LORD MEDWTN to DEAN RAMSAY.
Ainslie Place, Thursday morning
My dear Mr. Ramsay--I beg to thank you most truly for your very acceptable gift so kindly sent to me yesterday evening. I had heard with the greatest satisfaction of the admirable sketch you had read to the Royal Society of the public character of the latest of our Scottish worthies--a very remarkable man in many respects; one whose name must ever stand in the foremost rank of Christian philanthropists; all whose great and various talents and acquirements being devoted with untiring energy to the one great object--the temporal and eternal benefit of mankind. What I also greatly admired about him was that all the great adulation he met with never affected his simple-mindedness; his humility was remarkable. There was the same absence of conceit or assumption of any kind which also greatly distinguished his great cotemporary, our friend Walter Scott; in truth, both were too far elevated above other men to seek any adventitious distinction. I wish our country could show more men like Chalmers to hold up to imitation, or if too exalted to be imitated, yet still to be proud of; and that they were fortunate enough to have admirers such as you, capable of recording their worth in an éloge, such as the public has the satisfaction of receiving at your hands. Again I beg to thank you for your kind remembrance of me on the present occasion.--Believe me, my dear Sir, yours very truly,
J.H. FORBES.
Dr. CANDLISH to DEAN RAMSAY.
4 S. Charlotte Street, Tuesday, 6th March.
My dear Sir--I cannot deny myself the pleasure of expressing to you the deep interest and delight with which I listened to your discourse last night, so worthy, in every view, of the subject, the occasion, and the audience. And while I thank you most sincerely for so cordial and genial a tribute to the memory of the greatest of modern Scotsmen, I venture to express my hope that we may be favoured with an earlier and wider publication of it than the Transactions of the Royal Society will afford.--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."