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crowded and concentrated mass of hu man beings, is looked upon by many a philanthropist as one of those help less and irreclaimable distempers of the body politic, for which there is no remedy-he maintains, that there are certain practicable arrangements which, under the blessing of God, will stay this growing calamity, and would, by the perseverance of a few years, land us in a purer and better generation.

I. The first essential step towards the assimilation of the power and influence of religion, and the character of its ministers, over the population of large towns, to that exercised in country parishes, is a numerous and wellappointed agency. By dividing his parish into small manageable districts and assigning one or more of his friends in some capacity or other to each of them-and vesting them with such a right either of superintendance or of inquiry, as will always be found to be gratefully met by the population-and so raising as it were a ready intermedium of communication between himself and the inhabitants of his parish, a clergyman may at length attain an assimilation in point of result to a country parish, though not in the means by which he arrived at it. He can in his own person maintain at least a pretty close and habitual intercourse with the more remarkable cases; and as for the moral charm of cordial and Christian acquaintanceship, he can spread it abroad by deputation over that portion of the city which has been assigned to him. In this way an influence long unfelt in towns, may be speedily restored to them, and they know nothing of this department of our nature, who are blind to the truth of the position that out of the simple elements of attention, and advice, and civility, and good-will, conveyed through the tenements of the poor, by men a little more elevated in rank than themselves, a far more purifying and even more gracious operation can be made to descend upon them, than ever will be achieved by any other of the ministra tions of charity.

Such arrangements as these are peculiarly fitted to repair the disadvantages under which a city, purely commercial, necessarily labours. In all such cities there is a mighty and unfilled space interposed between the high and the low, in consequence of

which they are mutually blind to the real cordialities and attractions which belong to each other, and a resentful feeling is apt to be fostered, either of disdain or defiance. To de stroy all such unhappy feelings of animosity or repugnance, no better plan can be devised, than to multiply the agents of Christianity, whose delight it may be to go forth among the people, on no other errand than of pure good will, and with no other ministrations than those of respect and tenderness.

Nothing, we think, can be more beautiful than the paragraph in which Dr Chalmers winds up this part of his argument.

"There is one lesson that we need. not

teach, for experience has already taught it, and that is, the kindly influence which the mere presence of a human being has upon his fellows. Let the attention you bestow upon another be the genuine emanation of good will-and there is only one thing more to make it irresistible. The readiest way of finding access to a man's heart, is to go to his house and there to perform the deed of kindness, or to acquit yourself of the wonted and the looked-for acknowledg ment. By putting yourself under the roof of a poor neighbour, you in a manner put yourself under his protection-you render him for the time your superior-you throw your reception on his generosity, and be assured that it is a confidence which will al most never fail you. If Christianity be the errand on which you move, it will open for you the door of every family; and even the profane and the profligate will come to recognise the worth of that principle which prompts the unwearied assiduity of your services. By every circuit which you make amongst them, you will attain a higher vantage-ground of moral and spiritual influence and in spite of all that has been said of the ferocity of a city population, be assured that, in your rounds of visitation, you will meet with none of it, even among the lowest receptacles of human worthlessness. This is the home-walk in which you earn, if not a proud, at least a peaceful popularity-the popularity of the heart-the greetings of men who, touched even by your cheapest and easiest services of kindness, have nothing to give but their wishes of kindness back again; but in giving these have crowned your pious attentions with the only popularity that is worth the aspiring after the popularity that is won in the bosom of families, and at the side of deathbeds."

II. A second most essential step towards the assimilation of a city and a country parish, is one simple and unembarrassed relationship between the heritors and the kirk-session. Into

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the details of this part of the pamphlet it is needless now to enter. Suf fice it to say, that Dr Chalmers contends for this equitable privilege of a city clergyman, that he shall enjoy the same advantages with the very humblest minister of the establishment in his own retired country parish. If this, says he, be to strike out from the local system of any one city, it is also to fall in with the general and original system of Scotland. If it be to impart a form from the provinces, it is with the view of perfecting and strengthening that vehicle by which it is a possible thing to impart the cordiality, and the moral discipline, and the comparative virtue of the provinces along with it.

