THOMAS ERSKINE OF LINLATHEN.
LtREMARKABLE man has just passed away from among us. Mr. Thomas Erskine of Linlathen died at Edinburgh on the night of Sunday week, and the announcement of his death will awaken a deep feeling of sorrow in some of the best minds, both in England and on the Continent. It is a curious illustration of the state of religious feeling and of theological thought in Scotland, that while among his own countrymen Mr. Erskine had ceased to be much known or regarded, most of the Biblical scholars and thinkers of England of highest name were accustomed to look up to him with the deepest veneration. Such men as Maurice, Jowett, Stanley, and many others thought themselves only too highly favoured when permitted to it at the feet of the venerable old man and listen to his large-minded views on theological ques- tions. Mr. Maurice, many years ago, in a dedication of one of the volumes of his " Sermons " to him, spoke with characteristic warmth of his great obligations to him. " Have we a Gospel," he said, " for men, for all men ? Is it a Gospel that God's will is a will to all Good, a will to deliver them from all evil ? Is it a Gospel that He has reconciled the world unto Himself? Is it this absolutely, or this with a multitude of reservations, explanations, contradictions?" " It is more than twenty years ago," he adds (writing in 1852), " since a book of yours brought home to my mind the conviction that no Gospel but this can be of any use to the world, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is such a one. From that time I ceased to wish for refined explanations of the Catholic creeds. I ceased also to desire refined explanations of the Four Gospels and the Epistles. The first, taken as they stand, declare, it seems to me, the existence of a Kingdom of Heaven which is near to us all. The last show how that Kingdom of Heaven established itself on this earth of ours,—churches of Jews and Gentiles being called out as witnesses of it, and the Jewish nation perishing that it might be revealed in its fullness and unity as the ground of modern society."
One of Mr. Erakine's most remarkable characteristics was a sort of quickness of intellectual sympathy, which enabled him at once to take up a new point of view on any religious question, and to enter fully into any fresh specu- lations which were brought before him. We do not mean that he was ready to alter his own convictions, but that being strongly possessed with the feeling that Christianity is many-sided, he was ever prepared to have it presented to his mind under fresh aspects, and under new conditions and relations. He never thought of it as something to be comprehended and fully explained by the way of strict logical theory or system. It was always to him a sort of living reality, and he thought of the world of spiritual things as an actual entity, the laws of which are, quite as much as those of physical nature, the proper subjects of endless observation and inquiry. In this spirit he entered with the greatest possible interest into the study of Renan's " Life of Jesus " when it first appeared, not at once rejecting it or condemning it as a matter of course, but slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully examining all its chief positions, and then only putting them aside when he had deliberately established in his own mind that they were untenable. He followed, we believe, very much the same course with the " Ecce Homo," only not in the end finding himself so entirely out of harmony with its author. He had, in short, that kind of rare candour and freeness in theology which was capable of treating almost everything as an open question, and was ever fully prepared and inclined to go over again by any new path and re-test once more the grounds of his old convictions. Nothing was more alien to him than that sort of stolid fixity which never alters a train of thought, or looks at a great truth from more than one point of view. We are not prepared to flay, indeed, that he did not occa- sionally carry this tendency of his mind somewhat to excess. He was a little apt so to overload a subject with his thought, that its outline became confused and indeterminate, at least to others, and perhaps to himself also, for expression seemed sometimes to fail him when he was most anxious to bring out his meaning. This was, no doubt, the natural result, not of originally deficient mental power, but of a singularly strong, active, and curiously versatile mind becoming over-informed with its own thought. His life had been given almost exclusively to meditation, and it had been too little exposed to the wholesome, modifying, and corrective influ- ences of an acquaintance with affairs which would have given a prac- tical direction to its powers. Even with these drawbacks, however, one was able to see how noble and salutary had been the effect of that style of religious thought to which he gave himself up. All this mental activity in theology, all this keenness and unresting- mess of speculative faculty, never seemed in any degree to end (as with so many men it does end) merely in the intellect, but told with immediate and pervading effect upon his character. The result was a combination with his great mental power of a sort of saintly purity and beauty of religious feeling which we should imagine almost unexampled. More than any one else whom we ever met with, he fulfilled the idea of what Novelle called " a God-intoxicated man." God's love to men seemed to be constantly in his thoughts, and it was difficult for him to open his lips or to put pen to paper without some outpouring of an ever-present con- sciousness on this congenial theme. Even in dreams his mind appeared always to run upon the same topic, and during the last weeks of his life, we have heard that whenever he spoke through his sleep—as he had the habit of doing—his utterances indicated some rapt contemplation of spiritual things.
