to feel brotherly interest in the unfortunate, and who ought to manifest it by personal contact with them and personal ministering to their needs. Glasgow permitted him to make full trial of his plan of church and individual effort in St. John's parish. In each of the parochial districts the presiding deacon was able, at the cost of an hour a week in visiting, to investigate the condition of the people. Work was often found for those who lacked it. Relief was secured for the aged and the sick. Impostors were detected. And in short, whereas before the inception of the new plan the poor relief of St. John's parish had cost the city about $7,000 annually, in a few years' time Chalmers had reduced this expense to about $1,400. And he had done infinitely more. For he had made the poorest feel that the Christian Church had not forgotten them, that Jesus Christ still went about doing good, that the professed faith of Christians in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was something better than a pretence. When shall we see matured for our Canadian cities such a plan of reasonable, united, Christian beneficence, a system which shall map out our cities into small districts easily supervised, and so harmonize and unify the efforts of all Churches and societies as to leave no deserving case of hardship unrelieved, and at the same time save beneficence from the sharks of impostors who prey upon it? No Christian evidences and no religious revival would be more far-reaching in permanent religious results than such a practical manifestation of Christian brotherhood; and no work could be more pleasing to Him who taught us to love our neighbour as ourselves. Lying at the basis of all Chalmers' principles of social economy was a profound conviction of the supreme value of character as the basis of conduct and the indispensable condition of right social conditions. Get men into right relations to God and duty, then you have some chance to get them into right relations to each other. He was no Utopian dreamer of impossible ideals, but a warm-hearted lover of his brother men, who felt that pauperism is a national disgrace, that the intelligence, industry, and prosperity of the humblest classes is essential to the national stability, that Jesus Christ has but scant sympathy with a religiousness which spends itself in building costly churches and forgets the miseries of the poor. Chalmers was eminently sane. He was intensely evangelical in his theology. He believed and preached the old Gospel of redemption by the blood of Christ. But he was Pauline in the practical conclusion which he drew from the cross and which he worked into his own life. "He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again." In his life and work religion and ethics were indissolubly united. When he saw a good thing to do, he did it. As the organizer and leader of the Free Church, Chalmers stands secure in history. Not more surely was Carnot "the organizer of victory" than Chalmers. Not that he loved fighting, or fought merely for victory. He was dominated by the principle of the liberty and independence of the Church of Christ. His ability had made him the leader of the evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. And it was but fitting that, on the memorable eighteenth of May, 1843, when the heroic band of ministers and elders left all and followed Christ into dissent from their beloved national Church, the first moderator of the Free Church Assembly should be the man whose personality had done so much to make the great step possible and successful. The genius of organization seemed incarnated in Chalmers. In the seven years before the disruption, he pushed so successfully a scheme for Church extension within the Establishment, that he raised about $1,500,000, and built 220 churches. The same genius of organization now provided for the Free Church, cast for its support entirely upon the liberality of the people, that famous Sustentation Fund, which saved the Free Church ministers from starvation in those early heroic days, and still binds the Church together in the bonds of mutual helpfulness. In the West Port of Edinburgh he proved that the same plans of city mission work which had revolutionized his Glasgow parish, in the Establishment, were applicable to the work of a free and unendowed Church. As Principal of the new Free Church College he inspired the young ministers with a glorious devotion to the building up, not merely of a sect, but of the kingdom of God. And then came the end. On the night of Sabbath, May 30th, 1847, he retired to rest as usual. But in the morning he was found sleeping that sleep "from which none ever wakes to weep." Gently and beautifully had that prayer been answered for him, which he often uttered in the family circle: "May one and all of us be shielded under the canopy of the Redeemer's righteousness; that every hour that strikes, every day that dawns, every night that darkens round us, may find us meeter for death, and for the eternity that follows." Thomas Chalmers was a great man, and good as he was great -guileless as a child, unselfish as few men, absorbed in great truths and great enterprises, sympathetic, tender, yet firm in purpose, forceful in act, vehement in utterance, unfailing in sagacity, pure in motive, entirely devoted to God and humanity. Carlyle thought him overestimated, yet said: "But the great man was himself truly lovable, truly loved; and nothing personally could be more modest, intent on his good industries, not on himself or his fame." A few weeks before his death Chalmers called upon the Carlyles in London, and Carlyle describes the interview, concluding thus: "Chalmers was himself very beautiful to us during that hour, grave-not too grave-earnest, cordial face and figure very little altered, only the head