122 APPOINTMENT THERE TO PREACH. God, and hoping and praying for the copious gift of his Spirit. I was about to propose to you, however, a partnership with me in the services. If you will come there, then I will use you, you know; and all the introductory parts, before the sermon, you will perform. It will be quite a help to me, and so I shall be reconciled to your coming there, as the strength of an old man is not what it used to be. Non sum qualis eram is an ancient saying, which old men gradually learn to adopt. 1. Yes, my dear doctor, it is my purpose, certainly, to be with you; and not mine only. My daughter, and quite a company of us Americans, will be there; and among them your venerable friend, the Rev. Dr. Beecher and his lady. Nor shall we be offended, or at all regretful, to meet you in a place so humble. We consider it a greater honor to Chalmers, the minister of ONE, on earth a poor man, born in a manger and murdered on a cross, thus to officiate to the poor and the destitute, than it ever could be to dress or to be decorated to the excited senses, in all the gorgeous canonicals of sacerdotal pomp; as appears the rival of God, THE MAN OF SIN, in the ecumenical Cathedral of St. Peter's. Pardon an illustration so extravagant! I simply mean that the humility and the rarity of such a scene will only the more commend it to our approbation, the more endear its chief actor to our affections. As for my services, if I can at all meet your wishes, and assist your labors, it will give me real pleasure. You may command me. 2. It is a place, as you have heard, of horrible associations; so near to the very locality of the Burking operations, that of late thrilled all the world with their kidnapping and their summary murders. What a peril it was to many of our citizens, who narrowly escaped the snare! 1. Yes; and I hear that you are there actualizing your grand ideal truth of the disinfecting virtues of the gospel, in its proper contact with depraved individuals and degraded society. If you can there emit the influence of salvation, and THE NEGLECTED POOR IN CITIES. 123 truly Christianize the masses, the argument will be good; philosophy should ponder it, as the fact of its premises must be acknowledged, and what succeeds there may also succeed any where, in all the earth. Still, certain am I that the only catholicon in the world, that is, for the whole world, and in which there is no quackery, no illusion, and no failure, is the glorious gospel of the blessed God. Since, if men do not sincerely try it and take it, then the patient fails, not the medicament. If men will not obey the gospel, or believe it, they will BE DAMNED; since it never promises salvation, but only its terrible opposite, to the rejecter of its mercy and the disbeliever of its divinity. May the giver of the increase prosper your benignant and most praiseworthy efforts! 2. Oh! my dear sir, my soul sometimes shudders to see the awfully neglected condition of the poorer classes even in this great metropolis-and so it is, only worse, in London and the cities of the continent. It shall be for a lamentation! 1. Alas! indeed. How many millions in Christendom utterly neglect Christianity, and perish in their sins-while each, too, may say, accusing the neglects of Christians, No man cares for my soul. I cordially sympathize with your griefs, and correspond with your shudders, in this most solemn and affecting relation. There is a fault SOMEWHERE-their blood cries to God for their punishment, who directly or indirectly refuse them the appointed means of grace-whoever they are! 2. It seems a problem that the Church or the ministry has yet to work out-How are they to be reached? how brought under the influence of salvation? how subjected to Christ in the gospel? It is certainly a fearful problem, that! 1. Well, my dear sir, this conversation will, I trust, have the effect to prepare me to hear your faithful ministration, only with a higher and a better appreciation, if the Lord will that we live, and that we meet, as we now anticipate. 'Thus did this man of God think, and feel, and act for the 124 TENDER FEELINGS OF CHALMERS. poor. And if that theory is sound and correct which construes a moral action, not by what it accomplishes, but by what it cordially intends, or by that toward which its tendency aims and moves, then, virtually, the pious philanthropy of such a soul, desiring intensely the conversion of all men, as the only way of the salvation of all men, since he would do it if he could, may be construed in heaven as virtually converting, and virtually saving all men! And yet who truly loves Christ, through the faith of his word, and thinks wisely on such a subject, without virtually doing the same? In these relations, so private, so unknown, at least to the great public, I seem to myself as offending, I trust, against no right and no law, while picturing this great and good man, as he was, in his personal character and his unbent and truthful manifestations. The pleasure they minister to my own reconsideration and recollection of them, is only