Rab and His Friends and Other Papers

In his impetuosity, we find the rationale of much that is peculiar in the style of Dr. Chalmers. As a spoken style it was thoroughly effective. 31

He seized the nearest weapons, and smote down whatever he hit. But from this very vehemence, this haste, there was in his general style a want of correctness, of selectness, of nicety, of that curious felicity which makes thought immortal, and enshrines it in imperishable crystal. In the language of the affections he was singularly happy; but in a formal statement, rapid argumentation and analysis, he was often as we might think, uncouth, imperfect, and incorrect: chiefly owing to his temperament, to his fiery, impatient, swelling spirit, this gave his orations their fine audacity – this brought out hot from the furnace, his new words – this made his numbers run wild – lege solutis. We are sure this view will be found confirmed by these "Daily Readings," when he wrote little, and had not time to get heated, and when the nature of the work, the hour at which it was done, and his solitariness, made his thoughts flow at their "own sweet will," they are often quite as classical in expression, as they are deep and lucid in thought – reflecting heaven with its clouds and stars, and letting us see deep down into its own secret depths: this is to us one great charm of these volumes. Here he is broad and calm; in his great public performances by mouth and pen, he soon passed from the lucid into the luminous.

What, for instance, can be finer in expression than this? "It is well to be conversant with great elements – life and death, reason and madness."

"God forgets not his own purposes, though he executes them in his own way, and maintains his own pace, which he hastens not and shortens not to meet our impatience."

"I find it easier to apprehend the greatness of the Deity than any of his moral perfections, or his sacredness;" and this —

"One cannot but feel an interest in Ishmael – figuring him to be a noble of nature – one of those heroes of the wilderness who lived on the produce of his bow, and whose spirit was nursed and exercised among the wild adventures of the life that he led. And it does soften our conception of him whose hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him, when we read of his mother's influence over him, in the deference of Ishmael to whom we read another example of the respect yielded to females even in that so-called barbarous period of the world. There was a civilisation, the immediate effect of religion in these days, from which men fell away as the world grew older."

That he had a keen relish for material and moral beauty and grandeur we all know; what follows shows that he had also the true ear for beautiful words, as at once pleasant to the ear and suggestive of some higher feelings: "I have often felt, in reading Milton and Thomson, a strong poetical effect in the bare enumeration of different countries, and this strongly enhanced by the statement of some common and prevailing emotion, which passed from one to another." This is set forth with great beauty and power in verses 14th and 15th of Exodus xv., – "The people shall hear and be afraid – sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina. Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed – the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold of them – the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away." Any one who has a tolerable ear and any sensibility, must remember the sensation of delight in the mere sound – like the colours of a butterfly's wing, or the shapeless glories of evening clouds, to the eye – in reading aloud such passages as these: "Heshbon shall cry and Elealeh: their voice shall be heard to Jahaz: for by the way of Luhith with weeping shall they go it up; for in the way of Horonaim they shall raise a cry. – God came from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran. – Is not Calno as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as Damascus? – He is come to Aiath, he is passed to Migron; at Michmash he hath laid up his carriages: Ramah is afraid; Gibeah of Saul is fled. Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim: cause it to be heard unto Laish, O poor Anathoth! Mad-menah is removed; the inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves to flee. – The fields of Heshbon languish, the vine of Sibmah; I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh." Any one may prove to himself that much of the effect and beauty of these passages depends on these names; put others in their room, and try them.

We remember well our first hearing Dr. Chalmers. We were in a moorland district in Tweeddale, rejoicing in the country, after nine months of the High School. We heard that the famous preacher was to be at a neighbouring parish church, and off we set, a cartful of irrepressible youngsters. "Calm was all nature as a resting wheel." The crows, instead of making wing, were impudent and sat still; the cart-horses were standing, knowing the day, at the fieklgates, gossiping and gazing, idle and happy; the moor was stretching away in the pale sunlight – vast, dim, melancholy, like a sea; everywhere were to be seen the gathering people, "sprinklings of blithe company the country-side seemed moving to one centre. As we entered the kirk we saw a notorious character, a drover, who had much of the brutal look of what he worked in, with the knowing eve of a man of the city, a sort of big Peter Bell.

