the Old and New Testaments in order. They rise into a loftier region of devotion, and contain a more absolute unveiling of the heart, than we find in the Daily Readings. During the author's lifetime they were kept sacredly from every eye but his own. therefore find more frequent allusions to personal and domestic affairs-confessions of sins and tendencies to sin-that could only be made to God, and furnish rich material for a psychological study of this great man. It was, therefore, a matter of hesitation for a time whether they should be given to the public; but higher considerations than those of mere delicacy prevailed, and we are admitted to the most secret privacy of the man. We are allowed to lift the veil that hangs over the closet; to see this gifted spirit in rapt communion with Him who seeth in secret; to hear the broken groans and sobs of contrition with which he confessed the hidden evils of his heart; to see the sweet simplicity with which he bowed himself to the orderings of God's providence; and the earnestness with which he sought for light on the path of duty. We find him bringing his own frailties and passions; the state of his family; the WestPort Mission; the varying exigencies of the Free Church; American slavery; in a word, everything that lay on his mind,—directly to the great Source of wisdom and strength. We rejoice to see so noble a monument erected to his memory as this beautiful edition of his works, appearing simultaneously, in uniform style, on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be a fitter, and, we trust, a more enduring perpetuation of his name than the proudest mausoleum that ever greeted the sun.

As the name of Chalmers belongs now not to any one division of "the sacramental host," but to the whole Church, we embrace the occasion furnished by these volumes, to present some remarks on the life, character, and influence of this eminent man.

THOMAS CHALMERS was born in Anstruther, a small village in Fifeshire, on the Frith of Forth, March 17th, 1780. He was sent at an early age to the ancient University of St. Andrews, in his native county. During his academic career he manifested many of the traits of character that were afterwards developed on a wider stage of action. His untiring energy, his frank cordiality, his irresistible bonhomie, and his commanding superiority of intellect, were conspicuous among his compeers. His old landlady used to tell with great gusto his exploits among his fellow-students; settling by one cleaving word the dispute that had excited protracted wranglings.

There was early developed in his mind an intense love for physical science. Natural philosophy, chemistry, natural history, bo

tany, geology, conchology, &c., all shared his attention; but it was to mathematics, and especially to its application to astronomy, that his mind was most powerfully attracted. Nor were his excursions here merely those of an amateur. He studied these sciences deeply and thoroughly; and this early scientific training was manifest in all his subsequent intellectual development. His mathematical discipline gave accuracy, discrimination, and the power of patient, continuous thought, to a mind that would otherwise have run wild with excessive imagination; whilst the wonderful facts of natural science furnished the magnificent imagery, which his daring fancy often used with such brilliant effect. His mind was to celebrate the nuptials, or at least to publish the banns, between science and religion, and furnish in its own splendid attainments a prophetic instance of their future alliance. The great importance, therefore, of this prolonged courtship of the sciences, in fitting him for the great work of life, is very obvious.

There is no reason to believe that at this time he possessed more than a speculative acquaintance with religion. It was an age of coldness in the Church, and skepticism out of it,-with Principal Robertson as the type of the one, and David Hume of the other; and we cannot wonder that he, with so many others, had a form of godliness without any of its power. He had not received that fire-baptism that descended upon him with its rushing mighty power at a later period in life, and which sublimated the massy stores of his mind to a purity and splendour that attracted the world.

He was appointed mathematical tutor at St. Andrews about the time he attained his majority, and continued in this post until he was called to be a junior assistant to the minister of Cavers, in Roxburghshire. This position he soon exchanged for the rural charge of Kilmany, in his native county, near to St. Andrews, in May, 1803. Here he had ample leisure for his scientific pursuits; and could wander at will over the bleak hills of Fife, on botanical and geological excursions, startling the rude peasantry in the lonely glens with his hammer and box, as he sought for some rare flower or curious crystal. He soon reappeared in St. Andrews as a lecturer on chemistry. His first appearance as an author was in the great Leslie case, that created at the time a deep excitement in Scotland. The chair of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh being vacant, among a great many candidates, (Chalmers himself being of the number,) there were two who rallied around them powerful parties. Dr. Macknight received the support of the clergy of Edinburgh; whilst Mr. Leslie was the candidate of the philosophical party. After a bitter and prolonged struggle, the philosophical party triumphed, and

Mr. Leslie was elected. During the pendency of the contest, Dugald Stewart published a pamphlet against the clerical party, containing a letter from Playfair, asserting the incompatibility of mathematical studies with the duties of a clergyman. This letter roused all the ire of young Chalmers, and provoked him to break a lance with the polished academic, who, having himself passed from the mathematical chair, seemed to furnish in his own case a refutation of his position, or lay himself open to the charge of unfaithfulness as a pastor, or incompetency as a professor. Accordingly, he published an anonymous pamphlet, assailing Playfair with no little asperity. This tract has never been reprinted, and is only referred to as a part of his history It possesses his peculiarities of style in their most unpruned and exuberant form, and is pervaded by a fierce and unsanctified spirit. It is characteristic of the unhallowed state of the young pastor's soul, that he contended strenuously that "it required almost no consumption of intellectual effort" to discharge pastoral duty; and "that a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure, for the prosecution of any science in which his taste might dispose him to engage." The low estimate he evidently put upon the pastoral office, the appalling unconsciousness of its fearful responsibilities, his evident contempt for the office which he held uneasily as a means of subsistence, while his heart was engrossed with other pursuits, and the bitter, scornful, and sarcastic tone that pervades the whole production, furnish a melancholy picture of both the times and the man; a picture over which, when his eyes were opened, we doubt not he wept many a penitent

tear.

