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Sir, but I find you aye at your Bible,' 'All too little, John, all too little,' was the significant reply."-Vol. I. p. 262.

Now commenced the season of his popularity; for now for the first time he preached like a man who felt the supremacy of spiritual interests, and who found exercise within his profession for the highest gifts of his nature. He thenceforth lived amongst his people, visiting the sick, lecturing and examining at stated times, from house to house, and exercising a large and genial hospitality. His preaching became what it remained ever after, vehement, passionate, full of the glowing reiterations of unexhausted and inexhaustible moral interest; and the people flocked as they will always flock when seriousness, ardour, and genius meet in the same man. The church heretofore deserted became thronged, and to hear Chalmers became a great spiritual excitement to distant visitors.

There are some interesting notices during this period of his domestic relations at Kilmany. One of his sisters lived with him up to the time of her marriage, which was soon followed by his own. His house was always open to any members of his family whom he could serve, educate, or nurse, and it would appear that he had taken upon him the charge of one or two of his younger brothers. Yet there were manifest troubles connected with his housekeeping. His parishioners, and not unfrequently his visitors, were rude in their manners, and Scotch in their drinking habits, and sometimes he found it impossible to restrain intemperance without doing violence to his genial feelings as a host. These things were at all times a bitter shame and distress to him, and as his character acquired weight and grandeur no such licence was dreamed of in his presence. He was also clearly liable to the irritabilities and nervous distresses of an intellectual man, whose mind, quick and rapid in all its own operations, is readily fretted by insensibility and dulness. He could not, without sore pain, go in daily harness with slow and obtuse, or with common-place and small-minded people. These points are lightly touched, but he was much tried by what he calls the offensive peculiarities of some of his relations. His impatience under the trial, or his want of a perfect Christian gentleness and dignity, are recorded in his Journal

with much penitence and prayer. We have no doubt that he tried himself in such duties by a very high standard, and that not only his conscientiousness, but his habit of energetic expression, the wonderful force of his language, will convey an exaggerated idea of his infirmity to many who are without his consciousness of sinning in this direction, only because they are without his sensibility to sin. Most of us have felt the burden of precious and pledged time swept away by an unexpected visitor on the endless waves of unmeaning talk, but few of us would record our feelings with the same tremendous judgment on the impatience of our regrets. John Bonthron must have been a sad bore. On one occasion Chalmers had kindly invited him to supper, "and told him with emphasis that they supped at nine." The man came at eight the night after, and the record is: "All forbearance and civility left me, and with my prayers I mixed the darkness of that heart that hateth its brother. This is most truly lamentable, and reveals to me the exceeding nakedness of my heart. All my works gone through with cheerfulness, because there is nothing in them to thwart a natural feeling, or a constitutional tendency, can never be received as evidence of good, while self-denial is so litle practised,-while duty is shrunk from the moment it becomes painful,-while gentleness is unfelt, and with my profession of faith that God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven me all, I in fact can forgive nothing, and suffer the most trifling incidents of life to hurry me away from all principle and from all charity. Oh, why was not this present to me at the time of offence?"-He was so keenly alive to his constitutional inability to bear meekly the irksome peculiarities of inmates, that at one time he made a resolution against marriage, lest some unforeseen annoyance should betray itself. The contrast in peace, energetic industry, and sweetness. of feelings, between the days on which he was fretted by the irritations of domestic unsuitableness and his days of solitude, seemed to mark out single life as his bounden duty, and he even records the resolution of never hampering himself again with a regular housekeeper from his own family, if, without any breach of affection and true kindness on his part, fortune should ever set him free from the arrangements of that kind which were then in

existence. We must give one illustration of what he calls his "peculiar warfare," though rather at Anstruther than Kilmany, and it is also no bad example of the pomp and magniloquence of his style even on ordinary occasions, and the effect and energy of his cumulative moral descriptiveness.

"I think I am behaving well. I can scarcely force myself to talk when I am inclined to be silent, but I may at least ward off the assaults of anger. Now, this I have done; and while the Ehs? and the Whats? reciprocate in full play across the table, and explanations darken rather than clear up the subject, and entanglements of sense thicken and multiply on every side of me, and Aunty Jean tries to help out the matter by the uptakings of her quick and confident discernment, and confusion worse confounded is the upshot of one and all of her interferences—why, even then, I know that it is my duty, and I shall strive to make it my practice, to stand serene amid this war of significations and of cross-purposes, and gently to assist the infirmities which I may be soon called to share in.”Vol. I. p. 228.

