seems to have been a young woman "possessed of gifts of mind and temperament scarcely inferior to genius, " "with all the personal fascination of beauty," and endowed with a "young, fervid and impressionable imagination." 22 On her the subtlest arguments of one of the acutest men of the day were poured. Irving himself describes the result thus : "Being called down to Scotland upon some occasion, and residing for a while at his father's house, which is in the heart of that district of Scotland upon which the light of Mr. Campbell's ministry had arisen, he (Scott) was led to open his mind to some of the godly people of those parts, and among others to a young woman who was at that time lying ill of a consumption, from which afterwards, when brought to the very door of death, she was raised up in- stantaneously by the mighty hand of God. Being a woman of very fixed and constant spirit he was not able with all his power of statement and argument, which is unequalled by that of any man I have ever met with, to convince her of the distinction of regeneration and baptism with the Holy Ghost ; and when he could not prevail, he left her with a solemn charge to read over the Acts of the Apostles with that distinction in mind, and to beware how she hastily rejected what was, as he believed, the truth of God. By this young woman it was that God, not many months after, did restore the gift of speaking with tongues and prophesy- ing to the Church." 23
How it came about, Irving describes as follows: "The handmaiden of the Lord, of whom he made choice on that night" (a Sunday evening in the end of March — i. e., March 28, 1830) "to manifest forth in her His glory, had been long afflicted with a disease which the medical men pro- nounced to be a decline, and that it would soon bring her to her grave, whither her sister had been hurried by the same malady a few months before. Yet while all around her were anticipating her dissolution, she was in the strength of faith meditating missionary labours among the heathen ;
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and this night she was to receive the preparation of the Spirit; the preparation of the body she received not until some days after. It was on the Lord's day; and one of her sisters, along with a female friend who had come to the house for that end, had been spending the whole day in humiliation, and fasting, and prayer before God, with a special respect to the restoration of the gifts. They had come up in the evening to the sick-chamber of their sister, who was laid on a sofa, and, along with one or two others of the household, were engaged in prayer together. When in the midst of their devotion, the Holy Ghost came with mighty power upon the sick woman as she lay in her weak- ness, and constrained her to speak at great length and with superhuman strength in an unknown tongue, to the aston- ishment of all who heard, and to her own great edification and enjoyment in God; 'for he that speaketh in a tongue edifieth himself.' She has told me that this first seizure of the Spirit was the strongest she ever had, and that it was in some degree necessary it should have been so, other- wise she would not have dared to give way to it." 24
Meanwhile the "power" passed across the Clyde to the opposite town of Port Glasgow into another pious house- hold. When James Macdonald returned from his work to his midday dinner one day "he found his invalid sister in the agonies of this new inspiration. The awed family concluded . . . that she was dying." But she addressed her brothers at great length and solemnly prayed that James might at that time be endowed with the Holy Ghost. "Almost instantly James calmly said, 'I have got it.'" With a changed countenance in a few moments, "with a step and manner of the most indescribable majesty — he walked up to his sister's bedside and addressed her in these words of the 20th Psalm: 'Arise and stand upright.' He repeated the words, took her by the hand, and she arose." 25 After this wonderful cure James Macdonald wrote to Mary Campbell, "then apparently approaching
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death, conveying to her the same command that had been so effectual in the case of his sister." She rose up at once and declared herself healed. And here we have the re- stored gifts prepared for the church.