--Pray excuse this intrusion, and believe
me, yours very truly,
ROB. S. CANDLISH.
Dean Ramsay.
I will indulge myself only with one phrase from the Dean's
memoir of Dr. Chalmers:--"Chalmers's greatest delight was to
contrive plans and schemes for raising degraded human nature
in the scale of moral living. The favourite object of his
contemplation was human nature attaining the highest
perfection of which it is capable, and especially as that
perfection was manifested in saintly individuals, in
characters of great acquirements, adorned with the graces of
Christian piety. His greatest sorrow was to contemplate
masses of mankind hopelessly bound to vice and misery by
chains of passion, ignorance, and prejudice. As no one more
firmly believed in the power of Christianity to regenerate a
fallen race, as faith and experience both conspired to assure
him that the only effectual deliverance for the sinful and
degraded was to be wrought by Christian education, and by the
active agency of Christian instruction penetrating into the
haunts of vice and the abodes of misery, these acquisitions
he strove to secure for all his beloved countrymen; for these
he laboured, and for these he was willing to spend and to
be spent."
That high yet just character not only shows Dean Ramsay's
appreciation of Chalmers, but seems to show that he had
already set him up as the model which he himself was to
follow.
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