Thomas Chalmers

One might have thought that, after finishing his first course at St. Andrews, Chalmers would have held himself entitled to a long rest. But as soon as the session was ended, he set himself, during the fortnight that intervened, to prepare for the General Assembly. The question of pluralities, the question of pauperism, and the question of the amount of time to be spent by students in theological study were to be before the house, and Chalmers was interested in all. On one of these occasions he came into collision with Dr. Inglis, the leader of the Assembly; but, even on a point of order, Chalmers was equal to him, and in a division, he carried his motion. At the close of the Assembly, on the invitation of Mr. Leonard Horner, he took part in a meeting in Edinburgh on behalf of a then infant institution – the School of Arts. The motion which he made on that occasion was seconded by Sir Walter Scott. This was the only occasion on which these two eminent men appeared on the same platform and were associated in the same work.

The Assembly is past, but the time of rest has not yet come. Dr. Chalmers hurries back to Glasgow. Now that he has got breathing-time, his heart returns to the great experiment which he had begun there, and an unrestrainable eagerness takes possession of him to help it on. The next six weeks are spent in incessant labour in the old field. In looking back on this period he remarked in his peculiar phraseology, 'I think that I never spent a season of more crowded occupancy.' On his way to Glasgow he took Perth, where he preached a missionary sermon on a week-day, the collection amounting to £81, 8s. In Glasgow he preached steadily in the chapel of ease, and he had the great satisfaction, though of course it was but a temporary one, of adding four hundred to the sittings let, no doubt to accommodate the many persons who were bent on hearing him during the few weeks of his stay. During these six weeks he preached ten times in the chapel, writing all the lectures, and apparently the sermons too – seven of his texts being from the Epistle to the Romans, part of the exposition afterwards published. Apart from spiritual impulse and spiritual fruit, his six weeks in Glasgow benefited the chapel to the tune of £200. In the midst of his incessant public work he contrived to write to his wife a full journal of all his proceedings, and he gave her most explicit instructions to give the children a feast of strawberries on the arrival of each letter, and to let them know that they were from him. With all his greatness and eloquence, it is amusing to find him showing that nervousness in the prospect of a speech at a public dinner which but few men have been able to overcome. 'It kept me anxious all day.' One is reminded of Sir Robert Peel, who could hardly eat anything at public dinners when a speech was forthcoming, but sat in misery, crumbling his bread. 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.'

A source of greater trouble and annoyance arose after his Glasgow visit in connection with a promise to deliver a missionary sermon at Stockton, near Manchester. After his arrival, he found that an advertisement had been issued from which it appeared that the sermon would come in as a sort of interlude in a vast musical entertainment, in which an orchestra of at least a hundred persons, supported by drums, trumpets, bassoon, organ, serpents, violins without number, violoncellos, bass viols, flutes, and hautboys would take part. Chalmers was most indignant. He felt it an affront to himself, to be stuck up like a mountebank, as if he had come to help in the entertainment of a pleasure-seeking audience. But not less did he feel it a prostitution of his office, as if the Ambassador of Heaven, dealing with men on their state before God and their need of reconciliation, were to be mixed up with such a clatter. He was on the verge of refusing to preach at all. But remembering his promise, he compromised the matter by refusing to appear except at the time when his sermon was delivered. 'I stopped in the minister's room till it was all over. Went to the pulpit, prayed, preached, retired during the time of the collection, and again prayed. Before I left my own private room, they fell too again, with most tremendous fury, and the likest thing to it which I recollect is a great military band on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.' In spite of all, the collection exceeded £400. In telling the story, as he often did to his friends, he said that they hardly let him alone even while he was preaching; 'the fellows were tuning their trombones in my very ear.'

