A preacher.

His sermons.

CHAPTER XVI.

Dr. Murray as a Preacher.-Habit of Sermonizing.—System in Study.-Style of Speaking.-Contrast between his Sermons and Published Letters.-Calls to various Fields of Usefulness.

THE first great business of Dr. Murray's life was to preach the Gospel. All his energies were summoned to the work. All his ambition had its aim in its accomplishment. That he was eminently successful as a preacher, the fruits of his ministry are the most precious as well as abundant testimony.

In his earliest ministerial life he began to take great pains with his sermons. They were invariably written with deliberation, and method, and completeness, in a style of penmanship and general finish that seem scarcely consistent with the earnest mental activity that distinguished him. In later life, this habit of neatness, order, and preciseness grew upon him, so that his manuscript sermons would not have been more handsomely prepared had he expected to deposit them in a public library for inspection. The text is often written in English and Hebrew, or Greek, and neatly defined with black lines underneath, showing the particularity with which his paper was prepared before he proceeded to write his discourse.

He devoted the first part of every day in the week to his sermons, until his week's work upon them was done; and so systematic was he in this habit, that

In the pulpit.

His fame.

he always kept his work ahead of him, frequently having from five to ten sermons on hand that he had not preached; and this diligence was continued and increased even when he was able to avail himself, in an emergency, of the sermons that he had written twenty and thirty years before, which would, ́of course, be new to most of his hearers, and acceptable to all. When he was suddenly called to rest from his labors, the series of five fresh sermons on "A Future State" were found in his study, which have since been printed as a legacy to his people.

He was not a pulpit orator. He spoke with earnestness, solemnity, energy, and power, and he never failed to secure the fixed and interested attention of his hearers. But he was not eloquent in the sense which modern usage has given to the word. When he went into a new congregation, even in a distant city, his fame, preceding him, would draw together large numbers; but they had heard and read so much of the Irish wit, the satire, the pungency and point of KIRWAN, that they were disappointed when they heard the solid, methodical, instructive, and able discourses of DR. MURRAY. Very rare, indeed, it was that a flash of his native humor enlivened the page of one of his sermons. Seldom did he tell a story, or even introduce an anecdote, to illustrate his subject, though he would scarcely write a paragraph for the press without bringing them in with striking effect.

His sermons were always very serious, his writings for the newspaper were always very lively.

Few men have received more frequent and more

Invitations.

Church calls.

pressing invitations to take the pastoral charge of important congregations. And these invitations were given to him after full proof of his ministry, and many of them before he had acquired fame as an author. So frequently was he called on to preach at the dedication of new churches, and at ordination and installation of ministers, that he playfully sometimes styled himself the Bishop of New Jersey. But these calls often took him far beyond that diocese, even to Canada and Nova Scotia, where his visits were attended by demonstrations of great respect.

The progress which Nicholas Murray made, and the position which he occupied in the Church, may be seen at a glance by the summary of his course prepared from authentic documents:

1802, he was born in Ireland.

1819, he was in the employment of Harper & Brothers, Publishers,

New York.

1826, graduated at Williams College, Massachusetts.

1829, finished his course of study at the Theological Seminary at

Princeton, New Jersey.

1829, called to Wilkesbarre and Kingston, Pennsylvania.

Also to be Also to be

Secretary of the Presbyterian Education Society.
General Agent of the American Tract Society for the West.

1833, called to Elizabethtown, New Jersey.

1834, called to the Presbyterian Church of Charleston, South Carolina. His acceptance of this call was strongly urged by some of his best friends in the North, but he declined.

1835, elected Secretary of the Foreign Missionary Society (for New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, etc.), but he declined.

1836, called to the Park Street Church, Boston; a call that gave him great uneasiness. He declined it, and it was renewed and pressed upon him by a committee who visited him at Elizabethtown. He again declined, and a third effort, equally unsuc

Repeated.

And declined.

cessful, was made by the same Church to transfer him to the

metropolis of New England.

1837, called to Natchez, Mississippi, to succeed the Rev. George Potts, D.D., who came to New York; declined.

1839, called to Brooklyn, N. Y., to the Church of which the Rev. M. W. Jacobus, D.D., was afterward the pastor. To this Church he was nearly driven by the counsel and entreaties of his fathers and brethren in the ministry. He declined the call, and for ten years afterward steadily refused to allow his name to be presented to vacant churches, though often solicited for this purpose. He insisted that he would not be a "coquette. 1842, he was called, for the second time, to the Church in Natchez which had invited him in 1837, and again he declined the call. 1849, called to the Central Presbyterian Church in St. Louis; declined. 1850, called to the Seventh Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, and to

a professorship in the new Theological Seminary opened in that city. He was strongly tempted to go, that he might enter on a new field of labor in the West, but he finally, after great hesitancy, declined.

1852, called to the same Church in Brooklyn, N. Y., whose call he had refused in 1839. I was one of the committee who went to Elizabethtown and urged this call upon his attention. In the committee and in private, personally and by letter, I sought to induce him to leave Elizabethtown and go to Brooklyn. I set before him the obvious fact that being now just fifty years of age, he must move soon, or consider it a fixed fact that he must spend his days in Elizabethtown. But it was all in vain. He felt as Dr. A. Alexander did, who said "he had never known an instance of a minister going out of the general region where he had spent the energies of his youth, after he was fifty years of age, who did not repent it to the day of his death. His motto to ministers was, 'Go down hill where you went up.' Subsequently Dr. Murray was called to secretaryships in the Board of Education and the Board of Domestic Missions, but he preferred to live and die among his own people.

Such a record is rarely to be made in the life of any minister.

Visits Europe.

Native land.

CHAPTER XVII.

First Visit to Europe.-In London. -Meeting of Bible Society.Distinguished Men. -Tract Society.-Rev. Dr. Hamilton. -Dr. Cunningham.-France, Italy, and Switzerland.-Returns to Ireland and Scotland.-Visits his Birthplace.-Reflections.-Second Visit to Europe.-Letter from George H. Stuart, Esq.

To revisit the land of his birth, but still more to see the system of Romanism at home, had long been a passionate desire of Dr. Murray. Coming from his native land, not in childhood, but in youth, and having undergone so complete a transformation of character and condition as to be able scarcely to recognize himself as the wanderer from Ireland of thirty years. before, the greater was his curiosity and anxiety to look upon the scenes of his childhood and the land he had left.

But a stronger motive than this which urged him to cross the ocean was the duty and importance of studying the workings of popery in Ireland, France, and in other countries, especially in Italy. He was writing of Romanism constantly; he was often called on to speak and to preach in relation to it; he was justly regarded as the most popular writer on the subject, and he felt deeply the necessity of seeing for himself the form and fashion of the system in the land of its birth. Just before going abroad he visited the city of Washington, and was received with the highest