limited means, and upon a smaller scale, in St. Andrews; and but for his more onerous avocations in Edinburgh, which had engrossed him without intermission since his arrival in the northern capital, he would have made the attempt there also. But still he felt as if he could not enjoy the brief term of life that yet remained for him, or finally forego it with comfort, unless he made one other attempt in behalf of an experiment from which he had never ceased to hope for the most satisfactory results. Since the time that he had commenced these labours in Glasgow, he had seen much of society in its various phases, and largely amplified his experience of its character and requirements; but all had only the more convinced him that the lower orders, hitherto neglected, must be sought in their dens and hovels—that they must be solicited into the light of day and the usages of civilization—and that there the schoolmaster and the minister should be ready to meet them more than half-way. Without this "aggressive system," this "excavating process," by which the deep recesses of a crowded city were to be quarried, and its dark corners penetrated and pervaded, these destitute localities might be studded with churches and schools to no purpose. And the manner in which such a population were to be sought and won, he had also fully and practically demonstrated by his former experiments as a minister. Let but a district, however benighted, be divided into sections, where each tenement or close could have its own zealous, benevolent superintendent, and dull and obdurate indeed must the inhabitants of that territory be, if they could long continue to resist such solicitations. His first wish was, that the Free Church should have embarked in such a hopeful enterprise; but its experience was as yet so limited, and its difficulties so many, that it was not likely, during his own life-time at least, that it could carry on a home mission upon so extensive a scale. He therefore resolved to try the good work himself, and leave the result as a sacred legacy, for the imitation of the Church and posterity at large. "I have determined," he wrote to a friend in 1844," to assume a poor district of 2000 people, and superintend it myself, though it be a work greatly too much for my declining strength and means. Yet such do I hold to be the efficiency of the method, with the Divine blessing, that, perhaps, as the concluding act of my public life, I shall make the effort to exemplify what as yet I have only expounded." Only expounded? This truly was humble language from one who had already done so much!
The place selected for this benevolent trial was the most unhopeful that could be found in Edinburgh. It was the West Port, a district too well known in former years by the murders of Burke and Hare, and to which such an infamy still attached, that many of its inhabitants lived as if a good character were unattainable, and therefore not worth striving for. Its population consisted of about two thousand souls, the very sediment of the Edinburgh lower orders, who seem to have sunk into this loathesome locality because they could sink no farther. To cleanse, nay, even to enter this Augean stable, required no ordinary firmness of senses as well as nerve, where sight, touch, smell, and hearing were successively assailed to the uttermost. Dr. Chalmers, undaunted by the result of a survey, mapped this Alsatia into twenty districts, of about twenty families a-piece, over which were appointed as many visitors—men animated with his spirit, and imbued with his views, whose task was to visit every family once a-week, engage with them in kindly conversation, present them with useful tracts, and persuade them to join with them in the reading of Scripture and in prayer. A school was also opened for the young in the very close of the Burke and Hare murders.
