Church.54 We cannot quote them at large; here are some examples. In the course of his exposition of the first chapter of I Samuel, Irving mentions the church as bar- ren ... on which the ecstatic voice interposes: "Oh but she shall be fruitful: oh! oh! oh! she shall replenish the earth and subdue it — and subdue it!" A little further on, another breaks in with less appositeness to the subject: "Oh, you do grieve the Spirit — you do grieve the Spirit! Oh ! the body of Jesus is to be sorrowful in spirit ! You are to cry to your Father — to cry, to cry, in the bitterness of your souls ! Oh it is a mourning, a mourning, before the Lord — a sighing, and crying unto the Lord because of the desolations of Zion — because of the desolations of Zion — because of the desolations of Zion !" There were seven of these voices heard during the course of the service. They were all pious, but repetitious, and, one would think (with Mrs. Oliphant), quite unnecessary, interruptions of the service.
It is more difficult to convey a notion of what the "speak- ing with tongues" was like. The "tongues" were thought at first to be real languages. Observers of the Scotch in- stances are very clear that, although unintelligible to their hearers, they were languages with recognizable structure as such.55 Cardale easily separated in J. Macdonald's ut- terances two distinguishable tongues.56 Mary Campbell declared that the tongue which she spoke was ordinarily that of the Pelew Islanders.57 The opinion soon became set- tled, however, that the "tongues" were an ecstatic heavenly and no earthly speech. The piercing loudness and strength of the utterance was its most marked characteristic. One witness speaks of it as "bursting forth" from the lips of a woman, "with an astonishing and terrible crash." 58 Bax- ter says that it fell on him at his private devotions so loudly that he stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth to keep from alarming the house.59 Irving's own description of it is as follows: "The whole utterance from the beginning to
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the ending of it, is with a power, and strength, and fullness and sometimes rapidity of voice, altogether different from that of the person's ordinary utterance in any mood ; and I would say, both in its form and in its effects upon a simple mind, quite supernatural. There is a power in the voice to thrill the heart and overawe the spirit after a manner which I have never felt." 60 Carlyle once heard it, and he gives a characteristic description of it.61 "It was in a neighboring room. . . . There burst forth a shrieky hys- terical 'Lah lall lall !' (little or nothing else but /'s and <z's) continued for several minutes. . . . 'Why was there not a bucket of water to fling on that lah-lalling hysterical madwoman ? ' thought we or said to one another." Doubt- less both accounts are somewhat colored by the personal equation.
We may imagine what a public service would be like liable to interruptions by such manifestations. Henry Vizetelly, in his Glances Back Through the Years (1893), gives us a vignette picture of Irving in his new chapel in Newman Street. " What chiefly attracted me to the chapel in Newman-street was the expectation, generally realised, of the spirit moving some hysterical shrieking sister or frantic Boanerges brother (posted in the raised recess be- hind Irving's pulpit), to burst forth suddenly with one of those wild rapid utterances which, spite of their unintelli- gibility, sent a strange thrill through all who heard them for the first time. ... He had grown gray and haggard- looking, and this, with his long, straggling hair and rest- less look, emphasized by the cast in his eye, gave him a singularly wild and picturesque appearance. His voice, too, was piercingly loud, and his gestures were as vehement as those of any street ranter of the day."
I think you will not be sorry, however, to place by the side of this a full-length portrait of one of those early- morning prayer-meetings held in the Regent Street Church, which were the scene of the first public displays of the
150 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES