A Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Thomas Chalmers

that I rejoice to observe any demonstration of this in any way that may induce foresight and economy among them; so that if, in point of fact, Savings-Banks shall present a greater allurement to economy than any other institution, I should rejoice in their being encouraged and multiplied throughout our land.

You ask me how I liked the review of my "Discourses" in the "Christian Observer." I have lived too long in the rough element of severity and invective not to feel that it treats me with great moderation. There is an evident tone of friendship about it which would have reconciled me to much greater freedoms than it has actually used. And I still retain the same feeling of kindness toward its conductors, and the same opinion of its being by far the first of our religious periodicals, in respect both of talent and Christian spirit, that I have long entertained.

Perhaps I ought to say to you what I honestly think and feel of the evangelical clergy in the Church of England, that they are the great Christian luminaries of our country at this moment; nor, in all the other denominations of religion put together, have I met with a goodlier number of devoted and spiritual men spending their zeal, and earnestness, and talent, on the best of causes. There is one peculiarity with which I feel myself most frequently, and I admit most justly charged, and that is a pleonastic exhibition of the same idea. And yet when one thinks of the passage where the power of demonstration is likened to a hammer breaking the rock in pieces, who does not feel that in such a process the hammer is often directed to the same point of application? And be assured that there never yet was any cause carried, or any object practically driven, but by a succession of similar and repeated strokes. This is the case in Parliament. It is so also in the pulpit. And though I have no reason to believe that I shall ever contribute much to the establishment of any right position, and the overthrow of any wrong one, yet I have no doubt that an extensive impression will never be made on the public

mind by a bare and didactic exhibition of truth, however rigid and faultless the whole conduct of the argument may be ; and that, with our nature constituted as it is, there must be reiteration and variation, and impassioned urgency.

I have not had yet the pleasure of seeing your sermon on the funeral of the Princess Charlotte. Hall is eminently beautiful and impressive, and I really think it among the foremost of his productions. My own I am ashamed to speak of, and indeed it can scarcely be intelligible out of Glasgow, where the question of churches was perhaps about the next in interest to the main and overwhelming interest of that period. I feel some little value, however, for the appendix, for which I am altogether responsible on the footing of voluntary authorship.

I long for a more realizing sense of spiritual things. There is a darkness which no light of argument can disperse. There is a light which never can be reached but by knocking at the door of that sanctuary that we can not open. May God make to each of us the revelation which He maketh unto babes; and may such be our fellowship with the Father and the Son, as to stamp the recognizable character of Heaven on our fellowship one with another.

Have you ever attended to the doctrine of the disinterested love of God? I fear that Edwards, Witherspoon, and the American divines have a little darkened the freeness of the Gospel offer by their speculations on the subject. They seem to put all the discredit of selfishness on the love of gratitude, and would suspend the act of acceptance by faith, till, somehow or other, it could be made contemporaneous with the dawn of love to God on account of His own excellencies. This I do think is a forbidding of those whom God has not forbidden, and I can not but preach the Gospel without reserve to all men in every state of moral disease.

Do let me hear from you soon. May I request you to give my kindest remembrances to Mr. Wilson when you see him. There is no man in the world whom I have a greater love

for than Mr. Wilberforce; but I have such an impression of the way in which he is harassed and overdone by extensive calls upon his attendance, that I am fearful to intrude upon him even with compliments. I am, my dear sir, yours most affectionately, THOMAS CHALMERS.

No. CCXXV.

ANSTRUTHER, 11th August, 1819. MY DEAR SIR-I should have acknowledged your kind communication long ago. I am here on a visit to my mother and for sea-bathing, having reduced myself to a state of considerable languor, as inimical to mental as to bodily exertion. I observed with the utmost gratitude your readiness to assist me in the matter of my publications. I feel my thorough need of such assistance; and have to confess a very uncouth and primeval ignorance of many of the proprieties of our language, aggravated as it is in my case by carelessness and a kind of impatience to arrive at the conclusion of every undertaking.

Since I received yours, I have seen the "Christian Observer" upon my last work-very kind, and breathing the partialities of friendship. He speaks of sensibility to the lash of criticism. On this subject I have often admired a couplet in Beattie's "Minstrel,"

"Him, who ne'er listened to the voice of praise,
The silence of neglect can ne'er appal."

It were untrue to general nature, as well as to my own individual experience, did I profess to have fulfilled the first of the above lines, and therefore have no title to the privilege expressed in the second. But it is good to know the way of arriving at that privilege, even to love the praise of God, and not the praise of men. Nor do I know a more memorable remark of Foster's, than that, of all the propensities of unrenewed nature, the appetite for praise needs to be kept under the severest castigation.

By-the-way, have you seen his "Missionary Sermon ?”

What a marvelous composition!—how rich in sentiment, and how replete with matter so weighty and dense, that in my hands it would have been expanded into a large octavo volume ere I could have felt it to be in a right condition for being addressed to the general mind of the country. I underrate, I believe, the capacity of my readers; and in my anxiety. to convey a lucid impression, I nourish a diseased tendency to useless and excessive illustration.

I saw one of your excellent ones of the Church of England lately, Mr. Stuart of Percy Chapel. I have now seen many of the most distinguished of both our Establishments, and, without flattery, there is one mighty point of superiority that you have over us. You know that a man may look with an observant eye upon a particular affection, and yet not possess the affection itself. To have a just perception of the laws and the phenomena of anger, it is not necessary to have an irritable constitution; and it is not the most passionate who are worst fitted to acquire the metaphysics of human passion. Now this is just as true of our good as of our bad feelings. It is just as true of the spiritual as of the sensual part of our nature; and I do think that while the orthodox of our Church come forth with their didactic expositions of Christianity, and intellectually assign the right place to faith, and love, and holiness, the evangelical of yours show forth all these graces in real and living exemplification. We theorize about the virtues of the new creature: you actually breathe these virtues. I have seen many good epistles written with pen and ink, and all about Christ too, by our clergy; but I have not seen so many living epistles among them. We talk about religion; you talk religion. And as far as I have remarked, while the matter has come as abundantly to us in word and even in argument (λóyw, either verbo or ratione), it has come far more abundantly to you in power.

When in the same room with Mr. Stuart, I felt as in a pure and holy atmosphere, and learned how greatly more efficacious, in the way of especial influence upon others, is