prevalent sensitiveness as to the orthodoxy of ministers compared with the callousness as to their spirituality; and declares that there never can be peace in the Church so long as different forms of church government are held as being of divine appointment, the jure divino Prelatists and the jure divino Presbyterians appearing men of the same class, subject to the same delusions, and both of them infected with the temper which that delusion creates. The writer's future adhesion to the letter of Calvinism becomes very doubtful, when we find him arguing that the consistency of theological systems, instead of being a powerful evidence of their truth, is a sufficient argument of their being ill-founded.

"For seeing only a part of the moral system revealed to us in the Bible, a fact which no competent judge will question,-any system which harmonizes these parts so as to give them the completeness of a finished and consistent whole, must misrepresent the parts and force them into combinations not natural; as if a person should attempt to form a complete map when some of the sections into which it had been cut were awanting.' ""*

Removing from Arbroath to Campsie, Mr. Lee formed a most happy marriage, and his life is described as being singularly active, bright and happy, shining with a clear light of heart and intellect, full of well-done work and of kindly affection and friendship, with the sacredness of a real and quiet piety pervading all. He takes great pains with his preaching, so that, as one of his parishioners remarked, "You never find Mr. Lee flat," arranges in a decent and solemn order the exercises of a weekly prayer-meeting; kindly troubles himself to write a long exposure of Mormonism for a poor member of his flock led away by its pretensions; and although he occasionally roused indignation by "falling foul of the Shorter Catechism" in the pulpit, and his criticisms on the Bible were pronounced "injudicious," yet his self-denying diligence and zeal gained general respect.

His sermons possessed that directness of speech which gives Scotch preaching its intense practical power, in spite of the theological technicalities both of language and thought by which it is commonly pervaded, and which often tem

* I. 61.

pers the solemnity of religious exhortation with a strange mingling of sarcasm and humour. Mr. Lee, for example, once said, fixing his eye on a prominent member of his congregation who was dosing in the front gallery, “I am now coming to an important point, so I hope those who are sleeping will awake, and those who are awake will pay attention." He refutes some popular notions with a light spiritual banter, always a favourite weapon with him in debate. In a sermon on the "Necessity and Use of Good Works," referring to the notion that good works are chiefly valuable as the evidence of faith, he says:

"Faith is the opening of the eye of the mind to behold spiritual objects. Now would it not be absurd to say a man does all the actions which he performs (and which can be performed only by one whose eyes are open) in order to shew that his eyes are open? And if any one were to ask you why you walked about and worked at your employment, and read and wrote and did the other acts which no blind man can do properly, if at all, would you ever think of replying, 'I do all these things in order to prove that my eyes are open'?......A man opens his eyes that he may see to walk and work. He does not walk and work to prove that his eyes are open. So the spiritual eye is opened, i.e. faith is given to the soul, that it may see to walk in God's command, and to work the works of God; but it is absurd to say that the use of the spiritual works is to certify the openness of the spiritual eye."

In the great Disruption controversy, Mr. Lee did not take a prominent part. He proposes to some friends in the ministry to consult and pray together regarding their prospects and duty; but their decision being already taken, they prove dubious of the efficacy of mutual prayer for further direction.

A letter written by Mr. Lee to a leading "non-intrusionist" contains some curious points. Nonconformists are accustomed to strengthen their faith and renew their loftier aspirations by appealing to the immortal memory of the Two Thousand who refused submission to the Act of Uniformity; Mr. Lee appeals to the same history to confirm his resolution to conform! There could scarcely be a better theological illustration of the proverb, What is one man's meat is another man's poison.

* I. 55.

"I believe, and I say so from considerable observation of the opinions of various people, who naturally speak more unreservedly to me than they would do to a more determined partisan, that if you go out of the Church your honesty will be much less commended than the theory which drives you to such a course will be condemned. The whole Presbyterian and Independent ministers conformed to the Episcopal Church in England in 1662 except about 2000 (under one-fifth of the whole), and when the conditions imposed were palpable and grievous; and not more of the episcopal clergy were expelled and sequestered during the Commonwealth, the conditions being equally grievous and tyrannical."*

Can there be a stranger method of deciding between conformity and nonconformity, than this arithmetical calculation? The "immortal Two Thousand" of nonconformist history, regarded as "under one-fifth of the whole," have their claims put out of court, and point a moral on behalf of more prosperous conformity!

Mr. Lee's comparative want of interest in the great ecclesiastical conflict of the century, appears to have arisen from a conviction that it did not reach the actual defects of the Church, and played upon the surface rather than probed the depths of its requirements. Those who most loudly demanded freedom, meant mere deliverance from a certain outward order of procedure, and not from the sectarian character and spirit.

