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lofty. Rest, reflection, and deep meaning were in his eyc. His aspect and bearing were those of natural refinement. He had soul as well as intellect. I liked to feel his presence in the sanctuary services; and an occasional evening spent with him in our manse was no ordinary pleasure. On these occasions his natural reserve passed off in part, and gleams of wit and imagination began to appear. His reserve was the fruit of modesty, and not of conscious superiority, and seems to have become less as his experience increased."

While here, he produced a song, the best we think of all his published lyrics. It is entitled

THE AULD ASH TREE.

"There grows an ash by my bour door,
And a' its boughs are buskit braw,
In fairest weeds o' simmer green,
And birds sit singing on them a'.
But cease your sangs, ye blithesome birds,
An o' your liltin let me be ;

Ye bring deid simmers frae their graves,
To weary me, to weary me!"

Thus runs the last verse :

"Oh, I wad fain forget them a',

Remembered guid but deepens ill,
As gleids o' licht far seen by nicht,
Mak' the near mirk but mirker still.

Then silent be, thou dear auld tree,

O' a' thy voices let me be;

They bring the deid years frae their graves,
To weary me, to weary me!"

Davidson's studies at the Divinity Hall were finished in the autumn of 1863; and he was licensed as a preacher of the Gospel by the Presbytery of Edinburgh, February 2, 1864.

In March of the previous year he had the mortification of being rejected by the Edinburgh Presbytery for a sermon he delivered before that reverend court, apparently at one of the customary examinations. His biographer expresses astonishment that that sermon should have failed to pass the crucial standard, and that "no one was found to direct the attention of his brethren to the deep spiritual tone of the discourse, and to the quite exceptional-though necessarily undeveloped— power which it reveals." Keenly as this rejection was felt at the time, we find Davidson, a number of years afterwards, referring to it, in a letter to a friend, in a manner that shows the wound had been healed:-" Once upon a time, in my hot youth, and that is long ago, I had occasion to be rejected by the Presbytery of Edinburgh. Well, I have forgiven the whole court.

The Rev. God bless him, the old Drumclogger! -asked me what kind of books I read? for he had a feelinggood soul that he is-that my views were a little dishevelled. I felt a little backward about confessing to certain ballad-books. and other kinds of the literature of levity, and I said that 'it would be hard to tell' Upon which advised me to read Boston's Fourfold State. Now, some days after this I went down Leith Walk, and upon an old book stall at which I halted for a minute, what should catch my eye but a copy of Boston's Fourfold State? I grinned at him, and denounced the Rev.. in my mind, and was just going to pass on when I felt inspired by what I considered the most ingenious method of gratifying my spleen that could possibly occur to any mortal. Buy thee,' quoth I to the Fourfold State, Yes, thou shalt be bought with a vengeance! Thou shalt be so effectually bought that thou shalt be withdrawn from circulation. I will bury thee beneath all the old rubbish I possess, and there thou shalt slumber unread till cockle shells be silver bells'-thou old nightmare!'"

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The book was bought and buried, but was, after years, once more restored to the light, and read by the quondam disappointed student. He considered it to be " poor as a theological book to recommend any latter-day student of divinity to read," and says some other true and racy things about it which our readers must find out for themselves. Meantime he had forgiven his ancient Presbyterial foes, and, in token of this, "set the old anatomy (The Fourfold State) apon a book-shelf in respectable company."

Davidson's career as a probationer was characterized by the usual variety of experiences. He travels over all Scotland, of course, into England, and across to Ireland. His letters from the Green Isle, which like all his other letters are remarkably graphic, displaying at once a keen sense of humour, much shrewdness of observation, and quiet wisdom,-contain among other lively sketches a droll picture of an "Irish Clergyman, and his Study:"

"It (the study) reminded me of the old riddle-definition of an egg, that we used to puzzle each other with when we were children, ever so long ago, 'A little housie weel packit.' It measures exactly nine feet by fteen, and the walls of it are occupied thus: thirty-eight pictures and engravings, two illustrated almanacs, two fiddles, two fiddle-sticks, one banjo, four poems (in frames), one weather-glass, one map, one clock, twobook-cases. This is an exact inventory, for I grieve to own that I took down the list on the back of an old envelope with a pencil."

The clergyman himself, who had been out at a funeral when Davidson called, at last came in:

"He had an immense white scarf on, a knot on the right shoulder like a prize cabbage, and the ends sweeping the ground. He took me round the town, which is for all the world just like any other town, and then we came home again, and he played me a lot of Scotch and Irish tunes on the fiddle, with a wonderful degree of spunk and birr; then we talked a great deal about songs and music; then we had the unfailing Irish dinner of chicken and bacon with greens; then he read me a lot of his poems, and whenever I said 'very good,' he said Yis, it's kyapital' (quite seriously); and then we had tea, and then I came away home again. He gave me quite a lot of his pomes, as he called them, to take with me."

For two and a half years did Thomas Davidson faithfully pursue the life of a probationer, until at last he was laid aside through ill health. He was destined never again to resume his labours. The last sermon he preached was from the text, "Behold I stand at the door and knock." Of this sermon, Mr. Brown says: "It was evidently a favourite. He had preached it many times and in many places in the course of his wanderings. It was an appropriate last word to be spoken by one who in his public life never magnified himself, but was ever though quietly, not the less deeply-in earnest that the hearts of his hearers should be opened to receive Him who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.""

