selves under the profound impression that God's eye was ever on them as they toiled, and that everlasting interests hung suspended on the issue, present to us such a full and attractive exhibition of mere natural character as might have invited analysis, or fixed for a season the eye of our admiration. But all lesser interest connected with this period loses itself in the light and meaning thrown upon it by its close. As the year (1810) expired, and for his evening readings at Anstruther, while he remained there after his sister's death, Mr. Chalmers took up Wilberforce's "Practical View," a work especially intended to expose the inadequate conceptions regarding the leading and peculiar doctrines of Christianity which characterised the religious system prevail. ing among professed Christians. "We are loudly called on," said Mr. Wilberforce," to examine well our foundations. If anything be there unsound and hollow, the superstructure could not be safe though its exterior were less suspicious. Let the question then be asked, and let the answer be returned with all the consideration and solemnity which a question so important may justly demand, Whether, in the grand concern of all-the means of a sinner's acceptance with God, there be not reason to apprehend that nominal Christians too generally entertain very superficial and confused, if not highly dangerous notions?" The summons came from one whose character was otherwise so enthusiastically admired, and it was so wisely and so winningly given, that it would have been listened to, even if Mr. Chalmers had not been subject at the time to that restless dissatisfaction with the fruits of all his own former efforts, which made him at this conjuncture peculiarly open to instruction. As in this favourable spirit he read this volume, he found his own case accurately delineated and wisely prescribed for. The critical condition of the reader lent power to Mr. Wilberforce's volume. A prolonged but abortive effort had prepared Mr. Chalmers to welcome the truth of a gratuitous justification before God through the merits of Christ. For upwards of a year, he had striven with all his might to meet the high requirements of the Divine law-but the conviction was now wrought in him that he had been attempting an impossibility; that he had been trying to combine elements which would not amalgamate; that it must be either on his own merits wholly, or on Christ's merits wholly, that he must lean; and that, by introducing to any extent his own righteousness into the ground of his own meritorious acceptance with God, "he had been inserting a flaw, he had been importing a falsehood into the very principle of his justifi cation."-Ib. pp. 183-188.

With restored health and renewed heart, he applied himself vigorously to the duties of his office-amusing himself during severer studies with various experiments of the chemical kind. Among other experiments, he resolved on having his house fitted with gas-tubes, so early as 1811; a fact which proves that he possessed that faculty which is the accompaniment of highest genius foresight of the advances of humanity-a happy generalization from the newest principles of the time as to the ultimate results of them. After his conversion, Chalmers seems to

have abandoned his mathematical studies-engaging occasionally in the review department'-nourishing and fortifying his mind by a constant perusal of some of the ablest works in defence of Christianity-weaned from the ardour of scientific pursuits'and giving his undivided attention to theology, and to the sublime duties of his office-reasoning with the thoughtless, awakening to a new idea and to a new directness of life the listless and the frivolous, and ministering, at the bed of death, to those whose very dissolution was radiant with the hope of immortality. The following quotation from his journal, a year after his conversion, will plainly show that his renewed life, during that period, had been neither idly nor unprofitably spent :

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'March 16th. I have brought one year of the journal to its close; and though decidedly more religious in my taste, in my temper, in my views, and in my pursuits, I have still much to aspire after. The following is a rapid sketch of my last year's labours :-Read a good deal of mathematics, but have finally abandoned that study, and pursue henceforth an exclusive attention to Divinity. Read four volumes of "Lardner;" Newton on the "Prophecies;" Campbell on the "Gospels;" Charters's "Sermons ; " Young's Night Thoughts;" "Paradise Lost;" "Hints on Toleration," by Philagatharcles; Wilberforces's "View of Christianity;" Maltby's "Illustration of the Christian Evidence;" Scott's Lady of the Lake;" Lardner on the "Canons of the Old and New Testament;" and the "Edinburgh Review," and "Christian Instructor" as they came out. Wrote a review of "Charters's Sermons ;" great part of a large performance on the evidences of Christianity; a sermon on Psalm xi. 1; another on Psalm viii. 1; and a lecture on Psalm cxxxvii. 1-6; a great many in short-hand, for the ordinary supply of my parish, of which I delivered one on 1 Corrinthians viii. 13 [will be found in Dr. Chalmers's Works, vol. vi. p. 234], in the hearing of Dr. Charters, who seemed to be more taken with it than with one that was carefully written; a speech for Dr. Playfair, which I delivered at the Synod; and part of a review of "Hints on Toleration"-in all about thirty-four sheets of closely written paper.'Ib. pp. 204, 205.

In the early part of 1812, Mr. Chalmers became engaged to Miss Grace Pratt, daughter of Captain Pratt, of 1st Royal Veteran Battalion,' for whom we find in his journal this apostolical prayer:-O my God, pour thy best blessings ongive her ardent and decided Christianity. May she be the blessing and joy of all around her. May her light shine while she lives, and when she dies may it prove to be a mere step, a transition in her march to a joyful eternity.' The marriage took place on August 4th, in the same year, as privately as possible,' before dinner at Starbank.' The clergyman, a veteran in his ninetieth year, made a laughable mistake,' which, as Chalmers wrote to his sister, 'converted a business that is often accompanied with

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tears into a perfect frolic. It made me burst out, and set all the ladies a tittering. In laying the vows on Grace, what he required of her was that she should be a loving and affectionate husband, to which she curtsied.' With this lady, he lived in 'peace, harmony, and affection,' happily directing her mind, and sharing those joys which are richly given to the faithful and the virtuous, having a growing delight in the fulness and sufficiency of Christ,' and diligently labouring in the service of his Lord, for the elevation of humanity. On May 5th, 1813, his wife gave birth to a daughter, of which we find the following notice in his journal Born about five minutes before two in the afternoon, and I was employed at the time in correcting for the press the second paragraph about the contempt incurred by missionaries in my sermon on Psalm xli. 1.' In the October of 1812, Mr. Chalmers had preached, at Dundee, the first sermon on any public occasion after his conversion, in behalf of the Missionary Society -an organization to the philanthropy and grandeur of whose conceptions he was fully awake. In 1808, Sydney Smith had published in The Edinburgh Review' one of those articles. which attacked the missionary-idea, and which, it may truly be said, was written in angry ridicule of whatever is vital and posi tive in evangelical religion. But the nest of consecrated cob blers,' as this unhappy divine termed the heroic band of the immortal Carey and others, were men of larger stature, and of wider range of Christian benevolence, than the punning reviewer could comprehend. They were above him and beyond him in all that makes men really dignified and great. This brilliant diner out,' as we think Byron called him, could forge ill-conditioned jokes at marvellous speed-he could 'set the table in a roar,' pandering to the worn and wearied tastes of profligate voluptuaries-and he could easily detect any glaring fallacy in an election-manifesto, or a pseudo-philosophical argumentation, or he could hold up to ridicule the absurdities of a drowsy sermon-though we take leave to express our opinion, that his logical acumen and entire mental power have always been greatly exaggerated; but he had a perfect moral incapacity of pronouncing on those great men who made it their mission to reclaim the alien and the stranger, and to conquer heathendom itself to the dominion of Jesus. Seeking pleasure as its ultimate good, his soul could not kindle with that holy enthusiasm which glowed in the heart of a Paul, a Xavier, a Carey, and a Chalmers; nor were distant isles, desolate in their suicidal barbarity, and debased by foulest rites-whose gods were distortions of a demon, and whose religion was a bloody pantomime-any more to his courtly ear than the dwelling of savages, whom Nature had made degraded, and whom the civilized might leave to their

