IRVING, EDWARD, the most powerful and impressive, if not the greatest, pulpit orator of his day, was born at Annan, in Dumfriesshire, August 15, 1792. His parents were in circumstances to give him a good education. After learning all that the little town of his birth could teach him, he went to Edinburgh, and at the university of that city distinguished himself greatly in the study of the exact sciences. Taking his degree in the ordinary course, he left college, and went to teach mathematics in the burgh school of Haddington. The next year found him settled in Kirkcaldy; where, besides teaching as before, he read deeply in divinity, with the view of entering the church. In 1819, having been licensed, he left Kirkcaldy, hoping to be sent to the East, and there become a Protestant
Xavier. Accident, however, made him acquainted with Dr Chalmers, who appointed him his assistant in the parish of St John's, Glasgow. The strangeness of his doctrine, his wild prophet-like manner, and the disturbing force of his personal character, were ill-calculated to please his entire congregation. Some of them shrunk back before the strong reality of their young pastor's nature, and the stern truths which he had the courage to tell; others, warmly admiring his defiance of the comfortable old conventions to which they had been used, applauded, flattered, and perhaps helped a little to spoil him. His fame soon spread, and in 1822 he was invited to settle in London, where he was appointed minister of the church of the Caledonian Asylum. In a short time it became "the fashion" to attend his preaching. Crowds of people of every rank, from the highest to the lowest, flocked to hear him: statesmen, poets, painters, philosophers, literary men, merchants, and great noblemen, thronged his church, and the whole world of fashion soon lay at his feet. To retain his hold over it, he thought that on all occasions he ought to shine. Time for fresh study and thought was denied him. His old stores began to fail. The excitement he had created soon became too powerful for even his strong understanding and noble spirit to control. At any cost it must be kept up. To pause, were it but for a moment to steady his whirling brain, was to fall. Every new effort demanded something equally great and stimulating for the next display. In the zenith of his fame he published a volume of discourses under the title of For the Oracles of God, four orations; For Judgments to Come, an argument in nine parts. Three editions of this work were sold in less than half a year. Aimless, and without a wide or lasting interest, curiously quaint in style and manner, while the matter generally bears upon the topics of the passing hour, it contains many passages of extraordinary beauty and depth, many an outpouring of lofty devotion, and frequent bursts of the most passionate eloquence. As time wore on, the mysticism and strangeness of his written style became sensible also in his oral discourse. The
opinions and personal influence of Coleridge began to tell upon him. Turning to the Bible, he sought to explain all its difficulties through the medium of the unfulfilled prophecies. He next estranged many of his adherents by proclaiming and advocating the advent of the millennium. Then, comparing the early with the modern history of the Christian church, he thought that it was only the want of faith which prevented the ministers of the one from doing what had been done by the apostles of the other. This led him to preach the possibility of working miracles and speaking in unknown tongues. His conduct, which had long been watched with uneasiness and suspicion by the Church of Scotland, now came to be openly discussed in her courts, and Irving was deposed from her ministry. But his adherents were numerous and devoted, and built him a chapel, in which he continued to preach to them to the end. Even after his health began to give way his zeal remained unabated, and he persisted in squandering his energies as freely as in the first vigour of his strength. In 1834 he set out on a tour through Scotland, in the hope of re-establishing his shattered nerves, but he only reached Glasgow, where he died on the 8th of December, in the forty-third year of his age. He was buried in a crypt of the cathedral of that city.
No more devout or earnest spirit has appeared on the stage of time in the nineteenth century than Edward Irving. He was born to be a Christian minister, and, as was said of him by a friend who knew him well, "he strove with all the force that was in him to be it. He might have been so many things; not a speaker only, but a doer,—the leader of hosts of men. For his head, when the fog Babylon had not yet obscured it, was of strong far-reaching insight. His very enthusiasm was sanguine, not atrabilis; he was so loving, full of hope, so simple-hearted, and made all that approached him his. A giant force of activity was in the man; speculation was accident, not nature. There was in him a courage dauntless, not pugnacious, hardly fierce, by no possibility ferocious; as of the generous war-horse, gentle in its strength, yet that laughs at the shaking of the spear. But, above all, he what he might, to be a reality was indispensable for him." In another place the same friend exclaims—"But for Irving, I had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest, human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find." Similar was the judgment of all Irving's friends, and even of most of those whom the laws of their church compelled to take part in deposing him. All admired the man, his many virtues, his matchless eloquence; all deplored his fall, and the gulf of separation which it created between them.