Recollections of a Long Life: An AutobiographyCuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Religion
Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography
Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard)
Clergy -- United States -- Biography; Cuyler, Theodore L. (Theodore Ledyard), 1822-1909
Do many of the Londoners of this day remember Dr. James Hamilton, the
pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Regent's Square? They should do so,
for in his time he was the most popular devotional writer of both sides
of the Atlantic; and during my visit to London, in 1857, I was very
happy to form his acquaintance. He was a most cordial and charming man,
slender, tall, with dark eyes and hair, and a beaming countenance. When
one entered Hamilton's study he would hurry forward, seize his hands,
and taking both in his, reply to your "How do you do, sir," with "Come
in, come in; I am nicely, I assure ye." Would that all ministers were as
cordial and approachable. When I attended his church in Regent Square
they were singing, when I came in, a Psalm from the old Scotch Version.
The choristers sat in a desk below the pulpit. The singing was general
through the church, and excellent in style. Dr. Hamilton preached in a
gown, and, as the heat grew oppressive in the middle of his sermon,
threw it off. The discourse was delivered with extremely awkward
gestures, but in a voice of great sweetness. The text was: "My soul
thirsteth for the Living God." He described an arid wilderness, hot and
parched, and down beneath it a mighty vein of water into which an
artesian well was bored, and forthwith the waters gushed up through it
and swept over all the dry desert, making it one emerald meadow. "So,"
said he, "it is the incarnate Jesus flowing up through our own dusty,
barren desert humanity, and overflowing us with Heavenly life and grace,
until what was once dreary and dead becomes a fruitful garden of the
Lord." The discourse was like a chapter from one of Hamilton's savory
volumes. Five years afterwards, I dined with Hamilton, and the Rev.
William Arnot (who afterwards was his biographer), and I went to his
church to deliver the preparatory discourse to the sacrament on the next
Sabbath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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