, that he was another father
than before. No more happy laughter from the two in the parlor, as he
was reading Larry, the Irish postboy's letter in Miss Edgeworth's tale,
or the last Waverley novel; no more visitings in a cart with her, he
riding beside us on his white thorough-bred pony, to Kilbucho, or Rachan
Mill, or Kirklawhill. He went among his people as usual when they were
ill; he preached better than ever--they were sometimes frightened to
think how wonderfully he preached; but the sunshine was over--the glad
and careless look, the joy of young life and mutual love. He was little
with us, and, as I said, the house was still, except when he was
_mandating_ his sermons for Sabbath. This he always did, not only _viva
voce_, but with as much energy and loudness as in the pulpit; we felt
his voice was sharper, and rang keen through the house.

What we lost, the congregation and the world gained. He gave himself
wholly to his work. As you have yourself said, he changed his entire
system and fashion of preaching; from being elegant, rhetorical, and
ambitious, he became concentrated, urgent, moving (being himself moved),
keen, searching, unswerving, authoritative to fierceness, full of the
terrors of the Lord, if he could but persuade men. The truth of the
words of God had shone out upon him with an immediateness and infinity
of meaning and power, which made them, though the same words he had
looked on from childhood, other and greater and deeper words. He then
left the ordinary commentators, and men who write about meanings and
flutter around the circumference and corners; he was bent on the centre,
on touching with his own fingers, on seeing with his own eyes, the pearl
of great price. Then it was that he began to dig into the depths, into
the primary and auriferous rock of Scripture, and take nothing at
another's hand: then he took up with the word "apprehend;" he had laid
hold of the truth,--there it was, with its evidence, in his hand; and
every one who knew him must remember well how, in speaking with
earnestness of the meaning of a passage, he, in his ardent, hesitating
way, looked into the palm of his hand as if he actually saw there the
truth he was going to utter. This word _apprehend_ played a large part
in his lectures, as the thing itself did in his processes of
investigation, or, if I might make a word, _indigation_. Comprehension,
he said, was for few; apprehension was for every man who had hands and a
h