ROBERTSON 



745 



from over-devotion to work and a course of ascetic 

 austerities through which, in this period of bond- 

 age to the letter, a hypei-sensitive conscience 

 prompted him to seek after a higher level of 

 Christian life. A walking tour on the Continent 

 restored him to health, and at Geneva he married, 

 after a short acquaintance, a daughter of Sir 

 George William Denys. In the summer of 184'2 

 he became curate to the incumbent of Christ 

 Church, Cheltenham, and here for nearly five 

 years he laboured with unbroken devotion, despite 

 depression of spirits, conviction of failure, and 

 a painful and prolonged mental struggle through 

 which he fought his way upwards to certainty 

 in his grasp of the realities of Christian truth. 

 His faith in Evangelicalism was first shaken by 

 the intolerance and bitterness of its partisans, 

 and the spiritual agony of the revulsion shook his 

 soul to its foundations, and again broke down his 

 health. In September 1846 lie set out for the 

 Continent, and, after three months of travel and 

 preaching at Heidelberg, returned a follower of no 

 school to accept the curacy of St Ebbe's in Oxford. 

 Here the power of his preaching had already made 

 itself felt among his poor and even among the 

 undergraduates, when in August 1847 he accepted 

 an invitation to Trinity Chapel, Brighton. 



He hud now grown to his full stature as a dis- 

 ciple of Christ, and his rare union of imaginative 

 with dialectic power, the beauty ai_d freshness of 

 liis thought, his earnestness, originality, wide sym- 

 pathy, and knowledge of the human heart at once 

 arrested public attention. He brought the religion 

 of Jesus to bear on everyday life and the perplex- 

 ing social problems of the time, and pointed out 

 the path to the true liberty, equality, and frater- 

 nity in service and disciplineship as sons of God 

 and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. But his motives 

 were misunderstood by many, and, especially after 

 the excitement of 1848, he was branded for his 

 sympathy with working-men as a revolutionist 

 and enemy of social order, and subjected to much 

 misrepresentation and many a cruel and unjust 

 attack. He established the Working-men's Insti- 

 tute in Brighton, and taught its members how 

 to govern and to respect themselves, and he flung 

 himself with a passionate and chivalrous enthusiasm 

 into every battle waged in his day against tyranny 

 and wrong. Stern in denunciation of moral evil, 

 he was tolerant of intellectual error, and thus his 

 influence, like his Master's, extended to men 

 hitherto outside the pale of Christian sympathy. 

 The strength and absolute sincerity of his convic- 

 tions, and the broad rationality and certitude on 

 which these were Imsecl, gave new strength to many 

 a troubled and doubtingheart, and added in almost 

 unexampled degree the seal of power and com- 

 prehensiveness to his ministry. To him the Incar- 

 nation was the centre of all history ; Christ, God's 

 idea of human nature realised. He was no mere 

 negative theologian, for the central point of his 

 preaching was ever the historical reality of the life 

 of Christ, revealing at once sonship with God and 

 brotherhood with man. Men are sons of God by 

 virtue of His image stamped upon them in creation ; 

 they become so de jure by baptism, but de facto by 

 faith. The suffering of Christ makes atonement 

 for our sins by making possible in us the potential- 

 ity of sympathetically suffering for others; while 

 faith converts this potentiality into an actual 

 reality, as the foundation of union with God and 

 the spring of Christ-like qualities within u.. The 

 characteristic fruit of faith is a pervasive love to 

 Christ and to one another; and one of the privi- 

 leges that flow from it is an elevation from the 

 bondage of the letter, and a security in the freedom 

 of the npirit. Hence came Roliertson's honest 

 refusal to sign the petition for an enactment 



against opening the Crystal Palace on Sundays 

 a protest against binding the chains of Judaical 

 legalism on the Christian conscience which cost 

 him much odium and inspired one noble sermon. 

 Robertson grasped the idea of the vast compre- 

 hensiveness of the Christian ideal, with its unity 

 of spirit under diversity of form, recognising that 

 theological systems must be continually modified 

 by new conditions of life and thought in the his- 

 torical development of the ages. The intolerant 

 absolutism of the Evangelical school, and the High 

 Church subservience to form, as well as its search 

 for an ideal in the Christianity of the past rather 

 than in the present or the future, were alike re- 

 pugnant to him ; yet he possessed all the emotional 

 fervour which used to be claimed as the monopoly 

 of the one, and which he loved in his own day to 

 recognise in the fresh enthusiasm of the other, 

 together with the strength of thought and the 

 philosophic breadth usually associated with the 

 more liberal theology. He himself summed up 

 the cardinal principles of his teaching in these 

 propositions : ( 1 ) The establishment of positive 

 truth, instead of the negative destruction of error. 

 (2) That truth is made up of two opposite proposi- 

 tions, and not found in a via media between the 

 two. (3) That spiritual truth is discerned by the 

 spirit, instead of intellectually in propositions ; and 

 therefore Truth should be taught suggestively, not 

 dogmatically. (4 ) That belief in the human charac- 

 ter of Christ's humanity must l>e antecedent to 

 belief in his divine origin. (5) That Christianity, 

 as its teachers showed, works from the inward to 

 the outward, and not vice versa. (6) The soul of 

 goodness in things evil. 



In the pulpit Robertson's voice was low but clear 

 and musical, with occasional startling modulations, 

 and that peculiar thrill of suppressed emotion which 

 is the innermost secret of eloquence. He stood 

 almost motionlessly erect, his fine face, delicate 

 and mobile features, and deep blue eyes all elo- 

 quent in harmony with his words. Intensely 

 sensitive as he was, all self-consciousness vanished 

 as he spoke, his brain and heart aglow with a fire 

 of earnestness that burned up his physical strength. 

 His sermons were kneaded with liis heart's blood, 

 hence their reality, as he never spoke what had not 

 become a part of himself. In preparing them he 

 jotted down his thoughts on scraps of paper, next 

 wrote out his main ideas with some fullness in 

 logical sequence of thought, then made on a small 

 slip of pa]>er a brief abstract of the whole with 

 merely the heads and a few of the leading thoughts. 

 This he took with him into the pulpit, but hardly 

 had lie warmed to his subject ere it was crushed in 

 his grasp and Hung aside as useless. 



During his last years Robertson suffered intense 

 pain from a disease of the brain, which was 

 heightened by the excitability and unrest of his 

 temperament, and the misrepresentations that fell 

 like blows upon a hypersensitive nervous organisa- 

 tion. He preached his last sermon in Trinity 

 Chapel on 5tn June 1853, having resigned because 

 his vicar had refused on entirely inadequate grounds 

 to confirm his nomination of a curate. After a few 

 more weeks of cruel suffering he died, 15th August 

 1853, with the last words on his lips, ' I must die. 

 Let God do His work.' Eight days later he was 

 laid in the Extra-mural Cemetery at Brighton 

 amid the sorrow of the entire population of the 

 town. Its citizens knew well what Stopford 

 Brooke's biography twelve years later revealed to 

 the wider world, that his whole life had been a 

 passionate Imitation of Christ. 



Robertson of Brighton published in his lifetime but one 

 sermon-the four series (1855, 1855, 1857, 1859-63) so 

 well known over the English-speaking world, and consti- 

 tuting so unique a monument of religious genius, war> 



