accent, the broader vowels and larger utterance which startled southern hearers. In his own country his sway was for a long time supreme. His contributions to literature were almost exclusively Sermons, chief among which were his Astronomical Discourses and his (so-called) Commercial Discourses, preached on week-days to a congregation of merchants in Glasgow; along with several works on political economy, one of which in particular, the Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, published in 1821, came with all the greater force and meaning from his pen, that he had himself performed one of the highest offices of a Christian Statesman in triumphantly providing for the poor of a great parish in Glasgow, swarming with the starving and miserable, by a strictly parochial system, taking it entirely out of the hands of any poor-law agencies, and ruling it like an independent kingdom with a budget and revenue of its own, sufficient for itself. This romantic piece of civic and spiritual economy, the formation of an ideal state amid all the squalor of a modern poor and crowded parish, Chalmers made the mistake of thinking applicable to the whole country-which of course it would have been had there been a Chalmers at the head of every district, but was not in ordinary hands. As it was, it was little more than a splendid episode in local history— and one of the greatest achievements of his life.

Chalmers began life in the tranquil position of a Scotch country minister, was afterwards, as has been said, at the head of a great Glasgow parish, where he was prophet, law-giver and benevolent autocrat after which experiences of busy life he retired into an academical career, holding a Professor's Chair in succession in the Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. When the great controversy in the Church of Scotland arose, he at once placed himself on what was then called the "Non-intrusion" side, analogous, in complete difference, to the High Church movement: and became at once the head and leader of that party, the founder of the new institutions of the Free Church, and especially of the wise and farseeing expedient of the Sustentation Fund by which the principle of Church endowment was established in opposition to the fluctuating popular sway of what is called the voluntary principle. He became after the Disruption the first Principal of the Free Church College, and died holding that office in 1847.

Another great Scotch preacher but much lesser man was Robert Smith Candlish, a minister of Edinburgh who had much to do with the Free Church movement, and was a most noted and successful public orator, publishing also various collections of sermons. Dr. Cunningham, of the same party, wrote a meritorious, but somewhat

partisan, and not very readable History of the Church of Scotland.

It seems almost necessary in speaking of Dr. Chalmers to mention at least the name of Edward Irving, once his faithful and devoted lieutenant, a man of heroic mould, whose impassioned piety and enthusiasm carried him into paths dangerous to life and fame, the result being in his case an early death, but no shadow upon the spotless sincerity and truth of his great yet simple nature. His works in theology, if they can be so called, Sermons and Addresses, are in most cases poems of passionate fervour and an antique touch, as if of the Prophets and Seers. His life and wanderings and works were, however, over before our period begins. Among the foremost of the followers of Chalmers was Thomas Guthrie, a man. whose extraordinary success in the pulpit was not attained in the same legitimate way. Honest, devout and philanthropic, eager to lend his hand to every good work, his compositions were not of a kind to brook print. His style was florid and fluent in the highest degree, and the effect he produced upon the large audience he gathered round him was often of the most powerful kind: but the metaphors in which he indulged freely, and which even in the height of his public oratory were seen to be of the most highly differing quality, some full of simple natural poetry, while

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the others were forced, extravagant and turbidbecame sadly like pinchbeck and tinsel when preserved in a book. It is not an unusual effect with a popular preacher. He was, though not the inventor, at least one of the most successful workers of the Ragged School scheme, which was hoped in for a time, as so many moral panaceas have been, as a key to the everlasting problem of the social salvation and rescue of the miserable and degraded. Neither in that nor in any other scheme of the kind has the panacea yet been found; but this was nobly worked by Dr. Guthrie and for a time produced astonishing results. their generation it was this dissentient and in the formal sense of the word revolutionary party in the Church of Scotland which monopolised all that was most distinguished and greatest in theological teaching and literature. A little later the balance turned, and though Scotland has not yet produced another man worthy to tread in the steps of Thomas Chalmers, the higher level of thought and style and national influence has been found on the other side. To prove this it is scarcely necessary to do more than mention the names of Norman Macleod and John Tulloch ; the former indeed much less of a literary man than of a Churchman (in a sense of that word peculiar in meaning to Scotland), the latter less an ecclesiastic than a man of letters, whose works,

however, are so divided between theology—to which he made several notable additions-and general literature that it is difficult to know in which category to place him.

When these corresponding yet so different movements had passed their respective crises and fallen back into the ordinary course of life, a movement of another kind arose in England among a generation younger than that of Newman and one which felt perhaps the reaction which is inevitable after any strong wave of tendency. It may be said of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-72) that he was the Newman of this new divergence from rigid doctrine and formal ecclesiastical work and ways. He had that strong defence against excessive Churchmanship, the fact of a Nonconformist parentage, his father having been a Dissenting minister—and the conviction more certainly secured in this way than perhaps in any other, that there was no exclusive standard of goodness or certainty of salvation in any framework of ecclesiasticism, and that the highest faith and piety could exist outside the boundaries of the Church. This conviction did not, however, on the other hand lessen his allegiance to the Church which he had chosen as being the most perfect and desirable form and embodiment of true religion: but that flame of brotherly kindness in him which has been called by a later