Thomas Chalmers

But the event in his personal history that touched him more than anything else during this period was the completion of his sixtieth year, on 17th March 1840. It was a favourite thought that the seventh decade of life ought to be turned into a kind of Sabbath, and spent sabbatically, as if on the shore of the next world, or in the outer courts of the heavenly tabernacle. In the case of his mother the last years of her life had had something of this character, and Dr. Chalmers longed for a like experience. Deep in his soul lay the desire for direct and deliberate communion with God, for he not only believed in such communion as the greatest privilege of the human spirit, but he knew that it brought to the worshipper an actual communication of divine influence, so far as the creature was capable of receiving the divine. 'Oh that my heart were a fountain of gracious things,' he wrote in his diary on his sixtieth birthday, 'which might flow out with gracious influence on the heads of my acquaintances, and more particularly of the members of my family!'

So far as the seventh decade had been looked forward to as a time of rest, the hopes of Dr. Chalmers were wholly frustrated. The seven years that yet remained to him, if not the very busiest of his life, were years of peculiar tension, anxiety, and disappointment – things far more trying to the vital energies than work itself. The Church Extension scheme had to be worked out at home under the depressing influence of disappointment of Government help; and then came the crisis of the conflict with the civil courts, – the negotiations with Government, the taunts of Lord Aberdeen, the sickness of hope deferred, and, finally, the shattering of the national church. Though the Disruption brought quieter times, it did not bring the rest and freedom from care for which Chalmers longed; the entire fabric of the Free Church had to be set up, and especially the Sustentation Fund; his longing for rest was but the chase of an ignis fatuus that seemed always to lead him deeper and deeper into the fray.

Notwithstanding all, however, as time advanced, and his fame became more and more established, no change ever took place in the simple and humble demeanour of his spirit. 'I never saw a man,' said Joseph Gurney, 'who appeared to be more destitute of vanity, or less alive to any wish to be brilliant.' In one of his home letters he gives his reason for refusing all requests for his autograph: he could not bear anything that might imply his desire to be considered a great man.

But, though rest and leisure seemed further away than ever, Dr. Chalmers was determined that his seventh decade should not altogether want its sabbatic character. For this end, he resolved to make a far more systematic and earnest study of the Scriptures. In October 1841 he began two series of readings – a daily and a Sabbath portion. To impress the lessons of each passage the more on his mind, he made use of his pen, and carefully recorded the first, freshest, and readiest thoughts that the passage read suggested to him; not with any view to publication, nor with any idea of composing a commentary, but simply for his own edification. The Sabbath lessons, being a chapter for each Sabbath day from the Old Testament and one from the New, were more elevated and spiritual than the daily; and his remarks were often in the form of a direct address to God. This practice was continued with undeviating regularity, no matter where he might be, or however much engaged. If the volumes in which he entered his remarks were not at hand, he would write them in shorthand, and carefully extend them afterwards. In some of his meditations he would express in the frankest manner the most hidden thoughts and feelings of his soul. It is remarkable that one who, in his ordinary intercourse with men, seldom unveiled his feelings, and did not appear in any special degree to be under the influence of the unseen, should, nevertheless, in his communings with God, have shown such frankness and such an intense desire for divine guidance, and grace to enable him to follow it. Dr. Hanna well remarks, 'Behind the outer history of his life there lay that inner spiritual history which made the other what it was. His correspondence, his speeches, his published writings, and his published acts, which furnish such ample materials for unfolding the one history, are absolutely barren as to the other. We know of no other individual of the same force and breadth of character who, in all his converse, public and private, with his fellow-men, spoke so little of himself, or afforded such slender means of information as to his own spiritual condition and progress; and yet it would be difficult to name another of whose deeper religious experience we have so full and so trustworthy a record.'

