and the ablest, and the most useful of the great men whom Scotland has in any age produced. The grateful and religious Scottish people at home, as well as those thousands of the "dispersion," who are scattered over the face of the earth, will (so we imagine) for generations yet to come, regard it as a sacred duty to possess themselves of the Works entire of their own Chalmers. And, moreover, among these purchasers and readers of the Works, there will always be many who will draw from certain portions of them a large amount of their spiritual and theological aliment, and who will think themselves well and sufficiently disciplined, and kept safely orthodox and evangelical, so long as they are content to sit at the feet of this revered teacher.

THE high place which Thomas Chalmers | his immortal renown, as one of the best occupies in the religious history of Scotland, he holds securely; it is a position which he will not lose, unless a time shall come when John Knox and other worthies of the like stamp shall have ceased to be thought of in their native country with reverential gratitude. But the rank which his writings will ultimately hold in the body of English literature is a point yet to be determined; and at present it can be only conjecturally spoken of, and this on the ground of considerations of quite a different order from those which affect his place in the regards of his countrymen. Nevertheless, on this ground we do not hesitate to profess the belief that, as a religious writer and as a theologian, he will live. A distinction, however, must here be made: The "Works," entire, of Dr. Chalmers, will, no doubt, continue to be sought after, through a course of many years, and will often be reprinted in their mass for the use of Scotland, and of England too, buoyed up, as one might say, by

But when we come to think of English literature at large, and to think of it as influenced or favored by no special or national feelings, it is quite certain that the "WORKS" will undergo a severe sifting. Portions-large portions of the mass, we can not doubt, must subside, and, at no distant date, will cease to be often asked for, or popularly read. The works

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of the very best writers (if voluminous) | tion, as to its order, we have followed the have undergone the same discerptive pro- guidance of a conjecture as to what will cess. Nor has any human reputation be the relative longevity of the several hitherto been of such plenary force as Essays and Treatises-which conjecture, might suffice for immortalizing every para- in fact, may prove itself quite groundless, graph or treatise that a man has written and concerning which there may be room and printed. Assuredly Chalmers will now for differences of opinion. We are not stand his ground as an exception to disposed to take up the various materials this almost universal doom-a doom which before us, beginning with those treatises has consigned to oblivion a half, a three- which, bearing as they did upon those fourths, or a nine-tenths of the products movements of his times of which Chalof even the brightest minds; especially if mers was the soul, and which have long they have been, in their day, teeming and ago passed their season, are, as we imaindustrious minds, and if such writers gine, likely the soonest to be seldom read, have mixed themselves at large with the if not altogether forgotten. It will be no social and political movements of their disparagement to the permanent repute times. of this great man, if it be found that his enduring fame rests upon what he accomplished in those regions of thought which are the most remote from the fitfulness and the perturbations of secular, and local or national interests, and which abide substantially the same from age to age.

At this time—and if we are looking to the volumes now before us, it is not Chalmers as the great, the good, and the eminently useful man of his age and country whom we have to do with it is not Chalmers as related to those religious and ecclesiastical movements of which Scotland is now reaping the fruits; but it is It is no doubt true, that in those of his the same distinguished man, considered writings which we assume to possess the simply as a writer; and as one who comes least of an enduring quality and an intrinsic at this time to claim the place that may merit, there is much of what is instructive be due to him in the permanent religious-sound as it is in principle-and which literature of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, spread, and spreading over all the world. When thus thought of, the mass of his writings, as they are now put into our hands, ask for classification. Although these four-and-thirty volumes are characterized, in an unusual degree, by singleness of intention, by coherent thought, by unity of spirit, as well as by much uniformity of style and manner, they are, as to their form and their subjects, very diverse; nor could they well, as we think, be brought under a simpler distribution than the following. The volumes seem to range under five heads, as thus:

may therefore be made available in all times and places. And yet, as to these same principles, it is probable that the men of the next age may incline rather to take them up, practically wrought out as they were in Chalmers' own course of life, than as they are laboriously argued in his writings. The history of his beneficent achievements-the mere narrative of his useful life, not only has more force and carries more of available instruction, but it comes to us in a more condensed form. Chalmers' elaborate pleadings-his defences-his counter-statements-his endless clearings up-his many iterationsand his lavish figures, might indeed be eagerly listened to when his voice quickened the soul of an audience; but in the reading of the same (and it will be so more and more as time runs on) they tend to exhaust patience, rather than to instruct. It is eminently true of subjects of this class-to wit, the topics of social science, tical polity, that a severe condensation, as of municipal economics, and of ecclesiaswhich a lasting reputation must turn. In to the style, is the one excellence upon relation to those great social questions which never remain seven years together in quite the same position, Chalmers' pub

lic course will be appealed to in confirma- | force of the dialectic faculty, he seized tion of this or that rule or principle; and upon whatever was good and right in the perhaps his writings on this class of sub- main, and also sound in principle, among jects may continue to be sometimes cited; things actually existing and constituted, but they will not, as we think, like the and which may be made available for im"Wealth of Nations," and a very few mediate purposes: these he took up, and other books, continue to be read, as a upon these he worked with a prodigious matter of course, by every student in this energy, and with an industry-rare exceldepartment. In expressing an opinion lence-commensurate with that energy. such as this, little disparagement is im- Decisively conservative in temper, and plied; and, in fact, none but what Chal- reverential too in feeling, his aim was to mers' well-sustained reputation may easily bring up the things that are as near as afford. possible to their normal state of effectiveness: he labored to reinstate-to invigorate to quicken the languid pulse of the social body; to redress, to clear away from it encumbering accumulations. But there he stopped.

Wanting almost entirely, as we shall have occasion to show, the analytic faculty, wanting also the severe critical faculty, and wholly wanting that melancholic element which leads minds severely reflective to distrust obvious conclusions, and to scrutinize all things that are offered to their assent, Chalmers sent down his line into no abyss: he himself, as to the dim world of painful speculation, had never trodden a path, like that of Bunyan's Christian, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As a most kind-hearted man, his sympathies were awake toward all kinds of trouble, whether of mind, body, or estate; but specially and intellectually he had no sympathy with minds deeper rooted than his own, or more discriminative, or more exact, or more analytic, or more scrupulously honest toward their own misgivings. Such minds, in approaching his, would quickly discover that from him they would not receive the aid they needed.

Chalmers, if it were required of us to characterize him in a word, was the mangreat in action: he was the man to give a needed and an irresistible impulse to whatever he applied his Herculean shoulder. The world-or that world wherewith he concerned himself, he would not, and could not, and he did not, leave just what and where it was when first he looked about upon it; for that first glance moved his soul to its depths; moved it, not with scorn-not with malign antagonism-not with a wild, unknowing enthusiasm-not with despondency; but with a hopeful and a reasoning confidence-a calculated trust in the efficacy of those forces, those energies of renovation which, if well employed, and manfully worked, will not fail to bring about a better state of things, more or less complete. Chalmers was the man to give a healthful impulse to all things around him; but he was not the man to give them altogether a new direction. He was just so far the philosopher as an accomplished man must be who concerns himself at all with the things of philosophy; but he was not (as we presume to think) a philosopher in any higher sense; or in any sense that should give him a place of his own among those who And thus it is as to his philosophic have wrought out a scheme of thought writings. Admirably adapted as they were for themselves, and for their times. The to effect their immediate purpose-a purThought of this present age has not pivot- pose conservative and confirmatory, as reed itself upon Chalmers' mind. He was lated to the diffuse intellectuality of the the philanthropist, eminently so; and his times when they appeared, and well adaptunderstanding was of that robust ordered too, as they may still be, to meet the which utterly forbade his giving himself up to any of those vaporing modes of enthusiasm which so often bring all philanthropy into contempt. By an instinct quicker and surer than the guidance of reason-although reason never failed to come up to his aid, he rejected whatever was visionary and impracticable, or not at the moment practical; and by the same instinct, duly sustained as it was by the

same order of intellectuality at this time, or in any time future, they wholly fail to satisfy the conditions of philosophic discussion, such as it has of late years become. It may seem unfair to require of a manof a teacher, that he should forecast the progress of opinion for half a century in advance of his own times; but this at least may be said, that while a writer who touches the boundaries of thought in all