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His affection for the sister who habitually lived with him appears, notwithstanding the spectres which then frightened him from domestic thoughts, to have been strong and satisfying, and out of his close friendship with this beloved sister we have a grudge against the biographer. When she married and went to live in England, Chalmers commenced a correspondence with her which "descended to the humblest local intelligence, the minutest incidents in the family history of friends and parishioners being faithfully chronicled," with reservation always of the last page "to the great concern." Now all this daily life of the man he is pourtraying, in his manse, in his parish, in his pulpit, among his family, chronicled in minutest detail, the biographer inexplicably chooses to omit, and "bringing these last pages together," gives us a long string of religious admonitions and exhortations which may have been of great interest and value to an affectionate sister, but are absolutely worthless and characterless to the reader, bring out no personal features in either correspondent, and serve only to heap up and repeat imperfect expressions of Chalmers' thoughts upon religion. Shortly after this sister left him, he married. It is easy CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 50.

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for a man with disengaged affections to resolve upon study and a single life. When his heart is no longer his own, he forgets both his apprehensions and his resolves, and eagerly embraces a happier fate. He was married in his thirty-second year to Miss Grace Pratt, who had been residing for some time with an uncle at Kilmany, with whom, we are told, thirty-five years of unbroken domestic happiness were enjoyed.

Eloquence is among the rarest gifts of God, and the fame of the great preacher soon pervaded Scotland. A vacancy occurred in the Town Church of Glasgow, and after a vehement contest during which it was freely reported that the fervent evangelist was mad, Chalmers was elected. He nobly refused to give the smallest pledge of acceptance whilst the contest was pending, and long hesitated in his choice between the vast city and the dear valley and beloved people of Kilmany. He had a terror of the visitations and secular engagements of a large town. He seems never to have thought of Glasgow without a vision of unlettered multitudes battering at his hall door, and storming his study. The reality proved almost as bad as the apprehension, and his piteous pleadings against this evil, and the grandeur of his indignation, are sometimes ludicrously lively. He took every precaution by stipulation and express agreement, and previous announcement of his secluded habits, to guard his time and privacy -but he had a constant battle to maintain, and with unsatisfactory results. "I know," he says, previous to his election, in a letter to one of his supporters," of instances where a clergyman has been called from the country to town for his talent at preaching; and when he got there, they so belaboured him with the drudgery of their institutions, that they smothered and extinguished the very talent for which they had adopted him. The purity and independence of the clerical office are not sufficiently respected in great towns. He comes among them a clergyman, and they make a mere churchwarden of him.-It shall be my unceasing endeavour to get all this work shifted upon the laymen; and did I not hope to succeed in some measure I would be induced to set my face against the whole arrangement at this moment."

He preached his first sermon in Glasgow on the 30th

March 1815, and the following is a portion of a very lively description of his appearance on that occasion in "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk:"

"At first sight no doubt his face is a coarse one, but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it, that such as have eyes to see cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large half-closed eyelids have a certain drooping melancholy weight about them, which interested me very much, I understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The upper lip, from the nose downwards, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of leonine firmness of expression to all the lower part of the face. The cheeks are square and strong, in texture like pieces of marble, with the cheek-bones very broad and prominent. The eyes themselves are light in colour, and have a strange dreamy heaviness, that conveys any idea rather than that of dulness, but which contrasts in a wonderful manner with the dazzling watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their sockets, and illuminated into all their flame and fervour in some moments of high entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of the forehead is, perhaps, the most singular part of the whole visage; and, indeed, it presents a mixture so very singular, of forms commonly exhibited only in the widest. separation, that it is no wonder I should have required some little time to comprehend the meaning of it. In the first place, it is without exception the most marked mathematical forehead I ever met with-being far wider across the eyebrows than either Mr. Playfair's or Mr. Leslie's-and having the eyebrows themselves lifted up at their exterior ends quite out of the usual line, a peculiarity which Spurzheim had remarked in the countenances of almost all the great mathematical or calculating geniuses—such, for example, if I rightly remember, as Sir Isaac Newton himself, Kaestener, Euler, and many others. Immediately above the extraordinary breadth of this region, which in the heads of most mathematical persons is surmounted by no fine points of organization whatever, immediately above this, in the forehead, there is an arch of imagination, carrying out the summit boldly and roundly, in a style to which the heads of very few poets present anything comparable, while over this again there is a grand apex of high and solemn veneration and love, such as might have graced the bust of Plato himself, and such as in living men I had never beheld equalled but in the majestic head of Canova. The whole is edged with a few crisp dark locks, which stand forth boldly, and afford a fine relief to the death-like paleness of those massive temples. * * * * Of all

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