Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. This record, with all its excitements and labours, and the hum of a multitude which goes through it, was however the merest surface of Chalmers’ life. His thoughts were occupied far less with the people who crowded the Tron Kirk and besieged others, creeping in through church windows and clambering over scaffoldings to hear him, than with those who had no desire to hear him, who stood behind in gloomy or ignorant indifference, unmoved by the impulse which swept all other classes towards that point of attraction. It was not the mere fact of their indifference which stimulated him, though that is an incitement not unknown to those who achieve easy triumphs on every side but one. There was, however, a far deeper motive. When Chalmers came to Glasgow he was in every fibre of his being a countryman, a country minister, accustomed to that universal rural acquaintance and -influence which even the most easy-going head of a rural parish must die or else attain. And his was no easy mind taking things quietly, but a masterful and sympathetic spirit unable to let things or people alone. In his early days, before he had yet discovered how much higher and more vital a message he had PARISH ECONOMY. 97 to deliver, he had insisted upon opening the wonders .of chemistry to his gaping rustic folk, and teaching the old wives of the village to make a pot hoil without fire. Now he had a much greater work in hand, and it galled his spirit to think that there were thousands of his people, his own parishioners, those over whom he felt himself ordained, whom he never saw, and did not know, and could not reach by any of the usual means. The weavers of the Saltmarket had no seats in church. They came to no meetings, if not to a revolutionary assemblage now and then on the Green; and s…
