IRVING 417 nia troops for quelling the " whiskey insur- rection," and took an active part in all the most important movements. In March, 1801, he was appointed superintendent of military stores at Philadelphia. He was president of the state society of the Cincinnati at his death. IRVING, Edward, a Scottish preacher, horn at Annan, Dumfriesshire, Aug. 4, 1792, died in Glasgow, Dec. 8, 1834. He graduated at the university of Edinburgh in 1809, in his 19th year was appointed mathematical teacher in an academy at Haddington, and in 1812 rector of an academy at Kirkcaldy, where he remain- ed seven years, pursuing at the same time the studies required of a candidate for the minis- try of the church of Scotland. He was li- censed to preach hy the presbytery of Annan in 1815, but received no invitation to settle as a pastor, and continued to teach till 1818, when he went to Edinburgh. In 1819 he be- came Dr. Chalmers's assistant in Glasgow, where he continued three years, when he re- signed, having been called to the charge of the Caledonian church, Hatton Garden, London, a small remnant, of a congregation in connection with the chnrch of Scotland. He was ordain- ed by the presbytery of Annan, and entered upon his ministry in 1822. Within a few months of his settlement there crowds press- ed to his weekly services. The nobility, mem- bers of parliament, judges and barristers, phy- sicians, clergymen, dissenters, and noted beau- ties besieged the doors, attracted no less by the eloquence and power than by the plain- spoken originality of the preacher. With a view to break up the routine habit of mind, which he conceived destroyed the effect of preaching generally, he adopted a style of dis- course different from the usual form of ser- mon, which he called " orations." A series of these, entitled "Orations for the Oracles of God," which were preached in 1823, he pub- lished in the same year in a volume with an- other series entitled " An Argument for Judg- ment to Come, in Nine Parts." This was the first of his published writings. In 1824 the foundations of a new church in Regent square were laid, which was intended to more fully accommodate his thronging audiences. In this year he was called upon to deliver a missionary discourse, the sentiments of which were so contrary to the views of the London missionary society for which he preached, as to occasion much dissatisfaction. This dis- course was published about a year after its delivery, much enlarged, under the title "For Missionaries after the Apostolic School, a Se- ries of Orations, in Four Parts : Part I., the Doctrine." The other three parts never ap- peared. In 1825 he delivered a course of lec- tures, afterward published, entitled " Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed." On Christmas day of the same year he first began to make known his convictions in relation to the sec- ond and personal advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the nearness of that great event. In 1826 he fell in with a Spanish work enti- tled " The Coming of Messiah in Majesty and Glory, by Juan Josafat ben Ezra," which pur- ported to be written by a Christian Jew, but was in reality the work of Lacunza, a South American Jesuit. He undertook the transla- tion of this work, which confirmed his atten- tion to the subject of Messianic prophecy, and from this time it became a leading thought with him. He wrote an introduction, which occu- pies half of an octavo volume, and which is regarded as one of his best works. The book appeared in 1827. About the same time his attention was called by the death of one of his children to the subject of infant baptism, which resulted in a series of " Homilies on the Sacra- ments," of which only the first volume, on baptism, was published (12mo, 1828). From this he was led to enter more fully into the great doctrine of the incarnation, to the expo- sition of which he devoted much labor, both in preaching and in controversial writings; affirming the perfect oneness of Christ with us in all the attributes of manhood, including its infirmities and liability to temptation. On this account he was charged with asserting the sinfulness of Christ's human nature. What he , really taught was, that Jesus Christ took from his mother human nature, such as it was in Adam after the fall, though in him without actual sin. It is asserted that his teaching on this subject was the origin of a revival of a similar strain of teaching in a portion of the English church. In 1828 he visited Scotland, and preached to thronging congregations in the principal places. At Kirkcaldy, his old home, the crowded galleries of the old church fell, and about 35 persons were killed. At this time he opposed the abolition of the test act, advocated by Chalmers, and in 1829 pub- lished a book entitled " Church and State," arguing for an organic connection between the two. In 1830 he was tried by the London presbytery for heretical views of the incarna- tion. He resisted the authority of the presby- tery, on the ground of irregularity in the trial, and left them, appealing to the church of Scot- land. In this he was sustained by his own church with great unanimity. All this time the interest in the study of prophecy was kept alive by Irving and his friends, and took prac- tical form in a series of conferences of those interested which were held at Albury park, Sur- rey, under the patronage of Henry Drummond, Esq., and by the publication of a quarterly pe- riodical entitled " The Morning Watch," to which Irving was a copious contributor. In the spring of 1830 reports came to London of some remarkable phenomena in the neighbor- hood of Port Glasgow in Scotland, consisting of what appeared to be supernatural utter- ances, i. e., words spoken under the impulse of a supernatural power, partly in the vernac- ular and partly in forms of language that were not known, and in connection with them the healing of the sick. When this report was
