Very beautiful, too, was his spirit to his mother. Now that he lived at St. Andrews, he could see her often. In 1826 her last remaining daughter was married, and she was left alone. Deaf and lame, she was cut off, to a large extent, from intercourse with others. Yet her son could write: ’What a season of delight and of ripening for heaven has my mother’s old age turned out to her, who, in the absence of all foreign resources, enjoys a perpetual feast in the happy repose of her spirit on that Saviour whom she trusts—that God whom she feels to be reconciled to her!’ The dear old woman wrote of herself to her eldest son, James, in her seventy-seventh year: ’Since I last wrote to you I have had several severe complaints. I am very frail and very infirm; but what a blessing it is that my memory and the faculties of my mind are as active as if I were twenty! I bless God that it is so. I feel a pleasant contentment and peace of mind that the world cannot give nor take away. I amuse myself with working and reading. God is very good to me, who gives me a contented and happy frame of mind; and I trust my God will never leave nor forsake me, that when death comes, He will also be with me, and give me good hopes through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ It was her son’s privilege to be much with her during her last illness. ’My mother’s has been to me by far the most impressive deathbed I ever attended. The predominant feature of it has been the deep and immovable trust of her spirit upon the Saviour. This has been growing apace for some years, and it shed a singular and beautiful light on the evening of her days.’ It could not have been said of Dr. Chalmers that they made him the keeper of the vineyards, but his own vineyard he had not kept. How like the Apostle he was in being jealous over himself with a godly jealousy will appear from such extracts from his journal as this: ’I live as if in exile from God, in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. Erred in levity with Mr. Duncan in our reading-room; more kind and hospitable to Mr. Dwight than formerly on a similar occasion; marvelling little of God when moving through His delicious air upon our ride, and in the midst of His unnumbered beauties. Oh that I could associate with everything the first great Cause of all things! Absolutely nothing of the serious or sacred in me when sitting among eighteen immortals in the evening. What an exclusion of religion from the world’s companies! Give me wisdom and principle, O God. Oh! let me redeem the time, and give myself to the work of an entire and spiritual Christianity!’