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The remaining years of the invalid preacher's life were spent at his father's house near Jedburgh. His letters to his friends during this period reveal the slow yet sure progress made by the disease that wasted away his frame-a disease that has "nipped i' the bud" the career of many a promising youth. The sufferer was eminently patient and resigned during his protracted affliction-sometimes hopeful, as the victims of consumption usually are-at other times wistfully dubious as to what the outcome of the affliction would really be. The muse during these years did not desert him, and we find him. now and again cultivating her friendship. "In Redesdale," is a beautiful idyllic poem belonging to this period, as also "On a certain Premature Report," a piece of quite another description, which Mr. Brown thinks is "perhaps his best poem." A Doggrel Allegory of Hemoptysis," penned but a few months before his death, manifests that there was in him a weird power of conception, as well as strength of description, that needed only time and opportunity to be developed into striking results.

But the end of this patient, much-enduring, and Christianly manful life drew near; and when it did come the biographer thus describes the manner of it: "The invalid, who had cheered himself in dark December by picturing what the grass would be like in spring, smiled when he saw it, and said it was very beautiful. He was never in the open air again. On

the Thursday evening he retired to rest, apparently no worse than he had been for several days; but early on Friday morning his father heard him coughing more than usual, and went to his bedside. He saw at once the signs of an impending change, and called the other members of the household to take their long farewell. Mr. Polson, his faithful friend and minister, was sent for, and to him Davidson quietly, and in a few. words -as was his wont-gave humble expression to the Christian hope which sustained his heart. Like John Macleod Campbell, 'He spoke not much of religion when dying. His silent death was like his life, an "Amen" to God's will." He passed calmly away at noon on the 29th of April, 1870."

We have only to say, in conclusion, that this is a well written biography. Mr. Brown has, indeed, been fortunate in his subject, but the memory of his friend has lost nothing by being consigned to his judicious and sympathetic care. We heartily commend the book to our readers.

A. W.-P.

MAN'S DESIRE OF THE LIVING GOD..

DAVID, in the 42nd Psalm, says-"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God." In these words he gives expression to one of the purest and deepest feelings of the human heart. As the eye craves for light, the ear for sweet sound, the body for the genial atmosphere, so the heart of man craves for Him who is the light and the life of the universe. This feeling of the mind, this "wasting fever of the heart" of man, is quite inexplicable to many who, by way of pre-eminence, are called thinkers. "They have failed to lay their finger upon its secret." They would account for it by a reference to the imperfection of human nature; or they would silence it by that crude, ill digested, contradictory philosophy which proclaims that nothing beyond the province of sense is trustworthy or they would bury it for ever beneath the multiplicity of business cares, state cares, or the grosser attractions of the sensual appetities. But the human heart protests against these attempts to still its truest and deepest aspirations. Its loudest cry is not for pleasure that may corrupt, nor for philosophy that may disappoint, but for the personal God, at once the Author of its being, and the life and beauty of its days. From amid the din and bustle of commerce, the commotion of political parties, and the noise of theological battles, the cry is distinctly heard by those who have ears to hear the voices of the spiritual world-"Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us

The intellectual nature of man desires to see God.—Atheism may seem to give satisfaction to a few who have contrived by a kind of legerdemain to pass into a region of pure speculation, regardless alike of the voice of nature and the dictates of reason and conscience, but certainly it affords no place of peace and rest to the unbiassed and correctly informed mind. Looking on the heavens above, with their galaxies of stars, some so near that from the mountain top you fancy they could be touched, others so distant that not even on the wings of imagination is it possible to reach them; looking on the earth beneath, with its mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, fruits and flowers, birds and beasts; looking on man with his wealth of thought and love, his will and imagination, his deep spiritual desires and needs, the intelligence pleads for a cause equal to these things. It feels degraded and outraged when told, however soft and pretentious the language employed, that properly speaking they have no cause, and that they come into being, in all their infinite variety and adaptation, spontaneously. It rebels against the efforts which have been made by modern writers to reduce causation to mere antecedence, and clings tenaciously to the truth that the law of causation is at once a primary law of human thought, and of the world without. Whence came this universe?" is one of the child's first questions; a question which never grows old in maturest years. What power, what force brought into being these myriads of creations around, above, and beneath us? That they have a Creator the mind feels sure. Nothing cannot produce something. Non-existence cannot possibly beget existences; and the fact that something now exists, proves that something has always existed.

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Nor will the intelligence rest satisfied in the more spacious doctrine of Second Causes. Where then will it rest? it is asked, in disdainful impatience at its stubborn honesty. If it does not rest here what is there for it but blank despair? Something immensely better, even God. In anything less or else it instinctively refuses to be comforted. It seeks an all producing Cause, Itself uncreated, unoriginated. We cannot stop till we reach such a Cause, or to use the old nomenclature, a selfsufficient power, a self-existing Being, or better still, I am that I am. But having reached that point, the mind feels that it can rest." This is the language of Second Causes themselves, as it is that of intuition. They speak of a cause beyond themselves, of a Cause of causes, of an all producing Cause. Obedient to the law of gravitation, the stars move on unceasingly in their orbits, "but no law of gravitation could have assigned them their place in space." The universe thus bids us look

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