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O my brethren, are these merely rhetorical contrasts—a trick of words that die, and die deservedly as soon as they are uttered-or do they show us, show our consciences, our resolutions, our ambitions-show us here and show us now-two ways of looking upon human life? I will not ask you, Which is the more excellent way? On that we are agreed. Rather I will ask you, Is the more excellent way still possible? Can a life be laid and built, like a goodly vessel, upon those lines-a life that may be launched with honour, and reach at last a heavenly haven?

Are there no "little ones" now to be cared for, no "offences" to be removed, is there no slavery to be abolished?

Just seventy years ago, when, by a glorious and memorable majority of 283 to 16, the House of Commons decided that the Slave Trade should die, the friends of Wilberforce crowded to his house in Palace Yard to wish him joy of this long-deferred triumph. He replied playfully to one of them, "Well, what shall we abolish next?" Since that day there has been much to abolish in England; many a house of bondage then unsuspected, many an "offence" in the path of Christ's "little ones." And who shall say that the task is now complete, and that the will of the heavenly Father has been at last accomplished? The "offences" which cause ruin may be less flagrant than of old; their action may be more subtle, the means for removing them may also be more subtle, and leave a less conspicuous mark on history; but they are none the less real. Christ's "little ones," if only we have open Christ-like eyes, we have always with us in our country, in our parish, in the circle of our friends, perhaps in our own family.

crusaders, It is the will of God, only tempering that cry by the gracious and tender interpretation of it, It is the will of God that not one of His little ones should perish? If the Spirit of God, who alone can inspire any lasting devotion, can stamp this conviction deep in the heart of any here present, then will be proved once more the truth, the abiding truth, of the Saviour's promise, My words shall not pass away.

It is on His words that we have been dwelling. We have tried to catch their spirit. We have tried, not so much to prove, as to make it felt, that they are still living. We have shown that illustrious lives have been lived in the faith of them, and famous causes fought and won in their name. And now we say here to one and another, aiming our shaft at a venture, but believing that among so many it will somewhere hit, "Go and do thou likewise." Search out for some of Christ's "little ones"-weakness in some form, weakness despised, down-trodden, sorely tempted, much degraded, on the brink of perishing. Ask how it has all so come to pass, and why its state is still so pitiable. Understand, too, why it is that other attemptsto restore have failed, and why there be many that say that no restoration is possible. And then confront all these cries of despondency, however proud the tone with which they announce their conclusions, with the one strong declaration of your Master: "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of His little ones should perish."

The power of this truth is greater than the power of all the other half truths. In the faith of Christ many have rested from their labours-many sleep in the churchyards of England, many sleep here beneath our feet, or beneath the stone floor of other cathedrals

Do I address any to-night who are yet undecided as to their life's career? Are there any men—any young men who are not satis--who have lived and died proving, as well as fied with living for themselves? Are there any women, who, with leisure on their hands, find the life of society tame and flat, and long for the stir of some Christian campaign? Can I do wrong in suggesting to you, as your call to newness of life, the old cry of the

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believing, that this promise was true. They have taken Christ at His word. They have learned from Himself to know the true mind of His Father. They have proved that what was impossible with man was possible, and even easy, and at last triumphant, with God.

WILLIAM ARNOT.*

BY THE REV. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D., LL.D. LOSE to each other rise the Rhine | and the Danube; but descending on opposite sides of the watershed, their course, *Autobiography of the Rev. William Arnot, and Memoir. By his Daughter, Mrs. A. Fleming. London, 1877.

instead of being parallel, becomes a contrast. At the interval of half a century, two Scotchmen were born in the same rank of life, and reared under similar influences; but they, too, were on opposite sides of the watershed,

and their respective careers showed hardly a trace of visible resemblance. We know not if any reader of the brief chapter of autobiography of William Arnot, which forms the first eighty pages of this book, has been reminded of Robert Burns; but, for our part, we cannot help thinking that some striking elements of similarity were in the nature of the two men. Both were the sons of struggling farmers, or rather crofters, godly men, too, and of invincible integrity, whose example was itself a noble inheritance, and a great moral power. Both men were brought up to till the soil on their father's farms, and even in early boyhood became familiar with that toilsome life in which a little food and clothing is got in exchange for an enormous amount of the sweat of the brow. Both owed to the parish school their entrance into the domain of knowledge, and to such stray volumes as they happened to pick up the impulse that gave a special direction to their intellectual energies. To both, in early boyhood, the "History of Sir William Wallace" was a singularly attractive book, while other works of adventure, history, or imagination, served to open new worlds before them.* The sympathies of both ran deep and full with the toiling masses, making it somewhat difficult for them to be even fair and patient towards those who were born to rank and affluence. To both, nature was an object of enthusiastic delight, full of a Divine beauty and interest which vulgar eyes never saw, but which afforded a perpetual feast to all who could penetrate the superficial veil.

strong force of family affection, a turning of the heart with great power to its domestic treasures. Both were marked, too, by a sturdy independence, and by an outspoken frankness that left no doubt where their sympathies lay.

In very unequal measure, no doubt, but in both cases really, there was the poetical insight, the faculty for detecting those resemblances between the seen and the unseen, between the world of sense and the world of spirit, the expression of which, whether in prose or in verse, is the real work of the poet. In both, the poetic gift seems to have come to consciousness through the very monotony and prosaic nature of their ordinary employment. In the mouse started by his plough, Burns finds a subject for a sprightly and kindly poem, while Arnot, unable to endure a long summer day behind the harrows, gets relief in a sonnet to a snowdrop.* In the soul of both, the fountain of tears and the fountain of laughter lay near each other; the tender and the humorous chords were often touched together, and without any sense of the incongruous. The measure of the genius of the two men may have been widely different, but obviously they were of the same order, and one might naturally have looked for much resemblance in their respective careers.

Yet their actual lives were such a contrast that some will smile, possibly sneer, at our even placing the two names together. The one gay, frolicsome, untrammelled, walking in the sight of his eyes and in the ways of his heart; the other thoughtful, sedate, devout, controlling every irregular impulse, and looking back on an unblemished youth and an unsullied manhood. The one confessing, and too plainly showing, that he had """ says

"The verses to a Mouse and Mountain Daisy,

There were even more minute points of resemblance. When boyhood was passing into manhood, both were singularly susceptible of the tender passion, and were ever losing their hearts to some goddess or other. Burns tells us in his autobiography that his heart was "completely tinder," and that far Gilbert Burns, "were composed on the occasions mentioned, beyond all other impulses was "un penchant and when the author was holding the plough; I could point out the particular spot where each was composed. Holding pour l'adorable moitié du genre humain." the plough was a favourite situation with Robert for poetic Arnot in like manner confesses that through-compositions, and some of his best verses were produced when out his youth he was very susceptible, and formed many an attachment to girls of his own age and standing. He liked to chat with them on a summer evening, and was terribly afraid lest this penchant should be suspected at home. Yet along with this somewhat straggling susceptibility, reined in by Arnot, but allowed by Burns to carry him to unlawful extremes, there was in both a

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exercise." Arnot gives the following account of his first attempt at verse. "One summer day I was alone in a field driving three horses at the harrows. The 'yoking' is a period of five hours at a stretch. The ground was soft and dry. The harrows raised the hot dust round my head, and my feet at every step sunk heavily into the dry ground. It was a weary day-it was fatiguing work. I had no human being to speak to. I betook myself to rhyme. I composed a poem on a Snowdrop. It occupied my thoughts pleasantly, and diverted me from the oppressive exercise of my lungs and limbs. When twelve o'clock came, I unyoked my horses, leaped joyfully on the bare back of one, and, leading the other two, soon had the poor brutes in the stable. Off started then to my sleeping apartment, bottling all my laboured lines in my memory, and committed them to paper. The lines were sad doggrel. But though the lines are lost, the memory of the making of these lines, with the attendant circumstances, is still fresh and sweet. It is only one of a number of little mental efforts, which served to keep me from being entirely absorbed in the mass of coarse vulgarity. Little snatches of culture are of great value when brought into contact with the mind of the peasantry."

no aim in life, and that for want of it he could not keep steady; the other in full sympathy with the purpose of the Gospel of Christ, and counting it his highest honour to consecrate every energy to its advancement. The one drawn, through his own irregularities, into open and scornful antagonism to the representatives of the earnest religion of the country; the other in full sympathy with their substantial excellence, yet holding himself free, though with tender touch, to expose their blemishes. The one pouring out his soul in praise of John Barleycorn, as if he were only a father of blessings; the other denouncing him as a foul tyrant and traitor, who dragged the choicest young men and maidens to a fate more horrible than that inflicted by any Minotaur.

Where and what was the cause of this contrast? On the Divine side, no doubt, it lay in the grace that makes one man to differ from another. On the human side it lay in the spirit of self-control, which a sense of religion early evoked in Arnot, and which guided him safely through all the temptations of life. Arnot might have drifted as Burns drifted, and all his gifts and noble impulses would have been only like lights twinkling in a ruin, had not his religion become a living power, and his lot been cast with the whiterobed company that follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.

There was no very marked experience of conversion in Arnot's case. He could not tell when he began to have serious impressions. But he could trace remarkable occasions when they were so sharpened and deepened as to become like new forces in his heart. One of these was in his early childhood, when, being seriously ill, and apparently unconscious, he heard his father remark, as if he expected him to die, that he had always been attentive to his Bible and his duties. The remark had an opposite effect from what might have been expected, thereby illustrating the independence of mind and character which distinguished him through life. Had he been a pliable or commonplace child, the remark would have comforted him, and even in the prospect of death made him feel "all right." It had, in reality, the opposite effect. It led him to contrast what he knew to be the true condition of his heart with what it had seemed to his father. He knew that in God's judgment a different sentence would have been passed on him. "Some years afterwards, a sense of sinfulness was much quickened in a similar way by hearing two persons speak

favourably of my religious character. Somehow this throws one very directly on God, the heart-searcher. When one speaks evil of me, my heart defends; when one flatters me to my face, I drink in part of the flattery, and the other part I attribute to the good nature of my friend; but when one speaks well of me, not knowing that I hear it, this sends me to God, and I feel as if I were a hypocrite, to have such a character with those who see outside, while it is so different within." There is no affectation here; it is the honest judgment of an honest man. Arnot had no favour for deceptive lights, even when his own reputation seemed likely to benefit from them. He thought of the judgment of God, which is ever according to truth; and looking at things as in the presence of God, derived from it such a sense of reality that no counterfeit or sham could stand for a moment before him.

The most remarkable and decided influence on Arnot's early religious life arose from the illness and death of his only brother. Notwithstanding the amorous susceptibility to which he adverts, he seems to have owed comparatively little to female influence in the development of his Christian character. His mother died while he was an infant, and his elder sister, who seems to have been remarkably careful in many ways, does not appear to have attempted to mould his deeper nature. Arnot owed more to men; and, perhaps, this circumstance may be noted in connection with that fondness for young men, and power of attracting them, which was one of the features of his public life. The family of Kilgraston, in whose garden Arnot's brother had worked as a gardener, had come under the power of Divine grace in a remarkable way. One of the Grants, a midshipman in the navy, had been converted, and had died in the island of St. Helena, and two surviving brothers, one of whom became Sir Francis Grant of the Royal Academy, were deeply impressed by Divine truth. When Arnot's brother became ill, Francis Grant came often to see him, and would spend hours at his bedside, conversing freely on matters of spiritual experience. This could not but impress William Arnot, but it was from his own brother that the chief lesson came. His brother's disease was creeping paralysis, a very distressing malady for a young man, but cheerfully borne. His religious life, of which the origin was a secret in his own heart, grew steadily and beautifully. His brother William was drawn to him by a most tender sympathy. Whenever he

reached home at night he hastened to his bedside, and spent the evening beside him. He read to him, helped him with such employment as he could undertake, and sought in every way to mitigate his trial. He saw the end approaching, and felt the truth that this is not our rest. "The effects of that lesson never departed. The lesson was imprinted deep, and that, too, in a heart tender, yet in youth, and peculiarly softened by love and sorrow. It was calculated for a lifetime, and applied accordingly."

