FullReads

Footnote: [2] “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”–Rev. vi. 8.

We went home quieter than we came; we did not recount the foals with their long legs, and roguish eyes, and their sedate mothers; we did not speculate upon whose dog that was, and whether that was a crow or a man in the dim moor,–we thought of other things. That voice, that face; those great, simple, living thoughts; those floods of resistless eloquence; that piercing, shattering voice,–“that tremendous necessity.”

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Were we desirous of giving to one who had never seen or heard Dr. Chalmers an idea of what manner of man he was–what he was as a whole, in the full round of his notions, tastes, affections, and powers–we would put this book into their hands, and ask them to read it slowly, bit by bit, as he wrote it. In it he puts down simply, and at once, what passes through his mind as he reads; there is no making of himself feel and think–no getting into a frame of mind; he was not given to frames of mind; he preferred states to forms–substances to circumstances. There is something of everything in it–his relish for abstract thought–his love of taking soundings in deep places and finding no bottom–his knack of starting subtle questions, which he did not care to run to earth–his penetrating, regulating godliness–his delight in nature–his turn for politics, general, economical, and ecclesiastical–his picturesque eye–his humanity–his courtesy–his warm-heartedness–his impetuosity–his sympathy with all the wants, pleasures, and sorrows of his kind–his delight in the law of God, and his simple, devout, manly treatment of it–his acknowledgment of difficulties–his turn for the sciences of quantity and number, and indeed for natural science and art generally–his shrewdness–his worldly wisdom–his genius; all these come out–you gather them like fruit, here a little, and there a little. He goes over the Bible, not as a philosopher, or a theologian, or a historian, or a geologist, or a jurist, or a naturalist, or a statist, or a politician–picking out all that he wants, and a great deal more than he has any business with, and leaving every thing else as barren to his reader as it has been to himself; but he looks abroad upon his Father’s word–as he used so pleasantly to do on his world–as a man, and as a Christian; he submits himself to its influences, and lets his mind go out fully and naturally in its utterances. It is this which gives to this work all the charm of multitude in unity, of variety in harmony; and that sort of unexpectedness and ease of movement which we see everywhere in nature and in natural men.

Our readers will find in these delightful Bible Readings not a museum of antiquities, and curiosities, and laborious trifles; nor of scientific specimens, analyzed to the last degree, all standing in order, labelled and useless. They will not find in it an armory of weapons for fighting with and destroying their neighbors. They will get less of the physic of controversy than of the diet of holy living. They will find much of what Lord Bacon desired, when he said, “We want short, sound, and judicious notes upon Scripture, without running into commonplaces, pursuing controversies, or reducing those notes to artificial method, but leaving them quite loose and native. For certainly, as those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not wrung into controversies and commonplaces.” They will find it as a large pleasant garden; no great system; not trim, but beautiful, and in which there are things pleasant to the eye as well as good for food–flowers and fruits, and a few good, esculent, wholesome roots. There are Honesty, Thrift, Eye-bright (Euphrasy that cleanses the sight), Heart’s-ease. The good seed in abundance, and the strange mystical Passion-flower; and in the midst, and seen everywhere, if we but look for it, the Tree of Life, with its twelve manner of fruits–the very leaves of which are for the healing of the nations. And, perchance, when they take their walk through it at evening time, or at “the sweet hour of prime,” they may see a happy, wise, beaming old man at his work there–they may hear his well-known voice; and if they have their spiritual senses exercised as they ought, they will not fail to see by his side, “one like unto the Son of Man.”