RIGHT AT LAST.
I hope, Sir," said the venerable Mr. Ingleby to Mr. Roscoe, "you were gratified by your late visit to your brother, now, I trust, your son in the faith?"
Mr. Roscoe.—"I was more than gratified; I was both astonished and delighted. There is a marvellous change in him, in his spirit and habits, as well as in his theological opinions and style of preaching. He stands in the centre of a large circle of his clerical brethren, a living monument to the honour of the enlightening and renewing grace of God."
Rev. Mr. Ingleby.—"All such changes are both marvellous and natural. The unrenewed part of the community, both the clergy and the laity, look at them with some degree of amazement, regarding them as strange and mystical phenomena; but we know that they are the moral workmanship of the Spirit of God. They are also living evidences of the Divine origin of Christianity, bearing the same relation to it now, as the miracles of healing did on its first promulgation. Their production requires a power which is extra-human; but, notwithstanding this self-evident fact, different persons will attribute them to very different causes, as they did the undisputed miracles wrought by Jesus Christ. Some of the Pharisees asserted that he performed them by a power derived from the devil; others said, can a devil open the eyes of the blind? thus implying the absolute impossibility of his doing such a benevolent action. The same difference of opinion prevails amongst men, when they try to account for these moral miracles. Some refer them to an undefined fanaticism, or to a love of singularity, or to the power of persuasion, or to the imbecility or partial derangement of the intellectual faculty; and others ascribe them to the direct agency of the Spirit of God, which, certainly, is assigning an adequate cause, and the ONLY adequate cause for their existence."
Mr. Roscoe.—"Surely no one who knew my brother before his conversion, will accuse him of fanaticism, for a more doggedly stern advocate in behalf of Tractarianism never undertook its defence and support; and no one, I think, will venture to say that his intellect has passed under an eclipse since his conversion. No, Sir; such references would entail discredit on any one who would make them. All must admit that he himself is competent to give evidence on the fact and the cause of it; and he uniformly says, By the grace of God I am what I am."
Rev. Mr. Ingleby.—"As you refer to his style of preaching, I presume he has resumed his pulpit labours?"
Mr. Roscoe.—"Yes, Sir, he has; and if my eyes had been closed, and I had not known that he was in the pulpit, I should have thought that I was listening to a preacher I had never heard before. Formerly he was rather heavy, and there was a harsh monotonous tone in his delivery—but now he speaks with great ease and fluency, and with a pathetic earnestness which at times is thrilling. I have seen some of his hearers affected to tears, who used to sit as unmoved as stones. I was present when he delivered his first sermon, after several months' absence from the pulpit; and as he had given notice that he should assign the reasons which induced him to renounce the Tractarian heresy and adopt the Evangelical faith, there was an overflowing congregation. His text was a very appropriate one; it was taken from 2 Tim. iii. 5: 'Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof; from such turn away.' From these words of Paul he raised the following proposition, which he argued with great accuracy and telling force:—'We should hold no Christian fellowship with any order of ministers who unduly magnify the form and ceremonies of Christianity, and who, either actually or virtually, depreciate its doctrines and its precepts.'