Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/162

110 works instead of the covenant of grace. That the heavenly and divine might be everything, the human was reduced to nothing; and to exalt the all-in-all sufficiency of redemption, man was to sit still, not only under its present coming, but also its future influences. And to impress upon their hearers more fully the necessity of this redemption, an odious picture was generally drawn of human nature, in which all that is helpless, and worthless, and villanous, was heaped together indiscriminately, and made to constitute a picture of man in his original condition. In this way, either party diverged from the other, the one towards Socinianism, and the other to Antinomianism, so that it was sometimes hard to tell which of these aberrations was the worst; while of their flocks it might too often be said—

"The hungry sheep look'd up, and were not fed."

It would be insulting to ask which of these two parties Chalmers followed as a public spiritual teacher. His was a mind not likely to be allured either by the shrivelled philosophy of the one, or the caricatured Calvinism of the other. He rejected both, and adopted for himself a course which was based upon the fulness of revelation itself, instead of the exclusive one-sided nook of a body of mere religionists; a course which reconciled and harmonized the anomalies of every-day reality with the unerring declarations of Scripture. Thus, he could not see that every man at his birth was inevitably a liar, a murderer, and a villain. Instead of this, there was such a thing as innate virtue; and men might be patriots, philanthropists, and martyrs, even without being Christians. And here he drew such pictures of the natural man in his free unconstrained nobleness—such delineations of disinterestedness, humanity, integrity, and self-denial welling forth from hearts that were still unrenewed, as Plato might have heard with enthusiasm, and translated into his own richest Attic eloquence. And was not all this true? Was it not daily exhibited, not only in our empire at large, but even in the mercantile communities of that city in which his lot had now been cast? But while the self-complacent legalist was thus carried onward delighted, and regaled with such descriptions of the innate nobleness of human character as his own teachers had never furnished, he was suddenly brought to an awful pause by the same resistless eloquence. The preacher proceeded to show that still these words were an incontestable immutable verity, "There is none righteous, no not one." For in spite of all this excellence, the unrenewed heart was still at enmity with God, and in all its doings did nothing at his command or for his sake. And therefore, however valuable this excellence might be for time and the world, it was still worthless for eternity. It was of the earth, earthy, and would pass away with the earth. It sought a requital short of heaven, and even already had obtained its reward.

An event soon occurred after the arrival of Mr., now Dr., Chalmers in Glasgow, by which his reputation as a preacher was no longer to be confined to Scotland, but diffused over the world, wherever the English language is known. We allude to his well known "Astronomical Discourses," which, of all his writings, will perhaps be the most cherished by posterity. It was the custom of the city clergymen to preach every Thursday in rotation in the Tron church; and as there were only eight ministers, the turn of each arrived after an interval of two months. Dr. Chalmers took his share in this duty, for the first time, on the 15th November, 1815, and commenced with the first lecture of the astronomical series, which he followed up during his turn in these week-day services, for the year 1816. To those who have only read these discourses, it would be enough