Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/172

120 by the fact, that even for these humble prelections and examinations, his questions were written out, and his explanations prepared, as if he had been to confront the General Assembly, or the British Senate. In the hands of a talented artist would not such a subject furnish a true Christian counterpart to that of Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage? At the third session this duty was exchanged for one equally congenial, and still more important, arising from the request of some of the parents of his college pupils, that he would take charge of the religious education of their sons, by receiving them into his house on the evenings of the Sabbath. With a desire so closely connected with his professional office through the week he gladly complied, after having intrusted his Sabbath-school children to careful teachers, who laboured under his direction. These student meetings, at first, were assembled around his fireside, in the character of a little family circle, and as such he wished it to continue; but so greatly was the privilege valued, and so numerous were the applications for admission, that the circle gradually expanded into a class, which his ample drawing-room could scarcely contain. These examples were not long in producing their proper fruits. The students of St. Andrews, animated by such a pattern, bestirred themselves in the division of the town into districts, and the formation of Sabbath-schools; and in the course of their explorations for the purpose, they discovered, even in that ancient seat of learning and city of colleges, an amount of ignorance and religious indifference such as they had never suspected to be lying around them till now. Another and an equally natural direction into which the impulse was turned, was that of missionary exertion; and on Dr. Chalmers having accepted the office of president of a missionary society, the students caught new ardour from the addresses which he delivered, and the reports he read to them at the meetings. The consequence was, that a missionary society was formed for the students themselves, in which a third of those belonging to the united colleges were speedily enrolled. It was a wonderful change in St. Andrews, so long the very Lethe of religious indifference and unconcern, and among its pupils, so famed among the other colleges of Scotland for riot, recklessness, and dissipation. And the result showed that this was no fever-fit of passing emotion, but a permanent and substantial reality. For many of those students who most distinguished themselves by their zeal for missions, were also distinguished as diligent talented scholars, and attained the highest honours of the university. Not a few of them now occupy our pulpits, and are among the most noted in the church for zeal, eloquence, and ministerial diligence and fidelity. And more than all, several of them were already in training for that high missionary office whose claims they so earnestly advocated, and are now to be found labouring in the good work in the four quarters of the world. Speaking of Dr. Chalmers at this period, one of the most accomplished of his pupils, and now the most distinguished of our missionaries, thus writes:—"Perhaps the most noticeable peculiarity connected with the whole of this transformative process, was the indirect, rather than the direct, mode in which the effectuating influence was exerted. It did not result so much from any direct and formal exhortation on the part of Dr. Chalmers, as from the general awakening and suggestive power of his lectures, the naked force of his own personal piety, and the spreading contagiousness of his own personal example. He carried about with him a better than talismanic virtue, by which all who came in contact with him were almost unconsciously influenced, moulded, and impelled to imitate. He did not formally assemble his students, and in so many