Locke was not only an honester, but also a much more truly religious man than Cousin; and that Chubb, and Hume, and even Paine, were much honester infidels than Straus and Fourier.

Still, it may be said, that in respect to the higher and warmer aspects of religion, it was a season of faintness. It was an age of great appearance of secularity. Its philosophy, whether to its credit or not, was strikingly utilitarian. The distinguishing doctrines of the Gospel were not expressly denied, yet to a great extent, they remained buried in articles and confessions, and theological writings, which had been the product of the warmer temperature of preceding centuries; whilst a distorted prominence was given to those lower aspects of religious truth which seem to have more connexion with the happiness, and order, and mere secular prudence of this world, than with the awful interests of eternity. There seemed to have been wholly reversed the position of some of the enthusiasts of preceding periods. It had been maintained that the world was solely for the Church, the kingdoms and governments of the earth only for the saints. The predominant religious principles of the eighteenth century seemed to be, the Church for the world, the Church for the state, eternal truths only a means to ends, which, though right and virtuous, were still temporal ends; or, in other words, religion a police power for the preservation of the social and political harmony.

There was a careful avoidance not only of cant, but also of the true and natural language of religious emotion and religious philosophy. There was almost an entire divorce between theology and literature. There are now freely discussed by the secular press, topics of the most serious nature, which fifty, or seventy, or a hundred years ago, would have hardly gained admission into professedly serious publications. Addison had to apologise for inserting a little religious reading of the tamest and most general kind, in some of his Saturday papers; and that too, in a series avowedly devoted to the support of virtue and morality. Now, some of the highest and most sacred truths of religion, and in their most theological aspect, are freely treated of, not only in our Blackwood, our Edinburgh, and our Quarterly Reviews, but in the light Fraser, and even the radical and rationalising Westminster.

To say, however, that the foregoing secular characteristics prevailed throughout the whole of the period aforesaid, and among all the churches, would be most unjust. There were seasons of renewed life at various times, and in various places. In regard to national churches, we may say, that although the slumber of the English had been more profound, it had also been oftener disturbed than that of the Scottish. The thunders of a Whitfield and a Wesley, were pealing through England; an Edwards and a Tennent were alarming the conscience in America; a Françke and a THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. 2.

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Spener were disturbing the dead orthodoxy of the Lutherans in Germany, while the Scottish church still slumbered on in the drowsy fit which soon succeeded the Presbyterian establishment at the revolution of 1688. Fortified in the rigidity and clearness of its articles, in the historical recollections of ancestral faith, in the remembrance of solemn leagues and covenants, it could not easily be aroused to the feeling, that in its Robertsons, and its Blairs, it had lost that overpowering faith which in a Knox, a Melville, a Henderson, a Guthrie, and a Livingston, had dethroned despotisms, endured martyrdoms, wrought righteousness, and contended, even to the death, for the eternal crown, and the kingdom promised to the saints.

Still, as we have said, if her slumbers had been less frequently disturbed, it is also true that they had not been so deep. The religious fires of former ages had not burned down so low as among other Protestant churches in the sister kingdom, and on the continent. This was because religion had taken a deeper hold on the popular mind in Scotland, than in England or Germany. Even when the author of Douglas, and the intimate companion of David Hume, had come to be fair representatives of the great majority of the Scottish clergy, there was still, everywhere among the people, much remaining of that old faith and fervor that had burned so brightly in the long days of the Stuart persecutions. Whilst some of the preachers of Scotland were writing for the stage, others wholly engaged in secular authorship-although none were known to have sunk to the level of the Swifts and Sternes of the sister church-and the great mass had settled down into a dead formality, preaching the morals of Seneca and Epictetus in pulpits which had once heard the thunders of Melville and Knox, there was still in thousands of cottages, the living household church; there was still preserved the devout morning and evening exercise; there were still lying upon their shelves, and often most devoutly read, not only the "big ha' Bible," but also the choice and well-worn old volumes, containing the sermons and the rigid theology of the old preachers; there was, in short, still remaining much of that patriarchal or family religion, by which the peasantry of Scotland has ever been so strikingly distinguished from that of the sister kingdoms of England and Ireland.

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When, therefore, the voices of Whitfield and Wesley sounded the midnight cry, they were far less startled by it than the inhabitants of Cornwall, or Yorkshire, or Dublin. During, too, the darkest period of declension among the clergy, the Erskines and their associates had made a deep impression; yet still it may said, that no very great or universal change had taken place in the spiritual condition of the Scottish Kirk, previous to the stirring influence of that great man, some traits of whose remarkable character, it is designed to make the subject of the present article.

The declension had gone on until the beginning of the nineteenth century; less rapidly, towards the close of this period, among the clergy, (with whom it might even be said there had been something of a return movement), but with the beginning of an accelerated tendency to irreligion among the people.

At this point, we propose to take our first survey of the character and position of Chalmers. Nearly fifty years ago, he was the clergyman of the obscure country parish of Cavers, in Roxburghshire. At that period, as he himself avows in a production most remarkable when contrasted with his subsequent writings, he had no higher opinion of the clerical office than as a trade or employment in which, by means of two days in the week, at the utmost, of parochial labor, he might earn an honest livelihood, and devote the remaining five days to his favorite pursuits of natural science. In a pamphlet in reply to Prof. Playfair, he refutes, with some warmth, the idea that a clergyman, by his employment and professional modes of thinking, is unfitted for scientific studies and discoveries. He rather regards him as one who, from the little time required for his parochial duties, has even more leisure for such purposes than most other men. In short, his views on the subject are of the most exclusively secular aspect. There is in this, his first publication, an entire absence of anything that even looks like spirituality. Its whole tenor furnishes proof that any allusion to the salvation of souls as the great work of the ministry, or even the use of the expression, had he accidentally been betrayed into it, would have made the writer start back as from a sort of solemn cant involving ideas of religion too serious, too sombre, too much connected with eternity, and too condemnatory even of the highest pursuits that have relation merely to time. There may be recognized in this pamphlet, the peculiar ring of Chalmers' style, as a writer in Fraser's Magazine expresses it; but, otherwise, who would have thought it to be the production of the same man, who afterwards became the instrument of diffusing evangelical life through the National Church of Scotland, and whose numerous subsequent writings bear the stamp of earnestness, and solemnity, beyond almost anything that has proceeded from the modern pulpit?