"If it is the will of God that the Church of Scotland should now be overturned, I doubt not God has purposes to answer which none of the instruments have in view, and that another Church will succeed it founded on more comprehensive and catholic principles, of a less sectarian character and spirit, and better adapted to the present state of society and the wants of men. These defects in our Church are becoming more and more apparent; they are felt by many of the best ministers in the Church, and by more of the people, and they will prove fatal to the Church of Scotland at no distant day..... The discussions about spiritual independence have to many men, who have not yet avowed it, suggested that the Church of God has sinned in binding herself to relinquish her liberty to interpret the Word of God otherwise than as God himself shall give light, and that to cause her ministers to swear they will never hold or teach

* I. 35, 36.

otherwise than as they may believe when they swear, is to tempt them to swear they will refuse any new instruction God may give them; that they will be obstinately blind, and that the Church shall, century after century, refuse to become wiser or to understand the Word of God better than she did at a given period. And it excites my wonder that a Church can talk of spiritual independence in a trifle and deem it essential, when she has relinquished her independence in that capital and essential affair of the interpretation of the Word of God itself.”*

The debate between "intrusionist" and "non-intrusionist" failed to reach the soul of a man dwelling in his country parish among those larger thoughts and hopes which mingled with his deeper fears, and which the triumph of neither party could either satisfy or allay.

The disruption swept the Presbytery of Edinburgh of its most distinguished members. Chalmers, Cunningham, Welsh, Gordon, Candlish, Guthrie, threw their weight into the cause of the secession; and it became of singular importance to fill their places with the ablest men whose allegiance to the National Church remained unshaken. Mr. Lee was appointed to the church and parish of Old Greyfriars, and in 1843 took up his residence and work in Edinburgh.

When Mr. Lee commenced his famous career in Edinburgh, the more mystic tendencies of his nature had not been entirely subjugated by the keen strength of his satire, and his preaching was still tinged with what is popularly called "Evangelicalism," while he had a cautious aversion to several principles and measures which he afterwards adopted and advocated. A lady who valued his advice remembers being reproved by him in those days for reading "so ungodly a paper as the Scotsman," though the Scotsman was then, in point of piety, much what it was afterwards when Dr. Lee became a frequent contributor; and he was not prepared to accept a secular system of national education.

The character of his work in Edinburgh, however, was a natural growth from the previous stages of his life. During his Campsie ministry, his general reading had been large and varied. Of all men, a clergyman, we believe, should be the last to confine himself to merely professional litera

ture. The prevalent notion that a preacher's duty regarding theological books is akin to a lawyer's duty towards the statute-books, is, we contend, a delusion. A Christian minister-we do not mean a mere popular preacher, but a man who can search the hidden springs of thought and conduct, and give worthy guidance amid the ebb and flow of human passions-must deliver his own soul from professional technicalities by frequent and earnest intercourse with the highest works of philosophy, poetry and science.

The bulky commonplace-books, bearing witness to a remarkable variety and amount of reading, shew the broad and generous culture from which the greatness of the Edinburgh preacher sprang. On a page by themselves, and prefaced with the title, "The Teachers," he has written the names of Bacon, Burke, Butler, Shakspere, Milton, Locke, J. Taylor. From 1840 to 1843, his general reading included Coleridge, Thierry, Spenser, Clarendon, Cicero, S. Bernard, Justin Martyr, Whately, Neander, Bishop Bull, Ranke, Carlyle, Emerson; and his noblest preaching was pervaded by that spirit Milton indicates, when he writes, “I dare be known to think our sage and serious poet Spenser a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."

For the first time in his life, Dr. Lee reads in 1845 a Unitarian book; and it is interesting for those who live among the intellectual surroundings of Unitarian churches, to note that an Edinburgh student and divine is upwards of forty years of age when he chronicles this event.

"I have been painfully and profoundly interested in reading the Autobiography of Blanco White, a most curious psychological study. I think it is most useful to consider the views of men like him; men, I mean, who have adopted views which the great body of Christians consider unsound and dangerous.......Have you seen Martineau's 'Rationale of Religious Inquiry'? It is rhetorical, but very clever and acute, and contains, in my opinion, much important truth. Blanco White set me to read him. I am ashamed to say it is the first Unitarian book I ever read, except White's Life and Tayler's Retrospect, though this last is not a Unitarian book, though written by a man who holds those opinions. May God guide us through this sea of notions! I verily believe, at the same time, that something may be learned from all men and from all parties in the Christian Church."*

* I. 98, 100.