FullReads

When he was on a missionary tour in the north, he one morning met a band of Highland shearers on their way to the harvest; he asked them to stop and hear the word of God. They said they could not, as they had their wages to work for. He offered them what they said they would lose; to this they agreed, and he paid them, and closing his eyes engaged in prayer; when he had ended, he looked up, and his congregation had vanished! His shrewd brother Thomas, to whom he complained of this faithlessness, said, “Eben, the next time ye pay folk to hear you preach, keep your eyes open, and pay them when you are done.” I remember, on another occasion, in Bristo Church, with an immense audience, he had been going over the Scripture accounts of great sinners repenting and turning to God, repeating their names, from Manasseh onwards. He seemed to have closed the record, when, fixing his eyes on the end of the central passage, he called out abruptly, “I see a man!” Every one looked to that point,–“I see a man of Tarsus; and he says, Make mention of me!” It must not be supposed that the discourses of “Uncle Ebenezer,” with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were unwritten or extempore; they were carefully composed and written out,–only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered–they came on him again.

The Rev. John Belfrage, M. D., had more power over my father’s actions and his relations to the world, than any other of his friends: over his thoughts and convictions proper, not much,–few living men had, and even among the mighty dead, he called no man master. He used to say that the three master intellects devoted to the study of divine truth since the apostles, were Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards; but that even they were only primi inter pares,–this by the bye.

On all that concerned his outward life as a public teacher, as a father, and as a member of society, he consulted Dr. Belfrage, and was swayed greatly by his judgment, as, for instance, the choice of a profession for myself, his second marriage, etc. He knew him to be his true friend, and not only wise and honest, but preeminently a man of affairs, capax rerum. Dr. Belfrage was a great man in posse, if ever I saw one,–“a village Hampden.” Greatness was of his essence; nothing paltry, nothing secondary, nothing untrue. Large in body, large and handsome in face, lofty in manner to his equals or superiors;[20] homely, familiar, cordial with the young and the poor,–I never met with a more truly royal nature–more native and endued to rule, guide, and benefit mankind. He was forever scheming for the good of others, and chiefly in the way of helping them to help themselves. From a curious want of ambition–his desire for advancement was for that of his friends, not for his own, and here he was ambitious and zealous enough,–from non-concentration of his faculties in early life, and from an affection of the heart which ultimately killed him–it was too big for his body, and, under the relentless hydrostatic law, at last shattered the tabernacle it moved, like a steam-engine too powerful for the vessel it finds itself in,–his mental heart also was too big for his happiness,–from these causes, along with a love for gardening, which was a passion, and an inherited competency, which took away what John Hunter calls “the stimulus of necessity,” you may understand how this remarkable man–instead of being a Prime Minister, a Lord Chancellor, or a Dr. Gregory, a George Stephenson, or likeliest of all, a John Howard, without some of his weaknesses, lived and died minister of the small congregation of Slateford, near Edinburgh. It is also true that he was a physician, and an energetic and successful one, and got rid of some of his love of doing good to and managing human beings in this way; he was also an oracle in his district, to whom many had the wisdom to go to take as well as ask advice, and who was never weary of entering into the most minute details, and taking endless pains, being like Dr. Chalmers a strong believer in “the power of littles.” It would be out of place, though it would be not uninteresting, to tell how this great resident power–this strong will and authority, this capacious, clear, and beneficent intellect–dwelt in its petty sphere, like an oak in a flower-pot; but I cannot help recalling that signal act of friendship and of power in the matter of my father’s translation from Rose Street to Broughton Place, to which you have referred.