do we hear them express themselves, with a puzzled look in this wise, "Where was Dr. Chalmers' great power? We search for the secret of it vainly in his writings. His writings are fine, they are indeed very remarkable, but they do not inflame us; they do not overwhelm us with any sense of greatness. In what did consist the strange power of the man?" No analysis of his purely intellectual composition can ever solve this difficulty. His power, with a suitable mental accompaniment, lay in the intense heat and energy of his great and generous emotions. What his congregations felt mainly, when they were swallowed up in the deep rushing waves of his eloquence, was the heart that heaved them. The hearer that could not be still before him, but was one moment sitting, and the next upon his feet, and the moment after sitting again, who utterly forgot himself, and all about him, conscious of nothing but the preacher, and not conscious even of that consciousness, was captus in mente surely, but far more captus in corde. What no man, but a man with such a heart as Chalmers had, could have done, Chalmers did, when he literally dissolved his congregations in the all-surrounding ocean of his tenderness. There was love in his eye, love upon his tongue, love in every attitude and gesture, love not affected but felt, not felt just then and excited by the occasion, but resident in the very elements of the man, and welling up most naturally from the deep fountains of his own soul; and here was the hiding of his power. He would have astonished his hearers by his intellect alone. He would wonderfully have entertained and instructed them, but he would never have moved, and ravished and impressed them as he did. He would have smitten with tremendous power, and with deafening din on the cold iron, doing little execution howbeit, compared with the forming and fashioning strokes which he delivered on the almost liquescent mass, that he had prepared for himself in the furnace of his glowing affections.

Dr. Chalmers' piety took its type from what we have already considered of him. His lovingness, that was natural in him, received a Christian baptism, while he was minister at Kilmany, and from that day forth it was dyan in the theological sense. It was that love for man which is comprehended in love for God. It is remarkable how, from the time of his genuine conversion, his whole soul was brought into manifest subjection under the power of the gospel, and how steadily and strongly he shot upward toward the fullness of his spiritual stature. No

sooner was he come out from that dreadful bondage of legality in which he sighed so long; a dreadful bondage to him, for every link of its chain was worn into his very flesh, and ever present to his consciousness, than he seemed to enter, as few do, into the largest liberty of Christ. He could, with singular truth, adopt Paul's words, and say "When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood." A simpler faith, a more cordial self-forsaking deference to God's will and word, a calmer and more placid resignation, a deeper humility, a loftier zeal, a purer devotion, with a single eye to the divine glory, have been rarely seen in the church. Never was a truer, braver, more generous and noble hearted being on earth than young Chalmers, when he teazed almost out of their senses the dronish hum-drum professors at St. Andrews, by lecturing under the very shadow of their university, better than the best of them could, and drawing away their scholars after him, in spite of their scolding; and in the old manse at Kilmany, all that truth, and bravery, and generosity, and noble heartedness was converted and brought, magnified as the grace of God does magnify every good thing in the natural man which it converts, into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

"This regular and earnest study of the Bible was one of the first, and most noticeable effects of his conversion. His nearest neighbor and most frequent visitor was old John Bonthron, who, having once seen better days, was admitted to an easy and privileged, familiarity, in the exercise of which, one day before the memorable illness, (which had been greatly influential in the change that his character had undergone,) he said, 'I find you aye busy, sir, with one thing or another, but come when I may, I never find you at your studies for the Sabbath.' 'O, an hour or two on the Saturday evening is quite enough for that,' was the minister's answer. But now the change had come, and John, on entering the manse, often found him poring eagerly over the pages of the Bible. The difference was too striking to escape his notice, and with the freedom given him, which he was ready enough to use, he said, 'I never come in now but I find you aye at your Bible.' 'All too little, John, all too little,' was the significant reply."

The following appears in his journal at this period—“ Finished this day my perusal of the New Testament by daily chapters, in which my object was to commit striking passages VOL. I.-13

to memory. I mean to begin its perusal anew, in which this object shall be revived, and the object of fixing upon one sentiment of the chapter for habitual and recurring contemplation through the day, shall be added to the former."