-and England too, in a different senseyet waits the advent of one equal to her own Chalmers in grandeur of soul, and in moral energy, who shall take up the work of her renovation at the point where he left it unattempted, and shall give her at length a Christianity far larger than any Confession, and burdened with no burdens that are of man's devising.

directions is likely to anticipate the recur- | kind which he would not easily have overrent theories of times future, he who stops come; for it took its rise in the very confar short of those limits is likely to be stitution of his mind. This, as we have numbered with the antiquated at the very said, contained too little of that discrimnext coming on of a crisis in speculative inative severity, or of that penetrative exphilosophy. If, in these last times, reli- actitude which is required in parting off gious relief has had to contend with more the great and deep things of Christianity than enough of flippant sophistry, it has from the offensive asperities and the crudialso come to stand its ground in opposi- ties that had their origin in a rude, revotion to deeply-wrought speculative sys-lutionary, and fanatical period. Scotland tems, against which writings like those of Chalmers, whatever ability they may display, afford little or no defence. And besides, in the tone and style of these apologetic writings, as toward gainsayers, these Essays are less applicable than perhaps they might have been to the purposes for which they were intended. That firm conservative temper, and that reverential feeling, which we have just now spoken of, and which made Chalmers the thoroughgoing and uncompromising champion of the Creed of his Church, impelled him also to look out upon the host marshalled on the other side with a lofty and undiscriminating disapproval; these opposers-one and all-were, in his view, the enemy;" howbeit more than a few of that antagonist host would gladly have accepted CHRISTIAN TRUTH, if only it had been presented to them in its purity, as severed from the national Creed. Yet to render even this service-a service on the side of Christianity so needful, and yet so rarely attempted, namely, to present the TRUTH apart from the Creed-Chalmers, although large-hearted enough, and bold enough, and broad enough in his habits of thinking, lacked some qualifications. Nevertheless he might have addressed himself to the task, if only he had come to see the urgent necessity there is for doing it, and especially if he had perceived how urgent this necessity is, as related to the Christianity of Scotland, where the close adhesion of the Creed to the Truth-the entombing of the Truth within the Creed-task before him. He seized those prinhas in modern times forced so many of her choicest minds into a position of antagonism, whether open or latent, to the latter. An obstacle in Chalmers' way, which perhaps he would not have surmounted, even if he had clearly seen his call to enter upon that ground, was what we have named as his strong inbred feeling-might we say, his Churchman's feeling of alarm lest a pin of the Tabernacle should be loosened by presumptuous hands. Moreover, there was a difficulty in relation to a task of this

Diverse as are the subjects embraced in the compass of Chalmers' works, the mode of reasoning throughout them, and the style, are much the same everywhere. This mode and this style are clearly indicative of the history of his mind, as well as of the several positions he occupied toward the Church and the world. When first his powerful intellect woke up to a consciousness of what is termed "evangelic doctrine," he looked around him and found, on almost all sides, that this doctrine, although it still held its place as the authentic belief of the Church and the nation, had lost its hold, very generally, of the heart and soul both of the ministers of religion and of their hearers. The conviction that this was the actual state of things around him, wrought mightily in his mind and spirit, and it roused him to undertake the work in which his success was signal-that of calling back ministers and people to the realities of their own admitted faith. In prosecution of this great work, which was essentially unlike that of the Reformers, his style formed itself upon the leading conditions of the

ciples and doctrines which were not in dispute between himself and his hearers, and he strenuously insisted that these doctrines should be reädmitted to their due place of influence over the heart, the conscience, and the conduct of men. Hence comes much of that iteration which is so prominently the characteristic of Chalmers' style, and of that patience-trying practice of turning an argument over and over a dozen times. The Preacher, the Professor, the Writer, has his eye fixed