It is matter of regret that Mr. Erskine's maturest thoughts on religious and theological subjects have never been given to the world. During the last thirty years he has published almost nothing, and it is generally understood that the earlier pro- ductions of his pen inadequately represent his later phases of -opinion. For some years past he had been most anxious to supply this defect, and over and over again he strove to give a full -exposition of his views; but partly perhaps from his mind being, as we have already intimated, overcharged with thought on the subjects which he wished to discuss, partly from some growing subtlety and refinement in his speculations to which expression did not readily lend itself, but most of all, in all probability, in con- sequence of the great decay in his physical vigour, he never could :satisfy himself with anything which, he was able to produce. One short fragment, indeed, of great value, on what he called "The Spiritual Order," and another on "The Divine Sonship," were put in type shortly before his death. But with these exceptions, we suspect that the accumulated results of long years of brooding .meditation must have perished with him. The only hope is that as he was in the constant habit of imparting his ideas to his friends in conversation, some of these may yet be able to reproduce his reasonings and conclusions in a more or less perfect shape.
The essential character of Mr. Erskine's mind was that of a thinker. He was not in any proper sense of the word a learned or even a very widely read man. No one, however, could fail to recognize in him.a man of true and fine culture. He was, we believe, an excellent Greek scholar, and he had all that most 'valuable cultivation which results from mingling in the best :society. In early life he had studied for the Scottish Bar, and he passed advocate so far back as 1810. Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rather- 'furd (who was almost contemporary with him), and others of the same coterie were among his earliest associates. At a later period he was on terms of great intimacy with Thomas Carlyle, Edward Irving, John McLeod Campbell, Dr. Ewing the spiritual-
• minded and liberal Bishop of Argyle and the Isles, and his near rela- tive, the late amiable and accomplished Lord Manor. At Paris and Geneva, too, he had a circle of highly cultivated friends. And to the last, some of the best minds both of England and of his own -country used to find their way to Linlathen and to his lodgings in Edinburgh. In early life, we have heard that his unaffected -cleverness and gentle playfulness of fancy gave an irresistible charm to his society, and even in his later years he had always an abundant flow of conversation on subjects quite apart from theology. Most of his fine companionable qualities, indeed, he retained to the end of his life, and along with them all the simplicity, humility, and affectionateness of a child. Though a great converser, he was never engrossing in conversation. Though a great theologian, he never knew what arrogance or dogmatism was, nor did his mind ever seem to contract any tinge of narrow- ness from being much concentrated on one subject.
Before concluding, we may just allude to the relation in which Mr. Erskine stood to the Church of hisown country. The subject • is curious and rather instructive. It is well known that about the beginning of the century a strong reaction had begun to take place against the selfish, worldly policy and utter want of earnest- ness in religion of the old Moderate party of the Church of Scot-
land. This movement was at first led by Dr. John Erskine, a son of Erskine of Carnock, the great Scottish lawyer, and author of the " Institutes," and a man of great ability both as a man of business and as a writer on theology. (He was nearly related, by the way, to the family of Mr. Thomas Erskine.) On his death, about 1803, his place was taken by the late Sir Harry Moncrieff, a clergyman of great practical energy and the most remarkable sagacity, a man, too, of old family and possessed of immense influ- ence, both by character and position, throughout Scotland. Chiefly by the efforts of this remarkable man, the Evangelical party gradually became dominant in the Church of Scotland. Though called by this name, the Evangelicals in Scotland represented a somewhat different class of minds, and a different style of thought to the English Evangelicalism of the present day. The leading men among them had thoroughly enlarged views, good sound culture, and very liberal tendencies, so much so that all the best minds in Scotland, in particular every one connected with the rising Whig party, completely sympathized, if they did not absolutely identify themselves, with the movement. After a long struggle of more than thirty years, Evangelicism attained a, majority in the General Assembly. Its success, however, may be said to have been its ruin. In proportion as it became numerically strong, it tended ever more and more to intellectual weakness, and just as the more generous influences of the movement culminated in the raising up in the Church of a few great thinkers and men of genius, one or two great orators, and one or two great saints, its worser influences culminated in bigotry, fanaticism (heat without light), conventionalism, mediocrity. What with the poor culture offered by the Scottish Universities, and what with the national tendency to fervour and to bare logic ending ever in extremes, it could scarcely, perhaps, have been otherwise. The result, how- ever, was that within the Evangelical movement two antagonistic forces were found to have sprung up. These could not, of course, long dwell together ; and so, by proceedings almost worthy of the old Star Chamber, such men as Edward Irving, Scott of Manches- ter, and McLeod Campbell of Row, were driven forth from the Church. Even Chalmers, who remained to the last, found at length how uncongenial were the elements with which he had to contend, and died, there is some reason to believe, of a broken heart. It is scarcely necessary to add that after the disgraceful proceedings towards his friends Irving and Campbell, Mr. Erskine's connec- tion with the Church of Scotland may be said to have terminated. In the later years of his life he might frequently, indeed, be seen worshipping in a Presbyterian Church, but for a long period before his death he had been in communion with the Church of England.
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