The exceeding worldliness of Chalmers' spirit and pursuits at this time, may not have presented a fair or average specimen of the clerical character in the Church of Scotland; and yet the mere fact that he dared to use such language as descriptive of the estimation in which he himself held, and in which he must have supposed that others held, his sacred profession--the fact, that he dared even thus to think of it without rebuking himself, or expecting rebuke therefor from his associates in the ministry, certainly, shows the prevailing opinion as to the depth of secularity into which it was supposed to have generally fallen. There is no

reason to suppose that Chalmers was the worst among them, or that he was not a fair representative, in this respect, of a large portion of the Scottish clergy; at least of that past generation to whom he and his associates were just succeeding. It corresponds well to what Witherspoon had said of the moderate party among them, nearly forty years before, that they were more inclined to the study of Bayle's Dictionary, than of the Bible or of their own stern articles of faith.

How immense the difference between Chalmers in 1805, and Chalmers in 1847; between Chalmers the chemist, geologist, and astronomer, devoting to these favorite sciences five days in the week, whilst reluctantly employing one beside the tedious sabbath, in the discharge of his parochial duties, and those parochial duties consisting solely, perhaps, in the hurried preparation of some meagre distillation of lifeless ethics-how immense the difference, we say, between this Chalmers and the subsequent leader of the Free Church of Scotland! And how are we to account for the mighty change? No mere philosophy of human nature can ever solve a problem of this kind, unless we take into the explanation something which such philosophy has ever viewed with peculiar dislike. The fact, however, or phenomenon, may be expressed, and truly expressed, in the simplest and most ordinary language. Many would understand at once, or think they understood, the whole case, should it be said, that sometime after the letter to Prof. Playfair, Chalmers was converted, yes, converted-and that too, after he had been for years a professed Christian teacher. Or, to use another most expressive phrase, he experienced religion; in other words, that which, from his own showing, did not before possess one fifth part of the interest of mathematics or chemistry, even as a speculation for the head, became matter of experimental and absorbing concern for the heart; in fact, a new life, changing all his views, not only in religion, but also in respect to the ends of nature, of science, of morals, of politics, of all earthly pursuits, and all earthly existence. Or, to adopt a mode of speech often used in familiar language to denote the religious change, we might say of Chalmers that, at this period, he became serious. Common as this expression is, and most simple in itself, it does yet contain a most sublime fullness of meaning. To the man who has truly learned to reflect, this one word would seem to comprehend every other element of the religious character. For nothing is truly great but what is serious. God, as some one has said, is ever serious; angels are serious; all spiritual beings, and the spiritual world are ever thought of by us as serious; heaven is serious; hell is serious; the thought of the condition of man even in this world, such as it now is, and as it has been for 6000 years, is enough to call out the most serious emotion, and, when rightly entertained, to banish all levity from the soul, and all laughter

from the countenance; our destiny in another existence, under whatever aspect of religious belief we may view it, is most serious; in short, all life is serious; death is serious; misery is serious; true happiness is ever serious; whilst all things else, even the highest pursuits of science and philosophy, must be held to be the merest trifling, when regarded as terminating in themselves, or as severed from all bearing upon the higher moral life of the immortal spirit. There can be no better or more real division of classes among mankind than this-the men who are serious, and the men who are not; those who are in solemn earnest, and those who see nothing fea.ful in the problem of our existence. Has any one become truly and deeply serious; there need be no great fear that he will not be, at least, substantially orthodox on all the great truths that relate to the Scriptures and human destiny. The employment of such expressions as we have used, would be in perfect consistency with the peculiar theology which Chalmers most firmly held, and which has generally been styled, both by friends and foes, the evangelical. They are such, too, as he would not at all have hesitated to employ in his own case, had he, like Augustine, seen fit to give to the world a minute record of his own religious experience. Still, in describing such a change of such a man, we would rather avoid the peculiar phraseology of any school of religionists, and all terms that may be regarded as having reference to the processes, efficiences, and peculiar dogmas with which such change may be supposed to have been connected, rather than to the result itself in its most catholic aspect. Instead, then, of offending even the most unreasonable prejudice by saying that, at this period Chalmers was converted, or experienced religion, or became a subject of grace, it may without offence, and yet with all solemnity of meaning, be asserted, that from this remarkable epoch of his existence, he commenced living for eternity, as he had before lived for time. The evangelical, the churchman, the rationalist, the liberal Christian, and even the philosophical infidel, would all be content, we think, with the dignity of such a phraseology, expressive of a fact and a phenomenon in human existence, so important, so sublime, so worthy of the deepest investigation of the deepest philosophy. Viewed in reference to this, all other distinctions of character among men seem to vanish away, and to leave but the two classes before mentioned-the serious and the trifling-those who live for time, and those who live for eternity-those who bound all things, even their schemes for doing good, their patriotism, and their philanthropy, by the first, and those who estimate their own acts and those of their fellow men, and all human relations, by the second. Even our modern transcendentalists and professed admirers of Plato, must here give us credit for avoiding everything like cant, and all that is unphilosophical, since we have almost used the very