Parliamentary Committee in connection with the hardships suffered by congregations of the Free Church from the refusal of sites by aristocratic landowners. Undoubtedly the main activity of Chalmers during his Edinburgh life was connected with the work of the church. But before proceeding to this, it may be well to advert to his literary activity, which, amid all his other occupations, was very remarkable. We have already noticed his Bridgewater treatise, afterwards reconstructed in his _Natural Theology_. We have also noticed his volume on the subject of the Poor-Laws. It was during this period that he completed and published in four volumes his _Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans_, which had been begun but not finished as pulpit discourses in Glasgow; regarding which the late Mr. Isaac Taylor gave his judgment that they would probably be the most enduring of his writings. In this period likewise he collected and edited his whole works, amounting to the goodly number of twenty-five volumes. Of a large number of his pamphlets, introductory essays, articles in reviews, and other miscellaneous writings, our space allows us to say nothing. But the work of this period which Chalmers himself thought most of was, his treatise in two volumes on _Political Economy_. The subject had an attraction for him ever since his attendance on certain classes in the University of Edinburgh in 1799-1801. His first published volume had been on one of its topics. In the University of St. Andrews he had given a course of lectures upon it. It may seem strange that, after his change of views and intense consecration to spiritual work, he should still have felt so lively an interest in a subject usually considered the driest and most secular in the whole round of the sciences. But, as he remarked in his preface, there were two ways of presenting political economy. One was merely to expound its doctrines; the other, along with this, to consider its applications. It was with this latter object in view that Dr. Chalmers bestowed so earnest attention on the subject. On the doctrines of political economy, indeed, he held and expounded many original views,—views which were treated with undeserved contempt by the _Quarterly Review_, but of which so high an authority as Mr. Stuart Mill wrote in a very different spirit. Accepting it as the great aim of political economy to make the most of a country’s material resources, and advance to the utmost the comfort and prosperity of its people, Dr. Chalmers urged with great earnestness that all its methods were in themselves incompetent to secure this end. Without due provision for the moral and spiritual nature, the true welfare and the true comfort of men could never be achieved. Besides this, he held that society was ever tending to a condition which could not but defeat the very ends which political economy had in view. It was the constant tendency of population to increase, and thus outgrow production—outgrow the