PREFACE. DR. CHALMERS was licensed as a preacher of the gospel by the Presbytery of St. Andrews on the 31st July, 1799. In December, 1801, he became assistant to the Rev. Mr. Elliot, minister of Cavers, a parish lying along the banks of the Teviot, a few miles from Hawick. As Mr. Elliot was laid aside by his infirmities, the pulpit duties devolved wholly upon his assistant, after a regular discharge of which for a period of about nine months, Dr. Chalmers left Cavers in September, 1802. He was ordained as minister of the parish of Kilmany, in Fifeshire, on the 12th of May, 1803; and twelve of the most important and most fruitful years of his life were spent in this peaceful retreat. In the autumn of 1815, he was removed to Glasgow, in which city eight years of incessant but triumphant toil were devoted to all the different kinds of ministerial labor. In November, 1823, he finally resigned the pulpit for the professor's chair. He was twenty-three years of age at the date of his ordination, and forty-three when he gave up his charge-his ministry as an ordained clergyman covering thus the space of twenty years. From the large mass of his pulpit preparations Dr. Chalmers had already selected those discourses which seemed to him the worthiest of being published-the ikeliest by their publication to do good. Out of the remainder it might have been perilous-it would perhaps have been improper-to have selected so many as thirtythree new sermons, and to have presented them as of (KECAP) 5959 249 .5 238878 equal or kindred merit with those already issued through the press. It occurred to me, however, in reading over this class of his manuscripts, that without injury done to his usefulness or reputation as a preacher, a two-fold—a literary as well as a religious-object might be attained. by the publication of a series of them arranged in chronological order. It was as a preacher that Dr. Chalmers first reached celebrity. His earlier authorship had failed to make any deep impression on the public mind. His Treatise on the "Evidences of Christianity" had begun to attract attention, and would finally have secured to him a high place among the defenders of the Christian faith; but it was the publication of his "Astronomical Discourses" which at once raised him to a pinnacle of higher eminence, gave to him a larger audience, and won for him a larger influence than it had been the lot of any Scottish minister from the days of the Reformation to enjoy. In these discourses, whose eloquence filled all eyes with its dazzling splendor, and opened all lips to praise, an idiomatic peculiarity of phraseology was at once observable. Under this new employer of it, our language took new forms, and showed itself capable of rendering new services; and while critics. said of this new way of wielding words that it was neither strictly accurate nor classically elegant, it was universally felt and confessed that by an easy use and mastery of words and phrases which in other hands had been unmanageable, Dr. Chalmers possessed a rare, an unequaled power of setting forth his ideas in a multitude of changing phases, varying in a thousand ways the form of their presentation, not only without any injury to, but with positive and large enhancement of effect. There was an interminable but unwearying variety-a volu |