Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/176

124 amount it would prevail. At the next Assembly a full trial was to be made that should be conclusive upon the point at issue. Dr. Chalmers on this occasion was not a member, but his motion of the preceding year was again brought before the Assembly by Lord Moncrieff, in the form of an "Overture and Interim Act on Calls," and expressed as follows:—"The General Assembly declare, that it is a fundamental law of the Church, that no pastor shall be intruded into any congregation contrary to the will of the people; and, in order that the principle may be carried into full effect, the General Assembly, with the consent of a majority of the Presbyteries of this church, do declare, enact, and ordain, that it shall be an instruction to Presbyteries that if, at the moderating in a call to a vacant pastoral charge, the major part of the male heads of families, members of the vacant congregation, and in full communion with the church, shall disapprove of the person in whose favour the call is proposed to be moderated in, such disapproval shall be deemed sufficient ground for the Presbytery rejecting such person, and that he shall be rejected accordingly, and due notice thereof forthwith given to all concerned; but that if the major part of the said heads of families shall not disapprove of such person to be their pastor, the Presbytery shall proceed with the settlement according to the rules of the church: And farther declare, that no person shall be held to be entitled to disapprove as aforesaid, who shall refuse, if required, solemnly to declare, in presence of the Presbytery, that he is actuated by no factious or malicious motive, but solely by a conscientious regard to the spiritual interests of himself or the congregation." Such was the well-known measure called the Veto, which, being carried by a majority of forty-six, became part of the law of the Church of Scotland. Considering the previous domination of patronage, it was regarded with much complacency, as a valuable boon to public feeling, and a great step in advance towards a thorough reformation in the church. But, unfortunately, it was only a compromise with an evil that should have been utterly removed; a mere religious half-measure, that in the end was certain to dwindle into a nullity; and Dr. Chalmers lived long enough to confess its insufficiency and witness its downfall.

In the case of those honoured individuals who have "greatness thrust upon them," the imposition generally finds them at a season not only when they are least expectant of such distinctions, but apparently the furthest removed from all chance of obtaining them. Such all along had been the case with Chalmers. Fame had found him in the obscure parish of Kilmany, and there proclaimed him one of the foremost of pulpit orators. It had followed him into the murky wynds and narrow closes of the Trongate and Saltmarket of Glasgow; and there, while he was employed in devising means for the amelioration of poverty through parochial agency, it had lauded him in the senate and among statesmen as an able financier and political economist. Instead of seeking, he had been sought, by that high reputation which seems to have pursued him only the more intently by how much he endeavoured to escape it. And now, after he had been so earnestly employed in endeavouring to restore the old Scottish ecclesiastical regime and Puritan spirit of the seventeenth century—so loathed by the learned, the fashionable, and the free-thinking of the nineteenth—new honours, and these from the most unlikely sources, were showered upon him in full profusion. In 1834, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in the year following a vice-president. In the beginning of 1834, he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Institute of France; and