Rab and His Friends and Other Papers. Brown John

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      When we got to the village all the people were at their doors. One woman, the blacksmith Thomas Spence's wife, had a nursing baby in her arms, and he leapt up and crowed with joy at the strange sight, the crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse. This was my brother William, then nine years old, and Margaret Spence was his foster-mother. Those with me were overcome at this sight; he of all the world whose, in some ways, was the greatest loss, the least conscious, turning it to his own childish glee.

      We got to the churchyard and stood round the open grave. My dear old grandfather was asked by my father to pray; he did. I don't remember his words; I believe he, through his tears and sobs, repeated the Divine words, "All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass; the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth for ever;" adding, in his homely and pathetic way, that the flower would again bloom, never again to fade; that what was now sown in dishonour and weakness, would be raised in glory and power, like unto His own glorious body. Then to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, was placed over that dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also another much smaller springing from the same point as his, which he had caused to be put there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand. I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it rested at the bottom, it was too far down for me to see it – the grave was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might hold us all – my father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed by the rest.

      This was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end disappearing in the gloom.

      My mother's death was the second epoch in my father's life; it marked a change at once and for life; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved. 11 But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, because an entire change in his way of dealing with God's Word. Not that his abiding religious views and convictions were then originated or even altered – I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was "wise unto salvation" – but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave permanent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power – with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled; but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that [Greek] burned with a new ardour; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties have either consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion, or dwindled into lethargy. 12

      The manse became silent; we lived and slept and played under the shadow of that death, and we saw, or rather felt, that he was another father than before. No more happy laughter from the two in the parlour, 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 vivâ 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 everyone 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 head to rule them, and an eye to direct them. Out of this arose one of his deficiencies. He could go largely into the generalities of a subject, and relished greatly others doing it, so that they did do it really and well; but he was averse to abstract and wide reasonings. Principles he rejoiced in: he worked with them as with his choicest weapons; they were the polished stones for his sling, against the Goliaths of presumption, error, and tyranny in thought or in polity, civil or ecclesiastical; but he somehow divined a principle, or got at it naked and alone, rather than deduced it and brought it to a point from an immensity of particulars, and then rendered it back so as to blind them into one cosmos. One of my young friends, who afterwards went to India, and now dead, used to come and hear him in Broughton Place with me, and this word apprehend caught him, and as he had a great love for my father, in writing home to me, he never forgot to ask how "grand old Apprehend" was.

      From this time dates my father's possession and use of the German Exegetics. After my mother's death I slept with him; his bed was in his study, a small room, 13 with a very small grate; and I remember well his getting those fat, shapeless, spongy German books, as if one would sink in them, and be bogged in their bibulous, unsized paper; and watching him as he impatiently cut them up, and dived into them in his rapid, eclectic way, tasting them, and dropping for my play such a lot of soft, large, curled bits from the paper-cutter, leaving the edges all shaggy. He never came to bed when I was awake, which was not to be wondered at; but I can remember often awaking far on in the night or morning, and seeing that keen, beautiful, intense face bending over these Rosenmullers, and Ernestis, and Storrs, and Kuinoels – the fire out, and the grey dawn peering through the window; and when he heard me move, he would speak to me in the foolish words of endearment my mother was wont to use, and come to bed, and take me, warm as I was, into his cold bosom.

      Vitringa in Jesaiam I especially remember, a noble folio. Even then, with that eagerness to communicate what he had himself found, of which you must often have been made the subject, he went and told it. He would try to make me, small man as I was, "apprehend" what he and Vitringa between them had made out of the fifty-third chapter of his favourite prophet, the princely Isaiah. 14 Even then, so far as I can recal, he never took notes of what he read. He did not need this, his intellectual force and clearness were so great; he was so totus in illo, whatever it was, that he recorded, by a secret of its own, his mind's results and victories and memoranda, as he went on; he did not even mark his books, at least very seldom; he marked his mind.

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