ly and as a whole what the others could but
darkly and painfully guess at in detached and broken parts.

To this singular power of tracing analogies there was added in Mr.
Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid illustrations. In
some instances a single stroke produced a figure that swept across
the subject-matter of his discourse like the image of a lantern on a
wall; in others, he dwelt upon the picture produced, finishing it
with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination,
and sank deep into the memory. We remember hearing him preach on one
occasion on the return of the Jews, as a people, to Him whom they
had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not
fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his
language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became at
once that of metaphor: 'When _Joseph_,' he said, 'shall reveal
himself to _his brethren_, the _whole house of Pharaoh_ shall _hear
the weeping_.' Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty,
or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of
the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in
this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast
profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God,
which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly
it is explored, until at length the student--struck at first by
its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere
_measured_ expansiveness--finds that it partakes of the unlimited
infinity of the divine nature itself. Naturally and simply, as if
growing out of the subject, like a green berry-covered misletoe on the
mossy trunk of a reverend oak, there sprang up one of his more
lengthened illustrations. A child bred up in the interior of the
country has been brought for the first time to the sea-shore, and
carried out to the middle of one of the noble friths that indent so
deeply our line of coast; and on his return he informs his father,
with all a child's eagerness, of the wonderful expansiveness of the
_ocean_ which he has seen. He went out, he tells, far amid the
great waves and the rushing tides, till at length the huge hills
seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself
appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then
when in mid-sea the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and
down, and down, and the long line slipped s