there was to be no repose, save in that place where the "weary are at rest." But great though the sacrifice was, he did not shrink from the obligation. The financial affairs of the church which he had originated, and which were still in their new-born infancy, required his fostering care; and therefore he undertook the charge of the Sustentation Fund out of which the dispossessed ministers were to be supported; and not only maintained a wide correspondence, but performed a laborious tour in its behalf. And, truly, it was a difficult and trying office, where money was to be raised on the one hand entirely from voluntary benevolence, and distributed on the other among those who outnumbered its amount, and whose share had to be apportioned accordingly. All this, however, he endured till 1845, when, from very exhaustion, he was obliged to let the burden fall from his shoulders, and be taken up by younger hands, with the declaration—"It is not a matter of choice, but of physical necessity. I have neither the vigour nor the alertness of former days; and the strength no longer remains with me, either for the debates of the Assembly, or for the details of committees and their correspondence." This, too, was not the only, or perhaps even the most important task which the necessities of the disruption had devolved upon him. A college must be established, and that forthwith, for the training of an accomplished and efficient ministry; and here also Dr. Chalmers was in requisition. His office of theological professor in the university of Edinburgh was resigned as soon as his connection with the Established Church had ceased; but this was followed by his appointment to the offices of principal and primarius professor of divinity in the new institution which the Free Church contemplated. Here, then, was a college to create, as well as its duties to discharge; and how well these duties were discharged till the last hour of his life, the present generation of preachers and ministers who were his pupils can well and warmly attest. To his capacious and active mind, the mere gin-horse routine into which such professorial employments had too often degenerated, would have been not only an absolute mockery, but a downright torture; and therefore he was "in season out of season" in the subjects he taught, as well as his modes of educational training, esteeming no labour too much that could either impart new ideas or fresh enthusiasm to those whom he was rearing for the most important of all occupations. And even independently of this impulse which his labours thus communicated to the main-spring of action in the mechanism of the Free Church, the fact of his merely holding office there was of the highest importance to the college. No literary institution, however lowly in aspect or poor in endowments, could be insignificant, or even of a second-rate character, that had a man of such world-wide reputation at its head. The college is now a stately edifice, while the staff of theological professors with which it is supplied is the fullest and most complete of all our similar British institutions.
But amidst all this accumulated pressure of labour, under which even Dr. Chalmers had well nigh sunk, and the fresh blaze of reputation that fell upon his decline of life, making it brighter than his fullest noon-day—both alike the consequences of that new position which he occupied—there was one favourite duty of which he had never lost sight. It was the elevation of the ground-story of human society from the mud in which it was imbedded—the regeneration of our town pariahs into intelligent, virtuous, and useful citizens, by the agency of intellectual and religious education. This he had attempted in Glasgow, both in the Tron and St. John's parish; he had continued it, though with more
