Our last conveyed to our readers the mournful intelligence of the illness and death of the Rev. Alexander Stewart of Cromarty,––a man less known, perhaps, than any other of nearly equal calibre, or of a resembling exquisitiveness of mental faculty, which his country has ever produced, but whose sudden removal has, we find, created an impression far beyond the circle of even his occasional hearers, that the spirit which has passed away was one of the high cast which nature rarely produces, and that the consequent blank created in the existing phalanx of intellect is one which cannot be filled up. Comparatively little as the deceased was known beyond his own immediate walk of duty or circle of acquaintanceship, it is yet felt by thousands, of whom the greater part knew of him merely at second-hand by the abiding impression which he had left on the minds of the others, that, according to the poet,

The subject is one with which we can scarce trust ourselves. There are no writings to which we can appeal, for Mr. Stewart has left none, or at least none suited to convey an adequate impression of his powers; and yet of nothing are we more thoroughly convinced, than that the originality and vigour of his thinking, and the singular 171 vividness and force of his illustrations, added to a command of the principles of analogical reasoning, which even a Butler might have envied, entitled him to rank with the ablest and most extraordinary men of the age. Coleridge was not more thoroughly original, nor could he impart to his pictures more vividness of colouring, or more decided strength of outline. In glancing over our limited stock of idea, to note how we have come by it, we find that to two Scotchmen of the present century we stand more largely indebted than to any of their contemporaries, either at home or abroad. More of their thinking has got into our mind than that of any of the others; and their images and illustrations recur to us more frequently. And one of these is Thomas Chalmers; the other, Alexander Stewart.

There is an order of intellect decidedly original in its cast, and of considerable power, to whom notwithstanding originality is dangerous. Goldsmith, when he first entered on his literary career, found that all the good things on the side of truth had already been said; and that his good things, if he really desired to produce any, would require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. ‘When I was a young man,’ he states, in a passage which Johnson censured him for afterwards expunging, ‘being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over, for I found that generally what was new was false.’ Poor Edward Irving formed a melancholy illustration of this species of originality. His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker, or his pernicious drug to that of the inveterate opium-eater; and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not continue to exist, he launched into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made shipwreck of his faith. His originality formed but 172 the crooked wanderings of a journeyer who had forsaken the right way, and lost himself in the mazes of a doleful wilderness. Not such the originality of the higher order of minds; not such, for instance, the originality of a Newton, of whom it has been well said by a distinguished French critic, that ‘what province of thought soever he undertook, he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by the rest of men.’ One of the most striking characteristics of Mr. Stewart’s originality was the solidity of the truths which it always evolved. His was not the ability of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the direction in which they led was one in which men’s thought had no occasion to travel, and no business to perform. It was, on the contrary, the greatly higher ability of enlarging, widening, and lengthening the avenues long before opened upon important truths, and, in consequence, enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old, familiar directions. That in which he excelled all men we ever knew, was the analogical faculty––the power of detecting and demonstrating occult resemblances. He could read off as if by intuition––not by snatches and fragments, but as a consecutive whole––that older revelation of type and symbol which God first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to him, we have recognised, in the evident integrity of the reading, and the profound and consistent wisdom of what the record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, not less powerful and convincing than that to be found in any department of the Christian evidences yet opened up. Compared with even the higher names in this department, we have felt under his ministry as if, when admitted to the company of some party of modern savans employed in deciphering a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk of the desert, and here successful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, 173 to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off fluently and as a whole what the others could but darkly and painfully 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 single stroke produced a figure that swept across the subject-matter of his discourse like the image of a lantern on a wall; in others, he dwelt upon the picture produced, finishing it with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. We 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 at once that of metaphor: ‘When Joseph,’ he said, ‘shall reveal himself to his brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping.’ Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the 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 green berry-covered misletoe on the mossy trunk of a reverend oak, there sprang up one of his more lengthened illustrations. A child bred up in the interior of the country has been 174 brought for the first time to the sea-shore, and carried out to the middle of one of the noble friths that indent so deeply our line of coast; and on his return he informs his father, with all a child’s eagerness, of the wonderful expansiveness of the ocean which he has seen. He went out, he tells, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, till at length the huge 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 over the boat-edge coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ouse 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, you have not yet 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, in one of his satires, 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 in themselves, that a man of lower powers who ventured their use would find them efficient merely in lowering his subject and ruining his cause. We may refer, in illustration, to Burke’s celebrated figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in his indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. ‘We have not,’ he says, ‘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.’ 175 Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely and at will. We heard him, scarce a twelvemonth since, deliver a discourse of singular power, on the sin-offering of the Jewish economy, as minutely particularized by the divine penman in Leviticus. He described the slaughtered animal––foul with dust and blood––its throat gashed across––its entrails laid open––and steaming in its impurity to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire, amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp,––a vile and horrid thing, which no one could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The picture appeared too painfully vivid, its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a just taste. It seemed a thing to be covered up, not exhibited. But the master in this difficult walk well knew what he was doing. ‘And that,’ he said, as if 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.