had grown white, and in the eyes and features you could read something of a serene sadness, as if evening and star-crowned night were coming on, and the hot noises of the day growing unexpectedly insignificant to one. We had little thought this would be the last of Chalmers; but in a few weeks after he suddenly died. I suppose there will never again be such a preacher in any Christian church." . WHEN WE AWAKE. BY AMY PARKINSON. WE shall be satisfied: Oh, wondrous thought-oh, comfort passing sweet— We shall be satisfied! We shall be satisfied: Although on earth dire disappointments press, We shall be satisfied. We shall be satisfied: There every yearning heart God's fulness fills; We shall be satified: Though not 'mid scenes of earth, yet, in that land We shall be satisfied. We shall be satified: Not here-not now-but when we joyous rise With Him for aye to abide We shall be satisfied! TORONTO. WHAT ONE CHURCH DID FOR MISSIONS. THE STORY OF HERMANNSBURG. BY MARY S. DANIELS, B.A. It was an obscure church in an obscure parish. Worse than obscure, it was lifeless and indifferent. A seemingly more unpromising soil in which to cast the seed of missionary zeal could scarcely have been found than this of Hermannsburg. Where is Hermannsburg, does anyone ask? Among the lowlying lands of the German Empire, north and a little to the east of Hanover, stretches, in undulating lines of glorious purple bloom, the Lüneburger Heath. Its sparse population of peasants and humble yeomen is scattered among the small hamlets and occasional picturesque villages, which, with little hills and clustering woods, relieve here and there the monotony of unbroken heath. One of these villages is Hermannsburg. Like many another, it consists of scarcely more than one rambling street of roomy, homely cottages, each surmounted at the gables by the old Saxon horse, fashioned in wood. A little river divides it into two parts, and it is surrounded by stately trees. The most conspicuous object in the village is the wooden spire of the church. As the Lüneburger Heath, glowing with rich effects of colour, light and shade, has a certain, picturesque beauty distinguishing it from the dull uniformity of the surrounding country, so its inhabitants possess a distinct character, differing somewhat from that of the neighbouring German peoples. The Rev. W. F. Stevenson, who has been at some pains to acquaint himself with the history of Hermannsburg, writes: "They have a sturdy, independent, self-reliant spirit; a very marked family, as distinguished from the common continental social, life; much of the primitive English strength and honesty; and a local attachment as powerful as that of a Highlander or a Swiss." Yet Hermannsburg was not a place in which to look for missionary enthusiasm. The people of Hanover have never been characterized by much spiritual vitality, and though not swallowed up by the rationalism so prevalent in Germany, they became dominated by a frigid and formal orthodoxy scarcely less deadly in its effects. The conditions in the church itself were such as are most discouraging to an earnest evangelical pastor. But what conditions are hopeless while God is God? Within the short space of twelve years, beginning in 1848, Her mannsburg, little, lifeless, unpromising Hermannsburg,-was completely regenerated and had become a radiant centre of spiritual energy. So great was the change in the village itself that at the end of that time its inhabitants had become almost as one Christian family. In all Hermannsburg there was not a house without daily morning and evening prayers; absence from church on Sunday or at week-day services, except in case of illness, was unknown; drunkenness and poverty did not exist; the very labourers had prayer about their work, and hymns of the church rang from the fields and gardens instead of the popular ballads in vogue elsewhere. Every such reformation, whether great or small, is to be traced to the efforts of some single earnest soul, and the name which is forever associated with all that is bright in the career of Hermannsburg is that of the village pastor, Louis Harms. Of his life and personality some slight knowledge is essential to an understanding of our subject. Son of a former pastor, and thus endeared to the people by all those ties of respect and affection which are cemented when, as not seldom occurs in Germany, a pastorate continues in a family from generation to generation, he came first to assist his father in the parish in 1846. On the father's death, two years later, he became his successor. A man of uncommon endowments, as well as of exceptional energy and activity, was Louis Harms. With the temperament that makes a scholar he combined the strength, independence and profound local attachment so characteristic of his fellow Lüneburger. Even in boyhood, when his delight was to wander over the heath with the "Germania" of Tacitus as his favourite companion, localizing the ancient descriptions and uniting past and present in his eager mind, this combination was manifest. It was the same which in later years led him to employ all his powers, developed by the university career, so congenial to one of his tastes and intellectuality, in work among the peasantry of his own native heath. But what inspired his best endeavour, brought him his supreme success, and made him the power that he became, was neither his intellectual gifts nor his natural temperament, valuable aids though these were. It was rather his close relation to God, his absolute and earnest faith, the intensity and reality of his spiritual life, and his undivided consecration. These led the man of culture and scholarly tastes to identify himself with the ignorant and stolid peasants, to devote his life to the uplifting and betterment of theirs, to lead them out of a careless and |