So strong was the delusion to which Irving was now de- livered— that Irving who had been hitherto plastic wax in the hands of everybody. He was soon established in his new church in Newman Street. In that church an elab- orate order was set up, and an ornate ritual instituted ac- cording to the pattern of which Baxter himself had drawn the outlines, and which was ever more fully developed by deliverances from Baxter's followers.37 "Before the open- ing of this church, the prophet himself had published the wonderful narrative in which he repeated the predictions which came from his own lips, and, appealing to the whole world whether they had been fulfilled, proclaimed them a delusion." 38 Nothing, however, could now stay the de- velopment of the "Catholic Apostolic Church," not even Irving himself, had he wished to do so. More and more overruled and set aside by the powers he had evoked and could not control, he sank into an ever more subordinate position in the edifice he had raised.39
Meanwhile it was not going much better with the "gifts" in Scotland, where they had originated, than in London, whither they had been transplanted. The report of their outbreak on the Clyde had found a ready response in the heart of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. His whole religious life was intensely individualistic, and he too had become imbued with the same chiliastic hopes which in London were fostered by the prophetic studies of Albury. Predis- posed to recognize the phenomena as endowments of the Holy Ghost, he repaired at once to Port Glasgow and be- came an inmate of the Macdonalds' house, living with them for six weeks and attending the daily prayer-meetings, where he witnessed the manifestations. His immediate conclusions he published to the world in a tract, On the Gifts of the Spirit, issued at the close of 1830, and in a more con-
THOMAS ERSKINE 145
siderable volume which appeared the same year under the title The Brazen Serpent or Life Coming through Death. "The world," said he,40 "does not like the recurrence of miracles. And yet it is true that miracles have recurred. I cannot but tell what I have seen and heard. I have heard persons, both men and women, speak with tongues and prophesy, that is, speak in the Spirit to edification, exhor- tation, and comfort." A closer acquaintance with the phenomena, however, first shook and then shattered this favorable judgment. The developments in London were a great trial to his faith, as indeed they were also to that of the originators of the "gifts" at Port Glasgow, who did not hesitate -to denounce them as delusions. "James Macdonald writes," 41 Erskine tells one of his correspond- ents, "that the spirit among them declared the London people to be 'deceitful workers transforming themselves into the Apostles of Christ.' Strange things — spirit against spirit." He discovered that some at least of the deliver- ances of the Macdonalds rested on no profounder inspira- tion than paragraphs in the current newspapers.42 Before the end of 1833 he required to write:43 "My mind has un- dergone a considerable change. ... I have seen reason
to disbelieve that it is the Spirit of God which is in M ,
and I do not feel that I have stronger reason to believe that it is in others." His conviction grew ever stronger that all the manifestations he had himself witnessed at Port Glasgow were delusive,44 and that the whole develop- ment had originated and been maintained through a dread- ful mistake.45
Why he should have ever given himself to such a delusion \ is the real puzzle. There is an article in the Edinburgh Review for June, 1831, reviewing the new charismatic | literature, considering which the reviewer impatiently but not unjustly exclaims that "theologians look for truth, as children on excursions seek for pleasure, by leaving the plain path and the light of day to penetrate into caverns
(
146 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES