Memoir of John Macfarlane Author:William Graham 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 IV. PUBLIC LIFE—GLASGOW. LASGOW was, even in 1840, the large heart, brain, and purse of the Secession Church. Important as Edinburgh was in ot... more »her respects as the metropolis of the country, and always distinguished for possessing some of the best men in the denomination—still, confessedly, it was inferior in importance to Glasgow as its real centre. And what was true thirty years since is now, through the union of the Secession and Relief Churches in the United Presbyterian Church, and through the enormous increase of the population, more clearly and emphatically so. Indeed, no place knows this so well as Glasgow itself, or accepts it more calmly and complacently, as one of the things most surely to be believed in the denomination. The same holds with almost equal truth of the other branches of Christians. Chalmers—the Chalmers—was during former years in the capital of the west in the days of his mighty dominance; mighty both through the unspent fires of his genius, and the first outbursting streams of his grace; then, indeed, rivers flowed outof his very being—the deep of natural genius couching beneath the deep of Divine grace breaking up from above. That was a time of great talent in Glasgow. There were men like Dr Dick, Dr Wardlaw, Dr Anderson, but Chalmers overtopped all, like some Jofty summit, and was felt as a new force. The traveller looks along the Pyrenean range, from Pau, and straight across lower hills and grander mountains the eye is caught and kept in silent unswerving hold by the lonely dominating Pic du Midi—so Chalmers looked in the Glasgow pulpit of that period. But not even a Chalmers could have done his work unless others had been there before him. Glasgow is the natural centre for the south and west of Scotland. Indeed, if it is not made for...« less