jungles and their huts. That only which is really good shall be found durable in this world, and the best and holiest of men only shall have true fame. The glory of a Milton and a Howard shall be found, after many ages, like the Cyclopæan erections of the early time-colossal, indestructible, a glory' that cannot fade away;' while the great host of jokers and witlings, like insects which sparkled in the summer-light, and who made 'their summer-lives one ceaseless laugh, shall have passed away, leaving no wreck behind.' We shall not be thought harsh or ungenerous, by those who are wise, when we say that, had Sydney Smith known what is really the distinctive spirit of Christianity-had his own mind ever lain under its imbuing influences his keen spirit had been the first to perceive, in the founding of a missionary society, one of those great impulses which should carry a flood of civilization and of truth among savage hordes and deluded devotees, wherever these might exist. It has been the fate of every great reformation to be ridiculed at its birth; and as in our own day the acute Lardner argued, from clearest mathematical demonstration, the utter impossibility of a British steam-ship ever reaching an American harbour; so Sydney Smith, when the fathers of missionary enterprise set out on their illustrious voyage, asks, in his godless scorn, Why are we to send out little detachments of maniacs to spread over the fine regions of the world the most unjust and contemptible opinion of the gospel?' We imagine the pursy joker believed more in the gospel according to Canterbury, than in the gospel according to Luke or John. He has had his lifemarch-his works' (at least those of them which are his) follow him, and he is now a mere froth-bubble on the rushing stream of time; but the consecrated cobbler' of Hackleton, with £20 pittance for preaching,' has begotten a thought which is gradually removing idol and shrine, priest and warrior; and he has become great in the world's story. Completely had this son of thunder, this keen-edged wit, forgotten that causes, seemingly trivial, produce immense effects-that the life-long darling dream of a humble mechanic, and the song of a poet, poor and despised, are changing the habitudes of men, and harmonizing into one brotherhood the nations of the earth-and that the little spring and the rippling stream, in the far-off gorge and upland valley, become at last Maranon and Danube. On this subject it is a pleasing task to quote what our author has written with much taste and feeling :

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When the working of his mind began, of which the witty reviewer makes such pleasant use, Carey was a journeyman-shoemaker in the small hamlet of Hackleton, a few miles from Northampton; and when, as a "consecrated cobbler," he removed to the neighbouring village of

Moulton, it was to preach to a small congregation of Baptists for a salary under £20 a year, and to teach a school besides, that he might eke out a scanty livelihood. To Sydney Smith, as to nine-tenths of the British population at that time, it looked ridiculous enough that such a man should not only trouble his own mind, and try for years to trouble the minds of others, about the conversion of 420 millions of Pagans, but that he should actually propose that he himself should be sent out to execute the project. He succeeded at last, however, in obtaining liberty to bring the subject before the small religious community of which he was a member; and on the 2nd October, 1792, at a meeting of the Baptist Association at Kettering, it was resolved to form a Missionary Society; but when the sermon was preached, and the collection made, it was found to amount to no more than £12 13s. 6d. With such agents as Carey, and collections like this of Kettering to support them, Indian missions appeared a fit quarry for that shaft which none knew better than our Edinburgh reviewer how to use; and yet, looking somewhat more narrowly at the "consecrated cobbler," there was something about him, even at the beginning, sufficient to disarm ridicule; for, if we notice him in his little garden, he will be seen motionless, for an hour or more, in the attitude of intense thought; or, if we join him in his evening hours, we shall find him reading the Bible in one or other of four different languages with which he has already made himself familiar; or, if we follow him into his school, we shall discover him with a large leather-globe of his own construction, pointing out to the village urchins the different kingdoms of the earth, saying, These are Christians-these are Mahommedans -and these are Pagans, and these are Pagans!" his voice stopped by strong emotion as he repeats and re-repeats the last mournful utterance. Driven, by the jealousy of the East India Company, out of an English ship in which he was about to sail, he took his passage in a Danish vessel, and chose a Danish settlement in India for his resi dence; yet he lived till, from that press which he established at Serampore, there had issued 212,000 copies of the sacred Scriptures in forty different languages-the vernacular tongues of 380 millions of immortal beings, of whom more than 100 millions were British subjects, and till he had seen expended upon that noble object, on behalf of which the first small offering at Kettering was presented, no less a sum than £91,500.'—Пb. pp. 313–315.

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We have neither time nor space to follow the life of Mr. Chalmers closely, nor can we justly describe his special ' monthly devotions'-his waiting for God's Spirit-his constant reference to Christ and simple faith in him; nor can we, within our present limits, show how from his pulpit, in the copious flow of his eloquence, and among his congregation and friends, he shed the light of a simple and genuine piety; nor, how in his scientific foreshadowings he was ever in advance of his age. Particularly, however, must we remark, in reference to the then infant science of geology, that he broke away from the theological trammels of the time, and that he was the first religious teacher in Scotland