"He had a hardness in his eye,He had a hardness in his cheek."

He was our terror, and we not only wondered, but were afraid when we saw him going in. The kirk was full as it could hold. How different in looks to a brisk town congregation! There was a fine leisureliness and vague stare; all the dignity and vacancy of animals; eyebrows raised and mouths open, as is the habit with those who speak little and look much, and at far-off objects. The minister comes in, homely in his dress and gait, but having a great look about him, like a mountain among hills. The High School boys thought him like a "big one of ourselves," he looks vaguely round upon his audience, as if he saw in it one great object, not many. We shall never forget his smile! its general benignity; – how he let the light of his countenance fall on us! He read a few verses quietly; then prayed briefly, solemnly, with his eyes wide open all the time, but not seeing. Then he gave out his text; we forget it, but its subject was, "Death reigns." He stated slowly, calmly, the simple meaning of the words; what death was, and how and why it reigned; then suddenly he started, and looked like a man who had seen some great sight, and was breathless to declare it; he told us how death reigned – everywhere, at all times, in all places, how we all knew it, how we would yet know more of it. The drover, who had sat down in the table-seat opposite, was gazing up in a state of stupid excitement; he seemed restless, but never kept his eye from the speaker. The tide set in – everything added to its power, deep called to deep, imagery and illustration poured in; and every now and then the theme, – the simple, terrible statement, was repeated in some lucid interval. After overwhelming us with proofs of the reign of Death, and transferring to us his intense urgency and emotion; and after shrieking, as if in despair, these words, "Death is a tremendous necessity," – he suddenly looked beyond us as if into some distant region, and cried out, "Behold a mightier! – who is this? He cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in his apparel, speaking in righteousness, travelling in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save." Then, in a few plain sentences, he stated the truth as to sin entering, and death by sin, and death passing upon all. Then he took fire once more, and enforced, with redoubled energy and richness, the freeness, the simplicity, the security, the sufficiency of the great method of justification. How astonished and impressed we all were! He was at the full thunder of his power; the whole man was in an agony of earnestness. The drover was weeping like a child, the tears running down his ruddy, coarse cheeks – his face opened out and smoothed like an infant's; his whole body stirred with emotion. We all had insensibly been drawn out of our seats, and were converging towards the wonderful speaker. And when he sat down, after warning each one of us to remember who it was, and what it was, that followed death on his pale horse, 32 and how alone we could escape – we all sunk back into our seats. How beautiful to our eyes did the thunderer look – exhausted – but sweet and pure! How he poured out his soul before his God in giving thanks for sending the Abolisher of Death! Then a short psalm, and all was ended.

We went home quieter than we came; we did not recount the foals with their long legs, and roguish eyes, and their sedate mothers; we did not speculate whose dog that was, and whether that was a crow or a man in the dim moor, – we thought of other things. That voice, that face; those great, simple, living thoughts; those floods of resistless eloquence; that piercing, shattering voice, – that "tremendous necessity."

Were we desirous of giving to one who had never seen or heard Dr. Chalmers an idea of what manner of man he was – what he was as a whole, in the full round of his notions, tastes, affections, and powers, we would put this book into their hands, and ask them to read it slowly, bit by bit, as he wrote it. In it he puts down simply, and at once, what passes through his mind as he reads; there is no making of himself feel and think – no getting into a frame of mind; he was not given to frames of mind; he preferred states to forms – substances to circumstances. There is something of everything in it – his relish for abstract thought – his love of taking soundings in deep places and finding no bottom – his knack of starting subtle questions, which he did not care to run to earth – his penetrating, regulating godliness – his delight in nature – his turn for politics, general, economical, and ecclesiastical – his picturesque eye – his humanity – his courtesy – his warm-heartedness – his impetuosity – his sympathy – with all the wants, pleasures, and sorrows of his kind – his delight in the law of God, and his simple, devout, manly treatment of it – his acknowledgment of difficulties – his turn for the sciences of quantity and number, and indeed for natural science and art generally – his shrewdness – his worldly wisdom – his genius; all these come out – you gather them like fruit, here a little, and there a little. He goes over the Bible, not as a philosopher, or a theologian, or a historian, or a geologist, or a jurist, or a naturalist, or a statist, or a politician – picking out all that he wants, and a great deal more than he has any business with, and leaving everything else as barren to his reader as it has been to himself; but he looks abroad upon his Father's word – as he used so pleasantly to do on his world – as a man, and as a Christian; he submits himself to its influences, and lets his mind go out fully and naturally in its utterances. It is this which gives to this work all the charm of multitude in unity, of variety in harmony; and that sort of unexpectedness and ease of movement which we see everywhere in nature and in natural men.

