there is room for a healthy development in this direction.
Yet this is a transition about which our country has good cause to be
jealous; because it passed through a terrible experience of the
effects of preaching morality without doctrine. I question if in the
whole history of the pulpit there is a document more worthy of the
attention of preachers than the address which Dr. Chalmers sent to the
people of his first charge at Kilmeny, when he was leaving it for
Glasgow. It is well known that for seven years after his settlement in
this rural parish he was ignorant of the Gospel and preached only the
platitudes of the Moderate creed; but, the grace of God having
visited his heart, he lived for other five years among his people as a
true ambassador of Christ, beseeching them in Christ's name to be
reconciled to God. This is his summing up of the results of the two
periods:--

"And here I cannot but record the effect of an actual though
undesigned experiment, which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years
among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the
meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable
arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character
which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the
pests and the disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the
strength of these warm expostulations, have got the thief to give up
his stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and the liar
his deviations from truth, I should have felt all the repose of one
who had gotten his ultimate object. It never occurred to me that all
this might have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer have
remained in full alienation from God; and that, even could I have
established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of
abhorrence at the meanness of dishonesty that he was prevailed upon to
steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely
unturned to God and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to
Him as before. In a word, though I might have made him a more upright
and honourable man, I might have left him as destitute of the essence
of religious principle as ever. But the interesting fact is, that
during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the
natural enmity of the mind to God; while I was inattentive to the way
in which this enmity is dissolved, even by the free offer on the one
hand, and th