Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/36

300 Mr. Heugh went onward for years, alternated by two visits to London upon ministerial duties, in which he showed himself a sharp observer of public characters and the signs of the times, and by his earnest labours to promote that union between the two bodies of the Secession, which was afterwards happily accomplished.

As Mr. Heugh had now attained a distinction that placed him in the foremost rank of the religious community to which he belonged, the town of Stirling, venerable though it be from its ancient historical remembrances, was thought too limited a sphere for his exertions; and accordingly, in 1819, an attempt was made to secure his services for the populous and growing city of Glasgow. This was done by a call from the newly-formed congregation of Regent Street, Glasgow. But this call, and another from the same congregation, which followed soon after, was refused ; his people in Stirling had become so endeared to his affections, that he could not reconcile himself to the pain of parting, or the uncertainties of a new career. Bent, however, upon what they considered a point of most vital interest, by securing him for their minister, the congregation of Regent Street made a third call ; and the Secession Synod, overcome by this determined perseverance, agreed, though with reluctance, to transfer their valued brother to the great mercantile metropolis of Scotland. Accordingly, he was inducted into his new charge on the 9th of October, 1821. But how to part from his old congregation, among whom he had officiated so long—among whom, indeed, he had been born! "The feelings of tenderness," he said in his farewell discourse from the pulpit, "which this crisis awakens, I dare not attempt to express; but these may well be allowed to give place to this most solemn and paramount consideration—the responsibilities incurred both by you and by me for the opportunities which are now over. Eight hundred Sabbaths have well nigh elapsed since my ministry in this place began. What have you and I been doing on so many days of the Son of Man? "His personal adieus from house to house were also of the most painful description. "I enter no house," he writes, "connected with the congregation, in which tears are not shed; and the looks, and language, and grasp of the hand—of some of the poor especially—altogether overcome me. ... It is, indeed, a sort of living death." "Never," he added a few days afterwards, "have I passed through such a scene, and I often start and ask myself, is it real? But I must yield myself to the necessity. I have now no control over arrangements which were made without any agency of mine. Over these arrangements the Lord of the church has presided, and his grace is sufficient for me, and his strength can be made perfect in my weakness." In these feelings he tore himself from Stirling, and commenced his labours in a new field.

The transition of this affectionate-hearted pastor from Stirling to Glasgow was, in the first instance at least, anything but a change to greater ease and comfort; and at the commencement, Mr. Heugh had large demands upon his secular prudence, as well as Christian liberality. In the communion to which he belonged, there still lingered in Glasgow some of those old prejudices which had disappeared from other parts of the country. It was not allowed, for instance, for a family to pass from one pastoral superintendence to another, unless they removed their residence within an imaginary boundary line belonging to that other congregation, which had been fixed by the church courts. Then, too, in public worship there were certain trifles insisted upon as stiffly and keenly as if they had formed part of the creed or the decalogue. Thus, a