Our readers will find in these delightful Bible Readings not a museum of antiquities, and curiosities, and laborious trifles; nor of scientific specimens, analysed to the last degree, all standing in order, labelled and useless. They will not find in it an armoury of weapons for fighting with and destroying their neighbours. They will get less of the physic of controversy than of the diet of holy living. They will find much of what Lord Bacon desired, when he said, "We want short, sound, and judicious notes upon Scripture, without running into commonplaces, pursuing controversies, or reducing those notes to artificial method, but leaving them quite loose and native. For certainly, as those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not rung into controversies and commonplaces." They will find it as a large pleasant garden; no great system; not trim, but beautiful, and in which there are things pleasant to the eye as well as good for food – flowers and fruits, and a few good esculent, wholesome roots. There are Honesty, Thrift, Eye-bright (Euphrasy that cleanses the sight) Heart's-ease. The good seed in abundance, and the strange mystical Passion-flower; and in the midst, and seen everywhere, if we but look for it, the Tree of Life, with its twelve manner of fruits – the very leaves of which are for the healing of the nations. And perchance, when they take their walk through it at evening-time, or at "the sweet hour of prime," they may see a happy, wise, beaming old man at his work there – they may hear his well-known voice; and if they have their spiritual senses exercised as they ought, they will not fail to see by his side "one like unto the Son of Man."

DR. GEORGE WILSON

Among the many students at our University who some two-and-twenty years ago started on the great race, in the full flush of youth and health, and with that strong hunger for knowledge which only the young, or those who keep themselves so, ever know, there were three lads – Edward Forbes, Samuel Brown, and George Wilson – who soon moved on to the front and took the lead. They are now all three in their graves.

No three minds could well have been more diverse in constitution or bias; each was typical of a generic difference from the others. What they cordially agreed in, was their hunting in the same field and for the same game. The truth about this visible world, and all that it contains, was their quarry. This one thing they set themselves to do, but each had his own special gift, and took his own road – each had his own special choice of instruments and means. Any one man combining their essential powers, would have been the epitome of a natural philosopher, in the wide sense of the man who would master the philosophy of nature.

Edward Forbes, who bulks largest at present, and deservedly, for largeness was of his essence, was the observer proper. He saw everything under the broad and searching light of day, white and uncoloured, and with an unimpassioned eye. What he was after were the real appearances of things; phenomena as such; all that seems to be. His was the search after what is, over the great field of the world. He was in the best sense a natural historian, an observer and recorder of what is seen and of what goes on, and not less of what has been seen and what has gone on, in this wonderful historic earth of ours, with all its fulness. He was keen, exact, capacious, – tranquil and steady in his gaze as nature herself. He was, thus far, kindred to Aristotle, to Pliny, Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Humboldt, though the great German, and the greater Stagirite, had higher and deeper spiritual insights than Edward Forbes ever gave signs of. It is worth remembering that Dr. George Wilson was up to his death engaged in preparing his Memoir and Remains for the press. Who will now take up the tale?

