endeavours. While the population had increased twofold, church accommodation had in a great measure remained stationary; and even if additional churches should be built, the difficulty of supplying them with a proper ministry still remained. There was as little hope at the time that Government would supply the former as the Church the latter deficiency, and thus the affair was allowed to drift onward, let it finally strand where it might. To build or hire churches was Mr. Haldane's first aim, and these were speedily set up in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth, Thurso, Wick, and Elgin; and to furnish them with an efficient ministry, eighty students were soon enrolled, under the pastoral instruction of Dr. Bogue, Mr. Ewing, and Mr. Innes. His chapels, or Tabernacles, as they were usually called, continued to multiply, so that by the year 1805 nearly 200 preachers from Mr. Haldane's seminaries were labouring as ministers and missionaries in Scotland, besides those who had gone to America. When the result of all this devotedness is reduced to pounds, shillings, and pence, it assumes the most tangible form to the eye and understanding: we shall therefore simply state that, from 1798 to 1810, Mr. Haldane had expended about £70,000 in his labours to propagate the gospel at home. And be it remembered, too, that he was no mere philanthropic epicure, acting upon random impulses, or impatient, through sheer laziness, to be rid of his money as an incumbrance. Instead of this, he was as much alive to the enjoyments' of fortune as others as conscious of the value of money, and as provident in securing and expending it as the shrewdest trafficker could well be. But all this he deliberately did at the solemn call of duty; toiling, calculating, and foreseeing at every step ; and bestowing these princely sums, that were never to return to him, as considerately as if he had been speculating in the stocks, or investing funds in some hopeful mercantile enterprise. Never, perhaps, were Christian liberality and Scottish canniencss so admirably combined, or so nobly illustrated; and it is upon this principle that we are to estimate the true worth and the disinterested sacrifices of Robert Haldane.
The effects produced by these tabernacles were very soon apparent throughout Scotland. They roused a spirit of inquiry; and even when the feeling was nothing more than that of alarm, it led to inquiry, of all feelings the one most needful at such a crisis. The most neglected districts, the most secluded nooks of our land., were soon pervaded with an itinerant or settled mission; and communities that had slumbered in hundreds of parishes under the drowsy influence of Moderatism were shaken from their torpor, and raised into full activity. And was Presbyterian Scotland in very deed to become Independent? Happily for the national character and its established habits, so great a violence was not to be sustained; and the public mind, once awakened, had its own beloved Presbyrianism at hand, instead of that system of tabernacle church-government, which it could not well comprehend. In this way Independency fulfilled its mission in Scotland, and having accomplished this it silently retrograded, and left what remained for accomplishment to a more efficient, or at least a more popular and congenial agency. At first, indeed, Haldane, in the establishment of these chapels, had no idea of a dissent from the church they were only intended as auxiliaries; and both ministers and members were in the practice of going to the sacrament in the Established churches. But it was impossible that this harmony could long continue; and, as was the case of Methodism in England, the alliance was soon broken, and the new congregations were organized into a body of Dissenterism. And then followed a spirit of division, by which the
