thers could but darkly guess at in
detached and broken parts. To this singular power of tracing analogies
there was added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid
illustrations. In some instances a sudden stroke produced a figure that
at once illuminated the subject-matter of his discourse, like the light
of a lanthorn flashed hastily upon a painted wall; in others he dwelt
upon an illustrative picture, finishing it with stroke after stroke,
until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. I
remember hearing him preach, on one occasion, on the return of the Jews
as a people to HIM whom they had rejected, and the effect which their
sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile
world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent
simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When JOSEPH," he said, "shall
reveal himself to his _brethren_, the _whole house of Pharaoh shall hear
the weeping_." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast
profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which
ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored,
until at length the student--struck at first by its expansiveness, but
conceiving of it as if it were a mere _measured_ expansiveness--finds
that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the Divine nature itself.
Naturally and simply, as if growing out of the subject, like a
berry-covered mistletoe out of the massy trunk of an oak, there sprung
up one of his more lengthened illustrations. A child bred up in the
interior of the country has been brought for the first time to the
sea-shore, and carried out into the middle of one of the noble firths
that indent so deeply our line of coast. And, on his return, he
describes to his father, with all a child's eagerness, the wonderful
expansiveness of the _ocean_ which he had seen. He went out, he tells
him, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, until at length the
hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself
appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then, when in
mid-sea, the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and
down, and the long line slipped swiftly away, coil after coil, till, ere
the plummet rested on the ooze below, all was well-nigh expended. And
was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so
profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father