, the poorer was
the incense.

Yet there must be a fallacy somewhere involved in the common judgment on
this subject. For Mr. Robertson certainly was a popular preacher; and
yet, as he never made the slightest concession to any of the arts or
trickeries, the displays or exaggerations, which are supposed to be
essential conditions of that repute, his own example and experience may
stand as at least an exceptional proof of the possible dignity and
solidity of the position. When he had been addressing a thronged
congregation, who hung, impressed and awed, upon his utterances, he goes
home to write about the scene and its circumstances in strong disdain,
almost with angry contempt, as if it were a reproach to himself. Did not
the large majority of his hearers receive in their hearts and minds the
electric power of his earnest and ever instructive speech? Suppose it
were true, as he had painful reasons for knowing, that there were always
before him frivolous, empty-headed, and unappreciative hearers, the
hangers-on of a fashionable watering-place, who went to listen to him
because he was the rage; such as these could be only a scattering among
his auditors. Suppose, too, that the captious, the jealous, the bigoted,
and the conceited were represented there, intending to catch matter for
bringing him under public odium in their own circles, because he
trespassed upon the borders of heresy, or shocked the conventional
standards of snobbish society, or spread his range broadly over the
widest fields of moral and political relations; the very presence and
purpose of such listeners were, to one of his grandeur and purity of
spirit, a new inspiration of courage and fidelity. On the whole, so far
as Mr. Robertson really came under the designation which he so dreaded
to bear, he has made it an honorable one. Perhaps it would not be saying
the right, as it certainly is not saying the best thing about his
sermons, now so widely circulated on both sides of the Atlantic, to
speak of them as meeting any popular taste. Would that we could estimate
so highly the craving and the standard, among what are called religious
readers, as to assert for him a favoritism equal to that accorded to a
Cumming, a Spurgeon, or even a Chalmers. Chalmers may have spoken from
what was, in his time, the highest round of elevation at which he would
have been listened to by those who demanded fidelity to an accepted
doctrinal system as the basis for whatever el