He was
understood to have peculiar opinions about second marriages, although
he kept them very much to himself. One thing, however, was known,
that for a twelvemonth after the death of his wife he was away from
England, and that he came back an altered man to his people in
Bedfordshire, where at that time he was settled. His discourses were
remarkably strong, and of a kind seldom, or indeed never, heard now.
They taxed the whole mental powers of his audience, and were utterly
unlike the simple stuff which became fashionable with the
Evangelistic movement. Many of them, taken down by some of his
hearers, survive in manuscript to the present day. They will not, as
a rule, bear printing, because the assumption on which they rest is
not now assumed; but if it be granted, they are unanswerable; and it
is curious that even now and then, although they are never for a
moment anything else than a strict deduction from what we in the
latter half of the century consider unproven or even false, they
express themselves in the same terms as the newest philosophy.
Occasionally too, more particularly when he sets himself the task of
getting into the interior of a Bible character, he is intensely
dramatic, and what are shadows to the careless reader become living
human beings, with the reddest of blood visible under their skin.
Pages:
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101