Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 29.djvu/60

 the corollary of an impending end of the world was but reasonable. The Apocalyptic tendency expressed itself in the poetry and art of the time; in Byron's ‘Heaven and Earth’ and Moore's ‘Loves of the Angels;’ and in the pictures of Danby and Martin. It was inevitable that Irving should go with the current, and equally so that he should be entirely carried away by it. His entire absorption in the subject may be dated from the beginning of 1826, when he became acquainted with the work of the Spanish jesuit Lacunza, published under the pseudonym of Aben Ezra, ‘The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty.’ Deeply impressed, he resolved to translate it, and the intimacy which this task occasioned with Henry Drummond [q.v.] and others of similar sentiments gave birth to the conferences for the study of unfulfilled prophecy which for many years continued to be held at Drummond's seat at Albury. The translation was published in 1827, with a long preface, which has been reprinted separately. Irving's eloquence had long ago transformed his originally small and poor congregation into a large and rich one, and at this time the fact became externalised in a new church in Regent Square, then regarded as the handsomest of any not belonging to the establishment in London. There, Sunday after Sunday a thousand persons assembled to hear Irving expound for three hours at a stretch, though, as he assured Chalmers, he could bring himself down to an hour and forty minutes. A less devoted congregation at Hackney Chapel dropped away at the end of two hours and a half, and the prudent Chalmers began to fear ‘lest his prophecies and the excessive length and weariness of his services may not unship him altogether.’ Chalmers was right. Whether from Irving's prolixity, or their own fickleness, or from the distance of the new church from any leading thoroughfare, the fashionable crowds that had filled Hatton Garden stopped short of Regent Square. Irving proved his sincerity by making no attempt to bring them back. Early in 1828 he published his ‘Lectures on Baptism,’ evincing a decided approximation to the views of the sacramental party in the church of England. In May of that year he undertook a journey in Scotland, with the object of proclaiming the imminence of the second advent. The experiences of this tour were of a chequered character. Chalmers thought his Edinburgh lectures ‘woeful,’ but he brought the Edinburgh people out to hear them at five in the morning. At his native Annan he was received with enthusiasm; but at Kirkcaldy an unfortunate accident from the fall of the overcrowded galleries made him, most unreasonably, an object of popular displeasure. On this tour he contracted a friendship with Campbell of Row, soon about to be tried for heresy, which gave support to the suspicions of heterodoxy which were beginning to be entertained against himself. They were increased by the publication at the end of the year of his ‘Sermons on the Trinity,’ though these had been delivered in 1825 without exciting criticism from any quarter. Early in 1829 the ‘Morning Watch,’ a journal on unfulfilled prophecy, entirely pervaded, as Mrs. Oliphant remarks, by Irving, was established by the members of the Albury conference. Another expedition to Scotland followed, and at the beginning of 1830 his tract, ‘The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord's Human Nature,’ exposed him to open charges of heresy, intensified by the accusations similarly brought against his friends Campbell, Scott, and Maclean. For the time, however, inquisition remained in abeyance, while public attention was directed to matters of a more exciting character, and which gave an easier handle to Irving's adversaries.

The ‘unknown tongues’—the crowning development of Irving's ministrations—were first heard on 28 March 1830, from the mouth of Mary Campbell, ‘in the little farmhouse of Fernicarry, at the head of the Gairloch.’ On Irving's theories of the second advent, this and the miraculous cure of Miss Campbell, which was believed to have occurred shortly afterwards, were events to be expected, and he can scarcely be excused of excessive credulity for having rather encouraged than repressed the manifestations which rapidly multiplied. They were at first confined to private prayer-meetings, but on 16 Oct. 1831 the public services in Regent Square Church were interrupted by an outbreak of unintelligible discourse from a female worshipper, and such occurrences speedily became habitual. ‘I did rejoice with great joy,’ owns Irving, ‘that the bridal jewels of the church had been found again.’ The manifestations have been described by many, both speakers and hearers. The best descriptions are the vivid account of Robert Baxter, himself an agent, who ended by attributing them to diabolical possession, and that by Irving himself, who, obliged to maintain the Pentecostal affinities of the phenomenon, is exceedingly indignant with ‘the heedless sons of Belial’ who pronounced the utterances mere gibberish; and protests that, on the contrary, ‘it is regularly formed, well proportioned, deeply felt discourse, which evidently wanteth only the ear of him whose native tongue it is to make it a very masterpiece of power-