Among the greatest privileges and honours of his life, the writer will ever regard his having been for one session a student under Dr. Chalmers at Edinburgh; for three years a co-presbyter and cordial fellow-worker on his lines, in forming and building up a territorial congregation; and for many years the occupant of one of two chairs of theology which were constituted at the Disruption in New College, in place of the single chair which Dr. Chalmers had held, and thus in a sense, but most unworthily, one of his successors. EDINBURGH, _December_ 1896. CONTENTS CHAPTER I BIRTH, SCHOOL, AND COLLEGE, 1780-1803 CHAPTER II KILMANY, 1803-1815 CHAPTER III GLASGOW, 1815-1823 CHAPTER IV ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY, 1823-1828 CHAPTER V EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, 1828-1843 CHAPTER VI NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH, 1843-1847 THOMAS CHALMERS CHAPTER I BIRTH, SCHOOL, AND COLLEGE 1780-1803 Thomas Chalmers was born at Anstruther, Fifeshire, on the 17th March 1780, when the flowers were appearing on the earth, and the time of the singing of birds was come. It seems never to have been noticed that this was St. Patrick’s day, and no one has ever instituted a comparison between the lives of the two illustrious Scotsmen. But if only we had authentic materials for the life of Patrick, whose Scottish birth seems well established, it would probably be found that there was no slight similarity. Transferring his labours to Ireland, Patrick, with the Gospel of Jesus Christ as his instrument, laboured for the double object of bringing individuals within the Kingdom of God, and elevating and purifying the condition of the country. The same double aim was ever present to the mind of Chalmers. On the basis of the Gospel, he could not separate the social from the personal, the general from the particular, the temporal from the spiritual. He had always an Arcadia, a Utopia, a new spring-tide for his country in his vista; but a spring-tide to be realised in one way only—by the coming of the Spirit from on high.