proaching the city, saw a man distributing handbills. He resolved that if these bills should turn out to relate to tea, he would follow whatever guidance they might afford him. They were the advertisements of a coffee and tea warehouse which had recently been opened in the High Street. He went there, made an arrangement with the proprietor, Mr. Irons, father of his biographer, and in the spring of 1847 opened a shop in Elgin. The situation was congenial to him, and the business gave him opportunity to read. He read Edwards on the Will; was convinced by its reasoning; and in course of time failing to find in any of the writers of contrary opinions to Edwards what he considered effective answers to his arguments, from a sturdy Arminian and sympathizer with the Rev. James Morison, founder of the Evangelical Union of Scotland (now united with the Congregational Union), he became a fixed Calvinist. The tea business had begun to be a paying one, but the condition of Mr. Croll's arm becoming such that he was unable to attend to the shop properly, he was obliged, in order to avoid future loss, to give it up and retire to Perth.
He supported himself for a little while making induction apparatus for the curative application of electricity and galvanism; then, on the persuasion of a friend who had premises to let, engaged in keeping a temperance hotel at Blair-Gowrie. The house was not furnished, and, having no means to buy furniture, he made it while the building was being finished. The hotel business proved unsuccessful, and Croll's next effort was as a canvassing agent for insurance companies, in which occupation he spent four years and a half—about the most disagreeable part, he says, of his life.
About this time Mr. Croll published his first books, which indicated a leaning of his mind toward theological speculation. They were a pamphlet on Predestination, signed "A Moderate Calvinist," and pronounced by the Rev. Dr. Morison "an extraordinary production"; a pamphlet on the Bearing of Geology and Astronomy upon the Creation of the World; and a larger work on The Philosophy of Theism, a thoughtful book, displaying considerable philosophical insight and accumen, which was eagerly discussed by a knot of students who used to meet with the author. The direct object of this work was defined in the preface to be not to prove the existence of God, but to investigate the method to be pursued in order to arrive at a proof of his existence; or, as the author described it to Dr. Morison, the solution of the problem, Given an organic body, to show how it can be rationally proved that its cause must have been a personality endowed with intelligence, will, and sensitivity. The author maintained that a purely a priori or a purely a posteriori proof of the existence of God is impossible, and that the only way is by a
