EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 71 



bearer of a divine message to his fellow mortals. 

 Mr. Spurgeon believed that God sent him a message 

 through the medium of a shoemaker who posted up a 

 text of scripture on a shutter which the eminent 

 preacher had occasion to pass. It is almost laughable 

 and certainly significant to discover that the favoured 

 recipients of divine messages usually have a skeleton 

 formation quite different from the skeleton formation 

 of the impassioned bearers of purely human messages, 

 certain poets and novelists. 



It is interesting and not irrelevant in a study of the 

 bearing of physiological truths on men and movements 

 to look, for a few moments, at the relative strength of 

 inherited organization and the play of circumstance in 

 well known lives. Circumstance led Gladstone to be a 

 politician, but he has never lost his bent for religious 

 discussions. Cardinal Manning who, unlike Newman, 

 was not wholly free from a tinge of the popularity 

 hunter, was by circumstance a theologian : from natural 

 proclivity he would have been, as he said, " the mem- 

 ber for Marylebone." Bunyan, Wesley, Newman, and 

 Spurgeon were diverse, distinct, and well-marked 

 individualities, but they possessed in common certain 

 fundamental endowments and proclivities. These re- 

 mained unchanged however circumstance might change. 

 Wesley and Newman were a little more fitful in early 

 life; Bunyan and Spurgeon tended to be more petulant. 

 Bunyan had no rival as a caller of nicknames : " stink- 

 breath " was a mild example. All were conservative, 

 although they did not conserve the same things ; all 

 deferred unhesitatingly to authority but, through cir- 

 cumstance, their choice of authority was different ; all 

 were singularly active, but not in the same way ; all 

 were of blameless life ; in not one of them was there 

 any trace of the stronger passions. 