Many of us can remember the time when the same lesson was burnt into our hearts. Previously we knew the truth as a dogma; we knew it to be unquestionable; perhaps we could have written an excellent homily upon it. But a desolating blow came on our home, and thereafter we felt it. First afflictions are wonderful factors in the religious life. The world becomes disenchanted; from being shadows the unseen and the eternal become vivid, terrible realities, and our whole attitude to them is changed. So it was with young Arnot. Hereafter he felt himself a pilgrim and a stranger, and the world, beautiful though it was around him, was no longer his home.

The autobiography to which we have adverted contains two other passages which we must not pass over. One of them shows how Arnot's intense temperance proclivities were formed. It was in his sixteenth year that he made his first acquaintance with alcohol. "There was an annual fair in the neighbouring village of Dunning. In the evening I went to see it in the company of Mr. Thomson's foreman and other men. They led me into several public-houses, where they gave me whisky toddy. We were not very long in the village. There was not very much drinking; none of the men were intoxicated. I retained no recollection of the quantity I drank. I did not suspect danger. I had no intention and no fear of making myself tipsy; indeed, that did not occur to

me.

On the way home I felt the effects of the toddy in the form of great exhilaration of spirits. The men were greatly amused by my unwonted loquacity. After I came home I became sick and giddy. I hastened to bed; I passed a most wretched night. At the earliest dawn, about three in the morning, I left my bed and issued forth to the cool air. I was in a deplorable condition; something that seemed to be thirst was gnawing within me. I went to a well at the bottom of the garden, and drank of its clear cool stream, but it tasted like Epsom salts

in my mouth, and after I had drunk it I was as thirsty as before. . . . I was not well for several days after. . . . For many years after that I could not endure the taste of whisky in any shape, and could not even remain in a house where toddy was emitting its fumes. Whether the sense of sin and the fear of offending God would have kept me clear of drunkenness I cannot tell; but I know that the matter was not left to these motives alone. The illness that night, and the loathing of spirits which it produced, became a shield of defence to me. I sometimes think if people suffered as much as I did from their first act of inebriety they would never rush into a second."

For some time after this young Arnot went on, as best he could, conforming in some degree to the drinking customs of his class, but inwardly loathing them. His father's counsel was strong against his going to any party where drinking convivialities prevailed. Young Arnot at last summoned courage to defy public opinion, hard though he felt it to do so. He absented himself from the public-house on an occasion when his presence was counted on as indispensable, and thereby made a breach between himself and the convivialists which continued to the end of his life.

The other point we wish to notice in the autobiography is one of great interest-how young Arnot came to learn Latin, to attend the University of Glasgow, and aspire to the Christian ministry. His purpose to rise out of the condition of life in which he was arose from the consciousness of higher powers, along with an advice given him by his brother to devote himself to the ministry, backed by his own deepest desires to be employed in that service. It is a ticklish position for a young man when he is called to decide on so important a matter-so many fall into a fatal blunder from over-estimating their abilities, and misinterpreting the call of Providence. Mr. Arnot, in his autobiography, does not profess to have acted from motives entirely or absolutely pure. He honestly confesses he was sometimes ashamed of his humble calling, and that once, when a relation in better circumstances came to see him, he felt a pang shoot across him as he glanced at his rustic dress and thought of his rough employment. We are better pleased to read this than we should have been to be told that, in choosing the ministry, his motives were the very highest. Yet his conversation with his brother had impressed on him certain views of the ministry which would certainly

