kept asking and asking at me, and have just as good a right to be angry as he, that I have never moved a single footstep to them. This is really a vulgarism which must be abolished.—The ―s have been particularly cold, and Mr. Falconer's remarks have let me into the explanation. They have conceived themselves to be grievously insulted by the neglect of unconscious me, who all the while was prosecuting my own affairs without the slightest intention either of offending them or any other body-who spoke when I was spoken to, and went to the church when the bell rang." So oppressive did all this become to him, that, groaning under the unprofitable burden, he writes to Mrs. Chalmers: "Let it be my most fixed and firm determination to cultivate a distance from general society. I beg you will come to Glasgow on this principle, my dear, and let us do our utmost to keep our house clear of the swarms by which it has been hitherto infested." But of all interruptions, idle interruptions of his hours of study were what tried Dr. Chalmers' temper most severely. The following account of one such invasion is too good to be withheld :

"While Dr. Chalmers was very busily engaged one forenoon in his study, a man entered, who at once propitiated him under the provocation of an unexpected interruption, by telling him that he called under great distress of mind. Sit down, Sir; be good enough to be seated,' said Dr. Chalmers, turning eagerly and full of interest from his writing table. The visitor explained to him that he was troubled with doubts about the Divine origin of the Christian religion; and being kindly questioned as to what these were, he gave among others what is said in the Bible about Melchisedek being without father, and without mother, &c. Patiently and anxiously Dr. Chalmers sought to clear away each successive difficulty as it was stated. Expressing himself as if greatly relieved in mind, and imagining that he had gained his end-'Doctor,' said the visitor, ‘I am in great want of a little money at present, and perhaps you could help me in that way.' At once the object of the visit was seen. A perfect tornado of indignation burst upon the deceiver, driving him in very quick retreat from the study to the street door, these words escaping among others-Not a penny, Sir! not a penny! It's too bad! it's too bad! And to haul in your hypocrisy upon the shoulders of Melchisedek.""-Vol. II. p. 191.

From all these troubles, and from the demands of a popularity which was becoming increasingly oppressive,

and which he was conscious could neither be profitably sustained, nor lost without some injurious reaction,—after eight years' trial of Glasgow, he deserted that tumultuous fame which he contemptuously described as consisting in the heat, and throng, and applause "of a drivelling population," and took quiet refuge among the haunts of his boyhood, in the Moral Philosophy Chair of St. Andrew's. This determination excited much wonder, and some rude blame. He justifies himself in this way :

"Were there, at this moment, fifty vacancies in the Church, and the same number of vacancies in our Colleges, and fifty men to start into view, equally rich in their qualifications for the one department and the other, some of you would be for sending them to the pulpits, I would be for sending them to the Chairs. A Christianized university, in respect of its professorships, would be to me a mightier accession than a Christianized country, in respect of its parishes. And should there be a fountain out of which there emanated a thousand rills, it would be to the source that I should carry the salt of purification, and not to any of the streams which flow from it."-Vol. II. p. 376.

On the 9th November 1823, Dr. Chalmers preached his farewell sermon in St. John's, when the crowd was so great that the doors had to be guarded by a detachment of soldiers hastily summoned from the neighbouring barracks. Six days afterwards he was installed in his new office at St. Andrew's.

Here our materials for the present come to an end.We are aware that we have failed to communicate in these few pages the full image of Dr. Chalmers which may be collected from the numerous details and descriptions of his labours, manner of life, and conversation, scattered over these two volumes. His remarkable constitutional activity, both of mind and body, his tender susceptibility to friendships of the soul, the healthy energy and directness of his feelings, his genial cordiality, his domestic kindness and helpfulness, his "prosperous management" of men, his loving confidence in human nature, and even the searching sincerity of his religious character in private, and its burning intensity in public, must in this brief sketch but feebly appear. And chiefly to relieve our own feeling of the scant justice he has received at our

hands, we add two vivid exhibitions of him, in his own words. The first will show the noble uprightness, the severe conscientiousness of the man; and perhaps it will do more than exhibit, for surely it ought to communicate to whoever reads it, his sense of responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the people, his willingness to labour and suffer, that the Gospel should be preached to the Poor. A Clergyman who had contributed to the disappointment of his most cherished visions by inefficiency in the Chapelry of St. John's, and who through the same inefficiency had left on Dr. Chalmers the burden of a serious annual pecuniary loss, which could not be liquidated except by a more successful ministry on the scene of his failure, writes for testimonials and recommendations to strengthen his application for another situation. reply is entirely noble; and we wish it were impressed upon the conscience of every man who is asked to put his hand to a testimonial, and who is tempted by cowardice, or selfishness, or that unprincipled kindness to an acquaintance which is meanness and injury to every one else, to give a false report of another in matters affecting the highest interests of those whom that report misleads. The letter written at a later period of Dr. Chalmers' life, is long, but in more directions than one it is eminently characteristic.

"DEAR SIR,

ઃઃ

The

Edinburgh, December 24, 1831.

