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1866.]

Life and Letters of Mr. Robertson will find a most extended and appreciative welcome among a large company of sympathizing and grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. The way has been prepared for them, and their most hearty reception has been assured, by the acquaintance opened for us with his mind and heart through the extensive circulation of the several volumes containing his Sermons and Addresses. When the first of those volumes was reprinted here, it wrought an immediate effect upon hundreds, who were instinctively drawn to its perusal, and who have since seized with avidity upon each subsequent opportunity furnished them for possessing themselves of everything that could be put into print which would renew and intensify that effect. An exhaustive review of that one department of our religious literature which embraces utterances from the pulpit would, we believe, fully establish these two positions: first, that the ability shown alike in the composition and in the delivery of sermons is at least equal in each age and generation to the average of that which is exhibited in the forum and at the bar; and, second, that preachers of extraordinary power appear at just such intervals and under just such conditions as will best assure us of a reserved and as yet unrecognized capability in the pulpit, redeeming it from the charge of a general dulness and exhaustion. It was at the very time when the newspaper press of England and America was reiterating and illustrating this charge, not without many tokens that supported it, that the sermons of Mr. Robertson were offering at least one signal exception to its truth, sufficient even to silence it within the range of his ministry. An eminently able and effective preacher appears often enough to reassert the loftiest ideal of his profession, and, what is more, to vindicate it against the distrust and contempt to which it may seem to be exposed by the "popular preachers." As we write, there is circulating through the papers a very striking paragraph from an article by that distinguished divine, Mr. Caird, in which, with a sharp criticism, he deals, as we should suppose a man of his high tone would deal, with the theme of popular preaching, especially as to its effects upon the dispenser of it and upon the crowds who gather to it. Mr. Robertson shrank from the repute of it, and the inflictions which it visits, as he did from sin. He knew full well, that, as the popular taste and standard were not educated to an appreciation and approval of the very loftiest style of ministration, the more of curious, gaping notoriety, or even admiration, he might draw towards him, the poorer was the incense.

Yet there must be a fallacy somewhere involved in the common judgment on this subject. For Mr. Robertson certainly was a popular preacher; and yet, as he never made the slightest concession to any of the arts or trickeries, the displays or exaggerations, which are supposed to be essential conditions of that repute, his own example and experience may stand as at least an exceptional proof of the possible dignity and solidity of the position. When he had been addressing a thronged congregation, who hung, impressed and awed, upon his utterances, he goes home to write about the scene and its circumstances in strong disdain, almost with angry contempt, as if it were a reproach to himself. Did not the large majority of his hearers receive in their hearts and minds the electric power of his earnest and ever instructive speech? Suppose it were true, as he had painful reasons for knowing, that there were always before him frivolous, empty-headed, and unappreciative hearers, the hangers-on of a fashionable watering-place, who went to listen to him because he was the rage; such as these could be only a scattering among his auditors. Suppose, too, that the captious, the jealous, the bigoted, and the conceited were represented there, intending to catch matter for bringing him under public odium in their own circles, because he trespassed upon the borders of heresy, or shocked the conventional standards of snobbish society, or spread his range broadly over the widest fields of moral and political relations; the very presence and purpose of such listeners were, to one of his grandeur and purity of spirit, a new inspiration of courage and fidelity. On the whole, so far as Mr.