are opened, they break impetuously in, soon filling every pew, and blocking up all the passages, till standing room for one man more is not to be found in all the area of the building. Look round while all are settling themselves as best they can; you have before you as mixed and motley a collection of human beings as ever assembled within a church. Peers and peasants, citizens and strangers, millionaires and mechanics, the judge from the bench, the carter from the roadside, the high-born dame, the sewing maid of low degree-all for once close together. But in the crowd there is always one conspicuous figure. Looking only at the rough, red, shaggy hair, or at the chequered plaid hung over the broad shoulders across the manly breast from which it seldom in any circumstances is withdrawn, you may think that it is some shepherd from the distant hills who has wandered in from his shieling among the mountains to hear the great city preacher. But look again. The massy head, the broad projecting brow, the lips so firmly closed, the keen grey eye, and, above all, the look of intelligent and searching scrutiny cast around-all tell of something higher than shepherd life. It is Hugh Miller, the greatest of living Scotchmen, never to be missed in this congregation, of which he was not only a member but an office-bearer. How often as I sat opposite him, Sunday after Sunday, bave I gazed upon his mysterious countenance; the head inclined always to one side, bent half-way down; the eyes askance, fixed generally upon the floor, but occasionally lifted up, scanning curiously the uplifted faces of the crowd; and ever and anon, as the preacher warmed into some glow of high emotion or spread out some new picture, turning up to and concentrating upon him for a moment or two such a look as could come from no other eyes than his." And again: "No discourses ever delivered from the pulpit had more the appearance of extempore addresses. None were ever more carefully thought over, more completely written out beforehand, or more accurately committed to memory. If ever there was any one who might have trusted to the spur of the moment for the words to be employed, it was he. No readier speaker ever stepped upon a platform; but such was his deep sense of the sacredness of the pulpit, and the importance of weighing well every word that should proceed from it, that he never trusted to a passing impulse to mould even a single phrase. Yet in the manuscript there were often phrases, sentences, illustrations, that one on hearing them could scarcely believe to have been other than the suggestion of the moment, linking themselves, as apparently they did, with something that was then immediately before the speaker's eye. The explanation of this lay in the power (possessed in any considerable degree by but few, possessed by him in perfect measure) of

writing as if a large audience were around him, writing as if speaking, realising the presence of a crowd before him, and having that presence as a continual stimulus to thought and constant moulder of expression. The difference in fact that there almost invariably is between written and spoken address, was by his vivid imagination and quick sympathies reduced to a minimum, if not wholly obliterated."

Towards the end of 1847 he was obliged to retire from pulpit and pastoral work for a time in consequence of impaired health. A gift of money having been given him by his attached congregation, he travelled in various parts of England and in the Scottish Highlands. In April 1849 the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon him by the University of Edinburgh. In October of the same year he returned to his pulpit work, after a silence of about two years. He had now grave premonitions of heart disease, and he felt that he would no longer be fit for rough work. This made the step of securing a colleague absolutely necessary, and accordingly the Rev. William Hanna, LL.D., was inducted to the post on the 7th November 1850. He was quick to realise, what many ministers are inclined to ignore, the utilising of the holiday months of the year-especially August and September-when so many people are on the wing. "I think these two months," he wrote, "in a sense, the most important of the year. I know that many hear me then who are not in the way at other times of hearing a sound Gospel preached." Thackeray and Ruskin and other celebrities, all found their way to St John's when he was preaching. Hugh Miller and Sir James Y. Simpson both occupied seats in the area of the church. Lord Cockburn was also there "with the high dome-like head, and solemn, almost pensive air." He was beyond middle life ere any of his collected serinons were published. "Above any kind of printing," he wrote on one occasion, "I have been averse to the idea of printing modern-I don't say moderate-sermons, thinking that for sermon-composition the men of the present day are not fit to hold the candle to the masters of

the seventeenth century." "The Gospel in Ezekiel," a volume of sermons, was issued in 1855, and over 40,000 copies have now been sold. His other works, including reprinted contributions from Good Words and the Sunday Magazine, have all been more or less successful. He published in all about twenty volumes. An Englishman travelling on the Continent remarked that he "is the only man I ever heard of who has written sermons which one can read pleasantly in a railway carriage." D. L. Moody, the evangelist, once remarked to one of his sons, "I owe more to the writings of your father than to those of any other man." In 1862 Dr Guthrie was elected as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of