We had fondly hoped that for a man so singularly gifted, and who had but reached the ripe maturity of middle life, there remained important work yet to do. He seemed peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a commanding sphere, for ministering to some of the intellectual wants, and for withstanding with singular efficiency some of the more perilous tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which many have so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome and the pernicious, he could satisfy with provision at once sound and novel. And no man of the age had more thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors of the time in their first insidious approaches, or could more skilfully indicate the exact point at which they diverge from 176 the truth. But his work on earth is for ever over; and the sense of bereavement is deepened by the reflection that, save in the memory of a few, he has left behind him no adequate impress of the powers of his understanding or of the fineness of his genius. It is strange how much the lack of a single ingredient in a man’s moral constitution––and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast––may affect one’s whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study much and deeply; and he poured forth viva voce his full-volumed and many-sparkling tide of eloquent idea as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the shade. But he could not be made to understand or believe, that what so impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him was equally suited to impress and delight the many outside, or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. And so his exquisitely-toned thinking perished like the music of the bygone years, has died with himself, or, we should perhaps rather say, has gone with him to that better land, where all those fruits of intellect that the human spirits of greatest calibre have in this world produced, must form but the comparatively meagre beginnings of infinite, never-ending acquirement.

Mr. Stewart was one of the eminently excellent and loveable, and his entire character of the most transparent, childlike simplicity. The great realities of eternity were never far distant from his thoughts. Endowed with powers of humour at least equal to his other faculties, and a sense of 177 the ludicrous singularly nice, he has often reminded us in his genial moments, when indulging most freely, of a happy child at play in the presence of its father. Never was there an equal amount of wit more harmlessly indulged, or from which one could pass more directly or with less distraction to the contemplation of the matters which pertain to eternity. And no one could be long in his company without having his thoughts turned towards that unseen world to which he has now passed, or without receiving emphatic testimony regarding that Divine Person who is the wisdom and the power of God.

We have seen it stated that Mr. Stewart ‘was slow to join the non-intrusion party, and to acquiesce in the necessity of the secession.’ On this point we are qualified to speak. No one enjoyed more of his society during the first beginnings of the controversy, or was more largely honoured with his confidence, than the writer of these remarks; and the one point of difference between Mr. Stewart and him in their discussions in those days was, that while the writer was sanguine enough to anticipate a successful termination to the Church’s struggle, his soberer anticipations were of a character which the Disruption in 1843 entirely verified. But with the actual result full in view, he was yet the first man in his parish––we believe, in his presbytery also––to take his stand, modestly and unassumingly as became his character, but with a firmness which never once swerved or wavered. Nay, long ere the struggle began, founding on data with which we pretend not to be acquainted, he declared his conviction to not a few of his parishioners, that of the Establishment, as then constituted, he was to be the last minister in that parish. We know nothing, we repeat, of the data on which he founded; but he himself held that the conclusion was fairly deducible from those sacred oracles which no man more profoundly studied or more thoroughly knew. Alas! 178 what can it betoken our Church, that we should thus see such men, at once its strength and its ornament, so fast falling around us, like commanding officers picked down at the beginning of a battle, and that so few of resembling character, and none of at least equal power, should be rising to occupy the places made desolate by their fall!

November 13, 1847.