ART. III.-FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON. Just fifty years ago last August, Frederick William Robertson died in the thirty-eighth year of his age. Out of the last six years of his life came a series of sermons which multitudes have read with the absorbing interest of romance, and of which Principal Fairbairn says, "No body of sermons preached in the nineteenth century has had the same reformative power." The fullness of the strength of this rare preacher was spent in these few years. Prior to August, 1847, when he became rector of Trinity Church, Brighton, his history is interesting only because of what he was subsequent to that date. The record of his early life and education does not distinguish him from the multitude of other bright boys who have sincerely struggled to find their place in the world. His brief curacy in Winchester was not marked by anything unusual to give the slightest hint of what he was destined to become. His biographer says that his sermons. there contain all the characteristic doctrines against which he afterward so deliberately protested at Brighton. They were startlingly inferior, overloaded with minute analysis of dogmas, and weakened by the conventionalities of university theology. His career at Cheltenham, his second pastorate, was somewhat better; but, notwithstanding an evident development of intellectual strength, nothing appears there to foretell the giant spirit which was soon to startle the world with a trumpet blast, which the best minds of our generation believe sounded the voice of God, the reverberations of which are rumbling like a retiring thunderstorm along the edges of our century. In 1846 he left Cheltenham, broken in health, sick at heart, pronouncing his whole ministry a failure, with passionately morbid views of life, tormented with doubts, yet with a deep feeling that there was somewhere a satisfying truth which would fill his being if only in some way he could get his eyes open. A few months later he returned a new man, speaking with no stammering of mere surmise, nor the

dull monotony of recitation, but with strength of conviction, and clearness of statement, and magnetism of genuine life, that made him the foremost preacher of his century. Professor Hewett, of Cornell University, quotes approvingly an eminent bishop, whom he does not name: "Robertson was the greatest spiritual force of the nineteenth century in England." Dr. Edward Paxton Hood says, "No preacher has so touched the heart of the thoughtful, earnest classes of our day; and I am greatly mistaken if the published Life be not the noblest of them all." We are all familiar with Dean Stanley's opinion that he was superior to Newman and Arnold. Phillips Brooks delighted to acknowledge the immeasurable influence of Robertson on his character and ministry. W. S. Rainsford in his story in The Outlook tells of how when passing through the gravest ordeal of his life, when all others failed him, even Bishop Brooks telling him, “You must fight it out yourself," Robertson came to him with saving helpfulness. There are thousands in the ministry of all denominations who are ready to gratefully testify that his sincerity, his passionate devotion to duty, his unquestioning loyalty to the intuition of a pure heart as the only safe rule of morality, and the wealth of his sermons have gone like iron of another's soul into their very blood. His sermons have been translated into French and German, and have been read with the same avidity on the Continent as in England and America. It is almost incredible that six brief years of pastoral work could produce results so profound and so world-wide. It was certainly divine.

It is not our purpose in this article to repeat the familiar biography of this unusual man; much less to attempt a criticism of his sermons, which still charm the noblest minds and are accepted as models by nearly every phase of religious thought. But now that the cloud of intense passion and personal hostility which, fifty years ago, veiled this luminary is lifted, we propose to seek the secret of his stupendous influence through all these years. Whether we have found it or not, we are confident that we have the key of the door which

opens into the chamber where the secret lies. It is certainly not to be found in favoring environment. Outside of Brighton and a few personal friends his name commanded no recognition. Trinity Chapel was a small and unpretentious edifice which compared poorly with some of the second-rate Dissenting churches in the same town, and was attended chiefly by the poor. He had the backing of no party, but in his thought-life stood almost alone and far removed from the sympathy of his brethren. He never was an author. A single sermon and a few of his lectures had been hastily prepared for the press; and these he regarded as ephemeral, and none of them elicited very marked consideration. He rarely wrote a sermon, and those we have were mostly compiled from notes prepared by himself or taken by his admirers as they were spoken from the pulpit. They were printed for the personal gratification of those who loved him, and none were more surprised than they when they saw this handful of corn shaking like Lebanon. Nor do we believe that his singular intellectual intensity will explain his wonderful popularity. There were many giants in the British pulpit in those days-Stanley, Kingsley, Maurice, Martineau, Liddon, Newman, Archer Butler, Pusey, Keble, and many others, intellectual Goliaths with helmets of brass and coats of mail and carrying spears with staffs like a weaver's beam. In point of scholarship the young man of Brighton could hardly measure with the stalwarts of his time. In saying this we have no intention of depreciating his intellectual strength. In mental acuteness he had few peers. His power of analysis was charmingly simple because thoroughly logical and natural. Combined with this was a dominating synthetical element which brought diverse and even contradictory facts into a complete and consistent whole. His insight, which discerned essential truth incrusted in doubtful accretions, was all but preternatural. The feature of his literary style was its severe and curt simplicity, which sometimes seemed altogether too frail to carry the many thoughts with which he loaded it. He had a horror of what we call style,

