The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

people called Shakers, who, like the Catholic Apostolic Church, sprung from the Irvingite movement, have protracted some sort of existence to our day.

The religious atmosphere of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century was exceedingly unsettled and filled with a restless desire for change. In particular premillenarian extravagances were rife, and men were heatedly looking for the early coming of the Lord. It was out of this soil that Irvingism grew, predicting the immediate advent of Christ, and proclaiming the restoration of the extraordinary offices and gifts of the Apostolic age, along with an elaborate church organization, in preparation for His coming. Never have pretensions to gifts and powers of a supernatural order suffered more speedily and definitely the condemnation of facts. The predicted coming of the Lord did not take place: the "Apostles" appointed to receive Him at His coming were gradually called to their eternal home, and still He came not; the pretenders to supernatural gifts one after another awoke to the true state of the case and acknowledged themselves deluded. But the sect of Irvingites, broken in spirit, torn with dissension, altered in its pretensions, still hves on and adjusts itself to its blasted hopes as best it may.^

The views of Edward Irving, the founder of the sect, on the special matter now before us, the persistence or revival of the ApostoHc charismata in the modern church, may be read at large in two papers, entitled respectively "The Church with her endowment of holiness and power" and "The Gifts of the Holy Ghost commonly called supernatural," which are printed at the end of his Collected Writings, edited by his nephew, Gavin Carlyle. One or two extracts will bring before us the essential elements of his teaching.

"I have shown," he writes, "the great purpose and end of this endowment of Spiritual gifts: that purpose and end is not temporary but perpetual, till Christ's coming again; when that which is perfect shall come, and that which is in part shall be done away. If they ask for an explanation of the fact that these powers have ceased in the Church, I answer, that they have decayed just as faith and hoHness have decayed; but that they have ceased is not a matter so clear. Till the time of the Reformation, this opinion was never mooted in the Church; and to this day, the Roman Catholics and every other portion of the Church but ourselves, maintain the very contrary.... And I would say, that this gift hath ceased to be visible in the Church because of her great ignorance concerning the work of Christ at His second coming, of which it is the continual sign; because of her most culpable ignorance of Christ's crowned glory, of which it is the continual demonstration; because of her indifference to the world without, for preaching to which the gift of the Holy Ghost is the continual furnishing and outfit of the Church.... But things are taking a turn. Let the Church know that things are taking on a mighty turn. There is a shining forth of truth in these subjects beyond former days. The power and glory of a risen Lord, as well as the holiness of a Lord in flesh, is beginning to be understood and discussed of; and the enemy would spread a curtain of their sophistry between the Church and the bright dawn; he might as well hide the morning by drawing before our eyes the spider's web or the frostwork of the night, which the rising sun quickly dissipates.... The Church... will have her full dignity restored to her of testifying... of a risen Lord in power and glory, crowned for His Church and in His Church putting forth unto the world a first-fruit of that power and government over all creation which in her He will ever exercise over all creation. These gifts have ceased, I would say, just as the verdure, and leaves, and flowers, and fruits of the spring and summer and autumn cease in winter, because, by the chill and wintry blasts which have blown over the Church, her power to put forth her glorious beauty hath

been prevented. But because the winter is without a green leaf or beautiful flower, do men therefore argue that there shall be flowers and fruits no more?... If the Church be still in existence, and that no one denies; and if it be the law and end of her being to embody a first-fruit and earnest of the power which Christ is to put forth in the redemption of all nature; then what though she hath been brought so low, her life is still in her, and that life will, under a more fervent day, put forth its native forces." "Unless men, therefore, be left so far to themselves as to say that God hath ceased to testify to the work which Christ performed in the flesh — of casting Satan out; of redeeming all flesh from death, and disease its precursor; of restoring the animal and vegetable world, and all creation, to their original sinlessness, innocency, and subserviency to mankind — unless men be disposed to say, that they know God hath ceased to be at any pains or charges in giving testimony to this work of His Son, they have no ground for believing that the age of miracles is past.... As to the fact which they allege, that there have not of a long time been any such seals; granting their allegation to be a truth, which I do not beUeve, the answer to it is, that there hath been no testimony to the great work of Christ's redemption such as to be worthy of being so sealed unto... in Christendom, since the first three centuries.... The subject of the gifts, commonly called extraordinary, and rashly conceived of as given for a local and temporary end, is one of far greater importance than the advocates of either opinion have dared to conceive, or, at least, have ventured to express: being as I Judge, connected in the closest manner with the edification of the Church in love and holiness; with her witness among the nations for their conversion unto Christ; with the glory of God as the creator of the human soul for His shrine, agent, and interpreter; with the glory of Christ, as the head of the Church, subordinating all the members unto Himself for the use of the Creator;

with the glory of the Holy Ghost, as the very life and mind and substance of Godhead, inhabiting, informing and manifesting forth the being of God, in such wise that the Church should be God's manifested fullness, the fullness of God, who filleth all in all."^"

It is not my purpose to enter on a formal examination and criticism of Irving's views; they have already been judged by the course of history. But having thus presented them to you in his own highly ornate language, we may turn our attention to some account of the rise of the movement called (but not by its adherents) "Irvingism," as to a theme far more interesting and certainly as instructive for the general object which we have in view. We have spoken of Edward Irving as its founder, and so he was, without whose susceptibility, enthusiasm, force, and eloquence it could never have come into existence. But in another sense he may be thought of rather as its chief victim. It presents a curious subject for speculation, to consider how little often the chief movers in events like this are the real originators of them or the true forces which produce them. Just as J. H. Newman was in every high sense the leader of the Oxford movement while yet he himself was rather pushed on by the activity of others, so that it is Hterally true that it was Hurrell Froude who v/as at the bottom of his Anglo-Catholicism and W. G. Ward who nagged him, against his will, into Romanism; so Edward Irving was in every high sense the founder and leader of "Irvingism," which justly bears his name, while yet it is equally true that he was driven into it step by step by the influence and force of other minds. With all his sensitiveness of heart, enthusiastic earnestness of purpose, soaring views of reUgious truth, and grandeur of style in its presentation; in a word, with all those qualities which in their combination gave him a certain measure of greatness; his simplicity, perhaps we must also say, within due limits, his vanity, and certainly we must say his intellectual

weakness and deficiency in Judgment and common sense, made him the easy prey of other and more energetic orders of mind. Henry Drummond was his Hurrell Froude; Alexander J. Scott was his W. G. Ward.

Irving had none too brilliant a career as the young assistant of Chalmers in Glasgow, and the summons to London in July, 1822, to take charge of the dying Caledonian Chapel there, came no less as a surprise than as an opportunity.^^ From the first, however, he achieved in London a popularity which began by being astonishing, and ended by being immense. He became the talk of the town. Statesmen and men of letters hung on his words. Society took him under its patronage. The little church in Hatton Garden was soon outgrown. This sudden and unexampled popular applause perhaps did not completely turn his head, but it distinctly injured him. It left him an enthusiastic, simple-minded man; but it gave him overweening confidence in himself; and it infected him with the illusion that some high and world-wide mission had been committed to him.

At the very beginning of his London career, he adopted the crass premillennial views which later colored his whole thought. This was the work in him of James Hatley Frere,^^ a man of incisive mind and strong individuality, who seems to have deliberately selected Irving to be the popular mouthpiece of his Apocalyptic speculations. These he succeeded in impressing on him with amazing completeness of detail. Then came "the little prophetic conferences" at Albury, Henry Drummond's beautiful Surrey residence, v/here *'the students of prophecy," as they called themselves, began in 1826 to meet for annual conferences on the meaning of the prophetic Scriptures. ^^ These conferees were men of high social position and easy financial circumstances — Gerard Noel, Hugh McNeile, Lewis Way, Joseph Wolf, with Henry Drummond, the richest and most eccentric of them all, at their head — "a singular mixture of all things," Carlyle describes him; "of the saint, the wit, the philosopher, swimming, if I mistake not, in an element of dandyism." ^^ Irving's imaginative disposition took fire, and he soon became the chief figure of the coterie, and began to proclaim everywhere that the Lord was shortly to come, and that the chief duty of behevers was to press the signs of the times on the attention of men.

In this excited state of mind Irving was called upon to endure great personal trials. His opinions on the person of Christ were very properly called in question; and he was compelled to meet ecclesiastical process in consequence. In the midst of these distracting occurrences, he undertook a Journey to Scotland that he might proclaim there, as in London, the approaching coming of his Master. ^^ On this journey he met at Row (McLeod Campbell's parish) a man whose influence on his subsequent life cannot be overestimated— Alexander J. Scott, an impracticable probationer of the church of Scotland, whose strong and acute but indocile and wilful mind imposed upon every one whom he met an overestimate of his intellectual ability. This was in the summer of 1828. Irving was at once taken captive and engaged Scott to come up to London with him and share his work, on the only terms on which Scott could either then or at any subsequent time have been engaged — "entirely unfettered by any pledge as to doctrine."^® This "powerful and singular spirit," so sceptical of whatever others beheved — his driftage carried him ultimately beyond the limits of Christianity — so confident of whatever his mind fixed itself upon at the moment, had already reached the conclusion that the charismata of the early church might and should be enjoyed by the church of all ages. He succeeded in imposing this behef upon Irving, who himself dates his conviction that the spiritual gifts of the Apostolic age were not exceptional or temporary from 1828 — the year in which he became associated with Scott.^'

Irving was inclined to be content with holding his view