This was undoubtedly the inception of that plan of daily Bible study which he persevered in through the remainder of his life, and which resulted, in part, in the three volumes of "Daily Scripture Readings," and two of "Sabbath Scripture Readings," which are now found among his posthumous publications. He was less a critical than a devotional student of the word of God. He studied it upon his knees; not alone, or mainly that he might be able to teach others, but that he might himself be taught. He resorted to it for the bread of life to nourish his own soul, as well as that he might gather there for the souls of others. Chalmers could not well have been a critical student of the Scriptures. For dry elementary learning he had little aptitude or relish. His sympathies were much more with life and the realities of life, with practical combinations and applications. A skeleton was a displeasing object to him, until it was covered with integuments and sinews and flesh and a skin, and became capable of vital movements. We would by no means speak disrespectfully of biblical critics or criticism, but yet we must say that such a man as Chalmers was above them and it. He could have little sympathy for mere terminological and philological disquisitions; for their own sake, none at all. He wanted results, action, life. And, if we are not mistaken, his piety itself had somewhat to do with this. He could not make the Bible a subject of cold scientific investigation. He could not handle it as a geologist does a fossil. It was always the word of God to his soul, and nothing but that. It inflamed his devotion; it kindled his Christian zeal; and, if a sense of duty sometimes pressed him, as we are quite sure it did, to enter the school of the mere critics, he soon took sick of it, for the "word was in his heart, as a fire shut up in his bones, and he was weary with forbearing, and could not stay." Let Chambers not be reproached for his lack of critical acumen. You can not justly look for all things in one man. And yet we are not apologising for him, as though he were, in this respect, essentially deficient. He was not such a man as our Moses Stuart, and some others that we might name, but there were good reasons for this, of which he had no cause to be ashamed, but rather, possibly, to glory.

Chalmers" piety was of the working kind. His was emi

nently a Pauline conversion, begetting, for its first and characteristic utterance, the inquiry, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" And the spirit with which he now entered on the service of his new Master, is evinced in the intense earnestness with which he began instantly to labor for the spiritual welfare of his people, as well as in the burning zeal with which he espoused every general undertaking of Christian philanthropy.

"Upon the whole, however," says the biographer, and till the period of his illness at Fincraigs, "Dr. Chalmers' ministry was unpopular and ineffective; his church but poorly attended, and his private ministrations followed with but trifling effects. But the great change came, and with it a total alteration in the discharge of all parochial duty. From a place of visible subordination, the spiritual care and cultivation of his parish was elevated to the place of clear and recognized supremacy. To break up the peace of the indifferent and secure, by exposing at once the guilt of their ungodliness, and its fearful issue in a ruined eternity; to spread out an invitation wide as heaven's own all-embracing love, to every awakened sinner, to accept of eternal life in Jesus Christ; to plead with all, that instantly and heartily, with all good will, and with full and unreserved submission, they should give themselves up in absolute and entire dedication to the Redeemer; these were the objects for which he was now seen to strive with such a severity of conviction as implied that he had one thing to do, and 'with such a concentration of his forces, as, to idle spectators, looked like insanity.'"

Every one knows with what intense zeal he now devoted himself to the interests of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which, having been instituted a few years before, was, at this time, engaging a large share of the public attention. No man wrote and preached more, or more earnestly, on its behalf, than Chalmers. Nor were his labors confined to a mere eloquent advocacy of its claims. In his own parish, and wherever he had access and influence abroad, he established associations to promote its object by systematic collections. With the double aim of helping the society, and of cultivating the spirit of Christian benevolence among the people, he devised plans, and personally superintended the execution of them, for bringing the whole strength of the Church into active co-operation with this scheme of Christian beneficence. Nothing was despised. He called for every man's prayers, and for every man's exertions, and for every man's contributions. The pounds of the

rich he asked for, and the pennies of the poor. It was an absolute enthusiasm that characterized his efforts in this cause. "I long," he cried, in the first sermon which he preached for it-"I long to see the day, nor do I despair of seeing it, when every parish shall have a Christian society, when not a district of the land shall be left uncultivated, but shall yield a produce to the cause of the Saviour; when these lesser streams shall form into a mighty torrent to carry richness and fertility into the dry and desolate regions of the world; and when Britain, high in arms and political influence, shall earn a more permanent glory, by being the dispenser of light and power, and of the message of heaven to the remotest nations."

The zeal for gospel work which grace had kindled in the soul of Chalmers, and which blazed up so high and bright at first, was a zeal that lasted his life-time. This was the excellency and the glory of it. He never rested till he rested in death, and literally died working, being found dead in his bed, with the unfinished manuscript beside him of a report which was to have been read next day, in the General Assembly. We doubt not that he might have said, with perfect truth, when he composed himself to that sleep from which there came no waking, "The zeal of thine house hath consumed me."

It would be interesting here to follow him to Glasgow, and to recount the prodigious labors which he performed in that city, to follow him again to St. Andrews, and again to Edinburgh. His labors, however, were not confined to these localities. He interested himself in every good thing, and toiled in every good cause, and by his indomitable energy and powerful efforts on behalf of whatever served God and humanity, created for himself a real presence all over the three kingdoms. We have said that Chalmers never rested. He never did, in the sense in which that word is commonly understood. He varied his labors, but he never ceased from them. Even upon his journeys, he performed, commonly, an amount of work which would have been absolutely terrifying to most men. He made investigations, and composed sermons, essays, and reviews upon the road. Every chamber in which he passed a night he converted into a study, and every family that he visited was regarded by him as having a claim upon his ministerial fidelity. No man better enjoyed the courtesies of social life than he, or was more observant of them, yet it was his earnest prayer and his steady aim, never to be diverted by them from his duty as a Christian minister. Once, upon one of his excursions, he passed a night