Lectures, Addresses and Other Literary Remains

Probably the controversy with Popery would be more effectual and more practical in its results, if the opinions which Mr. Robertson avowed were taken as the basis on which it should be conducted.

In former years, Mr. Robertson had delivered a lecture at Cheltenham, on the Church of England's Independence of the Church of Rome; it is for the first time published here. It is marked by careful historical research, as well as by its freedom from merely passionate appeals to prejudice, while it is firm and uncompromising in its tone.

The next thing in order in this volume is the Lecture delivered at the opening of a Reading-room at Hurstpierpoint, a village about eight miles from Brighton, and which lecture Mr. Robertson consented to deliver from motives of personal friendship.

A reporter was present, and a fair copy from his notes was given to Mr. Robertson. That fair copy cannot now be discovered, and as these notes, in his own handwriting, appear to be the original preparative sketch of his lecture, and are so exceedingly suggestive, it has been judged better to print them as they were found.

The friend at whose instance this lecture was delivered writes:

6 ** * although the language used by Mr. Robertson was much above the comprehension of the agricultural class of the village, whose life is more marked by its stern contentment than of much self-education through the medium of books, yet I am able to record that there was nevertheless such a charm about this lecture as to excite a

considerable number of the audience to request its immediate publication.'

It is very noteworthy, that nearly all these public efforts of Mr. Robertson were in behalf of those engaged in labour. He had a high idea of work, regarding it as God's appointment for every man ; and while he always avowed his belief that the men of thought were labourers, as much as the men of action, he never lost an opportunity of urging on his hearers that a mere life of pleasure or fashion-the life of busy idleness was little better than living death. Some of his noblest utterances were those in which he sought to rouse men up to doing something better worthy of the vocation by which they were called. His own life was one long labour, of which, while others were marvelling at the wonderful gifts and graces it displayed, his own thought ever seemed to be 'not as though I had attained it.'

When many of the clergy and richer classes were looking suspiciously at the growing intelligence of working men, and connecting it with revolutionary events then going on in Europe, Mr. Robertson threw himself boldly into their cause, and avowed his belief that they had rights which, if trampled on, it was at the peril of the social fabric; that they had wrongs which it were well for England if she recognised and set herself steadily to remedy. In public and private he ever sought to bring classes together.

His pulpit ministrations were chiefly addressed to the richer classes of society, and he never failed to warn them, with a stern yet loving faithfulness, respecting the special responsibilities and temptations to which they were exposed.

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Most unflinchingly did he seek to impress upon them the duties they owed to those below them in the social scale; while, in speaking to labouring men, he as faithfully told them that one great cause why they were depressed and degraded was to be found in themselves: that when they could exercise self-denial, temperance, steadfastness in selfimprovement, it would be simply impossible for any one to keep them down. He told them, too, that in obtaining the mastery over self, they were attaining in God's kingdom a rank and a nobility greater than any mere earthly title could confer. And both classes responded to his earnest zeal for their welfare, with a genuine love, which is very touching, in a day of conventional flattery and mutual self-laudation.

1 See "The Church's Message to Men of Wealth;" published in the First Series of his Sermons.