ARTICLE II-ROBERTSON'S SERMONS AND EXTEMPORE PREACHING. Lectures and Addresses on Literary and Social Topics. By the late Rev. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON, M. A., of Brighton. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. Sermons, preached at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. By the late Rev. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON, M. A. First, Second and Third Series. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. ON Sunday, August 15th, 1847, there appeared in the pulpit of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, a new incumbent, by the name of FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON, who for six years attracted to it a crowded congregation, distinguished throughout England for intellect, wealth, and fashion, and who, dying on the same day of the same month, in 1853, bequeathed a still wider influence to his name by the publication of the successive volumes which owe their contents chiefly to the cherished recollections of his admiring friends. His figure was frail, and marked by extreme delicacy, the work of incipient disease; his head was beautifully moulded, and evidently the temple of a lofty and proportionate mind; a face spiritual and varying with the feeling of the moment; and his utterance "melodious and thrilling." He was an extempore preacher, preaching from "a few words penciled on a card, or scrap of note paper," speaking for the most part in a style simple and direct, but sometimes rising into a style of combined beauty and force, as finished as if elaborated in the study, only more vital and effective. The reigning feature of his sermons was their intellectuality. We have not met anywhere the traces of a more thoughtful and independent spirit. He seems to have subjected every doctrine of Christianity, not excepting the most sacred, to the tests of his analysis and experience. He thinks boldly and speaks freely, but it is rationalism married to faith, it is reason obeyed and honored, but bowing, in the end, at the foot of the cross. Before, however, proceeding to speak thus specifically of him, it will be of use to inquire into the facts of his short history. Our information is not large, but of interest. Born in 1816, he died in 1853, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, and about twelve years, as far as we can gather, after his ordination. It is an important fact, and illuminates his character and style of thought, that he belonged to a military family, his brothers, father and grandfather having distinguished themselves in the British army. He had himself so strong a predilection for this profession, that he would have entered it had not the commission, for which he had been waiting, reached him four days after he had been matriculated at Brazennose College, Oxford. He ever retained this early feeling, and some of the most eloquent passages in his writings occur in the defense of the service. It will do good to those whose associations in life and habits of thought are so far removed from the profession of arms, that they can see in it no possible points of contact with practical Christianity, to learn how a mind like Robertson's, at once intelligent and Christian, exquisitely sensible to the horrors of war, and too scholarly to be caught by its shows, could look upon it with favor, and even derive from it stimulus to a more magnanimous devotion to the service of the Prince of Peace. There occurs, in his vindication of the claims of poetry upon the working classes, a passage in which he alludes to the sentiments on war so eloquently advanced by our countryman, Dr. Channing. He says: "It is wonderful how the generous enthusiasm of Dr. Channing has led him into such a sophism. Take away honor, and imagination, and Poetry from war, and it becomes carnage. Doubtless. And take away public spirit and invisible principles from resistance to a tax, and Hampden becomes a noisy demagogue. Take away the grandeur of his cause, and Washington is a rebel, instead of the purest of patriots. Take away imagination from love, and what remains? Let a people treat with scorn the defenders of its liberties, and invest them with the symbols of degradation, and it will soon have no one to defend it. This is but a truism. "But it is a falsity if it implies that the mere change of symbolical dress, unless the dress truly represented a previous change of public feeling, would reverse the feeling with which the profession of arms is regarded. So long as people found it impossible to confound the warrior with the hangman, all that a change of garb could do would be to invest the sign with new dignity. Things mean become noble by association; the Thistle-the Leek-the Broom of the Plantagenets-the Garter-and the Death's Head and Cross Bones on the front of the Black Brunswickers, typical of the stern resolve to avenge their Chief— methinks those symbols did not exactly change the soldier into a sexton! “But the truth is that here, as elsewhere, Poetry has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it. It has distinguished-as, in spite of all mercenary and feeble sophistry, men ever will distinguish-war from mere bloodshed. It has discerned the higher feelings which lie beneath its revolting features. Carnage is terrible. The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity. Death, and insults to woman worse than death—and human features obliterated beneath the hoof of the war-horse-and reeking hospitals, and ruined commerce, and violated homes, and broken hearts-they are all awful. But there is something worse than death. Cowardice is worse. And the decay of enthusiasm and manliness is worse. And it is worse than death, aye, worse than a hundred thousand deaths, when a people has gravitated down into the creed that the 'wealth of nations' consists, not in generous hearts-Fire in each breast, and freedom on each brow-in national virtues, and primitive