"I would have replied to your letter of the 9th of November long ago, but I felt the weight and greatness of the subject, and had not strength to grapple with it, while the burden of my classes was upon me. I have taken the earliest opportunity, by taking the first of the holidays, for the difficult task of replying, as I feel I ought, to your communication.

"I trust I have long ceased to recommend to a public office for the purpose of befriending or benefitting any one. I have sometimes been mistaken; and my judgment, I am very sensible, is just as liable to err as that of other men. But my strong and single purpose, in every case where I am consulted, about the appointment either to chairs or to churches, shall be to render an honest advice; and to do it on no other principle than that of the greatest usefulness. I feel more and more the tremendous responsibility which attaches to the utterance of my opinion upon these subjects; and I desire that neither favour, nor friendship, nor gra

titude, nor any personal feelings or interests whatever, shall have the least influence in a deliberation so solemn as that which relates to the education of youth or to the Christian good of families.

"But to apply this to the matter before us. I had much conversation with you ere you undertook your present charge, on the peculiar nature of it. I laboured to impress upon you, that it was only upon the strength of your week-day attentions that you could ever hope to collect there a congregation upon the Sabbaths; that it was, in fact, a missionary station among a very outlandish people; and that the chapel was erected for the praiseworthy object of reclaiming these people to habits of church-going, along with the other decencies and observations of a Christian land-an achievement which I strenuously and repeatedly affirmed could only be carried into effect by unwearied, persevering, daily attentions to them and to their families. I put a paper into your hands, enumerating with great and anxious minuteness these attentions in the order of their importance and efficacy; and when I left Glasgow, we parted with the mutual agreement of exchanging letters once a-month on what to me was the most interesting of all topics, the progress of operations on whose success my heart was infinitely more set than on that of any other enterprize on which I have ever ventured in the whole course of my existence.

"I was looking lately to my volume of St. John's Sermons, and find that the thirteenth was preached by me on the opening of your chapel. It is now more than eight years since that composition was executed; nor am I conscious of having ever, till the other day, looked at it since. I was therefore the more interested in observing there an exposition of the same principles which I am now insisting onprinciples on which I expatiated much and anxiously in your hearing, and still the only principles on which I hold it possible to reclaim a population that have lapsed into a state of practical heathenism. And I must add, that notwithstanding the failure of all my fond and sanguine hopes in the Chapelry of St. John's, I will still proclaim it as my faith that if a minister in your circumstances will but ply with the attention of common and Christian kindness through the week the families of such a district as the one that has been assigned to you-if he will but attend their funerals, and visit their sick-beds, and watch over the deaths of those who are near and dear to them, and take cognizance of their children, and become the affectionate friend and familiar of the common people within the limits of his territory; and if, to lighten the cares and fatigues of such a superintendence, and bring it within the compass of his own individual strength, he will attach to him by his cordiality and courteousness, a parochial agency, at once to relieve him of his toils and give a tenfold efficacy to his labours-I cannot but aver it as my yet unshaken confidence, that, on these things being done, the result, in CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 50.

2 H

the course of years, would be a numerous and steady congregation, gathered out from among the families who had been attached by the services of Christian philanthropy performed in the midst of them. That such a congregation has not been formed in the Chapelry of St. John's is to me the most grievous and humbling mortification by far that I ever experienced; but if those things which from the outset I ever held to be indispensable, and which still, with the blessing of God, I hold to be sufficient-if these things have been undone, then, however distressed and disappointed I have been at this individual instance, I will not yet let go my triumphant anticipation, that, by means of the diligence and devotedness of Christian labourers, the worst of our city population may still be Christianized.

"Our regular correspondence ceased within a few months of my leaving Glasgow-a cessation which did not begin with me, for my interest in the success of the enterprize I left behind me never ceased. I heard reports of your * * * and thus having traversed every principle on which I conceived that we had a full common understanding at the outset of your connection with your present charge. But it is not on the credit given by me to particular reports, that I decline the recommendation of you to any other charge. It is on the general fact, that you have not succeeded in a situation where I believe that, with due labour and right management on your part, you would have succeeded. Even though I could allege no evidence against your qualifications, I must, ere I am entitled to exert myself in your favour, have positive evidence for them and that is an evidence which I altogether want—I dare not, consistently with common honesty, take so much as one step for your removal from your present to another situation. And there are certain circumstances which I must take the liberty of stating, as they serve irresistibly in my opinion to prove, that I could not share in any such attempt without incurring a guilt, the sense of which would oppress and overwhelm my own conscience, and the disclosure of which would, or at least ought, to stamp me with infamy among my fellow-men.

"I made on the chapel and its ground, an outlay of seven hundred and fifty pounds, with the expectation certainly of making good the interest, and at length recovering the principal. And I am told by Mr. Paul, of such being the deficiency of the receipts, that the amount of my obligation, as being the holder of five shares, to make it good, will come to forty pounds a-year, entailing upon me, therefore, the loss of about eighty pounds a-year-an encroachment upon my income, which, in my present circumstances, and with my present family, I cannot very well afford.

"Now this is the re-action which such a state of things brings upon my feelings; and I believe it will be sympathized with by every man who has in him the soul and the conscience of high