augmented and enhanced in communicating something of their history to others—as here, to dispense from such a fountain, is not to exhaust, or reduce, or impair it. I never knew a man, probably, so greatly celebrated, or distinguished in a way so highly eminent, who seemed to have and to hold so rich, and so simple, and so child-like a humility. At times, his incidental expressions of it, with nothing factitious, or artistic, or gotup-for-effect in them, were very sweet and beautiful. They were rare and ripe specimens in Christian cardiology. He was the disciple, acting in the felt presence of his Master. He is now with Him. Here we may make a circular deviation, for future use and terminal illustration. I give facts and anecdotes, which I never witnessed, with a sense of vagueness and indefiniteness; still, in the present instance, with some rational and good confidence in the substantial truth of the story. If the reader will digest and remember it, my ulterior reason may at length approve itself to his judgment. CARDINAL POINTS OF ORTHODOXY. 125 Orthodoxy, not only in Scotland, but here also in America, yet here, I opine, with many more excellent exceptions, is often found at fault, in preaching its own doctrines, mainly by making, in an important and practical point, a seeming or a real, as well as a practical, contradiction. It requires one skillful in the word of righteousness to preach orthodoxy, and yet avoid it. Now, I am not disparaging orthodoxy; by which I mean the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, of God. But theology, like any other great science—though it be infinitely and eternally the greatest of the sciences, as it includes all others, requires learning, thorough and well-taught wisdom, to master and elucidate to the people, harmoniously and profitably, all its loca difficiliora, or parts and places of difficulty. One of these, and a great one, is, always to reconcile the real dependence of the sinner and the saint on grace divine, AS THE BIBLE DOES; with his obligation to do the commands of God and his agency in obeying the gospel. The excellent manner in which apostles did this is no mean proof of the inspiration that produced it. They left contradictions and learned nonsense to the schoolmen; those copious and specious dealers in hoc genus omne, whose logic can prove any thing, whose rhetoric can grace stultiloquence with beautiful plausibility, and whose audacity can affirm, quite credibly, whatever error may suit the occasion. Now we admit that many examples of sincere stupidity, and many of illustrious stultiloquy, and many of blundering injury, may be quoted here against us; and that they do hurt hazardous to the souls of men! They seem almost to warrant the caricature, in which they are sometimes decorated, vulgarly and profanely, to the gaze and the contempt of millions. Take a specimen; which, in a justly definable variation or qualification of the sense of the words used, is just the eternal truth of God, all of it! You can and you can't, You will and you wont; 126 MORRISONISM WHAT. You shall and you shan't, You'll be damn'd if you don't. As I have it, the Church of Scotland licensed and ordained a young man of the name of MORRISON, whose gifts and ventures in the ministry were making some unique and censured demonstrations, about the time of my last visit there, or just previous to it. He saw there was a difficulty, from his premises, in making to the sinner the real offer of the gospel. He felt it with intense distress. He could neither solve nor bear it; so, Alexander-like, he cut the knot. He cut himself too—like some in our country, who, however, have no wholesome and effective Presbyterian discipline or constitutional polity to set things right when they get wrong; even on such great articles as the revealed mode of the Godhead; the supreme deity of Christ; the real vicarious and expiatory nature of his atonement; the divine method of justification; the principles, and uses, and ends of language, as the medium of revelation from God to us, or from one man to another. Morrison, it seems, vacated and denied the office-work of the Spirit; as if the order, Repent and believe the gospel, were irreconcilable with it; as if the invitation, Come to me, were embarrassed only, not facilitated by it. The result was his deposition from office, and the denunciation of his doctrine. Another result-every body in the pulpit was just a little, or not a little, too particular, at once to preach down MORRISONIANISM, and to show every body, and his wife and children, how specially clear were they of all taint of it. Morrisonians, indeed!-they, so wise and sound, they were no such thing at all! The people, too, sympathized in the antagony; and even Chalmers seemed willing to care too much about defining his position of antipathy. This phobia was quite pervading; sometimes rather ridiculous. Why not let the people hear what the Spirit saith to the churches, without breaking order, and symmetry, and influence, at every turn and sentence, by pragmatical intervention, in an attempt |