in their individual weaknesses and meannesses and sins. By reason of this delicate susceptibility of feeling he was a man of notable weaknesses. He was too sensitive for this rude world and became morbidly so. It brought him sometimes to the verge of unmanliness. He longed for a sympathy which he did not get, or thought he did not get, or did not know that he did get, and it was not always easy for him to believe in its reality, even when the demonstration was before him. He was frank to a fault and poured out his complaints into the ears of his friends. He could not conceal what was going on within him, and if he had forced himself to do it, his preaching would have been shorn of half its power. But on the whole it is surprising that we detect no more specifically in his public utterances the struggle of his life. His strong manhood saved him. He never lost himself in his dreams nor in his emotions. His strong mind and valiant heart and sturdy will dominated all tendency to excess of sentiment or of emotion, and all his studies but added fuel to the flame of his devotion to men. His tastes, as we have seen, were aristocratic, but his sympathies democratic, and no one can fail to see and feel that he is in contact with a man of superb manliness. Intellectual independence and moral courage are the two strong traits of his manhood, and the intensity of his emotional nature but made them the more impressive. He was a born intellectual leader. The Brighton ministry was one of transcendent power. He was a free man, at last emancipated from an intellectual thraldom that had crippled his pulpit power. The power of the Christian pulpit is conditioned by its freedom. No man can speak force

fully who cannot speak freely. This intellectual courage of Robertson's was an immense power. It had a martial quality. He was rash at times, but what soldier in the thick of the fight will not sometimes adventure rash things? Practical wisdom is a pastoral virtue. A preacher must know his resources and the conditions of his message. But if any man on earth needs a soldierly courage, it is he. This combination of delicacy and forcefulness, of fine feeling, strong intelligence, and strenuous will, made him the preacher for many classes of people. The so-called common people felt the power of his sympathy and respected his manly intelligence and sincerity. They saw his large- and tender-heartedness, but felt too that he was a man. Imaginative people were attracted by the semipoetic glow of his speech. The young were attracted by his earnestness and grace, and the sceptical by their confidence in his ability to sympathize with them, or at least to understand them, in their intellectual perplexities. He illustrates most strikingly the tremendous power in pulpit oratory of a sympathetic heart and a forceful will. Without them one may be a pulpit teacher of a sort, but not a preacher.

All this is connected with what in our day calls itself the magnètic quality in the personality. He was a man of Grecian beauty of face and grace of form, and altogether of a singularly attractive physical personality. He was charged with physical nerve force, and he spake with a musical sweetness of voice, with grace and force combined of physical movement, that sent his words like flying arrows, swift and straight, into the quick. He never wrote his sermons. They were carefully studied,

and came out of the broad fields of his culture and training. They bear the mark of thorough, earnest thought and comprehensive study. They are a testimony as to the importance of training the man in habits of clear, broad thinking. He has a strong and comprehensive grasp upon the main facts and truths of Christianity. He develops his subject in its broad outlines in an altogether quickening, suggestive, and attractive manner. It was one of his homiletical principles to preach suggestively rather than dogmatically. He would not present the truth in abstract or dialectical form for the indoctrination of the understanding, but in such way as to secure an emotional interest in it, and it was the more sure to reach the heart of the hearer. His preaching is clearly discriminated thought, conveyed by the language of feeling and imagination, and it suggests more than is said. His biographical sermons, which are masterpieces of this type of preaching, are eminently of this suggestive order. The sermon on Balaam and on John the Baptist illustrate the quality above mentioned. "The Parable of the Sower," "God's Revelation of Heaven," "Jacob's Wrestling," "The Good Shepherd," "The Irreparable Past," "The Illusiveness of Life," which are among his most impressive sermons, all bear the same mark of breadth, insight, and suggestiveness. The singularly impressive character of his preaching is largely conditioned by its penetrating suggestiveness. This is also connected with its fragmentary character and its not infrequent suggestion of inadequacy to the full demands of the subject. But it was his purpose never to treat the subject exhaustively. The truth comes to us in glimpses, but they are glimpses

of great and fruitful truths, and the mind follows the subject discussed because the feelings are enlisted and the imagination stimulated, and thus impel the mind to action. He carefully prepared the outline, jotting it down. on slips of paper, sometimes fully and sometimes meagrely, not infrequently leaving only salient stress words. But the sermon was always well in hand. He permitted nothing to turn him aside from careful preparation, and he always gave his mind free movement along the line of an orderly logical plan. Thus he went into the pulpit. He begins with the deliberation of self-mastery, but soon warms with his theme, and launches out unconstrained upon the broad stream of his thought. His frame would sometimes quiver with the intensity of his emotion, his keen eye seemed to shoot his congregation through, and with most graceful movement, in absolute unconsciousness of himself, he would pour out his treasures upon them; and in all this there was no loss of self-possession. His delicate instincts, his refined tastes, his firm mental poise, always rescued him from going to pieces. In this combination of intensity and self-possession he proved himself to be an orator. He speaks deprecatingly, indeed, of oratory as an art. But it is evident that he had carefully cultivated his rare gift of speech, that he had mastered an impressive literary style, and he knew its real worth.

5. The rhetorical qualities of Robertson's preaching are a helpful study, and our discussion would be incomplete without some reference to them. It is true that the sermons in their present form are not the original product. It was probably fuller and more complete than what is left to us. And yet the product as we

have it may be assumed to represent adequately his literary style, for the sermons were either written out by him after they were preached, before the tide of the preaching impulse had ebbed, or were revised by his own hand from the notes of friends, or were taken down stenographically. Moreover, the sermons in their present form bear a common mark, and when compared with his lectures and letters, we discover the same general literary characteristics, although confessedly the letters are sometimes more accurate in expression than the sermons or lectures. We catch at once the note of reality in all his utterances. He detested all artifice in speech. "I believe I could have become an orator," he says in one of his letters, "had I chosen to take pains. I see what rhetoric does and what it seems to do, and I thoroughly despise it, . . . and yet perhaps I do it injustice; with an unworldly, noble love to give it reality, what might it not do!" He certainly did no injustice in this utterance to the stilted, artificial rhetoric that has sometimes been introduced into the Christian pulpit, but he did scant justice to the best type of modern pulpit rhetoric, and least of all did he do justice to his own rhetoric. He not only might have become, he did become, an orator of great effectiveness, although confessedly the orator is lost in the preacher; and it is perfectly evident that he did "take the pains" with his rhetoric at least, if not with his oratory, such as all effective public speakers have taken, and without which no man can expect to be effective. And it was precisely that " unworldly noble love" of his that rescued him from all artifice and gave to his speech the ring of reality. His words always express what is true to his thought, feel