III. The third essential step towards the assimilation of a town with a country parish, is an entire exemption of the minister from all the secularities which of late years have been oppressively heaped upon his office, and which are still augmenting upon it, at a rate of rapid and alarming accumulation. Dr Chalmers exposes the mischief of such secularities by a harrative of the way in which the sanctity of the clerical profession has been disturbed and violated. This we give entire.

"Among the people of our busy land, who are ever on the wing of activity, and, whether in circumstances of peace or of war, are at all times feeling the impulse of some national movement or other, it is not to be wondered at, that a series of transactions should be constantly flowing between the metropolis of the empire, and its distant provinces. There are the remittances which pass through our public offices, from soldiers and sailors, to their relatives at home; there are letters of inquiry sent back again from these relatives ;-there is all the correspondence, and all the business of drafts, and other negotiations, which ensue upon the decease of a soldier, or a sailor ;-there is the whole tribe of hospital allowances, the payment of pensions, and a variety of other items, which, all taken together, would make out a very strange and tedious enumeration.

"The individuals with whom these transactions are carried on, need to be verified. They live in some parish or other; and who can be fitter for the required purpose, than the parish minister? He is, or he ought to be, acquainted with every one of his parishioners; and this acquaintance, which he never can obtain in towns, but by years of ministerial exertion amongst them, is turned to an object destructive of the very principle on which he was selected for such a service.

It saddles him with a task which breaks in upon his ministerial exertions; which widens his distance from his people; and, in the end, makes him as unfit for certifying a single clause of information about them, as the most private individual in his neighbourhood.

"Yet so it is. The minister is the organ of many a communication between his people and the offices in London,-and many a weary signature is exacted from him,-and a world of management is devolved upon his shoulders, and, instead of sitting like his fathers in office, surrounded by the the

ology of present and other days, he must now turn his study into a counting-room, and have his well-arranged cabinet before him, fitted up with its sections and its other conveniencies, for notices, and duplicates, and all the scraps and memoranda of a manifold correspondence.

"But the history does not stop here. The example of government has descended, whole field of private and individual agency. and is now quickly running through the The regulation of the business of prizemonies, is one out of several examples that occur to me. The emigration of new settlers to Canada was another. The business of the Kinloch bequest is a third. It does not appear, that there is any act of government authorising the agents in this matter to fix on the clergy, as the organs either for the transaction of their business, or the conveyance of their information to the people of the land. But they find it convenient to follow the example of government, and have accordingly done so; and, in this way, a mighty host of schedules, and circulars, and printed forms, with long blank spaces, which the minister will have the goodness to fill up, according to the best of his knowledge, come into mustering competition with the whole of his other claims, and his other engagements. It is true, that the minister may, in this case, decline to have the goodness; but then, the people are apprised of the arrangement, and, trained as they have been, too well, to look up to the minister as an organ of civil accommodation, will they lay siege to his dwelling-place, and pour upon him with their inquiries; and the cruel alternative is laid upon him either to obstruct the convenience of his parishioners, and bid them from his presence, or to take the whole weight of a management that has been so indiscreetly and so wantonly assigned to him. In this painful struggle between the kindness of his nature, and the primitive and essential duties of his office, he may happen to fix on the worse, and not on that even, the better part. It is not reason, for such a service, I should leave the ministry of the word and prayer. But, in an unlucky moment, I did so, along, I believe, with a vast majority of my brethren; and out of the multitude of other doings, from this source of employment alone, which are now past, and have sunk into oblivion, the

single achievement of seventy signatures in one day, is all that my dizzy recollection has been able to keep and to perpetuate.

