In this excited state of mind Irving was called upon to endure great personal trials. His opinions on the person of Christ were very properly called in question ; and he was compelled to meet ecclesiastical process in consequence. In the midst of these distracting occurrences, he undertook a journey to Scotland that he might proclaim there, as in London, the approaching coming of his Master.15 On this journey he met at Row (McLeod Campbell's parish) a man whose influence on his subsequent life cannot be overesti- mated— Alexander J. Scott, an impracticable probationer of the church of Scotland, whose strong and acute but in- docile and wilful mind imposed upon every one whom he met an overestimate of his intellectual ability. This was in the summer of 1828. Irving was at once taken captive and engaged Scott to come up to London with him and share his work, on the only terms on which Scott could either then or at any subsequent time have been engaged — "entirely unfettered by any pledge as to doctrine."16 This "powerful and singular spirit," so sceptical of what- ever others believed — his driftage carried him ultimately beyond the limits of Christianity — so confident of what- ever his mind fixed itself upon at the moment, had already reached the conclusion that the charismata of the early church might and should be enjoyed by the church of all ages. He succeeded in imposing this belief upon Irving, who himself dates his conviction that the spiritual gifts of the Apostolic age were not exceptional or temporary from 1828 — the year in which he became associated with Scott.17
Irving was inclined to be content with holding his view
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as a theory. This, however, did not content "the restless soul" by his side. As Irving himself relates: "And as we went out and in together, he used often to signify to me his conviction that the Spiritual Gifts ought to be exercised in the Church; that we are at liberty, and indeed bound, to pray for them as being baptized into the assurance of the 'gift of the Holy Ghost,' as well as of 'repentance and re- mission of sins. . . .' Though I could make no answer to this," he adds, "and it is altogether unanswerable, I con- tinued still to be very little moved to seek myself or to stir up my people to seek these spiritual treasures. Yet I went forward to contend and to instruct whenever the subject came before me in my public ministrations of read- ing and preaching the Word, that the Holy Ghost ought to be manifested among us all, the same as ever He was in any one of the primitive Churches." 18 Scott, his assistant, doubtless did likewise. Here we see, at least, Scott's preparation of Irving himself and of his church for what was to come.
"But," says Mrs. Oliphant,19 "Mr. Scott's influence did not end there. About the same period at which he was engaged in quickening this germ of expectation in the breast of Irving, circumstances brought him in the way of sowing a still more effectual seed." There was a district in Scot- land suffering at this time under great religious excitement — roused partly by the preaching of John McLeod Camp- bell, and partly by the influence of the kindly life of Isa- bella Campbell of Fernicarry, a young saint whose death had just profoundly moved the community. There, just at this juncture, Scott appeared, a "master of statement and argument," as Irving describes him, and in Mrs. Oliphant's words, "bent all his powers to laying this train of splendid mischief."20 "When Isabella Campbell died, a portion of her fame — her pilgrim visitors — her position as one of the most remarkable persons in the countryside, a pious and tender oracle — descended to her sister Mary," 21 who
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