my pupils were charged to the full with the striking thoughts and graphic illustrations of the very elaborate discourses deemed too high for them, they remembered of the very simple ones, specially lowered to suit narrow capacities, not a single word or note. All the attempts at originating a cheap literature that have failed, have been attempts pitched too low: the higher-toned efforts have usually succeeded. If the writer of these chapters has been in any degree successful in addressing himself as a journalist to the Presbyterian people of Scotland, it has always been, not by writing down to them, but by doing his best on all occasions to write up to them. He has ever thought of them as represented by his friend William, his uncles, and his Cousin George,—by shrewd old John Fraser, and his reckless though very intelligent acquaintance Cha; and by addressing to them on every occasion as good sense and as solid information as he could possibly muster, he has at times succeeded in catching their ear, and perhaps, in some degree, in influencing their judgment.

CHAPTER XVII.

Beware, Lorenzo, a slow, sudden death."

YOUNG.

THERE was one special subject which my friend, in our quiet evening walks, used to urge seriously upon my attention. He had thrown up, under strong religious impressions, what promised to be so good a business, and in two years he had already saved money enough to meet the expenses of a college course of education. And assuredly, never did man determine on entering the ministry with views more thoroughly disinterested than his. Patronage ruled supreme in the Scottish Establishment at the time; and my friend had no influence and no patron; but he could not see his way clear to join with the Evangelical Dissenters or the Secession; and believing that the most important work on earth is the work of saving souls, he had entered on his new course in the full conviction that, if God had work for him of this high character to do. He would find him an opportunity of doing it. And now, thoroughly in earnest, and as part of the special employment to which he had devoted himself, he set himself to press upon my attention the importance, in their personal bearing, of religious concerns. I was not unacquainted with the standard theology of the Scottish Church. In the parish school I had, indeed, acquired no ideas on the subject; and though I now hear a good deal

said, chiefly with a controversial bearing, about the excellent religious influence of our parochial seminaries, I never knew any one who owed other than the merest smattering of theo-` logical knowledge to these institutions, and not a single individual who had ever derived from them any tincture, even the slightest, of religious feeling. In truth, during almost the whole of the last century, and for at least the first forty years of the present, the people of Scotland were, with all their faults, considerably more Christian than the larger part of their schoolmasters. So far as I can remember, I carried in my memory from school only a single remark at all theological in its character, and it was of a kind suited rather to do harm than good. In reading in the class one Saturday morning a portion of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm, I was told by the master that that ethical poem was a sort of alphabetical acrostic; a circumstance, he added, that accounted for its broken and inconsecutive character as a composition. Chiefly, however, from the Sabbath-day catechisings to which I had been subjected during boyhood by my uncles, and latterly from the old divines, my Uncle Sandy's favorites, and from the teachings of the pulpit, I had acquired a considerable amount of religious knowledge. I had thought, too, a good deal about some of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, in their character as abtruse positions, such as the doctrine of the Divine decrees, and of man's inability to assume the initiative in the work of his own conversion. I had, besides, a great admiration of the Bible, especially of its narrative and poetical parts; and could scarce give strong enough expression to the contempt which I entertained for the vulgar and tasteless sceptics who, with Paine at their head, could speak of it as a weak or foolish book. Farther, reared in a family circle, some of whose mem bers were habitually devout, and all of whom respected and stood up for religion, and were imbued with the stirring ecclesiastical traditions of their country, I felt that the religious side in any quarrel had a sort of hereditary claim upon me. I be lieve I may venture to say, that previous to this time I had never seen a religious man badgered for his religion, and much in a

minority, without openly taking part with him; nor is it impossible that, in a time of trouble, I might have almost deserved the character given by old John Howie to a rather notable “gentleman sometimes called Burly,” who, “ although he was by some reckoned none of the most religious,” joined himself to the suffering party, and was “always zealous and honest-hearted." And yet my religion was a strangely incongruous thing. It took the form, in my mind, of a mass of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent point developed out of due proportion, from the circumstance that I had thought upon it for myself; and while, entangled, if I may so speak, amid the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic mass, there harbored no inconsiderable amount of superstition, there rested over it the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even spoken, of myself as an infidel. But an infidel I assuredly was not: my belief was at least as real as my incredulity, and had, I am inclined to think, a much deeper seat in my mind. But wavering between the two extremes,—now a believer, and anon a sceptic,-the belief usually exhibiting itself as a stronglybased instinct,—the scepticism as the result of some intellectual process, I lived on for years in a sort of uneasy see-saw condition, without any middle ground between the two extremes, on which I could at once reason and believe.

That middle ground I now succeeded in finding. It is at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one's conclusions regarding it are often so doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than in any other; but it is not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's beliefs than of one's feelings; and I trust I need not hesitate to say, that I was led to see at this time, through the instrumentality of my friend, that my theologic system had previously wanted a central object, to which the heart, as certainly as the intellect, could at

tach itself; and that the true centre of an efficient Christianity is, as the name ought of itself to indicate, "the Word made Flesh." Around this central sun of the Christian system,-appreciated, however, not as a doctrine which is a mere abstraction, but as a Divine Person,-so truly man, that the affections of the human heart can lay hold upon Him, and so truly God, that the mind, through faith, can at all times and in all places be brought into direct contact with Him, -all that is truly religious takes its place in a subsidiary and subordinate relation. I say subsidiary and subordinate. The Divine Man is the great attractive centre,—the sole gravitating point of a system which owes to Him all the coherency, and which would be but a chaos were He away. It seems to be the existence of the human nature in this central and paramount object that imparts to Christianity, in its subjective character, its peculiar power of influencing and controlling the human mind. There may be men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and inconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the feeling, in its true form, must be a very rare and exceptional one. In all my experience of men, I never knew a genuine instance of it. The love of an abstract God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human constitution as the love of an abstract sun or planet. And so it will be found, that in all the religions that have taken strong hold of the mind of man, the element of a vigorous humanity has mingled, in the character of its gods, with the theistic element. The gods of the classic mythology were simply powerful men let loose from the tyranny of the physical laws; and, in their purely human character, as warm friends and deadly enemies, they were both feared and loved. And so the belief which bowed at their shrines ruled the old civilized world for many centuries. In the great ancient mythologies of the East,—Budhism and Brahmanism,-both very influential forms of belief,