words of a modern writer, "It is those who know the feelings of a crown of thorns, and of a social crucifixion, for whom Heaven reserves the final hosannahs, and a seat at the right hand of power.""

THE FIRST DAYS, AND THE LAST, OF CÆSAR MALAN. FORTY years ago, and still later, the name of Cæsar Malan was a household word in large circles of English society. It is not forgotten now, and will not, so long as the history of the Church of the nineteenth century is remembered. He belonged, we are informed,* to a family still numerous in the Piedmontese valleys of the Waldenses. A portion of it migrated to France, and settled in Dauphiny. Many of his name, both in Piedmont and France, were conspicuous in the rolls of heroic confessors for Christ. The Malans of Dauphiny, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, sacrificed everything for their faith. While some sought, in the wilds of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, the religious freedom which had been wrenched from them in their native land, one of them, Pierre Malan, the great-grandfather of Cæsar, fled from Merindol, his home in Dauphiny, after the martyrdom of his sister in 1714, and reached Geneva, in 1722, in a state of utter destitution.

Henri Abraham Cæsar,-for such was his full name, -was born in Geneva on the 7th of July, 1787. His mother's family, the Prestreaus, like the Malans, were a family of refugees, and her father's history was full of romantic and dramatic incidents. Cæsar's father did not inherit, at least did not cherish, the faith of his ancestors. He succumbed in no small measure to the influence of Voltaire, whose works, with those of Rousseau, occupied the place of honour on his library shelves. To him all spiritual enthusiasm was, to say the least, suspicious; and, while his amiability of disposition rendered him incapable of individual sarcasm, he greeted religious topics with the smile of superior intellect, and encountered every utterance of fervent piety with the passionless rigour of what he called his common sense. Cæsar's mother was the means of implanting in his mind the earliest seeds of Divine truth. With angelic sweetness of disposition, she combined a piety as simple as it was sincere.

Of the incidents of Cæsar's childhood, the following is recorded in his mother's words. "It was during a severe winter, and in days when our circumstances were far from affluent, when your father was about seven years old, that I made him a present one day of a pair of warm woollen gloves. A morning or two afterwards, on his return from school, I noticed that he was not wearing them, and, by dint of questioning, elicited the explanation that he had given them to a poor boy with chilblained hands.

* For Malan's history, we are indebted to his "Life, Labours, and Writings," by one of his sons, published by Nisbet and Co.

'You see, mamma,' he said, 'I can put my hands into my coat sleeves-his coat was not warm like mine."" The mother commended her boy for what he had done, telling him, however, at the same time, that he must not expect another pair, "though," she added, as she told the story, "I often suffered that winter at the sight of his poor little frost-bitten hands. Still, independent of the cost to me of replacing the gloves, which I could ill afford, it was of paramount importance that he should learn from experience that those only can have the privilege and pleasure of giving who give at the cost of personal sacrifice."

Cæsar Malan's education was conducted from first to last at the Collegiate Institution, established by the great Reformer, and which, at this time, continued to be much in the same condition in which Calvin had left it. "There it was that contemporary scholars contracted those lasting friendships which made Protestant Geneva less a city than a family and household. There it was that young men from their earliest days were trained to order, industry, obedience; above all, to a faith in absolute equality in the presence of a common duty,-virtues which for so long a time have been the source of power and glory to the little republic."

As a young man he became remarkable for the exemplary regularity of his life, and for his active and ungrudging benevolence. Many proofs are at hand that he exhibited from the very first in a high degree those sterling qualities which shone out so brilliantly in his after career. He was known as a "saint." It is said (and the tradition was confirmed to his biographer by one friend still alive), that once, during an unusually bitter winter, he went, unknown to his parents, night after night, to a wood-yard to purchase bundles of fagots, which he carried off and distributed himself to sundry poor families. Testimony, too, abounds as to his courage and presence of mind. How he stopped, for instance, one day, two horses which had run away, no one being at hand to help him. Also as to the depth of his sympathy with distress, how with earnest solicitude he watched over some wounded Austrian soldiers.