It was the troubles of the church, and the profound responsibility therewith connected, that so powerfully stimulated his desire for fellowship and guidance from on high. Only those who lived at the time can realise the exceeding bitterness of the tone of many opponents, shown both by word of mouth and through the press; and their readiness, if any prominent churchman should make a slip, to pounce upon him and hold him up to the reprobation of the public. It is a mode of treatment that has not yet become obsolete. Some sally of Dr. Chalmers's had in this way brought a nest of hornets about him – 'Yet I am supported in a way that is marvellous under every visitation.' Under April 2, 1840, he writes in his journal: —

'An utter prostration of spirit from the speech of Lord Aberdeen.' – 'April 3. Recovered my spirits, but not my spirituality. 'June 8. Sadly engrossed with the Dean of Faculty's charge against me. My God, uphold me!' – 'June 21. Have not yet recovered the shock of Lord Aberdeen's foul attack on me in the House of Lords. May I live henceforth in the perpetual sunshine of God's reconciled countenance!' – 'July 5. A letter yesterday from Dr. Gordon, enclosing one from Lord Aberdeen, which will require a strenuous exercise both of wisdom and charity. My God, guide and govern all my movements!' – 'July 17. Hurt by a report in the Witness of Lord Aberdeen's saying in the House that after having brought the church into jeopardy, I had left them to find their way out of it as they could. Recovered from this. Desire to roll all over upon God.'

Alongside of these appeals to God for grace and wisdom in public life, numberless passages occur in which one knows not whether to admire more his profound humility or the intensity of his aspirations for a more heavenly condition: —

'1841, May 17. Cannot but remark how I gravitate to ungodliness. Why are my thoughts when alone and not studying so little occupied with God? And oh that in company I might appear more for His glory! Assist me to do this in my family, and let me watch my opportunities for doing Christian good… Let me carry about with me a distinct confidence in forgiveness through the blood of Christ, and with earnest desire of showing forth His praise and learning His doctrine, let me try how this confidence will work in me. The fruits of righteousness so produced will arise from the sense of my own nothingness, and have Christ alone as their origin.' – 'July 10. Am I not too light-hearted and too luxurious, and altogether too self-indulgent? Certain it is that in and of myself I am altogether vile and worthless, and would need, in dependence on grace alone, to have more of watchfulness unto prayer, more of self-denial, and a far more tender sense of the evil of ungodliness than habitually and practically belong to me.' – 'July 4. Never am I in a better frame than when dwelling in simple faith on Christ's offered righteousness, and making it the object of my acceptation. O Lord, I pray for more and more of the clearness and enlargement of this view; and grant me the spirit of adoption. Oh that I could attain the experience of him who says, "I have believed, therefore have I spoken"!'

One is constantly reminded in reading the private journals of Dr. Chalmers of the 119th Psalm, with its remarkable combination of profoundest humility and intense and holiest longing for conformity of heart and life to the will of God. And it does not surprise us to learn that the text of Scripture which he felt to describe his own case most correctly was the verse (20), 'My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judgments at all times.'

CHAPTER VI

NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH

1843-1847

Gifted and mighty men though many of the leaders of the Disruption were, Chalmers towered high above them all. With the multitude his illustrious name gave a dazzling éclatto the movement; with the thoughtful the fact that a man of his sagacity, patriotism, and caution, and strong proclivity to an established church, should have thrown himself heart and soul into the non-intrusion cause, created the conviction that it must be supported by very weighty considerations. What but the strongest sense of fatal injury to the church could have induced him, after electrifying London with pleadings for a national establishment of religion, to forsake his own, and become practically a voluntary? No man felt his responsibility for the Disruption more deeply than Chalmers; and no man laboured more assiduously in behalf of the Free. Church, in the creation of which he had had such a share. To the General Assembly of 1843 he gave in the Reports of the Sustentation and Building Committees, both of which were very encouraging. The months of August and September were spent in a tour to the east and north of Scotland, on behalf of the Sustentation Fund. In October he attended an extra meeting of the General Assembly at Glasgow, opening it with a sermon from Nehemiah xi. 16. In November he had to enter on his duties as Principal and Professor of Divinity in the Free Church Theological Institution, now known as the 'New College.'

It was natural for him to be very much cheered by the numberless letters and visits of congratulation that came to the Free Church from every quarter. When even those who had as voluntaries been his most inveterate opponents in his church endowment effort, came with their warm and most brotherly salutations, a new hope of union sprang up that rekindled hope for the highest welfare of Scotland.

Speaking to the General Assembly held at Glasgow in the autumn of 1843, he said: —

'I confess to you that I was much interested by the arrival, by one post after another, of those addresses and resolutions from various churches, of whose very existence I was not aware till I received their letters. And I think that every man, whose heart is in the right place, will be delighted with such movements. They are movements quite in my own favourite direction, because one and all of them are movements of convergency; or, in other words, movements which point in the first instance to union, and, as soon as possible and prudent, I trust their landing-place will be incorporation. There is among them one very pleasant address, signed by – I have not had time to count the names, – but I believe some of the youngsters of my family tried a more wholesale method of arriving at a probable estimate of the amount of support thus given to the Free Church; instead of numbering, they measured it, and found it about seventeen yards long… I have felt exceedingly delighted with these communications. I must say that I consider it as infinitely more characteristic of the religion which we profess – the religion of peace and charity – that instead of each denomination sitting aloft and apart upon its own hill, and frowning upon each other from their respective orbits, they should hold kindly and mutual converse, and see each other eye to eye, while they will discern, to their mutual astonishment, if not how thoroughly, at least how substantially, they are at one. I just conclude with observing that now is the time to rally about the common standard all that is pure and vital in Protestantism; for now it is that we shall have to make head against a new form and revival of Antichrist, whether in the form of Popery – naked Popery, or Popery in disguise, even that Antichrist which threatens to shake a most withering mildew over the whole of Christendom.'

The same views were expressed with equal emphasis at a general meeting, held about the same time, in commemora tion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Westminster Assembly. And when the Evangelical Alliance was projected, he wrote a pamphlet in its favour, expressing a strong desire that it should be called the Protestant Alliance, and that it should have for its double object the protection and promotion of the cause of Protestantism; and, in his own familiar and favourite line, the work of a great Home Mission.

Among the eminent strangers who visited Scotland about this time none excited a livelier interest in Dr. Chalmers's mind than Dr. Merle D'Aubigné, who came in 1845, when in the full flush of his fame as the popular historian of the Reformation.

At the Disruption there was a vast amount of work to be done, for it would have required more than seven hundred churches to accommodate all the congregations that adhered to the Free Church. There were, besides, many cases of peculiar difficulty, caused chiefly by the refusal of proprietors to grant sites for churches and manses on their properties, a refusal which on vast estates like those of the Duke of Sutherland or the Duke of Buccleuch would have amounted to an absolute extinction of the church. Dr. Chalmers, however, under the influence of his strong desire for a sabbatic decennium, kept clear of the ordinary work of the church, excepting the Sustentation Fund and his college lectures. As for the college itself, it was mainly in the hands of Dr. Welsh, until his lamented death in 1845, when Dr. Chalmers felt constrained to become convener of the College Committee. Among other services, Dr. Welsh took in hand to provide for a college building, which it was proposed to erect from the contributions of twenty subscribers of £1000 each. This was a serious undertaking at a time when the wealthier friends of the church had been straining all their energies for the Building, Sustentation, and Mission Funds. But the whole sum was speedily contributed in the way proposed, and though in the end the price of the site and the cost of the building amounted to more than double the sum named at the beginning, the whole was ultimately provided. Such liberality for college purposes was due in a great degree to the profound regard in which Dr. Chalmers was held, and in a somewhat less degree to his colleague Dr. Welsh.