Scotland. His closing address urged home the fact, that in order to utilise the rising talent, and genius, and energy of the country, in order that the minister may be generous, and hospitable, and open-handed, give his family a liberal education, and conform to the usages of genteel life, the ministry should be well paid. As his writings and sermons show, he was early devoted to the cause of total abstinence. "Independent of the good it did to my family and others, it was a great personal advantage to myself. It made my health better, my head clearer, my spirits lighter, and my purse heavier." In his work for ragged schools he found that in eight cases out of ten the miserable condition of the outcast children was due to careless and drunken parents. "It is," he said, "impossible to exaggerate, impossible truthfully to paint, the effect of this vice on those who suffer from itmost of all on those poor innocent children that are dying under cruelty and starvation, that shiver in their rags upon our streets, that walk unshod the winter snows, and with their matter hair, and hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes, and sallow countenances, glare out on us, wild and savage-like, from those patched and dusty windows." While abstaining for personal safety, and for the influence of his example, he laid down no hard and fast rule for others. He was one of the founders of the Free Church Temperance Society, of the Scottish Association for the Suppression of Drunkenness, endeavoured to reduce the number of licensed houses in Edinburgh, and in 1850 published a lengthy pamphlet entitled, "A Plea on Behalf of Drunkards, and against Drunkenness." He also wrote several tracts and a volume of sermons-"The City; its Sins and Sorrows"-on the same subject. The author was not a little amused at one time, while standing engaged in conversation with his publisher, to hear a bookseller's apprentice enter and ask for "twenty copies of Guthrie's 'Sins."" "Strange,' ," he once wrote, "that ministers will meet in General Assemblies and discuss this thing and that thing, nor address themselves aright and with self-denial to this spring and well-head of miseries and murders, the damnation of souls, and the ruin of our land." He would often contrast the shocking sights to be seen in the High Street or Lawnmarket of Edinburgh with the comparative sobriety of Continental towns. He looked with pleasure on the progress made in the cause of temperance reform within the Church of England. Approving highly of the effort to secure better dwellings for the working-classes, he became a shareholder in a building investment company. He lent his countenance and presence to innocent amusements for the people. When called in question for his attendance at a popular concert, he said, "Consider whether the interests of religion and morality are not more likely to be promoted by ministers and

religious people taking an interest in such innocent amusements, than by their standing aloof with a sour face and a frown on their brows, or by their endeavouring to dam up waters which, if not directed into pleasant and profitable channels, will break out in some mischievous immoral and destructive way." He did not consider the Free Church's scheme of education instituted in 1843 as a truly national method, and welcomed the English Education Act. He wrote: "My great hope is, under God, in the Education Act passed last session. If, as I hope and think, it will be fairly and vigorously wrought out, it will, I tell them here, prove itself in time the most important and blessed measure passed in Parliament since the Reformation." At another time he broke off his argument in one of his speeches, and with tears exclaimed: "What care I for the Free Church, or any church upon earth, in comparison with my desire to save and bless those poor children in the High Street?"

We have already seen how he endeavoured, as far as possible, to give his evenings to his family. "Next to the love of God," writes Dr Ker, "his spirit was sustained in his last days by the love of his children." He was blest with eleven chil dren, ten of whom-six sons and four daughters he was spared to see grow up. When travelling abroad he was careful to keep the home circle posted up in his movements; and when members of his own family went out into the world, his letters show his earnest solicitude for their welfare. Here is one, dated Edinburgh, 1858:

"I find it very difficult now to get anything into my mind, it has become so hard with age. That impressible season, therefore, through which you are now passing, should be taken advantage of to store up that best knowledge which the Word of God furnishes. . Before I was fourteen years of age, I had read through all Robertson's histories, David Hume's England,' books of voyages and travels, I know not how many. There is too little solid reading now-a-days among all; and books on trade, political economy, law, geography, and history, would profitably fill up any spare time you have from business and exercise, and go far to strengthen your position by making all men feel that in knowledge you were much above the common run of men."