Of his theological studies and of the character of his early religion, we have the following account from himself. "During my four years' study of theology, and especially during the two last, I frequently preached, sometimes in the rural parishes of Geneva, sometimes in the neighbouring countries. At that time, I was utterly ignorant of Gospel grace, and though my character as a young man was upright, even to severity, no thought had ever entered my mind of any other way of salvation than that of my own work and deservings.

"From the very first, and through my mother's teaching, I had learned to believe in the divinity of the Son of God, and I remember that, at the age of fourteen, I maintained this verity against some of my fellow-students in the college room; yet the belief was as dead within me, and during my four years' study, not a syllable reached me from the lips of my instructors calculated to call it into life. Moreover, the theses which I wrote under

the direction of the professor of sacred oratory, went no further than to treat of human wisdom and morality; yet, with this only as the testimony of my conscience, I thought myself, and was thought by others, very religious; my morals were unimpeachable, and my general conversation reputed devout."

Writing in 1835, Malan said,-" Were I to go back to my recollections of academical life and its theological teaching, I should fail to find a single instance in which instruction was given me on the divinity of our Saviour, man's fallen nature, or the doctrine of justification by faith. I think," he adds, "my contemporaries retain the same impression as myself."

This explains the testimony of Robert Haldane, who had had considerable intercourse with those "contemporaries." "If they had been brought up in the schools of Socrates and Plato," he exclaimed indignantly to one of their professors, "they could not have been more totally ignorant of the saving truths of the gospel. Their studies seem to have been entirely devoid of all scriptural teaching whatsoever." "We learnt," adds one of them (Rev. A, Bost, sen.), "nothing beyond the dogmas of natural religion. The New Testament was not considered necessary as a text-book of study for the ministry."

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"Not that it is to be inferred from all this," says Malan's son, his tutors had failed utterly to set before him the sacredness of the Scriptures. The Church of Geneva herself had never yet given birth to an avowed and direct assailant of their authority. It was from a man who, until then, had occupied a leading position in the opposite camp, that such an attack eventually proceeded, in the lifetime of the present generation. But there is a worse treatment of the Bible than this, and of that she had been guilty. To attack it openly was only to throw it on the defensive, to challenge a scrutiny of the proofs on which its authority rested, to evoke all the ancient ardour with which that authority was upheld. Never thus did the Church of Geneva treat the Bible, to no such prominence did she expose it, she only ignored it, she only passed it over in silence. Investing it with an exaggerated awe, her very reverence, amounting to superstition, held it back from general use. Whilst admitting with the unhappy Rousseau, to the very fullest extent, the majesty of Scripture,' she would have deemed it as nothing short of exaggeration to take its authority as the only rule of faith and aim of life."

In October, 1810, Cæsar Malan was ordained to the ministry, at the age of twenty-three. The ceremony took place in the church of GenevaM. Picot, dean of the clerical body, presiding. The oath which he took on this occasion was to the following effect :-" You swear before God, and on the Sacred Scriptures open before you, to preach in its simplicity the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: to recognise as the only infallible rule of faith and conduct, the Word of God, as contained in the sacred books of the Old and New Testament: to abstain from all spirit of sectarianism : to shun everything from which schism might arise, or which might tend to

disturb the union of the Church: to hold inviolably secret all confessions made to you in the disburdening of individual consciences, except such as. tend in the direction of high treason: and to exert yourself to the utmost for the edification of the Church of God, by living in the midst of the world,' in temperance, justice, and piety, and by devoting yourself to the zealous fulfilment of all the duties of your sacred calling."

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In the following year he married the younger daughter of M. Schönenberger, a merchant long established at Geneva.

For five or six years Malan's preaching was in decided opposition to gospel truth. A stranger at that time to the religious movement which was beginning to assert itself around him, the Bible was to him an all but sealed book. Happening to be travelling, on one occasion, during this period, and having nothing to occupy him, he tried to read a chapter or two as a species of distraction. But he found the style so old-fashioned, he declares, and the language so common-place, that he put the book aside, and betook himself to a volume of literature.

