ish preacher and the great Scottish novelist kept for a
whole year so nearly abreast of one another. It was, besides, the first
volume of Sermons which fairly broke the lines which had separated too
long the literary from the religious public. Its secondary merits won
audience for it in quarters where evangelical Christianity was nauseated
and despised. It disarmed even the keen hostility of Hazlitt, and kept
him for a whole forenoon spell-bound beneath its power. "These sermons,"
he says, "ran like wild-fire through the country, were the darlings of
watering-places, were laid in the windows of inns, and were to be met
with in all places of public resort.... We remember finding the volume
in the orchard of the inn at Burford Bridge, near Boxhill, and passing a
whole and very delightful morning in reading it without quitting the
shade of an apple tree." The attractive volume stole an hour or two from
the occupations of the greatest statesman and orator of the day.
"Canning," says Sir James Mackintosh, "told me that he was entirely
converted to admiration of Chalmers; so is Bobus, whose conversion is
thought the greatest proof of victory. Canning says there are most
magnificent passages in his 'Astronomical Sermons."[23] Four years
before this time, through the pages of the "Edinburgh Christian
Instructor," Dr. Chalmers had said, "Men of tasteful and cultivated
literature are repelled from theology at the very outset by the
unseemly garb in which she is presented to them. If there be room for
the display of eloquence in urgent and pathetic exhortation, in masterly
discussion, in elevating greatness of conception, does not theology
embrace all these, and will not the language that is clearly and
appropriately expressive of them possess many of the constituents and
varieties of good writing? If theology, then, can command such an
advantage, on what principle should it be kept back from her?... In the
subject itself there is a grandeur which it were vain to look for in the
ordinary themes of eloquence or poetry. Let writers arise, then, to do
it justice. Let them be all things to all men, that they may gain some;
and if a single proselyte can be thereby drawn from the ranks of
literature, let all the embellishments of genius and fancy be thrown
around the subject. One man has already done much. Others are rising
around him, and with the advantage of a higher subject, they will in
time rival the unchristian moralists of the day