his country and the world, was the subordination of the impulses of a gigantic spirit to motives of a purely Christian order. Ambition alternating with such motives might have consisted with a career splendid, and useful also-useful perhaps in a more than ordinary degree. But no such compromise of such impulses would have consisted with the course of the man who was to renovate the Christianity of his country.

"Sunday, 24th.-Rose about nine: went immediately to the composition of my sermon. Could not attend church in the forenoon; preached in the afternoon. Have reason to question myself seriously as to my spirit in regard to all public services. Do I seek the glory of God? Have I no secret longings after my own glory?

I

Have I

a greater desire to ascertain the good I have done to souls, or the good may have done to my own reputation? Do I not feel the impression of the splendid auditory that comes to hear me? Let me set myself in good earnest to quell this humiliating affection. O my God, let me lie low, and know what it is to be divested of self.

"25th. I have to record this day, that I am not mortified to the love of praise. . . . I do much fear, or rather I certainly know, that I feel a complacency in all this, and what if it be not superior to the pleasure I should feel in having been the instrument of a saving and spiritual impression? This is so distinct a preference of my own glory to that of God, so obvious a preaching of self instead of the Saviour, so glaring a preference of the wisdom of words to the simplicity which is in the cross of Christ, that my carnal tendencies in regard to this matter should be the subject of my strictest vigilance and severest castigation."-Vol. iii. p. 91.

It would not be easy to find an instance-in truth, we do not recollect one, within the compass of modern times-comparable, on the whole, to that to which, for a moment, we are now intending to advert, if it be considered as a trial of a man's conquest over the idolatry of SELF. The initial stages of this mastery had been passed through in those critical weeks of early life during which Chalmers awoke to the consciousness of Christianity, such as throughout his after course he proclaimed it. The particular instance we have now in view, shews that that was not a spring-time fervour, quickly to subside, but that it was a firm life-long principle which had come in to rule his heart, and to give direction to his labours. In every sense it was the very choice of the three kingdoms-as to rank, station, official position, personal intelligence, notoriety, that had crowded itself into the spacious room where he delivered his "Lectures on Religious Establishments." An audience rather to be chosen than this, by an ambitious orator, could nowhere have been found. But the effect actually produced upon this cultured and this self-esteeming company, by the orator, far overwent all ordinary bounds

of excitement: he carried with him all the mind and feeling that came within the sound of his voice: when he rose-all rose; and the acclamations of that aristocracy of the British empire came in, as a thunder, to shake the soul of the man who was thus taught to feel what his power was:—

"Nothing," says one who met him in private, after the delivery of his first Lecture," nothing was more striking, amidst all this excitement, than the child-like humility of the great man himself. All the flattery seemed to produce no effect whatever on him; his mind was entirely absorbed in his great object; and the same kind, playful, and truly Christian spirit, that so endeared him to us all, was everywhere apparent in his conduct."- Vol. iv. p. 40.

If one were to sit down, coldly, to analyze Chalmers's qualities, intellectual and moral, for the purpose of reporting thereupon, and of shewing from which of these elements his power over the minds of others resulted, or from which, chiefly, there might seem to remain a something not fully accounted for it would be so-for this power (so irresistible wherever it is found) sprung not from this or that faculty, eminent in him; nor merely from the accumulation of such gifts; but rather from a condensation of all faculties-spirit, mind, heart, bodily energy, effected by the force of the one-master influence to which he had surrendered his being. Whenever this sort of concentration has place, even in instances that stand at an immeasurable distance below the one before us, as to mind and accomplishment, yet the same power over other spirits shows itself in its degree. The moment when the tones of a voice, (never to be mistaken when once they have been heard,) and which are proper to this species of influence, fall upon the ear, we all-great and small, or how highly soever we may rate our individual superiority to the speaker, we all fall before it :-we surrender at discretion, for the hour, at least: such is a law of the world of mind; and such is also a law in the "kingdom of grace." But when, as in the instance of Chalmers, forces of the rarest kind came to be thus concentrated, the effect was in the properest sense of the wordirresistible. One might, perhaps--if well-cased in the coldest suit of analytic severity, have stood out against the orator, if listened to as an orator merely; but not against this "man of God," whose many splendid gifts were used by him, as tools only, and used with a lavish disregard-a high contempt of all things, except the making full proof of his ministry, "and the finishing of the work which had been given him, by the Lord," to do it.

It would not be a very difficult (although an invidious) task, to take in hand the several articles of this great man's intellectual furniture, and to show, that, in each, he has had his equals, or his superiors. Be it so; nor does he stand

alone, far from it-looking only to recent times, as an example of Christian devotedness and simplicity. But we think he does stand quite alone-we do not recollect an instance fairly comparable to this, of natural gifts so remarkable, we may say-so splendid, that have been in any such manner concentrated, and brought to bear upon the highest purposes, with so absolute a subordination and exclusion of inferior and disturbing motives. On this ground, we should be content to rest our challenge, in behalf of Chalmers, of a foremost place among the noted, and the best men of modern times.

It could be of no sort of avail-even if any who knew the man better than we did, were inclined so to act, to bring against us, while we make this challenge, some exceptive instances, with the whispered cautionary saw" the best of men, are but men at the best" and-" I could tell you-so and so." We do not doubt you could, but we do not want to hear it. We know already all that your string of pretty anecdotes could teach us; we know that Chalmers was not a seraph; but a man: we know that the mastery he had acquired over inferior motives and over personal ambition, must have cost such a man mighty struggles; —and, therefore, that there must have been moments when Satan (the great detractor, or when petty detractors) might have caught him at a disadvantage. So it may have been; so it must have been; and therefore it is that his example is of that kind which so well breathes holy purposes into young bosoms: we know of this Elijah, that he "was a man of like passions with ourselves."

We give this prominence to this characteristic of Chalmers's oratory, because we think it, in fact, the secret of his power, not as a pulpit orator merely, but in every aspect in which he has a claim to be spoken of, as a public man. It was this same concentration of his faculties, and this subordination of all to the higher purposes of his life, which made him what he was-not only as a PREACHER and WRITER; but as the RESTORER of evangelic doctrine and evangelic feeling in Scotland; as the ECONOMIST, and municipal Reformer; and as the LEADER of the great Ecclesiastical movements of his times. In each of these principal aspects, it is our purpose (with all brevity) to regard him.

Not because he was not a most effective pulpit orator, and a powerful writer, should we hold his merits in these respects in a secondary place; but because what he was, either as Preacher or Writer, comes most naturally into its fit place of Instrumentality, in relation to the substantial purposes to which Dr. Chalmers devoted his powers, both as a speaker and a writer. From his public appearances in the pulpit, or through the press,

deduct the whole of that massive force which sprang from the sense he had of the importance of the object before him, and what remains would not have been enough to fill out a tenth of that space which, through life, he occupied in the esteem, the admiration, and the reverential regard of his contemporaries. An Orator truly, and a Writer too, but immeasurably more was he to his country, and to the world, than either.

In speaking of Dr. Chalmers as the main mover of a revived evangelic feeling in Scotland, it is (we should think) superfluous for us to protest against the putting an invidious interpretation upon what we may advance, as if we were either unconscious of the part that had been nobly and well sustained by others, or were too slenderly informed as to facts relating to the antecedent period, or were inclined to disparage what was good and admirable, already existing. If anything that follows should seem to bear a meaning of this sort, we beg the reader to understand us otherwise. Nor let it be too readily imagined that a feeling more allied to things south of the Tweed, than to things north of it, throws a prejudicial shade over the latter in our view.

As to the relative religious condition of England and Scotland at the time when he entered upon his course as an evangelic preacher, it is decisively expressed in several passages of these Memoirs. His journeys southward, and the intimacies he formed among the religiously-minded upper classes of the Established Church, produced a decisive impression upon his mind, and sent him back to Scotland such as probably he would never have been if he had not crossed the Tweed, or had made himself extensively familiar with English evangelical writers. We refer below to passages which need not be cited, but which afford quite enough support to what is here affirmed.*

All counterpoising instances allowed for to the utmost extent that can be thought reasonable, it must yet be stated as a broad fact, that the evangelic revival of the last century, which took its rise in the Methodistic movement, had affected England more widely, more deeply, and in a more auspicious manner than it had affected Scotland. The question is not, whether Whitefield's preaching or Wesley's had met with as much immediate acceptance as it might and should in Scotland; but the impulse did not, in

* Dr. Chalmers refers in terms of high approval, and as having much affected his own views and feelings, to the following among other English evangelical writings "Wilberforce's Practical View," vol. i. pp. 184-186; "Baxter's Body of Practical Divinity," p. 213; "Life of Henry," p. 217; "Foster's Essays," p. 226; "Hannah More," pp. 210, 211; "Romaine's Life of Faith," vol. ii. p. 455, vol. iii. p. 87. He experienced similar benefits from the acquaintance he had formed with several eminent Christian men in England. See vol. i. p. 335, vol. ii. pp. 360, 363, 364, vol. iii. p. 395.

Moderatism of the Past Age.

215

the same degree or manner, convey itself to the religious masses; nor, in any such way as in England, did it call up a body of ministers influenced by the same spirit, and attached to the same principles. Little might there be to choose between the lip-orthodoxy of the English Church of that time, and the semiinfidelity or the moderatism of the Scotch; for the one was a mere "form of godliness," and so was the other: if there be an intrinsic difference between the two that is worth the pains of hunting for, let it be hunted for. But herein an extrinsic difference may be noted that while the one was, in many instances, giving way before a genial life-stirring influence, the other offered a fixed resistance to any such influences: in the one country-England-the existing formalism had become little more than a breathless representative of what had once lived; but the other sat in its place of authority, eyeing with jealousy any signs of life about it.

The mind of Scotland, decisively intellectual and logical as it is, and the close contact of many of its clergy with the fathers of the infidelity of the age, gave to that shadow of Christianity which they professionally respected more of coherence and more of philosophic completeness than was ever thought of or cared for among the chubby, rosy, portly, beneficed-ones-the sleek lookers-out for stalls, deaneries, and mitres, of the English Church. DEMAS loses his own soul; but then he stands less in the way of the progress of the Gospel than do the sallowvisaged gownsmen of Mars Hill. These, while they mock at Paul's sermon, reason too, and they make good their ground. Demas betakes himself to what he so well loves, and is silent; but the anti-Christianity of Scotland, and its non-Christianity, was not mere worldliness-it was a distinctly pronounced scheme, framed for the express purpose of shutting out the Gospel. Yet this is not all; and should not an entire candour lead us to acknowledge something more in behalf of the moderate party, of that time?

The men-many of them highly accomplished, as they were, and distinguished too by their genius and intelligence, who headed the non-evangelic feeling of the last century, in Scotland-the intimates of Hume and Adam Smith, when they recoiled from what we regard as First Principles in Christianity, thought of those principles only as they were embodied and enunciated in those forms with which themselves were proximately connected. Among those bright spirits, how many of them could be named who had ever given themselves the pains to inquire what it was which the Apostles had taught? Very, very few. That which they did think of, that concerning which they had any sufficient information, or any definite idea,