Stopping at a Vaudois village on one occasion he preached for the pastor. "As we were leaving the church," he told afterwards, "he said to me, with a grave and mournful expression, It appears to me, sir, that you have not yet learnt that, in order to convert others, you must first be converted yourself. Your sermon was not a Christian discourse, and I sincerely hope my people didn't understand it.' Blessed salutary words! From them and from all that this faithful servant of Christ added to them, I began to understand what a Christian means-what it really is to be a Christian."

"At the time of my ordination at Geneva," he writes, "I was in utter ignorance of the truth as it is in Jesus. In this darkness I lingered till 1814, at which time I first apprehended the truth that our Lord Jesus Christ is God. I had had some indefinite idea of the importance of this truth from the commencement of my ministry, after a series of conversations with a pastor of the Canton de Vaud, but it was not till the time above specified that I actually received it. Under the teaching of God's Holy Spirit, I owe this development of my faith to hearing the divine word from the lips of various Christians, among whom I may mention, in particular, M.M. Demellayer, Galland, Coulin, Gaussen, and Paul Henry of Berlin; and, above all, M. Moulin."

"From that time I began," he says, "to discern the doctrine of grace and justification by faith without the works of the law. Galland often spoke of it, and I found that, in the expositions I made in the week-day services, I gradually arrived at the truth that man is justified by faith alone. This was in the year 1815. At the close of that year I began to teach this doctrine to my pupils at the college, and it was then that I first encountered the admonitions and reproaches of those of my superiors who did not relish the truth I was professing."

In illustration of his ignorance of gospel truth, Malan gives an analysis

of a sermon preached by him in 1813 (text-Phil. iii. 13, 14), and which had been written under the special superintendence of one of his professors. In it is set forth the innocence of human nature, and a sinner's justification by his own merits and efforts. It concludes as follows: As you contemplate the excellences you have already attained, and see opening before you the path to new achievements, you will taste a secret, ineffable joy. The consciousness of progress will fill your hearts with sweetest hope; and thus, in adding day by day to your previous merits, a hoard of gold tried in the fire, the purchase-money of immortality, you will anticipate with heavenly delight the arrival of that happy hour wherein you shall be called to render back to the Creator the souls which you have embellished with accumulated virtues."

At the close of 1815 we have seen that Cæsar Malan began to teach the doctrine of justification by faith to his pupils. In the beginning of 1816 he contracted an intimacy with two pious foreigners, one of them the Lutheran pastor in Geneva, which proved a means of great spiritual benefit to him. At the same period the following incident occurred: "One afternoon, while I was reading the New Testament at my desk, while my pupils were preparing their next lesson, I turned to the 2nd chapter of Ephesians. When I came to the words, 'By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,' the passage seemed to shine out before my eyes. I was so deeply moved by it that I was compelled to leave the room and take a turn in the courtyard, where I walked up and down exclaiming with intensest feeling, I am saved! I am saved!""

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At a later period in the same year, he met casually, at an hotel, for the first time, Mr. Robert Haldane, whose visit to Geneva is associated with the conversion of D'Aubigne, Gaussen, and others. And to Mr. Haldane he owed further enlightenment and strengthening. Speaking of the new life on which he had entered, his son remarks: "If my father's case proved no exception to the rule that the experimental knowledge of salvation must be followed by a new life, this new life of his was not inaugurated by one of those tragical struggles of the soul which any observer may detect; nor yet did it erect itself on the ruins, we will not say of irregular morals, but even of worldly habits. Rather it was a quiet transition from a moral, and, in a limited sense, a devout life, to a life genuinely spiritual, and, in the gospel sense of the term, renewed. Further, this new principle in him did not start into being by concentrating a hitherto wavering mind, or by supplying, under divine grace, a force and symmetry of character as yet wanting. On the contrary, the message of the gospel found in him one to whom religion was no novelty, while morality was a sternest law; a man whose candid and ingenuous spirit, and resolute following of right, had secured for him general esteem."

It was impossible for such a man to remain long without rendering public testimony to the truth which was possessing his soul. It was on the 15th