Samuel Brown was, so to speak, at the opposite pole – rapid, impatient, fearless, full of passion and imaginative power – desiring to divine the essences rather than the appearances of things – in search of the what chiefly in order to question it, make it give up at whatever cost the secret of its why; his fiery, projective, subtle spirit, could not linger in the outer fields of mere observation, though he had a quite rare faculty for seeing as well as for looking, which latter act, however, he greatly preferred; but he pushed into the heart and inner life of every question, eager to evoke from it the very secret of itself. Forbes, as we have said, wandered at will, and with a settled purpose and a fine hunting scent, at his leisure, and free and almost indifferent, over the ample fields – happy and joyous and full of work – unencumbered with theory 01* with wings, for he cared not to fly. Samuel Brown, whose wings were perhaps sometimes too much for him, more ambitious, more of a solitary turn, was for ever climbing the Mount Sinais and Pisgahs of science, to speak of Him whose haunt they were, – climbing there all alone and in the dark, and with much peril, if haply he might descry the break of day and the promised land; or, to vary the figure, diving into deep and not undangerous wells, that he might the better see the stars at noon, and possibly find Her who is said to lurk there. He had more of Plato, though he wanted the symmetry and persistent grandeur of the son of Ariston. He was perhaps liker his own favourite Kepler; such a man in a word as we have not seen since Sir Humphry Davy, whom in many things he curiously resembled, and not the least in this that the prose of each was more poetical than the verse.

His fate has been a mournful and a strange one, but he knew it, and encountered it with a full knowledge of what it entailed. He perilled everything on his theory; and if this hypothesis – it may be somewhat prematurely uttered to the world, and the full working out of which, by rigid scientific realization, was denied him by years of intense and incapacitating suffering, ending only in death, but the "relevancy" of which, to use the happy expression of Dr. Chalmers, we hold him to have proved, and in giving a glimpse of which, he showed, we firmly believe, what has been called that "instinctive grasp which the healthy imagination takes of possible truth," – if his theory of the unity of matter, and the consequent transmutability of the now called elementary bodies, were substantiated in the lower but essential platform of actual experiment, this, along with his original doctrine of atoms and their forces, would change the entire face of chemistry, and make a Cosmos where now there is endless agglomeration and confusion, – would, in a word, do for the science of the molecular constitution of matter and its laws of action and reaction at insensible distances, what Newton's doctrine of gravitation has done for the celestial dynamics. For, let it be remembered, that the highest speculation and proof in this department – by such men as Dumas, Faraday, and William Thomson, and others – points in this direction; it does no more as yet perhaps than point, but some of us may live to see "resurgam" inscribed over Samuel Brown's untimely grave, and applied with gratitude and honour to him whose eyes closed in darkness on the one great object of his life, and the hopes of whose "unaccomplished years" lie buried with him.

Very different from either, though worthy of and capable of relishing much that was greatest and best in both, was he whom we all loved and mourn, and who, this day week,33 was carried by such a multitude of mourners to that grave, which to his eye had been open and ready for years.

George Wilson was born in Edinburgh in 1818. His father, Mr. Archibald Wilson, was a wine merchant, and died sixteen years ago; his mother, Janet Aitken, still lives to mourn and to remember him, and she will agree with us that it is sweeter to remember him than to have converse with the rest. Any one who has had the privilege to know him, and to enjoy his bright and rich and beautiful mind, will not need to go far to learn where it was that her son George got all of that genius and worth and delightfulness which is transmissible. She verifies what is so often and so truly said of the mothers of remarkable men. She was his first and best Alma Mater, and in many senses his last, for her influence over him continued through life. George had a twin brother, who died in early life; and we cannot help referring to his being one of twins, something of that wonderful faculty of attracting and being personally loved by those about him, which was one of his strongest as it was one of his most winning powers. He was always fond of books, and of fun, the play of the mind. He left the High School at fifteen and took to medicine; but he soon singled out chemistry, and, under the late Kenneth Kemp, and our own distinguished Professor of Materia Medica, himself a first-class chemist, he acquired such knowledge as to become assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Graham, then Professor of Chemistry in University College, and now Master of the Mint. So he came out of a thorough and good school, and had the best of masters.