and instinctively shirked it. The consequence was his speech became the thinnest possible body of his thought, quivering with its life, iridescent with its colors, and throwing out thought-fragrance like the breath of the rose. His speech was almost disincarnated thought, and that gave to it the resonance of poetry. Its beauty was unlike Guthrie's, which was overloaded with paint from his palette, or that of Ruskin, which flashed like precious stones cut and polished by the lapidary. His was the outburst of life, which came like the voices and colors of nature. His simple speech rolls on with rhythmic movement like the rise and fall of the ocean's breast or the swing of the forest. In the same sense that Gautier pronounced Lamartine to be the greatest musician of poetry, we can say that Robertson was the greatest musician. of sermons.

The secret of his power was spiritual rather than intellectual. He met and interpreted a widely felt religious want of his time. When he entered the ministry the religious life of the English Church was restless, tossing upon the billows of uncertainty. A dead traditionalism would not satisfy hearts that craved life. Ecclesiastical ceremonies that once were the bloom of a living faith had become fixed mounds to suppress it. Theological dogmas were more matters for prolonged and often acrid discussion than things to be realized in experience. The spirituality that was ardently cultivated was that of inward mood, lyrical and feverish, rather than that of active beneficence. True men felt the unreality of it all and were groping "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone." Newman's "Lead, kindly Light" was begotten of that period, and accurately expresses it. Many, like him, went over to Rome to rest in an authoritative faith which had the backing of the centuries. Others sought refuge in Trinitarianism, which, notwithstanding its chill, did not, at least, require a soul to be untrue in professing a faith that was confessedly unreal. Others renounced all faith in deadening dogma and plunged headlong into infidelity. Still others sought to make religion real by arti

ficially awakened emotions, which stimulated without making one a whit better. The religious life of the great multitude was expressed in the word "groping." Into that condition Robertson came like a prophet of God, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. His preparation for his supreme work was a severe one. But right gloriously did he meet it; and this made his life, which in all its outward events was very commonplace, as fascinating as that of heroic knighthood. Only, the chivalry, the courage, the conflict, the victory, the prancing steeds, the glittering armor, and the tossing plumes were all within. His was the story of a soul.

He began his ministry as an Evangelical, and sought the unfolding of his divine life along the lines of thought peculiar to that school, and by the most devoted use of its methods. He preached the orthodox doctrines. He sought inward holiness by fastings, sacraments, and abstention from worldly things. He gave himself to devotion, meditation, secret prayer, and alms. It is a wonder that he did not become a Fénelon or a Fletcher. If he had continued ten years longer on that line the Anglican Church would have produced another Mystic whom we would have catalogued among the saints. But there were two things that prevented it: First, the results did not verify his faith. After all his effort things did not come to pass. Wisdom was not justified of her children. Whether it was literally so or not, he at least felt that it was all a failure both in his inner life and in his ministry. The people did not become holy. They were the same erring, striving people as those who were not so orthodox. Some of the most evangelical ones were selfish, sordid, mean; while some who were the farthest removed from the so-called true faith were the most refined, generous, manly. All this produced grave doubt as to the truth of the teachings which he had believed lay at the foundation of character. There was, however, one thing that prevented the utter collapse of his faith, and that was an exceptional case in which all he believed ought to be actually occurred. A single perfect flower proves the genuineness of the plant and is an assurance of the