desire for divine guidance, and grace to enable him to follow it. Dr. Hanna well remarks, ’Behind the outer history of his life there lay that inner spiritual history which made the other what it was. His correspondence, his speeches, his published writings, and his published acts, which furnish such ample materials for unfolding the one history, are absolutely barren as to the other. We know of no other individual of the same force and breadth of character who, in all his converse, public and private, with his fellow-men, spoke so little of himself, or afforded such slender means of information as to his own spiritual condition and progress; and yet it would be difficult to name another of whose deeper religious experience we have so full and so trustworthy a record.’ It was the troubles of the church, and the profound responsibility therewith connected, that so powerfully stimulated his desire for fellowship and guidance from on high. Only those who lived at the time can realise the exceeding bitterness of the tone of many opponents, shown both by word of mouth and through the press; and their readiness, if any prominent churchman should make a slip, to pounce upon him and hold him up to the reprobation of the public. It is a mode of treatment that has not yet become obsolete. Some sally of Dr. Chalmers’s had in this way brought a nest of hornets about him—’Yet I am supported in a way that is marvellous under every visitation.’ Under April 2, 1840, he writes in his journal:— ’An utter prostration of spirit from the speech of Lord Aberdeen.’—’April 3. Recovered my spirits, but not my spirituality. ’June 8. Sadly engrossed with the Dean of Faculty’s charge against me. My God, uphold me!’—’June 21. Have not yet recovered the shock of Lord Aberdeen’s foul attack on me in the House of Lords. May I live henceforth in the perpetual sunshine of God’s reconciled countenance!’—’July 5. A letter yesterday from Dr. Gordon, enclosing one from Lord Aberdeen, which will require a strenuous exercise both of wisdom and charity. My God, guide and govern all my movements!’—’July 17. Hurt by a report in the _Witness_ of Lord Aberdeen’s saying in the House that after having brought the church into jeopardy, I had left them to find their way out of it as they could. Recovered from this. Desire to roll all over upon God.’ Alongside of these appeals to God for grace and wisdom in public life, numberless passages occur in which one knows not whether to admire more his profound humility or the intensity of his aspirations for a more heavenly condition:—