If, for the expediting of business, we

work of a Christian teacher is enough, by itself, to engross and take possession of the entire powers of any sin

hourly called upon to attend to matters, not only separate and distinct from, but absolutely irreconcileable with the discharge of his loftier duties, he must by degrees become indifferent to, and incapable of his own sacred functions, a sorry man of business, and a lukewarm and inefficient servant of God. There is something dignified and noble in the following

are made free with, even by private indi-gle man; and that if he be daily and viduals, it is not to be wondered at, if charitable bodies should, at all times, look for our subserviency to their schemes and their operations of benevolence. When a patriotic fund, or a Waterloo subscription, blazons in all the splendour of a nation's munificence, and a nation's gratitude, before the public eye,-who shall have the hardihood to refuse a single item of the bidden cooperation that is expected from him? Surely such a demand as this is quite irresistible; and, accordingly, from this quarter too, a heavy load of consultations and certificates, with the additional singularity of having to do with the drawing of money, and the keeping of it in safe custody, and the dealing of it out in small discretionary parcels according to the needs and circumstances of the parties;-all, all is placed upon the shoulders of the already jaded and overborne

minister.

That all this is radically wrong and pernicious, no person can deny-and Dr Chalmers merely recommends the substitution of lay for clerical agency. He says rightly and beautifully.

The laymen require no more than a correct view of the importance of the substitution which we now demand from them, and, when that is given, they will come forth, in hundreds, from their hiding places. The ranks of philanthropy will soon fill, and this fine city be put into a glow with generous wishes, and high and liberal devisings for the good of her population. Instead of ministers being brought down to the habit of merchants, merchants will be brought up to tone and habit of ministers. And if, through the ascending scale of charity, some of them should rise so high as to do what was done by the Elders of other days-if, unashamed of the gospel of Christ, they should stand intrepidly forth as the guides and comforters of the people-if, not unwilling, and not afraid to vary the labours of the counting-house, with the labours of an affectionate urgency amongst the chambers of the sick, and the afflicted, and the dying, they shall bring back the habit of the olden time, amongst our families-another generation will not pass away, till they have brought back all the piety, and all the kindness of the olden time along with it.

In the latter part of this eloquent composition, Dr Chalmers points out the evil consequences that must result

from the accumulation of secular duties on the clergymen of large cities, upon their character as ministers of religion, and also upon the theological literature of Scotland. He lays down that undeniable principle, that the

observations:

"I need say no more about the direct blow which the prevailing system of our towns must, at length, in this way, give to the cause of practical Christianity, in our congregations and parishes. I proceed to another effect, still more palpable, if not It will more prejudicial, than the former. keep back and degrade the theological literature of Scotland.

"There is nothing in the contrast which I am now to offer, between the theology of our age and that of another, which is not highly honourable to the present race of clergymen. The truth is, that they have kept their ground so well against the whole of this blasting and degenerating operation, as to render it necessary, for the purpose of giving full effect to my argument, that I should look forward, in perspective, to the next age, and compute the inevitable difference which must obtain between its literature and that of the last generation.

"On looking back to the distance of half a century, we behold the picture of a church adorned by the literature of her clergy. It is of no consequence to the argument, that the whole of this literature was not professional. Part of it was so; and every part of it proved, at least, the fact, that there was time, and tranquillity, and full protection from all that was uncongenial for the labours of the understanding, I cannot but look back with regret, bordering upon envy, to that period in the history of our church, when her ministers companied with the sages of philosophy, and bore away an equal share of the public veneration-when the petulancies of Hume, as he sported his unguarded hour, among the circles of the enlightened, were met by the pastors of humble Presbyterianism, who, equal in reach and in accomplishment to himself, could repel the force of all his sophistries, and rebuke him into silence when this most subtle and profound of infidels aimed his decisive thrust at the Christian testimony,

and a minister of our church, and he, too, the minister of a town, dared all the hazards of the intellectual warfare, and bore the palm of superiority away from him-In a word, I look back, as I do upon a scene of departed glory, to that period, when the clergy of our cities could ply the

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