putation had been made
long before, and indeed Chalmers died 30th May 1847, only four years
after he "went out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders,
having been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a
minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became famous
as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 he was appointed
Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, and (shortly afterwards)
of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one of the Bridgewater treatise
writers--a group of distinguished persons endowed to produce tractates
on Natural Theology--and his work, _The Adaptation of External Nature to
the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man_, was one of the most
famous of that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from
the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' works are
extremely voluminous; the testimony as to the effect of his preaching is
tolerably uniform; he was a man of very wide range of thought, and of
remarkable faculty of popularisation; and there is no doubt that he was
a born leader of men. But as literature his works have hardly maintained
the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him,
unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that
there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself
is not of the finest.

Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an early friend
of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers himself, and died
thirteen years before him. But at nearly the time when Chalmers was at
the height of his reputation as a preacher in Glasgow, Irving was
drawing crowds to the unfashionable quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by
sermons of extraordinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities
of doctrine which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much
better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more strictly
literary affinities than Chalmers; he came under the influence of
Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both with his eloquence
and with his vagaries); and he may be regarded as having been much more
of a man of letters who had lost his way and strayed into theology than
as a theologian proper.

To what extent this great and famous influence of Coleridge actually
worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been debated. It is however
generally stated that he, like his friend Sterling, was induced to t