions clear and quiet, to a degree that a coarse and careless man, spoiled by the violence and noise of other pulpit men, might think insipid. But let him go over the words slowly, and he would not say this again; and let him see and feel the solemnizing, commanding power of that large, square, leonine countenance, the broad massive frame, as of a compressed Hercules, and the living, pure, melodious voice, powerful, but not by reason of loudness, dropping out from his compressed lips the words of truth, and he would not say this again. His voice had a singular pathos in it; and those who remember his often-called-for sermon on the "Bright and the Morning Star," can reproduce in their mind its tones and refrain. The thoughts of such men—so rare, so apt to be unvisited and unvalued—often bring into my mind a spring of pure water I once saw near the top of Cairngorm; always the same, cool in summer, keeping its few plants alive and happy with its warm breath in winter, floods and droughts never making its pulse change; and all this because it came from the interior heights, and was distilled by nature's own cunning, and had taken its time—was indeed a well of living water. And with Dr. Henderson this of the mountain holds curiously; he was retired, but not concealed; and he was of the primary formation, he had no organic remains of other men in him; he liked and fed on all manner of literature; knew poetry well; but it was all outside of him; his thoughts were essentially his own.
He was peculiarly a preacher for preachers, as Spenser is a poet for poets. They felt he was a master. He published, after the entreaties of years, a volume of sermons which has long been out of print, and which he would never prepare for a second edition; he had much too little of the love of fame, and though not destitute of self-reliance and self-value, and resolved and unchangeable to obstinacy, he was not in the least degree vain.
But you will think I am writing more about my father's friends and myself than about him. In a certain sense we may know a man by his friends; a man chooses his friends from harmony, not from sameness, just as we would rather sing in parts than all sing the air. One man fits into the mind of another not by meeting his points, but by dovetailing; each finds in the other what he in a double sense wants. This was true of my father's friends. Dr. Balmer was like him in much more than perhaps any,—in love of books and lonely study, in his general views of divine truth, and in their metaphysical and literary likings, but they differed deeply. Dr. Balmer was serene and just rather than subtle and profound; his was the still, translucent stream,—my father's the rapid, and it might be deep; on the one you could safely sail, the other hurried you on, and yet never were two men, during a long life of intimate intercourse, more cordial.
I must close the list; one only and the best—the most endeared of them all—Dr. Heugh. He was, in mental constitution and temper, perhaps more unlike my father than any of the others I have mentioned. His was essentially a practical understanding; he was a man of action, a man for men more than for man, the curious reverse in this of my father. He delighted in public life, had a native turn for affairs, for all that society needs and demands,—clear-headed, ready, intrepid, adroit; with a fine temper, but keen and honest, with an argument and a question and a joke for every one; not disputatious, but delighting in a brisk argument, fonder of wrestling than of fencing, but ready for action, not much of a long shot, always keeping his eye on the immediate, the possible, the attainable, but in all this guided by genuine principle, and the finest honour and exactest truth. He excelled in the conduct of public business, saw his way clear, made other men see theirs, was for ever getting the Synod out of difficulties and confusions, by some clear, tidy, conclusive "motion and then his speaking, so easy and bright and pithy, manly and gentlemanly, grave when it should be, never when it should not—mobile, fearless, rapid, brilliant as Saladin—his silent, pensive, impassioned and emphatic friend was more like the lion-hearted Richard, with his heavy mace; he might miss, but let him hit, and there needed no repetition. Each admired the other; indeed Dr. Heugh's love of my father was quite romantic; and though they were opposed on several great public questions, such as the Apocrypha controversy, the atonement question at its commencement; and though they were both of them too keen and too honest to mince matters or be mealy-mouthed, they never misunderstood each other, never had a shadow of estrangement, so that our Paul and Barnabas, though their contentions were sometimes sharp enough, never "departed asunder," indeed they loved each other the longer the more.
Take him all in all, as a friend, as a gentleman, as a Christian, as a citizen, I never knew a man so thoroughly delightful as Dr. Heugh. Others had more of this or more of that, but there was a symmetry, a compactness, a sweetness, a true delightfulness about him I can remember in no one else. No man with so much temptation to be heady and high-minded, sarcastic, and managing, from his overflowing wit and talent, was ever more natural, more honest, or more considerate, indeed tenderhearted. He was full of animal spirits and of fun, and one of the best wits and jokers I ever knew; and such an asker of questions, of posers! We children had a pleasing dread of that nimble, sharp, exact man, who made us explain and name everything. Of Scotch stories he had as many original ones as would make a second volume for Dean Ramsay. How well I remember the very corner of the room in Biggar manse, forty years ago, when from him I got the first shock and relish of humour; became conscious of mental tickling; of a word being made to carry double and being all the lighter of it. It is an old story now, but it was new then: a big, perspiring countryman rushed into the Black Bull coach-office, and holding the door, shouted, "Are yir insides a' oot?" This was my first tasting of the flavour of a joke.
Had Dr. Heugh, instead of being the admirable clergyman he was devoted himself to public civil life, and gone into Parliament, he would have taken a high place as a debater, a practical statesman and patriot. He had many of the best qualities of Canning, and our own Premier, with purer and higher qualities than either. There is no one our church should be more proud of than of this beloved and excellent man, the holiness and humility, the jealous, godly fear in whose nature was not known fully even to his friends, till he was gone, when his private daily self-searchings and prostrations before his Master and judge were for the first time made known.
There are few characters, both sides of which are so unsullied, so pure, and without reproach. I am back at Biggar at the old sacramental times; I see and hear my grandfather, or Mr. Horne of Braehead, Mr. Leckie of Peebles, Mr. Harper of Lanark, as inveterate in argument as he was warm in heart, Mr. Comrie of Penicuik, with his keen, Voltaire-like face, and much of that unhappy and unique man's wit, and sense, and perfection of expression, without his darker and baser qualities. I can hear their hearty talk, can see them coming and going between the meeting-house and the Tent on the side of the burn, and then the Monday dinner, and the cheerful talk, and the many clerical stories and pleasantries, and their going home on their hardy little horses, Mr. Comrie leaving his curl-papers till the next solemnity, and leaving also some joke of his own, clear and compact as a diamond, and as cutting.
I am in Rose Street on the monthly lecture, the church crammed, passages and pulpit stairs. Exact to a minute, James Chalmers—the old soldier and beadle, slim, meek, but incorruptible by proffered half-crowns from ladies who thus tried to get in before the doors opened—appears, and all the people in that long pew rise up, and he, followed by his minister, erect and engrossed, walks in along the seat, and they struggle up to the pulpit. We all know what he is to speak of; he looks troubled even to distress;—it is the matter of Uriah the Hittite. He gives out the opening verses of the 51st Psalm, and offering up a short and abrupt prayer, which every one takes to himself, announces his miserable and dreadful subject, fencing it, as it were, in a low penetrating voice, daring any one of us to think an evil thought; there was little need at that time of the warning,—he infused his own intense, pure spirit, into us all.