"I have made it a point, since my earliest days at school, to do my best to keep in the front rank, whatever work I was engaged in; and, were I you, I would do my best, before many years were come and gone, to let people know that I was one of the best-informed men in the town, knowing my own business thoroughly, and a little of almost every other body's. I have found that I raised myself much in the estimation of other men by showing them that I knew something of their business as well as my own.

Farming and manufactures, for instance, you should read on, and pump everybody on them. There is nothing pleases men more than asking them questions about their business. It gives them an opportunity of appearing as instructors, and impresses them, moreover, with a very favourable opinion of you as one anxious to acquire | knowledge, so that there is a double advantage here. You get useful information, and make a favourable impression besides-and all knowledge is useful, even to the making of a pin or shoe-nail. "Amenity of manners is one of the most important things that you can cultivate. I have been propounding it for years, as the result of a long and large observation on mankind, that a man's success in life, in almost every profession, depends more on his agreeable, pleasant, polite, kind, and complacent manners than on anything else. I don't want you to profess anything that is not true; but you cannot be too studious of saying and doing things that will please others, and saying and doing nothing unnecessarily which will in the slightest degree hurt them or grate on their self-complacency; when you have to differ from them, do it with all possible reluctance and modesty; and when duty requires you to refuse any request, do it with the utmost politeness and tenderness."

not know the French tongue more thoroughly," he writes from Martigny in 1856. "I would jaw to everybody, and gather a vast mass of interesting knowledge. Everybody, Papist and Protestant, man and woman, grey-haired patriarchs and the sucking child, Donald of the Highland hills, or a shepherd of the Alps, all like to be spoken to, and treated as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh." He interested himself latterly in the Waldensian Church, and was one of the founders of the Waldensian Aid Society; and one of the last addresses he ever delivered was in the cause of Italian evangelisation in London. The state of his health obliged him to demit his charge in Free St John's, 17th May 1864. Another sphere of public usefulness opened to him. Mr Alexander Strahan, the well-known publisher, made overtures to him regarding the editorship of a new magazine, to be called the Sunday Magazine; the Rev. W. G. Blaikie, D.D., to be assistant editor. accepted, and in a letter to his eldest son he says: "I cannot be too thankful that, in God's good providence, I have such a pleasant prospect before me a suitable sphere of usefulness in the evening of my day." This magazine was at once successful. It has been the organ through which a bright and refreshing stream of Christian literature has gone forth to bless the land. A proposal from Messrs Cassell, the London publishers, to write a "Life of Christ," he de

He

and successfully accomplished by Canon Farrar.

He greatly enjoyed the visits made to Dunkeld, to Inverary Castle, the seat of the Duke of Argyll, and to his Highland retreat at Lochlee, and latterly the time spent nearly every season in London; he entered with keen zest into the pleasures of social life or society, which Shakespeare has termed "the happiness of life." "I never," writes the Rev. Newman Hall, "heard Dr Guthrie's equal for vivacity and variety in conversation. Sometimes he convulsed us with laughter by his witty anecdotes. Sometimes every eye was moistened, in sympathy with his own, at some tale of sorrow or of love. Sometimes he would charm us by his descriptions of scenery and of fishing, his chief pastime; and throughout all there was interwoven the golden thread of Christian love and hope." At his annual retreat at Lochlee, Forfarshire, he would indulge in boating and fishing.

After visiting Switzerland in 1856, he would say to those on his return, who had not been there: "Then save up as much money as will take you there. You will get a new revelation of the Creator's glory. I say to everybody, See the Alps before you die!" "I only regret I do

But the end was approaching. Obliged to move about for change of air and scene, he died quietly at St Leonards-on-Sea, surrounded by eight of his ten children, on 23 February 1873. His last illness was soothed by the tender hand of affection. "Give me a bairn's hymn," he would say; and in response, his children would sing, "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me, or "There is a Happy Land." The Highland servant who attended him was the first to remark the death-sign: "Surely the wrinkles on the brow are smoothing out," she said. His remains were interred in the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh, amidst a concourse of about 30,000 spectators. In the large funeral procession there were 230 children from the Original Ragged Schools. A little boy and girl were led forward from amongst them and laid a wreath upon the green sod over his grave. We may very fitly conclude this notice with his favourite motto, given in so many of his speeches, and which shows the drift and tendency of his life:

