There was a fine healthfulness in his spirit. There is nothing in his life to lead one to think that he had ever been much intoxicated by the fame which had attended him; he appears to have been always beneath the control of the great truths in which he believed, and it was not the seductive charms of popularity for which he cared, but the power of those truths to bring light, conviction, and rest, to human souls. All his sermons look that way; all that we know of his preaching, and experience, turns in that direction.
Rose-leaves are said to act as an emetic, and have much the same effect on the constitution as senna-leaves. It is so with those sweet things which fame offers to the imagination; the conserves of its fragrance, by-and-by, become sickening. So, the robust nature of our fine old friend had to rise over grief, and disappointment, and unfriendliness, and diaconal dictation and impertinence. Only one thing he remembered. He appears to have been sustained, even as Edward Irving was, in his conviction that the truth of his message, the lamp of the ministry which he carried, gave to him a right, and a prerogative which he was not to relinquish; he had proved himself, he had proved the Spirit of God to be in him of a truth. He was not a wrangler, not disposed to maintain debates as to his rights; nor was he disposed to yield to caprice, faction, and turbulence; and so, he began to think of retiring, old as he was, from the field, the fragrance of which had proclaimed that the Lord had blessed him there.
Christmas Evans, as he draws near to the close of his work in Anglesea, only illustrates what many a far greater, and many a lesser man than he, have alike illustrated. There is a fine word among the many fine words of that great, although eccentric teacher, John Ruskin:—“It is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of man, that in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the further off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success.” This was, no doubt, the consolation of Christmas; but as we look upon him, a friendly voice reminds us, that, as he leaves Anglesea, he realizes very much of Robert Browning’s soliloquy of the martyred patriot:—