He then took the degree of M.D., and became a Lecturer on Chemistry, in what is now called the extra-academical school of medicine, but which in our day was satisfied with the title of private lecturers. He became at once a great favourite, and, had his health and strength enabled him, he would have been long a most successful and popular teacher; but general feeble health, and a disease in the ankle-joint requiring partial amputation of the foot, and recurrent attacks of a serious kind in his lungs, made his life of public teaching one long and sad trial. How nobly, how sweetly, how cheerily he bore all these long baffling years; how his bright, active, ardent, unsparing soul lorded it over his frail but willing body, making it do more than seemed possible, and as it were by sheer force of will ordering it to live longer than was in it to do, those who lived with him and witnessed this triumph of spirit over matter, will not soon forget. It was a lesson to every one of what true goodness of nature, elevated and cheered by the highest and happiest of all motives, can make a man endure, achieve, and enjoy.

As is well known, Dr. Wilson was appointed in 1855 to the newly-constituted Professorship of Technology, and to the Curatorship of the Industrial Museum. The expenditure of thought, of ingenuity, of research and management – the expenditure, in a word, of himself – involved in originating and giving form and purpose to a scheme so new and so undefined, and, in our view, so undefinable, must, we fear, have shortened his life, and withdrawn his precious and quite singular powers of illustrating and adorning, and, in the highest sense, sanctifying and blessing science, from this which seemed always to us his proper sphere. Indeed, in the opinion of some good judges, the institution of such a chair at all, and especially in connexion with a University such as ours, and the attaching to it the conduct of a great Museum of the Industrial Arts, was somewhat hastily gone into, and might have with advantage waited for and obtained a little more consideration and forethought. Be this as it may, Dr. Wilson did his duty with his whole heart and soul – making a class, which was always increasing, and which was at its largest at his death.

We have left ourselves no space to speak of Dr. Wilson as an author, as an academic and popular lecturer, as a member of learned societies, as a man of exquisite literary powers and fancy, and as a citizen of remarkable public acceptation. This must come from some more careful, and fuller, and more leisurely record of his genius and worth. What he was as a friend it is not for us to say; we only know that when we leave this world we would desire no better memorial than to be remembered by many as George Wilson now is, and always will be. His Life of Cavendish is admirable as a biography, full of life, of picturesque touches, and of realization of the man and of his times, and is, moreover, thoroughly scientific, containing, among other discussions, by far the best account of the great water controversy from the Cavendish point of view. His Life of John Reid is a vivid and memorable presentation to the world of the true lineaments, manner of life, and inmost thought and heroic sufferings, as well as of the noble scientific achievements of that strong, truthful, courageous, and altogether admirable man, and true discoverer – a genuine follower of John Hunter.

The Five Gateways of Knowledge is a prose poem, a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy – the white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism of his mind into the coloured glories of the spectrum; truth dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less but all the more true. His other papers in the British Quarterly, the North British Review, and his last gem on "Paper, Pens, and Ink," in his valued and generous friend Macmillan's first number of his Magazine, are all astonishing proofs of the brightness, accuracy, vivacity, unweariedness of his mind, and the endless sympathy and affectionate play of his affections with the full round of scientific truth. His essay on "Colour Blindness" is, we believe, as perfect a monogram as exists, and will remain likely untouched and unadded to, factum ad unguem. As may be seen from these remarks, we regard him not so much as, like Edward Forbes, a great observer and quiet generalizer, or, like Samuel Brown, a discoverer and philosopher properly so called – though, as we have said, he had enough of these two men's prime qualities to understand and relish and admire them. His great quality lay in making men love ascertained and recorded truth, scientific truth especially; he made his reader and hearer enjoy facts. He illuminated the Book of Nature as they did the missals of old. His nature was so thoroughly composite, so in full harmony with itself, that no one faculty could or cared to act without calling in all the others to join in full chorus. To take an illustration from his own science, his faculties interpenetrated and interfused themselves into each other, as the gases do, by a law of their nature. Thus it was that everybody understood and liked and was impressed by him; he touched them at every point. Knowledge was to him no barren, cold essence: it was alive and flushed with the colours of the earth and sky, and all over with light and stars. His flowers – and his mind was full of flowers – were from seeds, and were sown by himself. They were neither taken from other gardens and stuck in rootless, as children do, much less were they of the nature of gum-flowers, made with hands, wretched and dry and scentless.