It must be owned that Dr. Chalmers was not satisfied with the success of the Sustentation Fund. It had been adopted not only unanimously but enthusiastically by the whole church, and considering all that had to be done for other purposes, it was marvellous that in the first year it amounted to £68,700, enough to furnish fully £100 to six hundred ministers. That, however, was but two-thirds of the amount which Chalmers had named as the minimum payment to each minister from this fund. And, besides, there were many additional ministers to be provided for, needed by the new adhering congregations; and moreover, – and this was never absent from his thoughts – there was to be considered the vast home-mission work needed in order to realise his lifelong desire to overtake the whole spiritual destitution of the country. It was the inadequacy of the Sustentation Fund to realise this further object that was the chief cause of his disappointment. Moreover, he found in the machinery of his scheme a serious leak, which bade fair to ruin it. Every congregation was to receive an equal dividend for its minister from this fund, whatever might be the amount of its own contributions. In order that this provision might work satisfactorily, it was necessary that congregations should make an equal effort for the fund. But it was soon found that many congregations were steeped in selfishness, and, while drawing their equal dividend, their contributions were but a fraction of what they should have been. Chalmers had calculated on a brotherly spirit and a brotherly conscience, which he now found were often wanting. He became alarmed for the future, and proposed a modification of the original arrangement, to the effect that no congregation should receive from the fund more than its own contribution and a half more. But it was too late. The fund had been constituted on the footing of an equal dividend, and there was a strong opposition to the change. Chalmers remonstrated by word of mouth and by pamphlets on the 'Economics of the Free Church.' All that the Assembly would allow was that the new plan should be tried with new congregations. But as the new congregations were generally comparatively poor, the result was something like starvation to their ministers; and, after a short trial, the plan was given up. But no one could deny the serious nature of the evil that Chalmers had pointed out, and for many a long year there were perplexed discussions as to the remedy. Even now, though the leak has been abundantly dealt with, it has not been quite overcome. In his remonstrances, Chalmers showed more vehemence than was perhaps reasonable, considering that it was the defect of his own original scheme that caused the difficulty. But his vehemence was due to the conviction that came home so strongly to him, that the Sustentation Fund could not become the instrument of carrying out his dearly-cherished project, – of recovering the whole waste-places of Scotland, and making them parts of the vineyard of the Lord. The thought saddened him, and it led him to speak more disparagingly of what the Free Church had accomplished, and what the Sustentation Fund had accomplished, than was altogether deserved.

After experiencing three disappointments – from the Whigs, and the Tories, and the Free Church, it might have been supposed that, all eager as he was for rest and quiet, he would now let the matter alone. But no. There remained one other step. By an experimentum crucis, by a demonstration of what, under the divine blessing, could be done by his scheme in as unfavourable a district as could be found, he might yet vindicate it in the eyes of all men; he might leave behind him a monument which would be a perpetual rebuke of the languor and listlessness of the church; a perpetual encouragement to similar undertakings, and a perpetual testimony to the maxim of John Eliot, the apostle of the North American Indians, which he used often to quote, that 'prayer and pains can do everything.'

This was the origin of the West Port experiment. Writing on 26th July 1844, just fourteen months after the Disruption, to his friend Mr. Lennox of New York, the munificent founder of the Lennox Library and the Lennox Hospital, New York, between whom and Dr. Chalmers there had sprung up a very cordial friendship, he said: 'I have determined to assume a poor district of two thousand people, and superintend it myself, though it be a work greatly too much for my declining strength and means. Yet such do I hold to be the efficiency of the method with the divine blessing, that perhaps, as the concluding act of my public life, I shall make the effort to exemplify what as yet I have only expounded.'

To prepare the way and interest the public in his scheme, he delivered four lectures, in which the methods and advantages of territorial schools and churches were set forth with his usual force. Free Church feeling was running very hieh at the time, and Dr. Chalmers was at great pains to show that his undertaking was dictated solely by a regard to the good of the people. 'Who cares,' he asked, 'about the Free Church, compared with the Christian good of Scotland? Who cares about any church but as an instrument of Christian good? For be assured that the moral and religious well-being of the population is of infinitely higher importance than the advancement of any sect.'

