DR. CANDLISH.
TT is practically impossible for Englishmen to understand the 1 importance which, with one voice, Scotchmen assigned to Dr. Candlish. Englishmen may be told of it, and may fancy that they comprehend the terms of exposition or demonstration, but the words used will inevitably fail to convey to an English mind the same point and significance which they have for Scotchmen. No eeclesiastical man can, as such, be of much importance in England. If he is endowed with genius, if he is a fountain of original and vivifying ideas,—if he is a Robertson or a Maurice, —his ecclesiastical associations will not prevent his becoming a national power, but their tendency will be rather to obstruct than to promote his influence. Even when the idea of a man great as an ecclesiastic isfairly grasped, the English mind thinks of such men as Dominic, Portocarrero, Antonelli, and has still no surmise of an ecclesiasticism national, vital, and popular. Mr. Buckle, in his fampus historical parallel between Scotland and Spain, now recog- nised as a paradox, illustrates for us with felicitous appositeness ..the difficulty for English observers which was incarnated -in 1)r.,Candlish. Mr. Buckle was an extremely clever man ; in the logical terms of his demonstration it was most improbable that lie would commit 'an error ; but he failed to -.comprehend that--to put it antithetically and with some allowance .for the antithesis—the ecclesiastical element in the caseof Scotland has been a food, and in the case of Spain a poison. "Scotch -literature' and thonght, Scotch industry;- James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns : I find 'Knox and the Re- formation acting in the heart's core of every one of these persons and phenomena." These are the words of Thomas Carlyle, and they solve the riddle of Scottish history. It did not strike'Backle that mummy-wheat Might be very good wheat-,-that--a nation liright develop healthfully`and strenuously, although the forum in 'which it developed were, to a great extent, ecclesiastical. The proof of the wheat is that it can' grow ; the proof that Scottish ecclesiasticism had vitality in it is that it has budded in modern times into those things which Mr. Carlyle specifies and several more. The old Scottish Parliament Was autocratic, and had little connection with the life of the nation ; at the time of the Union between England and Scotland it ceased to exist: But the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church had always been, popular, and at every critical juncture in the history. of the nation, the feelings and opinions of the great body of the Scottish people could be better ascertained 'by consulting the General Assembly than by consulting Parliament. The General Assembly was, in fact, the representative body of a democratic and intensely popular Re- public. The Scottish peasant might there sit side by side with the foremost divines, and a fair proportion of the ablest laymen and moot experienced lawyers, of Scotland. It was a Parliament whose edicts had only an indirect political significance, but which sent its roots into every parish in Scotland, and touched all the most per- sonal concerns of the population, moral, social, and domestic. It was in this arena, measuring himself in debate against the most acute logicians and deftest rhetoricians of the Parliament House, and speaking into the ears of local worthies from every corner of Scotland, that Candlish first laid his grasp on the heart and brain of the country. The ten years' agitation which issued in the dis- ruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was in some sense a contest between legal Scotland and clerical Scotland for the lead of the nation ; and it must be admitted that, if the lawyers had their own way in the Court of Session, the rising barristers of the period—and they were clever men, who have since gone to the head of the pro- fession—were, in the General Assembly, utterly vanquished and thrust out of sight by such clerical debaters as Cunningham and
Candlish. The period preceding the Disruption was, in respect of oratory, the most brilliant in the whole history of the Assembly ; and the finest and most characteristic intellectual performances of Candlish were his great- speeches in debate, and his masterly participation in the generalship of his party.