"I live for those that love me,

For those that know me true,
For the heaven that smiles above me,
And waits my coming too;
For the cause that needs assistance,
For the wrongs that need resistance,
For the future in the distance,
For the good that I can do."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, the American philosopher, poet, and essayist, is the son of a Unitarian clergyman of Boston, and was born in the latter city, 25th May 1803. In 1821, when eventeen years of age, he graduated at Harvard University, and turning his attention to theology, was ordained minister of the second Unitarian church of Boston. Embracing some peculiar views as to the forms of worship, he abandoned preaching, and retiring to the village of Concord-like Carlyle at Craigenputtoch-he gave himself up to thinking and writing, chiefly regarding the nature of man and his relation to the universe. He delivered "Man-Thinking," an oration, before the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society in 1837. An address before the senior class in Divinity College, Cambridge, attracted even greater attention. He did not pretend to reason, but to discover. He acted as a seer, and announced, not argued. One of his distinctive doctrines is, that the Deity is impersonal, and comes to self-consciousness only in individuals. In distinction from pantheism, Emerson "sinks God and nature in man." He has been termed a "seeker with no past at his back." In 1838 he published "Literary Ethics," an oration; in 1839, "Nature: an Essay." In 1840 he commenced the Dial, a magazine of literature, philosophy, and religion, which he continued for four years. Margaret Fuller was associated with him in the conduct of this magazine. In 1841 he published "The Method of Nature," "Man the Reformer," three lectures on the times, and the first series of his essays. In 1844 a second series of his essays was published. In 1846 the first volume of his poems was issued. He visited England in 1848, and delivered lectures on "The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century." "Representative Men," a volume containing six lectures on eminent men, was issued in 1850. In connection with Mr W. H. Channing he published in 1852 the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli." Emerson's other works are: "English Traits," 1856; "The Conduct of Life," 1860; an "Oration on the Death of President Lincoln," 1865; "May Day," and other pieces in verse, 1867; "Society and Solitude;" a third volume of essays, 1870; an introduction to Professor Godwin's translation of "Plutarch's Morals," 1871; "Parnassus: Selected Poems," 1871; and another volume of essays, being the fourth, in 1871. In 1866 he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Harvard. His literary style is pronounced by some to be modelled on that of Carlyle.

AN EVENING WITH EMERSON.*

According to arrangement, I met Emerson one evening at the Parker House, to accompany him to Roxbury (a suburb of Boston), to hear one of his public lectures. We walked part of the way along Washington Street, brilliant with its shop-lights, till the horse-cars should overtake us-the philosopher, with characteristic homeliness, carrying his manuscript under his arm, wrapped in a bit of newspaper. When the car came up all the seats were occupied, so we had to stand-no one rising to offer a seat to Emerson, either because in the dim light he was not recognised, or because, in that land of equality and fraternity, one man is as good as another.

Leaving the omnibus at Roxbury, we made our way to the Mechanics' Institution, where the lecture was to be delivered, and found the chairman waiting in the ante-room. On the chairman asking what the subject of lecture was to be, Emerson said he had brought two lectures with him, and would take a look at the audience before deciding which to give.

"Have you a good light falling on the desk?" he inquired; "for if not, I must trouble you to get a lamp. I am an old man, and need light."

The hall was so crowded that I had to carry in a chair for myself over the heads of the people. When Emerson appeared there was some applause; but a Scotchman misses in America the enthusiasm that in this country would greet a man like Emerson.

The chairman having announced the subject for next meeting, said: "I have now the plea sure of introducing, as the lecturer for this evening, Mr Emerson." This is the stereotyped form at all such meetings, and the chairman has nothing else to do.

The gaunt man, simple and homely in his appearance, rose, took off his overcoat, laid it across the back of a chair, took his place at the desk, and began to adjust his manuscript, which (made up of sheets and scraps of every size, age, and hue) looked like a handful of invoices taken from a merchant's file.

Let me try to convey an idea of his manner and style. When he stood up, there was still some talking amongst the audience, and movement of people coming in. Emerson stood waiting, with head inclined, and his calm, deep, thoughtful eyes passing dreamily over the sea of

* By David Macrae, in "The Americans at Home," and here reproduced by permission.