and on the other, as subjects, to the judicial tribunals; then, by general consent, men of eloquence like Chalmers, and of fancy like Guthrie, stood aside, and there stepped into the arena two strong logicians, vigorous athletes, with sinewy arms and brawny figures, well matched and of equal power, Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Robertson. As they fought, men looked on breathless, followed with fixed eyes their firm stride and strenuous grasp, and saw with wondering interest this display of pugilistic power. Both are now gone. They served the same great cause of Truth; and now both, faithful brethren, they rest in

peace.

But it was not by logic only, or strong reasoning, that Dr. Robertson was known. There was another feature in his character not less remarkable. Not, certainly, from the rough logician would you have looked for tenderness. Honey out of the lion's carcase seemed a riddle as strange. Yet no man had warmer affections; and as years passed, these deepened and became more tender. From earliest days you see in his letters to his parents, especially to his mother, the marks of a deep and true affection. În acts always considerate; in words also a thoughtful care. As sickness comes and bereavement, and then to the widowed father the infirmities of age, still tenderer becomes the tone, and full of loving piety. To his brothers, and all their relations, there are outpourings of affection; to his adopted children, a parental love. It was thus in later life; but in its first stages we remark the same. As soon as he was placed in his parish, ere yet he had entered his manse or married, he endeared himself to his people: none more painstaking in his visits; to the sick and aged unwearied in ministration; to the bereaved or troubled, a tender friend and faithful counsellor. The look, the moistened eye, the warm pressure of the kindly hand, spoke more expressively than words, and in every hut and home gained him a welcome. To the young he devoted special care; he gathered them early in a Sabbath school, which he himself taught; and his pastoral visits (diets, as in Scotland they are called) were memorable. These he had always in winter; for of his own health and ease he never thought, and winter was the time of least pressing labour among his people. In a farmer's barn, in cold and dreary days, he gathered the people, and, from ten in the morning till dark, he catechised the young and questioned the old. With tenacious memory he recalled the names of each person of the family; and none, if absent, could escape his notice. For these he asked; and, earnest for them, he would have them come to him on the Sunday, if they had no other day at command. Scrutinizing was the examination both of old and young; anxious he was for their and as he never thought of sparing himself, so neither did he spare

progress;

them. The lazy, the careless, the dissolute tried to escape this ordeal. One old woman said, "She wad na gang to be heckled, and hae her taes drapping aff wi' the cauld." But the heckling told; both old and young felt it to be for their good. They improved, and they loved the man who had helped them. Thus they came to understand his preaching, as they learned to like the man: for, at the outset, he was not a popular preacher; too logical and fond of reasoning, with long sentences and subtle distinctions, firing above the people's heads; but when he got their hearts, there was a change on both sides; they listened better, and his style became more simple. Thus there was contact; he more earnest, and they more interested.

But he did not attend only to the spiritual wants of his people. It is one of the advantages of the training of Presbyterian ministers, that they understand country matters. No man was more alive to these than Dr. Robertson. He had worked hard on his father's farm. He now turned to practise the knowledge he had gained. Long after, when up in years, he offered to try his skill in reaping against a younger minister, and beat him in the trial. His love of scientific pursuits helped him here. In 1840, when Liebig's work on agriculture appeared, he turned to his discoveries eagerly. He had studied chemistry at college, and here came the occasion for its application. Artificial manures, bones dissolved in sulphuric acid, superphosphate of lime. What experiments to gloat on! and he tried them all. At times a bad hit the grass of his glebe burnt off, close and clean; but another trial, and he succeeded. Then the minister's glebe became the wonder of the country side, and the farmers near came and looked and learned. He gave his advice freely; he helped his father's farm; and on that farm, which he had known sterile, with a small kernel of cultivated land, the ploughed acres spread and grew, till grass and green crops ran far up and over the moors. Then of the parish roads he was a resolute reformer. Through the thirty square miles of his parish, he found the roads execrable; stones as big as one's head, ruts and holes to swallow up a waggon; but he prevailed on the farmers to lend a hand, and he constrained the road trustees to assist the farmers. Ellon felt in temporal things, as in higher matters, the presence of the strenuous hand. In 1832 he entered his parish; in 1837 he married the widow of his predecessor, Mr. Douglas, to whose three sons (for he had no children of his own) he was paternally kind. To two visitors, during his stay at Ellon, he was much indebted. Dr. Duff came to him when he returned from India, and by his holiness and zeal stirred up in his heart the slumbering fire. He never lost the sense of this, but his interest in the India missions, and his regard for the man, always remained.

Dr. Chalmers was the other visitor, before the unhappy divisions in the Church had separated close friends. He came to Ellon twice, when engaged on his work of church extension, in 1836 and 1839; he found in Mr. Robertson a sympathetic helper, and with his large and just view he looked upon this active ministry, marked it as a model of parish work, and said that, if all ministers worked like Mr. Robertson, the best days of the Kirk of Scotland would revive. Dr. Chalmers thus got help, and was thankful; but he gave as well as got. He made of his host a disciple, and taught him first to feel what Scotland wanted, and how the want was to be supplied. Thus he dropped a seed into a fertile soil, which in after years bore abundant fruit.

Soon after this began the Non-intrusion conflict. Then the two men drifted apart. Dr. Chalmers became a leader on one side. Dr. Robertson occupied the foremost rank on the the other. Yet not a leader; for from the passions of his own party his temperament kept him aloof. Through all these stormy scenes he held his own course; descending often into the arena, and with strong arm, because with deep convictions, dealing his blows; yet from all violent courses standing apart, and, above the dust of the angry disputants, lifting his head to breathe a purer air. In the questions on which he could agree with his opponents, the Indian mission and the departure of Dr. Duff, he joined them eagerly. Then, as he writes to his wife, the General Assembly showed itself truly an assembly of Christian men. When the struggle grew closer, though he took his part with decision, and held firmly his own opinions, he looked with jealousy at the proceedings of the courts of justice, and in the ultra policy and tactics of the moderate party he did not sympathise. He condemns their acts in his private letters to his wife, and, eager for conciliation, he drew upon himself the suspicion of his own side that he was not hearty and thorough. In their sense he was not. He did not hail, he mourned, the secession of 1843. In after years he cast about to find some healing measure. It is well to notice --a hint for after times-that, in his last years, he lets drop the thought that, in a country Presbyterian as Scotland, the best way to avoid disputes would be to break the yoke of patronage, and leave the appointment of ministers to the Courts of the Presbyterian Church and the people; coming from such a man, a memorable thought. But, in 1843, his energies were directed into the channel in which they flowed for the rest of his life; and in which, overwhelming as were his labours, he could look back with thankfulness to their origin in the lessons of Dr. Chalmers. To Dr. Robertson, as well as others, 1843 was an eventful year. The government of Sir Robert Peel had appointed him a member of the Com

mission of Inquiry into the state of the Scotch poor; and, with his usual determination, he had taken an active part, and had assisted greatly both in collecting the facts and in preparing the Report. His talents had impressed the government favourably; and while he himself expected, from the attacks made upon him by his own side, and the suspicions entertained of him that he would not receive promotion, Lord Aberdeen had fixed his eye upon him, and through his influence he was appointed to the chair of Church History, which Dr. Welsh vacated. He left his parish with regret. His people had become warmly attached to him. The agitation, which had affected other parts of Scotland, found no material in Ellon. An attempt was made to stir the people more than once, and by notable persons. But it failed. From that firmly cemented union, which bound together in one body the pastor and his people, the waves of agitation, though they dashed themselves, fell back in disorder.

Now, also, when the ranks of the Presbyterian leaders were thinned by the secession, Dr. Robertson, whose reputation had been established, took his place in the General Assembly as one of its foremost men. Then the tone of his mind, as well as the temper of his counsels, became apparent. He at least had nothing to change. What he had been in the heat of conflict, he showed himself still, but with augmented authority, in the lull of quieter times. The Free Church, guided by its eminent leaders, and stirred by the excitement of a new enterprise, had risen to the height of its claims, had assumed all the duties of a Church, and kept up the works in which the United Church had engaged. Its Indian missions, its foreign missions, were continued with equal vigour. But how would the Residuary Church act? How could it, exhausted and crippled, hope to resume these efforts? Its leaders-conveners at home, and committees abroad-were all gone. If it tried, where was it to find men and means? Would not the attempt be a failure? Then was it seen what one earnest man can do. In the happier season, when the Church was unbroken, Dr. Robertson had supported Dr. Duff, and taken a warm interest in the mission to India. Dr. Duff, indeed, was gone, but the duty and the need of missions to India remained. "I cannot deny myself the pleasure," Dr. Robertson said in a memorable speech, "of expressing my hope and confidence, that our exertions in behalf of this noble and truly Christian scheme will be redoubled. . . . . Amidst our wranglings of late years, I have often felt those days on which the reports of the various schemes connected with the Church were read, to be among the happiest days of my life. . . . If the time should ever come when the Church of Scotland loses its missionary spirit, then indeed will its death-knell be rung." Meeting the charge, that these efforts were dictated by a spirit of jealousy and emulation, he

rises into that higher atmosphere, where the Christian breathes the air of a heavenly harmony. No doubt, he admits, infirm as we are, there was imperfection in their motives, and out of that evil God drew forth good. The Church, relieved from destruction, should throb in every pulse with an eager desire to promote its Master's kingdom; instead of returning railing with railing, they should study to be more earnest, and bring forth fruit, and correct their own faults. "May the effect be to diffuse the pure spirit of the Gospel, and may the Most High pour upon us all of His Spirit, that we may be enabled to lay upon His altar our own bodies as a pure and reasonable sacrifice."

It was in this spirit that he undertook, in the midst of the new and hard labours of his Professor's chair, the work of his life-the collection of a sum of money adequate to the endowment of the new churches which had sprung up to supply the wants of the increased population. For the population of Scotland, under the impulse of manufactures and minerals, had risen from 800,000 to 3,000,000 souls; and the need of new churches being apparent, a number of these had been built in dense city districts or hamlets, hives of manufacture, under the impulse of the bold eloquence and eager enthusiasm of Chalmers. These were not destroyed by the disruption. The secession, as Dr. Chalmers said, became in many parts a great Church-Extension scheme, and supplied by one grand effort the blanks which still remained. But in all these cases, as in England we now feel sorely, a want remains, and begins to gall and wound the Church; and that is how to provide the maintenance of the minister. The erection of the church is easy. Excitement, impulse, love of construction or of order, speculative calculations and building interests, will produce a church. Such an effort has its reward; it imposes a temporary burden; yet requires no perseverance, constancy, or much self-denial. But these feelings are enlisted against the yearly maintenance of the minister; and, where the need is greatest, most complete is the breakdown. For where all are poor, voluntaryism fails, and the seat-rents of the pews supply pence, not pounds. The Free Church sought to meet this exigency by a common fund-how lasting, is a question for the future. Dr. Robertson resolved to meet the want by a new endowment-the hardest work of all; for the results of such an appeal are distant, doubtful, unimpressive, and the demand is large. Yet to this scheme he gave himself. In 1846, he began, as Convener of the Committee on Endowment. Such an object, when he set it forth, seemed, to the great body of the clergy, a mere dream. How were they to get money-large sums impossible to find- especially in a divided country and a dislocated church? Such was the view of the old, the cautious, the timid, the lazy, and the selfish