He was in fact born for debate, and among those who have watched his career the opinion has been unanimous that the sphere in which he would have shown to greatest advantage was the House of Commons. His appearance suggested that nature had not designed him for a preacher. That he was a man of remarkable powers, you could not look at him for two minutes without perceiving. The imposing size of brain, the bold, strongly- marked facial bones, the expressive lines of the mouth, the keen, sparkling glance, the vivid intelligence of the whole countenance, told you that, unless faces lied, this was a man of men. But the restlessness of the eye, the look of ardour, and energy, and intellectual impatience in every feature, the entire absence of that professional placidity and benignity which makes the hearts of women leap for joy when the face clerical looks upon them, suggested the doubt whether he ought to have been a preacher. " The drooping glance which seems to shun the lust of the eye, and the bowed head which denotes an oppressive sense of humility," declared by Mr. Hill, in his clever sketch of Lord Selborne, to be characteristic of " Churchmen oat of holy ordera," were the reverse of characteristic of this statesman in canonicals. He was the worst listener in the world, and devout as he was, it would, we are convinced, have been intolerably irksome for him to attend church, unless he had been in the pulpit. When he was in a pew, and a dull preacher in the pulpit, he was a sight to see, —now spinning round on his seat, now casting a glance down the aisles and along the heads of the congregation as if he were going to devour them, now throwing back his head and looking reso- lutely at the preacher, as if ashamed of himself and determined to attend, soon giving it up in despair, jerking himself round again, and taking refuge in a fierce assault on his thumb-nail, which he would bite to the quick. It was only, however, when compelled to listen that he was a fidget. Any form of activity, sportful or serious, concentrated his energies. In playing bowls, he showed the same vehemence which he showed in debate. Work—we speak of him in his prime—was a pleasure to him. At the time of the Disruption, when the Free Church had to be organised and all the leaders were burdened, the business capabilities of Candlish were the amazement of all, and were pointedly referred to by Cunningham in the Assembly as unique. He would have made an incomparable Cabinet Minister, keeping his department in the highest efficiency, and finding relaxation in those efforts in debate which might fatigue other men. His best compositions in a lite- rary point of view were his speeches and his pamphlets. His books,which consisted; on the whole, of sermons,were too laboured and stiff ; we have heard Hugh Miller, an excellent judge, say that his book style suggested translation from a foreign or dead lan- guage. But in speech and pamphlet he Was brief, compact, nervous, telling ; never ornate, always impassioned.
As a preacher and theologian he was not, as his most enthu- siastic admirer, if in the slightest degree qualified to judge, will admit, the source of a new influence, the proclaimer of any original idea. He was content with the pulpit method of the Puritans, adopting their formal divisions, and confining himself to his text. That he was in some sense a great preacher may be regarded as proved, first, by his being for forty years the popular, we had almost said the adored occupant of the pulpit of one of the largest and most refined congregations in Edinburgh ; and secondly, by the testimony of multitudes of men, now clergymen, lawyers, doctors, litterateurs, who, while students, heard him with enthralled admiration. But though we have personally felt the spell, we could hardy say wherein it consisted. Doubtless it lay, to some extent, in the perfect unity which, formally divided as they were, always characterised the discourses of Candlish. From the first sentence to the last there was a continuity which satis- fied and fascinated the mind. There was always in the sermon a leading idea, and as he proceeded in its development the vehemence of the preacher increased, and the emotional climax was also the logical climax, so that the reasoning faculty blended its suffrage with the homage of the heart. The language, besides, was always forcible and expressive, and coming from the preacher's own lips, enveloped in the glow of his ardour, it did not seem stiff. There was beyond comparison more of sterling brain-work in his sermons than in those of Guthrie or Spurgeon, though neither in him nor in them do we find originality of
spiritual idea. From what is really new in modern theology he held aloof ; nay, he stepped forward to evince in the most aggro-
sive manner his opposition to it. The theology of Neander and his school in Germany, and of Coleridge, Maurice, Robertson, and many others in England, 'was for him little better than heresy. Between his conception of Revelation and that of Maurice there was irreconcilable diversity, and there could be no edifying or useful debate between him and the English divine. The central idea of his theology, as of Puritan theology in general, was the Divine Sovereignty, exercised over finite beings in the form of law, embodied in eternal decrees, which decrees it was, in the last resort, blasphemy for the finite being to question, whether as to their justice or mercy: In his last important work, upon the test-question of the fatherhood of God, he goes for his foundations to Paul and the Epistle to the Romans, not, in the first instance at least, to Christ. Though a kindly, friendly, genial man in private, he had, as a theologian, little sympathy, and as an ecclesiastical disciplinarian little tenderness and for- bearance. It is pleasing to learn that, on occasion of the celebra- tion of the Scott Centenary in Edinburgh, he sent a letter to the Scotsman, not printed because other arrangements had been made, strongly urging that Thomas Carlyle should be asked to preside. No one who heard him preach frequently could fail to discover his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He took a principal part in founding what has become one of the characteristic institutions of the day, the Free Church of Scotland, and it seems an in- evitable law that those who throw their whole souls into any practical work whatever must submit to limitations of intellect and sympathy. For them it is clearly right to obey the dictates of conscience, and perhaps the world does not lose much in the long run by their limitation.
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