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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadThe Worlds Greatest Sermons by Grenville Kleiser: 124. Edward Irving
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Irving
1792-1834
Biographical Note
Edward Irving was born at Annan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in 1792. He was an early friend and lover of Jane Welsh, who afterwards married Thomas Carlyle. He showed ability at school, but had also a taste for the preaching of extreme Presbyterian seceders from the Church of Scotland. After graduating at the University of Edinburgh, in 1809, he began life by teaching school, but obtained a license to preach in 1815. He became assistant to Chalmers at Glasgow in 1819, where, great preacher as he was, he felt himself eclipsed by Chalmers, and in 1822 accepted the pulpit at a chapel in Hatton Garden, London. Here he leapt into fame. His melodious and resonant voice, his noble presence and the beauty of his features, enhanced the eloquence of his language. Eventually he became unbalanced by the adulation of the aristocratic and intellectual crowd that listened to him. They, however, grew tired of his prophecies and denunciations, and his eccentricities of judgment finally led to disruption, and “after a few years of futile but splendid evangelization, he died a broken-hearted man, tender and true to the last, although the victim of unsubstantial religious vagaries.†Carlyle wrote a touching memoir of his life. He died in 1834.