have kept him from aspiring to it, as some do, merely as a means of reaching a higher social position. He had already made some progress in Latin. His efforts to learn it were most commendable. He would take his Rudiments in his hand as he left his father's cottage at half-past five in the morning, and pore over a declension or a conjugation on his way to his work. At meal hours the book was again in his hands. Even when he had| five minutes' rest, waiting for his comrades, the Rudiments was again pulled from his pocket. Out of an income of nine shillings a week he had contrived, besides paying board to his father, to save twenty pounds. The matter was brought to a point one day by his father offering to take and stock for him a vacant farm in the neighbourhood. Grateful to his father, he refused the offer. He was now fairly on the rails for the ministry. But eight years of study lay before him. It was a hard pull, for he had to support himself by teaching in the intervals of study. Arnot became a zealous student. From Sir Daniel K. Sandford he caught an enthusiasm for Greek. Among his fellow-students were such men as James Halley and James Hamilton, eminent equally as scholars and as Christian men, and very delightful and stimulating as companions, both of whose biographies it fell to him subsequently to write. At length the long preparation was over, and Arnot was called to be minister of St. Peter's, Glasgow, one of the new charges which had sprung from the church extension zeal of Dr. Chalmers and his friends.

The life which follows this autobiographical fragment is a record of the pastoral work of thirty-six years, of which twenty-five were spent in Glasgow, and the remaining eleven in Edinburgh. The pastoral work was varied by sundry literary performances, and by three visits to the other side of the Atlantic. Extracts are given from many letters, and occasionally from what is called a private diary, which seems, however, to have been written, like many such diaries, with no strictly private purpose. There is a youthful vivacity running through the whole, the sprightliness of one who never lost his joyful, radiant, elastic temperament. All through, Arnot is the type of the happy, hearty Christian worker. Not only was this in accordance with his temperament, but Providence seems to have ordered his lot on purpose that this type of the servant of God might be fully realised by him. The death of his brother was his greatest domestic grief. His family life was almost unbroken sunshine. His pastoral work was

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successful, he was popular, his books sold well, his tracts were scattered like snowflakes, his speeches were always listened to with interest, and his appearances in Exeter Hall were never failures. Sunbeams fell liberally upon him, and they were reflected liberally from him. As his nature was sunny, so was his life. He could not have been content to nourish in his people a gloomy piety. What he sought to foster was piety in union with joy and gladness, with the pleasures arising from the sense of God's love, from the play of domestic affections, from the free enjoyment of nature, from the exercise of a harmless humour, from the feeling that to God's children all things work together for good, and from the hope full of immortality.

There were some very characteristic features of his ministry. His first book, entitled "The Race for Riches," was in the line of Dr. Chalmers's "Commercial Discourses." So was his principal book, his "Illustrations of the Book of Proverbs," published under the rather sensational title of "Laws from Heaven for Life on Earth." There was a strong ethical element in Arnot's preaching; but it was an ethical element on an evangelical basis. The system of grace was to him the corner-stone of the whole Gospel, as it must be to every man who understands what Christianity is. But Arnot felt that a great superstructure had to be reared on that foundation. Among the preachers of the present day, one recognises two very distinct types, apart altogether from the manner of preaching. There is the evangelistic school, who in every sermon aim at conversion; there is another school, who aim at the cultivation and upbuilding of Christian character. We should say that some English preachers, and notably the preachers in the great public schools, are of this latter class. They wish to train their hearers to ways and habits of life in accordance with the Christian spirit. They do this too often without providing for that infusion of the Christian spirit which comes from and with conversion. It seems to us that Arnot aimed at both. On the one hand, he saw no possibility of a Christian character without the initial act of union to Christ. But, on the other hand, he saw that there might be conversion attended with many defects. He wished to see all Christians true, honest, loving, and above the sordid vices so common in a commercial community. laboured to produce this type of Christian character. He had to expose vices and weaknesses of various kinds, and people

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