November 1825 found him again at his work in St. Andrews, with a better prepared course, and a very numerous class. Notwithstanding the labours of the recess, no symptom of exhaustion appeared; on the contrary, he seemed to thirst for further labour, and whereas the subject of political economy had been considered to fall to the professor of moral philosophy, he intimated that in the following session he would make political economy the subject of a separate course. A numerous class was enrolled, but instead of teaching the subject by lectures, he treated it by means of a text-book. The text-book was Dr. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, on portions of which the students were examined, the professor occasionally adding explanations or little dissertations of his own, or referring to more modern books which gave the latest aspects of the subject.

It should be added that Dr. Chalmers always opened his class with prayer. This was an innovation in a class of philosophy. The prayers were short and pithy, often bearing on the subject of the preceding lecture, and the language was often felicitous, and even sublime. Of the like quality were the prayers he offered when he became a professor of divinity. Many of these will be found in the Institutes of Theology.

But at St. Andrews he was very far from confining himself to academic labours. He could not look round him without feeling that, small though the town was, it was not less in need than crowded Glasgow of efforts to dispel its spiritual darkness, and awaken young and old to the things of eternity. The place had fallen from its high estate; it was no longer like the St. Andrews of those days when, fragrant with martyr memories, it formed one of the chief centres of evangelical influence in Scotland. The first form of pastoral activity to which Dr. Chalmers betook himself was that of a Sabbath-school teacher. As soon as he had leisure after the first session, he marked out for himself a district of the town in the neighbourhood of his house, visited the families, and invited the children to attend a class of his own on the Sunday evenings. For that class he made as careful, though not as elaborate, preparations as for his students in the university. By and by it increased to rather burdensome size.

Meanwhile, another class of young persons engaged his attention, and the Sabbath school was handed over to others. It had been suggested to him that great good would result from a students' class, from gathering together, on Tuesday evenings, such students as desired to receive from him religious instruction of the same kind as they had been accustomed to receive in their fathers' houses before they came to college. The first winter of this meeting, five students came for the purpose. Chalmers instructed them and dealt with them, gave them books for Sabbath reading, examining them as to their contents, and at the same time taking a book of his own, Scripture References, as a kind of doctrinal text-book of his expositions and examinations. Next year, the number was about a dozen. In the third year, the number became so great that his dining-room was crowded with students. One of them remarked afterwards that they learned more of Christian ethics at these meetings than from all his class-room lectures on moral philosophy.

In some instances, the fruit of these meetings was very remarkable. According to the testimony of Dr. Duff, who was one of Chalmers's young men, the students of St. Andrews, previous to his coming, were a godless lot. To make a profession of piety was to incur universal derision. Nor were the divinity students much better; some of them, indeed, were more notorious than other students for impiety, immorality, and riotous revellings. Dr. Chalmers was the instrument of a great revival. In 1823-24, some of the students formed themselves into a missionary society, which held meetings next session in the room of a remarkable man, John Urquhart, one of those saintly youths whose early death puts an end to the boundless promise of their student careers. Dr. Chalmers had already become president of a missionary society, embracing different denominations. At the monthly meetings of this society, which became so large that they had soon to be held in the Town Hall, he gave addresses on missionary topics, not only communicating information, but also pressing the motives and encouragements to missionary effort, answering objections, and gathering from the reports on the state of the heathen confirmations of Scripture, and evidences of the divine origin of Christianity. A university missionary society had now become possible, and its career began in 1825-26 under more favourable conditions than could have been looked for. The blessing of God rested on it, for it furnished some of the first and noblest missionaries that the Church of Scotland sent into the foreign field. The first was the Rev. Robert Nesbit, who spent many laborious and effective years at Bombay. Before Dr. Chalmers left St. Andrews, another of his students, Mr. Adams, had begun his missionary career. In 1829, Chalmers presided at the ordination of Alexander Duff, now one of the brightest names in the record of missions. The Rev. A. Mackay and the Rev. David Ewart followed, and John Urquhart was preparing to go when illness and death arrested his career. A more beautiful or promising springtime of missionary activity could hardly be imagined. And the same course that had thus been begun at St. Andrews was also being followed in Edinburgh. On 27th December 1825, the Edinburgh University Missionary Association was founded, chiefly through the influence of John Wilson, afterwards so well known as Dr. Wilson of Bombay. Chalmers has sometimes been called a man of one idea, and in some minds the notion got hold that all his interest was in home missions, and that he looked with comparative indifference on foreign. It would be more correct to say that he was a man of all manner of ideas, but that he worked out only one idea at a time. In that large heart there was room not only for the welfare of Scotland, but of the whole world too. His identification of himself with the missionary cause, at a time when many derided it, was an act of high moral courage. So was another act, his taking sittings for his family in the dissenting chapels, that they might be nourished with evangelical food, not then to be obtained in the Established Church. Occasionally he would attend these chapels himself, both on Sundays and week-days; not disdaining the devotional services of a pious mechanic at the prayer-meeting, and deriving far more help therefrom than from the dreary ministrations either of the town church or that of the college.

