, you have not seen
aught of its greatness: you have sailed over merely one of its little
arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried
you, "you would have _seen_ no shore, and you would have _found_ no
bottom." In one rare quality of the orator Mr. Stewart stood alone among
his contemporaries. Pope refers to a strange power of creating love and
admiration by "just touching the brink of all we hate." And Burke, in
some of his nobler passages, happily exemplifies the thing. He
intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of
figures so homely--nay, almost so repulsive--that the man of lower
powers who ventured on their use would find them effective in but
lowering his subject, and ruining his cause. I need but refer, in
illustration, to the well-known figure of the disembowelled bird, which
occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary
French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," says the
orator, "been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like
stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred
shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but
singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr.
Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the last sermons I heard
him preach--a discourse of singular power--was on the "Sin-offering" of
the Jewish economy, as minutely described in Leviticus. He drew a
picture of the slaughtered animal, foul with dust and blood, and
streaming, in its impurity, to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire
amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp--its throat gashed
across--its entrails laid open; a vile and horrid thing, which no one
could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without
contracting defilement. The description appeared too painfully
vivid--its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a
just taste. But the master in this difficult walk knew what he was
doing. And that, he said, pointing to the strongly-coloured picture he
had just completed--"And THAT IS SIN." By one stroke the intended effect
was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the
revolting material image to the great moral evil.

How could such a man pass from earth, and leave no trace behind him?
Mainly, I believe, from two several causes. As the minister of an
attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty