turned his attention to the rural districts, and opened a school at the village of Loanhead, a few miles distant from Edinburgh. Here he took his station exclusively as teacher, and so effectually, that he soon had 200 pupils. His zealous missionary labours in these and similar undertakings, introduced him to the Haldanes, men of congenial spirit, who were eager to second his efforts; and accordingly, in company with Captain James Haldane, the younger brother, he set off on a tour through the west of Scotland, partly for the distribution of tracts, but mainly for the establishment of Sabbath-schools. With this view they visited Glasgow, Paisley, and Greenock; and although the trip occupied only a single week, the formation of sixty schools was the result within three months afterwards. A system of religious education was thus prosperously commenced that was soon to overspread the country, and which, we trust, will continue, until society, still better christianized than it is at present, will revert to the good old plan of having the Sunday-school at home, with the head of the house as its zealous affectionate teacher.
From Sabbath-school teaching to preaching was but a step, upon which Mr. Campbell next ventured; it was a change from growing to grown children, where the latter were to the full as unintelligent as the former, but with still greater need of the coercions of religion, while the kind of instruction which had been found so available with the one might be equally so with the other. He commenced in the first instance with Gilmerton, a village in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, chiefly inhabited by colliers, the despised Pariahs of British society; and having opened a preaching station for Sabbath evening service, he was aided in his labours by students of divinity and lay-preachers; and especially by Rate, Aikman, and the Haldanes, the fathers of Scottish Independency. Encouraged by the success of this trial upon Gilmerton, Messrs. Campbell, Rate, and James Haldane resolved to attempt an itinerancy of lay-preaching over the whole of Scotland north of Edinburgh. It was a novel experiment, for, except the brief visits of Whitefield to Scotland, the practice of preaching in the open air had been discontinued there since the happy accession of William and Mary to the throne. In every town and village to which they came, they announced their purpose and the place of muster, and there the crowds who assembled were roused anew with proclamations of those evangelical doctrines to which very few pulpits of the day were wont to give utterance. This, indeed, was a sufficiently humble mode of preaching; but it was apostolic withal, and suited to the wants of the times; and one of the best fruits of this lay and out-of-door preaching was, that in the present day it is needed no longer. After he had toiled in the work until he broke down from sheer exhaustion, and resumed it as soon as his health had recovered, Campbell saw with satisfaction this field successfully occupied by the Haldanes, and those whom they had trained to an itinerant ministry.
Hitherto it had been the reproach of Protestantism, that it was not a missionary church. The Reformed communities, instead of preaching the gospel to all nations, had selfishly confined it to themselves; and while Papists were alert in traversing every land, and braving every danger to make converts, they were wont to allege, and with a show of justice, that the opposite church could not be a genuine Christian one, as it had so shamefully neglected this most important commission with which it had been intrusted by our blessed Lord at his departure. Now, however, the reproach was to be rolled away; and one of the first fruits of this awakened sense of duty was the formation of the London
