The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss | Page 5

Satanic influence which should have been ascribed rather to unstrung nerves and loss of sleep, or to a violation of the laws of health. [4] The disturbing influence of nervous and other bodily or mental disorders upon religious experience deserves a fuller discussion than it has yet received. It is a subject which both modern science and modern thought, if guided by Christian wisdom, might help greatly to elucidate.
The morbid and melancholy element, however, was only a painful incident of his character. It tinged his life with a vein of deep sadness and led to undue severity of self-discipline; but it did not seriously impair the strength and beauty of his Christian manhood. It rather served to bring them into fuller relief, and even to render more striking those bright natural traits--the sportive humor, the ready mother wit, the facetious pleasantry, the keen sense of the ridiculous, and the wondrous story-telling gift--which made him a most delightful companion to young and old, to the wise and the unlettered alike. It served, moreover, to impart peculiar tenderness to his pastoral intercourse, especially with members of his flock tried and tempted like as he was. He had learned how to counsel and comfort them by the things which he also had suffered. He may have been too exacting and harsh in dealing with himself; but in dealing with other souls nothing could exceed the gentleness, wisdom, and soothing influence of his ministrations.
As a preacher he was the impersonation of simple, earnest, and impassioned utterance. Although not an orator in the ordinary sense of the term, he touched the hearts of his hearers with a power beyond the reach of any oratory. Some of his printed sermons are models in their kind; that _e.g._ on "Sins estimated by the Light of Heaven," and that addressed to Seamen. His theology was a mild type of the old New England Calvinism, modified, on the one hand, by the influence of his favorite authors--such as Thomas à Kempis, and Fenelon, the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century, John Newton and Richard Cecil--and on the other, by his own profound experience and seraphic love. Of his theology, his preaching and his piety alike, Christ was the living centre. His expressions of personal love to the Saviour are surpassed by nothing in the writings of the old mystics. Here is a passage from a letter to his mother, written while he was still a young pastor:
I have sometimes heard of spells and charms to excite love, and have wished for them, when a boy, that I might cause others to love me. But how much do I now wish for some charm which should lead men to love the Saviour!... Could I paint a true likeness of Him, methinks I should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever. It would be heaven enough to hear Him praised and adored. But I can not paint Him; I can not describe Him; I can not make others love Him; nay, I can not love Him a thousandth part so much as I ought myself. O, for an angel's tongue! O, for the tongues of ten thousand angels, to sound His praises.
He had a remarkable familiarity with the word of God and his mind seemed surcharged with its power. "You could not, in conversation, mention a passage of Scripture to him but you found his soul in harmony with it--the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of meaning which a sentence from the word of God presented to his mind." [5]
He was wonderfully gifted in prayer. Here all his intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection. When he said, "Let us pray," a divine influence seemed to rest upon all present. His prayers were not mere pious mental exercises, they were devout inspirations.
No one can form an adequate conception of what Dr. Payson was from any of the productions of his pen. Admirable as his written sermons are, his extempore prayers and the gushings of his heart in familiar talk were altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote. It was my custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth. His prayers always took my spirit into the immediate