His next work was on his favourite science, Political Economy; and entitled, "An Inquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources." The main principle of this work is, that taxation is no evil; a principle which is pushed to such an extravagant extent, that it becomes almost burlesque. The most important features which the work has for us are, the illustrations it gives of his character. Two points are especially prominent,-an intense dislike of the spirit of trade and the influence of commerce, and a burning military ardour.

His suspicion of the commercial spirit, although modified by subsequent experience, was never entirely removed. It reappears in the Commercial Discourses delivered amidst the merchant princes of Glasgow. It arose from a noble principle in his nature. Loving to look at objects in the light of their real value, and their relations to intellectual and spiritual concerns, he feared the debasing influence of that spirit which estimated everything by the commercial standard

of convertibility into pecuniary gain; and believed that the habits of mind engendered by the tricks and lotteries of traffic were essentially ignoble, and must degrade the souls of those who were drawn into this absorbing vortex.

His military ardour was, we presume, much more effectually moderated in after life, than his antipathy to the commercial spirit; but at this time it was very fervent. Fired by the spirit that was awaked all over Europe by the terrible career of Napoleon, it is not a matter of surprise that, with his heart so completely alive to mere worldly things, he should be fascinated by that dread element in them, then so imposing and powerful,-War. So strong was the martial spirit within him, that he was not content with mere paper exhibitions of it, in treatises on economics, but, minister as he was of the gospel of peace, he actually enlisted in a volunteer corps. On one occasion he visited a friend's house, at some distance from home, in his military costume; and it was so near the close of the week, he was easily persuaded to remain over the Sabbath and preach. This accordingly he did, in a garment of more clerical hue, belonging to his friend, which was terribly strained over the brawny shoulders of Chalmers; but on leaving the pulpit he escaped from its confining restraint to his own costume; and the amazement of the honest villagers, which began in the church, at his strange appearance in black, was completed as they saw his stalwart figure striding through their quiet streets on Sabbath evening, in a flame of scarlet. These eccentricities develop the same straight-forward directness of character, and the same indifference to mere appearances, that were afterwards exhibited in more moderate and unexceptionable forms.

His preaching at this period was, as might be expected, of a cold and superficial cast,-mere ethical disquisition, that played around the head without touching the heart. His dissertations were eloquent, and his displays of intellect prodigious; but they were powerless to the pulling down of the strongholds in the human heart. An amusing instance of the felt incongruity of these fulminations was exhibited in the same church that had witnessed the startling phenomena of the clerical red-coat. He was preaching from the text, "Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup;" and descanting most vehemently on the perils of the generous juice of the grape, to a set of rustics whose highest source of inspiration was "honest John Barleycorn," or mountain dew. At length one of them, "puir daft Jean Pirie," who too often had a "drap i' the ee," and whose sense of the incongruity was quickened by a dim perception of an attack on her besetting frailty, after repeated paragraphs rounding off with the em

phatic words, "Look not thou upon the wine when it is red in the cup," exclaimed, in a shrill voice that rose clear and startling above the thunder of Chalmers, "Red i' the cup! Troth an' it may be ony o' the colours o' the rainbow, for a' that the maist o' us see o't." Poor Jeanie could feel, in the dimness of her clouded mind, what the gifted preacher as yet had failed to see,-that these splendid declamations on mere morality played above the soul like an aurora, beautiful and glittering, but cold and powerless.

But a change was at hand; a change that was not only to give him new views of the Gospel, but was also to breathe into his whole nature a new energy, and transform him into one of the "few mighty," who are raised up by God in every age of the Church to do his work in human history. Hitherto, he knew nothing of the Gospel but its outer courts; the secret shrine and the incarnate mystery were hidden from his sight. But about

the year 1809, he was engaged to write the article on Christianity for Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia. His heart was softened by the loss of a dear friend, and prepared for the reception of the good seed. In prosecuting the studies necessary for this article, he was led to examine the lives of the primitive Christians, the writings of modern apologists, and especially Wilberforce's Practical View. He began to perceive that there was something in Christianity which he had never yet comprehended. At this juncture he was laid on a sick-bed; and, by the blessing of God on the truth which had been brought in contact with his heart, and the counsels of a faithful Dissenting minister, the scales fell from his eyes, and he saw THE CROSS. He arose from his sick-bed a new creature. Immediately, conferring not with flesh and blood, he began fearlessly to proclaim the mighty change that had come over his spirit, to confess publicly his previous blindness, and to preach Christ crucified. The quiet parish of Kilmany was stirred to its remotest borders by the words of fire that came from lips so freshly touched with a living coal from the holy altar, and reformations that years of ethical orations had failed to produce, began rapidly to take place under the exhibition of the Gospel.

The fame of this wonderful transformation soon extended beyond his country parish, and acquired for him a metropolitan, and finally a national, reputation. He was accordingly, in 1815, invited by the Town Council of Glasgow to take charge of the Tron Church and parish in that city. It was here, perhaps, that the highest triumphs of his eloquence were achieved. He found a gay, skeptical, moneyloving population, whose religious condition was a sort of cross between Blair's Sermons and Hume's Essays,-a barren, hybrid com