an able (though not in the vulgar sense "popular") preacher, was enhanced by the strong recommendations of Dr. Muir and other eminent divines; and on the 29th of August, 1843, he was appointed to the Church and parish of the Old Grey Friars, vacant by the secession of the Rev. John Sym. He left Campsie amid many expressions of his parishioners' affection and respect; one of these taking the substantial form of a cheque for £110, which the principal heritor in his parish, Mr. Kincaid Lennox, enclosed to him, at the request of the subscribers, on 16th November, "as a mark of their esteem and regard."

On 5th November, he preached his last sermon in Campsie, from the text, "Work out your own salvation." In the course of it he tells his people with a frank honesty, in pleasant contrast to the unreal talk about "providential calls,' so common on such occasions, that

*

one of his reasons for leaving them is that with his growing family he cannot afford to live among them as their minister should.

"A bishop, says S. Paul, must be given to hospitality, and though he may innocently dispense with this duty when he finds it impossible to perform it, there is surely no reason why he should continue in those circumstances when he may relieve himself from them. A minister who has not a shilling to give to a poor man is justified in withholding it; but it is not desirable he should be in those circumstances if he can help it."

Towards the end he says:

"My brethren, it will comfort my heart if you continue as heretofore a united people. If murmurings and disputings and

* "It's weel kent," said a shrewd parishioner to a friend of mine, "that the Lord never gies a ca' to a puirer steepend."

separations take place among you I shall be truly grieved and humbled-for then I shall fear that my labour among you has been in vain. I have laboured to impress on your minds the doctrine that schism is a sin most solemnly condemned in the New Testament; whereas the things on account of which the late painful separations have been made, are mere opinionserroneous opinions I think them-but even if correct, nothing but opinions, never expressly laid down, much less enjoined in the Word of God. And I do hope it has been your apprehending this, that your separating yourselves from your brethren would be a sin, a sin against Christ, because of His Body, and no mere feeling or custom which has kept you together in one body.

"Brethren, I thank you for all your kindness to me and mine. From many I have received much substantial kindness, and kind wishes from many more. The Lord reward it. And I ask forgiveness of those whom I may have offended in any way. I may have done so in many cases of which I am not aware. For my own part, I feel it very easy to pardon anything which any one has done amiss toward me. I rejoice to do it, and I do it from the heart. Let us bear each other on our hearts when we approach the Mercy Seat. So let us continue for ever united, for our separation will not be long. Soon we shall meet in the world of spirits to give account of the things done in the body, according to that we have done. Oh, let this deeply affect our hearts! Work out your own salvation."

In November he quitted his pleasant country manse on the green slope of the Campsie Hills, within sound of the burn dashing down Campsie Glen, and full of life and hope took his residence and work in Edinburgh.

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CHAPTER IV.

OLD GREYFRIARS.-CHURCH

COURTS.-ERASTUS.-CORRE

SPONDENCE. HERIOT'S HOSPITAL.

“Vulgus hominum existimat, se non frustra vixisse, si per fas nefas-que congestas divitias relinquant morientes. At Cato ideo non putat se frustra natum, quod integrum et sanctum civem præstiterit reipublicæ, quod incorruptum magistratum, quod posteritati quoque virtutis et industriæ suæ monumenta reliquerit.”—Erasmus: Convivium Religiosum.

THE Church of which Mr. Lee now became the minister was a plain and heavy edifice, built in 1612, within the enclosure fronting the Castle Rock, which had formed the gardens of the old Monastery of the Grey Friars. Under its roof, in February, 1638, THE COVENANT was produced by Alexander Henderson and Johnston of Warristoun, and after a prayer by Henderson and an exhortation by the Earl of Loudon, was solemnly signed by the assembled multitude of nobles, gentry, clergy, and burgesses. The crowd was too great for all to enter the church, and the document was afterwards carried out to a flat stone in the churchyard, and there signed until night fell, and men could no longer see to write their names. Again, in 1679, the churchyard of the Greyfriars was the scene of another act in the tragedy of the Scottish Church history of the seventeenth century. Through the summer and autumn of that year it was thronged with the prisoners taken at Bothwell Brig, whom no jail in Edinburgh could contain, and who were kept there

under the open sky until the paternal Government of Charles II., having executed some, and shipped others off to be sold as slaves at Barbadoes, released the broken remnant.

The Church had been served by several distinguished ministers-by Principal Robertson, Dr. Erskine, and Dr. Inglis, among others.* The parish embraced a very poor and squalid district in the region of the Cowgate. The congregation had been much crippled by the secession in May, 1843, and when Mr. Lee began his ministration in November, was weak in numbers and influence. The walls of the old church looked down on a very different scene from that which was to be witnessed in the restored church on any Sunday during the last nine years of his incumbency. The minister himself was, in some respects, a very different man then from the man he afterwards became. The liberal and rational element, which subsequently marked his character and ministry so strongly, was then only partially developed. The process had been going on, but it had not reached its height. He, as yet, had a cautious aversion to several principles and measures which he afterwards came to adopt and advocate. His preaching, while free and full in its declarations of the gospel, was more tinged with what is popularly called "Evangelicalism" than it afterwards was. He still was half inclined to look askance at advanced Liberalism. A lady, who valued his advice, remembers being reproved by him in those days for reading "so ungodly a paper as the Scotsman," though the Scotsman then was in

* Sir Walter Scott attended it in his youth and describes the service there in Dr. Erskine's time, in "Guy Mannering," chap. 37.

point of piety much what it was afterwards, when Dr. Lee was a frequent contributor. He was disposed to oppose secular education, as he had been in Campsie, where Mr. Robert Dalglish (now M.P. for Glasgow) had adopted that system, rather than leave the Roman Catholic children in his works without education altogether. He was not at first prepared in the Church courts to go as far as his friend Dr. Barclay, who in the earlier years of Mr. Lee's Edinburgh career was the most advanced Liberal, and consequently the "best abused" man in the metropolitan Presbytery. He was, however, moving on. His intellect was too keen, and his sympathies were too generous, to allow of his acting, for any length of time, along with the advocates of reactionary policies, or the supporters of inert and effete systems, and doctrines that through long misuse had lost their meaning and living force. Among his later readings before quitting Campsie, he had given much attention to Carlyle,-to "Sartor Resartus," "the French Revolution," and some of the "Essays and Tracts." This had its proper influence, which is traceable. No reasonable man can read Carlyle, and not grow into a deeper apprehension of the solemnity of duty, and of the necessity of testing all doctrines and systems by their moral worth, and into a stronger reverence for the rights of men, as men.

Mr. Lee brought to the extended arena in which he had now to work, and in which he must needs encounter a greater variety of intelligence than is usually presented to the influence of a country minister, a mind thoroughly well furnished with its own stores, naturally open and receptive, and candid in meeting the opinions of others. For the last few years he had been reading and