The district selected was of the worst description – a fourth part of the whole population being paupers, and another fourth street beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The population amounted to upwards of 400 families, of whom 300 had no connection with any church. Of 411 children of school age, 290 were growing up without any education. The plan of Dr. Chalmers was to divide the whole territory into twenty districts, containing each about twenty families. To each district a visitor was appointed, whose duty was to visit each family once a week, under directions printed by Dr. Chalmers to show the specific object of the visitation. A school was provided, and the visitors were instructed, in the first instance, to show an active interest in the young, and exhort the parents to send their children to the school. A small fee was exacted, on the principle that what was paid for would be more valued, and that a more regular attendance would be secured.5 The visitors were instructed to meet with Dr. Chalmers every Saturday evening, the first meeting taking place on 27th July 1844. On the 6th November, Dr. Chalmers held his first meeting with the people, telling them all he would do for them, and all that they were expected to do for themselves. On 11th November, when the school was opened, there were 64 scholars; in the course of the year there were 250. On the 22nd December, public worship was commenced by Dr. Chalmers in a tan-loft. The attendance was not encouraging after all the visiting that had been going on – only about a dozen adults, and these mostly old women. In April 1845, the services of the Rev. W. Tasker were secured as missionary-minister, and before the end of the year the nucleus of a fair congregation had been formed. A library, a savings-bank, a washing-house, and a female industrial school were added to the parochial equipments. Dr. Chalmers preached and worshipped often in the loft, met with the visitors, and addressed the people as new features were added to the scheme. 'When he was a hearer merely,' says Mr. Dodds, 'one would see him near the pulpit, in a crowd of deaf old women, who were meanly clothed, but were following the services with unflagging attention and interest. His eye was upon every one of them, to anticipate their wishes and difficulties. He would help one old woman to find out the text; he would take hold of the psalm-book of another, hand to hand, and join her in the song of praise. Any one looking at him could see that he was in a state of supreme enjoyment.' And most earnestly did he pray for a blessing on the work, and that it might be the forerunner of many such undertakings.

'We would give Thee no rest, O God, until Thou hast opened the window of heaven and caused righteousness to flow down that street like a mighty river.' 'Let such a memorial of Christian philanthropy be set up in that place as to be a praise and an example both in the city of our habitation and in other cities of the land.' 'Reveal to me, O God, the right tactics, the right way and method of proceeding in the management of the affairs of the West Port. Oh that I were enabled to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan which are there!' 'O my God, give me the power of ordering matters aright in the West Port… And more especially, O God, let me understand Thy will in regard to the right place and performances of a female agency.' 'Draw close the affections and affinity between Mr. Tasker and the families of the West Port… Do Thou guide and encourage him, O Lord… Oh may he not only be himself saved, but may he be the instrument of salvation to many; and may both he and I be carried in safety, and at length with triumph, to that prosperous termination for which we are jointly labouring!'

We have no space to dwell further on the history of the West Port. The sweep of the experiment was complete. On 19th February 1847 a new church was opened; and on the 25th April, one month before his death, Dr. Chalmers administered the Lord's Supper to the congregation. On that occasion he said to Mr. Tasker, 'I have got now the desire of my heart; God has indeed answered my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in peace and die.' And he wrote to Mr. Lennox, 'I wish to communicate what to me is the most joyful event of my life. I have been intent for thirty years on the completion of a territorial experiment, and I have now to bless God for the consummation of it.'

It may be well to add that under Mr. Tasker and his successors the cause has prospered greatly. After being enlarged twice, the original church still proved too small, and a new and spacious building was erected a little way off. The congregation now numbers upwards of 1300 communicants. Of course it is not wholly territorial; people that have become attached to a church cannot be driven out of it when they leave the neighbourhood; but the old building is still retained as a mission church, and the territorial work continues. In the Free Church in Edinburgh the experiment was repeated many times, new territorial churches in poor and needy districts having been erected at Holyrood, Pleasance, Back of Canongate (Moray), Cowgate, Cowgate Head, and Fountainbridge. In Glasgow there have been many more, and several in the other large towns of Scotland. The Established Church has striven with great success to have its extension churches endowed, thereby carrying into effect the original idea of Chalmers. And yet, in spite of all this, the aim of Chalmers is as far from being realised as ever. With the increasing population, the number of persons, in our large towns especially, who have no connection with any church is larger than in Chalmers's time. And, alas! the wave of scepticism and of secularism that is passing over us intensifies the evil and magnifies the difficulty.