Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/58

46 deceased, whose name I would gladly mention for honour and affection—but I withhold my pen.

“ … A young relative of his,—a most remarkable man,— … rapidly gained an immense sway over me. I shall henceforth call him ‘the Irish Clergyman’. His ‘bodily presence’ was indeed ‘weak’! A fallen cheek, a bloodshot eye, … a seldom shaven beard, a shabby suit of clothes and a generally neglected person, drew at first pity, with wonder to see such a figure in a drawing- room. It was currently reported that a person in Limerick offered him a halfpenny, mistaking him for a beggar; and if not true, the story was yet well invented. This young man had taken high honours in Dublin University and had studied for the bar, where, under the auspices of his eminent kinsman, he had excellent prospects; but his conscience would not allow him to take a brief, lest he should be selling his talents to defeat justice. With keen, logical powers, he had warm sympathies, solid judgment of character, thoughtful tenderness and total self-abandonment. He before long took Holy Orders, and became an indefatigable curate in the mountains of Wicklow. Every evening he sallied forth to teach in the cabins, and roving far and wide over mountain and amid bogs, was seldom home before midnight. By such exertions his strength was undermined. … His whole frame might have vied in emaciation with a monk of La Trappe.

“Such a phenomenon intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked on him as a genuine ‘saint’ of the ancient breed. The stamp of heaven seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence. That a dozen such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment was ere long my conviction. … He had practically given up all reading except that of the Bible; and no small part of his movement towards me soon took the form of dissuasion from all other voluntary study.

“In fact I had myself more and more concentrated my religious reading on this one book; still, I could not help feeling the value of a cultivated mind. Against this, my new eccentric friend, (