and modified his whole Christian life.  In its earlier stages, he was apt to lay too much stress by far upon fugitive “frames,” and to mistake mere weariness, torpor, and even diseased action of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour.  And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes.  It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times.  The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now.  Many things were ascribed to Satanic influence which should have been ascribed rather to unstrung nerves and loss of sleep, or to a violation of the laws of health. [4] The disturbing influence of nervous and other bodily or mental disorders upon religious experience deserves a fuller discussion than it has yet received.  It is a subject which both modern science and modern thought, if guided by Christian wisdom, might help greatly to elucidate.

The morbid and melancholy element, however, was only a painful incident of his character.  It tinged his life with a vein of deep sadness and led to undue severity of self-discipline; but it did not seriously impair the strength and beauty of his Christian manhood.  It rather served to bring them into fuller relief, and even to render more striking those bright natural traits—­the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift—­which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike.  It served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse, especially with members of his flock tried and tempted like as he was.  He had learned how to counsel and comfort them by the things which he also had suffered.  He may have been too exacting and harsh in dealing with himself; but in dealing with other souls nothing could exceed the gentleness, wisdom, and soothing influence of his ministrations.

As a preacher he was the impersonation of simple, earnest, and impassioned utterance.  Although not an orator in the ordinary sense of the term, he touched the hearts of his hearers with a power beyond the reach of any oratory.  Some of his printed sermons are models in their kind; that e.g. on “Sins estimated by the Light of Heaven,” and that addressed to Seamen.  His theology was a mild type of the old New England Calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors—­such as Thomas a Kempis, and Fenelon, the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, John Newton and Richard Cecil—­and on the other, by his own profound experience and seraphic love.  Of his theology, his preaching and his piety alike, Christ was the living centre.  His expressions of personal love to the Saviour are surpassed by nothing in the writings of the old mystics.  Here is a passage from a letter to his mother, written while he was still a young pastor: