union; the "auld Ha'-Bible" was their corner-stone. Such homes write on the face of the world the best evidence of the truth of Christianity! And the father of Thomas Chalmers was the worthy head of such a home, a fine example of the right-hearted Calvinistic Scotchman. Of deep and tender feelings, yet ever manly and firm, humble and reverent toward God, unobtrusive yet unbending in the presence of men, John Chalmers of Anstruther was that style of man which forms the life-blood of a nation, and whose presence in a family is the satisfactory guarantee of an education which may, without hesitation, be pronounced good. Thomas was his sixth child; he was born at Anstruther in Fife, in March, 1780. He showed from the first a noble disposition: truthful, joyous, affectionate; the reader can judge how the influences of such a father and such a home would act upon him.

In his childhood we find little worthy of remark; little more, probably, than is to be told of all healthy and clever children. When so much a child as to be grossly ill-treated by his nurse, he is yet so much a man as to observe with strict honor a promise of secrecy which she easily won from his unsuspecting heart; he soon determines to be a minister, and, not to lose time, chooses his first text, "Let brotherly love continue," a text, by the way, of which he would have approved as heartily at sixty as at six; one day he is caught pacing his room, and repeating, in evident emotion, the words "Oh, Absalom, my son, my son." These are pleasing traits, if nowise extraordinary; they at least show clearly that he was a noble child.

At school he was almost precisely what it is best for a boy to be; if he erred at all, it was on the safe side. This portion of his training may be characterized fully and fitly by saying, that the important education of the class-room was carefully prevented from encroaching on the perhaps even more import

ant education of the playground. He was distinguished in school by no remarkable proficiency, and might be known among his class-fellows only by the greater strength and buoyancy of his young nature. When he chose to learn, he learned fast; this is an undoubted and important fact. But it was in the field or the playground, where the free loud laugh of the glad young bosom rang cheerily, every faculty awake to watch the turns and win the triumphs of the game, every muscle in fine healthful tension, every drop of blood surging in exultant fullness of life, that an observant and penetrating eye might have discerned the probability of his trimming skillfully between metaphysical dreaminess and mechanic dullness, and attaining a healthful, powerful manhood. He was at school rather a Clive than a Coleridge. His youthful mind was one of marked candor and purity; at no period of his life was he tainted with aught definitely vicious or ignoble. His nature was open, generous, affectionate; his strength, physical and intellectual, exuberant; he was social, truthful, and pureminded.

Ere completing his twelfth year, he entered the University of St. Andrews. During the first two sessions, he was still a school-boy. "Golf, foot-ball, and particularly hand-ball," with similar avocations, occupied his time. Any thing deserving the name of classical culture he never received. At the precise period when a few additional years at school would probably have affected his whole history, he was sent to the university; his sympathies, unawakened to the greatness and the beauty of antiquity, were soon arrested by mathematics.

It was in his fourteenth year that his mind awoke to its full intellectual vigor. He then commenced his third session at the university, and entered upon the study of mathematics. The pursuit was eminently congenial, and he at once became

distinguished. The teacher of the mathematical classes in St. Andrews at this time was Dr. James Brown, and Chalmers was much in his society. It was the period of the French Revolution, and Dr. Brown participated largely in the excitement of the time. He was of the school of radical reform in politics, and no doubt of extremely liberal sentiments on relig ious matters. As was to be expected, Chalmers embraced the opinions of his instructor. He read Godwin's Political Justice with delight and approval; he gazed on that vast, elaborate, and surely imposing structure, with its ice-pinnacles, clear, sharply defined, glittering in the wintery air, and deemed it a palace in whose many chambers the human race might at length find rest; he breathed for a time the thin atmosphere of its chill virtue and clockwork justice, and thought it were well always to be there. The ideas which he had brought from his father's house fell away from him; for the homespun but substantial garb of Scotch Calvinism, he substituted one of modern make, jaunty and of bright color, but spun mainly of vapor and moonshine. The thorough depravity of man, an atonement by the death of Christ, salvation by faith alone, were left to the weak and narrow-minded. What seemed a wider and more brilliant prospect opened to the eye of the aspiring student. Scaling the sunny heights of college promotion, loving truth and proclaiming virtue, winning the crowns of fame, expatiating in the sky-fields of thought and imagination, basking in the smile of the Universal Benevolence, he would go on in his strength and prosper. This we consider the first epoch in the intellectual history of Chalmers.

In 1795, he entered the Divinity Hall, formally to commence the study of theology. His mind, however, was yet under the spell of geometry. He had forced his way to the French mathematical literature, and was diligently occupied

in that opulent field. Toward the close, however, of his first theological session, a more important intellectual influence than that of mathematics was brought to bear upon his mind. He became acquainted with the Inquiry of Jonathan Edwards. Its study was to him an exercise of rapturous delight; his mind was filled with it till it seemed about to "lose its balance." It was the second determining influence in his mental development; mathematics and radicalism were the first. We must make one or two observations on its nature, and on what it reveals.

The simple fact that, at the age of fifteen, it was to him not a task, but a positive and intense pleasure, to follow the dry light of the great American metaphysician into those remote. and difficult regions of thought, is a proof of extraordinary intellectual endowment. At an age when his sympathies might have been expected to find comfort and response in the circulating library, and his intellect a pleasurable occupation in the lighter walks of history or science, he found his whole spiritual nature freely and delightfully exercised by the treatise on the freedom of the will. And the effect it produced on his boyish mind is remarkable. With the exception of Swift's icy misanthropy, we can remember no phenomenon in literature comparable to the unimpassioned coldness of the mind of Edwards in the investigation of those high and awful themes which are directly or indirectly the subject of his Inquiry. We conceive his argument, when well understood in its limits and conditions, to be irrefragable; yet it is more than can be demanded of the human mind to disrobe itself so entirely of human sympathy as the mind of Jonathan Edwards appears to disrobe itself as we read that treatise. We assert not that its author was a man devoid of kindness of heart, but, in his work on the freedom of the will, he seems to us to resolve himself abso

lutely into a thinking apparatus. He deliberately looks into hell, and the whole heat of its burnings can not melt into a tear the ice in his eye; he gazes on a great portion of his brother men stretched to eternity upon a wheel, and his eyelid quivers no more than if he saw a butterfly.

Now we desire to note, that, despite the tremendous impression produced on the mind of Chalmers by the Inquiry into the freedom of the will, the effect was not to darken but to brighten, not to depress but to elevate. It produced "a twelvemonth of elysium;" these are his own words. His intellect was not beaten hard, and rendered dead to all other impulses a common case with young men whom the genius of some writer overpowers. He did not, with a trembling, gloomy, irresistible curiosity, pry and pry into the world of mystery here opened up to him, as young Foster would have done. He accepted the truth he found; he saw the whole universe in God. But when he went with Edwards to the mouth of hell, he still heard the melodies of heaven. He saw that Infinite Power clasped the world, but he could feel that Infinite Wisdom guided the infinite might, and be content. His mind expanded and brightened. He might have been seen at early morn in the dewy fields, whither he went to wander alone, and to expatiate in the vast conception; to feel the world but a little station on which to stand and see himself overarched by the infinitude of God as by the illimitable azure above his head; to lift up his eyes and catch a glimpse of the golden chains by which the universe hung round the throne of God. Looking upon him in those hours, it seems scarce possible not to be reminded of that striking passage in modern poetry, in which the great poet of nature and meditation, whose conception of certain great influences which aid in molding lofty and thoughtful character was perhaps stronger