simplicity, and heroic endurance, and preference of duty to life; not in MEN, but in silk, and cotton, and something that they call 'capital. Peace is blessed. Peace, arising out of charity. But Peace, springing out of the calculations of selfishness, is not blessed. If the price to be paid for peace is this, that wealth accumulate and men decay, better far that every street in every town of our once noble country should run blood! "Through the physical horrors of warfare, Poetry discerned the redeeming nobleness. For in truth, when war is not prolonged, the kindling of all the higher passions prevents the access of the baser ones. A nation split and severed by mean religious and political dissensions, suddenly feels its unity, and men's hearts beat together, at the mere possibility of invasion. And even woman, as the author of the 'History of the Peninsular War' has well remarked, sufferer as she is by war, yet gains; in the more chivalrous respect paid to her, in the elevation of the feelings excited towards her, in the attitude of protection assumed by men, and in the high calls to duty which arouse her from the frivolousness and feebleness into which her existence is apt to sink."-Lectures and Addresses, pp. 199–202. The passage which immediately follows, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting, as it illustrates also his power of description, and the felicity with which he borrowed illustrations from the scenes of war: "I will illustrate this by one more anecdote from the same campaign to which allusion has been already made-Sir Charles Napier's campaign against the robber tribes of Upper Scinde. "A detachment of troops was marching along a valley, the cliffs overhanging which were crested by the enemy. A sergeant, with eleven men, chanced to become separated from the rest by taking the wrong side of a ravine, which they expected soon to terminate, but which suddenly deepened into an impassable chasm. The officer in command signaled to the party an order to return. They mistook the signal for a command to charge; the brave fellows answered with a cheer, and charged. At the summit of the steep mountain was a triangular platform, defended by a breastwork, behind which were seventy of the foe. On they went, charging up one of those fearful paths, eleven against seventy. The contest could not long be doubtful with such odds. One after another they fell; six upon the spot, the remainder hurled backwards; but not until they had slain nearly twice their own number. "There is a custom, we are told, amongst the hillsmen, that when a great chieftain of their own falls in battle, his wrist is bound with a thread either of red or green, the red denoting the highest rank. According to custom, they stripped the dead, and threw their bodies over the precipice. When their com rades came, they found their corpses stark and gashed; but round both wrists of every British hero was twined the red thread !* "I think you will perceive how Poetry, expressing in this rude symbolism unutterable admiration of heroic daring, had given another aspect to war than that of butchery; and you will understand how, with such a foe, and such a general as the English commander, who more than once refused battle because the wives and children of the enemy were in the hostile camp, and he feared for their lives, carnage changed its character, and became chivalry; and how it was that the British troops learned to treat their captive women with respect; and the chieftains of the Cutchee hills offered their swords and services with enthusiasm to their conqueror; and the wild hill-tribes, transplanted to the plains, became as persevering in agriculture as they had been before in war.”— Lectures and Addresses, pp. 201–204. Robertson was largely endowed with the poetic sense; and if we may be allowed the expression, this was his organon, in his work as a Theologian and Preacher. He did not treat religion as a truth addressing the intellect alone or chiefly, but the heart. It was to him a life, an experience; and as life alone can comprehend life, and experience feel for experience, so he approached religion, not on the side of speculation, but of appropriation. We have been impressed, in reading his discourses, with the value to a minister of this poetic faculty. Some of his interpretations of Scripture are wondrously poetic, original, and inspiring. There is an exegesis by intuition, the gazing at a truth from out of eyes that sparkle with a kindred spirit, in whose depths there is an • "History of the Administration of Scinde," by Lieut. Gen. Sir William Napier. interpreted longing, an unconscious, or half unconscious want, to which the truth is an answer and a seal. Robertson insists eloquently, and with great fullness of illustration, upon the pre-requisite of unworldliness to a perception of poetry. "I know not," he says, "that I could give a more distinct idea of what I mean by unworldliness, than by relating an anecdote of a boy of rare genius, inheriting genius from both parents, who, when he began the study of mathematics, was impressed with so strange and solemn a sense of awe, that never before, he said, had he been able to comprehend the existence of the Eternal. It is not difficult to understand what the boy meant. Mathematics contain truths entirely independent of time and space; they tell of relations which have no connection, necessarily, with weight or quality; they deal with the eternal principles and laws of the mind; and it is certain that these laws are more real and eternal than anything which can be seen or felt. This is what I mean by unworldliness." He taught that "poetry, like high art, and like religion, introduces its votaries into a world of which the senses take no cognizance, and until a man's eyes have been clarified by that power which enables him to look beyond the visible; until 'He from thick films shall purge the visual ray, high poetry is simply and merely unintelligible." |