In one respect Dr. Chalmers's course did not run smoothly at St. Andrews. He got into loggerheads with his colleagues on the subject of college finance. In dealing with the funds of the college, it had been the practice of the Senatus to lay aside a certain amount for general expenses, and to divide the balance as a supplemental salary among the different professors. Chalmers was not clear that this was a legitimate course, and for some years he refused to receive his share of the supplemental fund, which accordingly accumulated until it amounted to some £700. Reflecting as this refusal did, or was supposed to do, on the honesty of his colleagues, it gave him more pain than any other public duty he was ever called to perform. After he had left St. Andrews, the university commissioners having looked into the matter, recorded it as their judgment that there was no good reason why he should not accept of the sum standing at his credit; and as Dr. Chalmers had desired only that the matter should be settled by competent authority, he accepted the money. But nothing could exceed his surprise and indignation when he found, in the published report of the commissioners in 1831, a statement that 'the principal and professors appear to have made these appropriations without any authority.' In a letter addressed to the commissioners, and published in 1832, after quoting their judgment in his own case, he said he could not divine what they really thought of these appropriations – whether they were honest or fraudulent. 'If you think them wrong, how is it that to me you have called the evil good? If right, how is it that to your Sovereign you have called the good evil?'

During his five years' incumbency in St. Andrews, he issued two volumes from the press. The first was the third and concluding volume of The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. Among the topics embraced in this volume were the Poor-Laws and the Combination-Laws. The particular aspect of the Poor-Laws with which he dealt, and which he most thoroughly condemned, was the application of the poor-rates, as in England, to supplement the wages of ill-paid labourers. Though kindly meant, this arrangement, he held, was an invasion of the relation between master and men so ruinous, and involved a bounty to the masters so unjust, that no toleration ought to be found for it. This was also the general opinion; and the practice was discontinued by law. According to Dr. Chalmers's biographer, his exposure of the practice formed a powerful contribution towards its removal.

In regard to the Combination-Laws, which imposed severe and stringent penalties on any united movements of workmen for increasing their wages, a bill for repealing them had been introduced and carried by Mr. Huskisson, whose efforts to free industry from the fetters of Protection were hailed by Dr. Chalmers with great delight. Unfortunately, the carrying of this measure into law was accompanied by certain deplorable excesses on the part of some classes of workmen, who did not understand how to use their new-found liberty. Dr. Chalmers strongly upheld the righteousness of the repeal of the old laws, mainly on the ground that we ought not to manufacture crime out of acts (such as workmen's combinations) which the natural conscience does not condemn. But with equal firmness he denounced any interference with the freedom of labour, especially when men on strike coerced and persecuted those that might be willing to work. The experience of seventy years has not materially changed the position. 'Strike, if you please,' is the voice of reason and justice to workmen; 'but leave those who do not concur with you at perfect freedom to do as they please.'

The other publication of this period was a book on Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments. It was devoted chiefly to the case of the Scottish universities. Among the reforms which he advocated, a foremost place was given to the raising of the standard of scholarship for those joining the university. Though apparently disregarded at the time, it was seen, whenever serious attention began to be given to the state of our universities, that this was indeed the most important change to begin with. What Dr. Chalmers proposed was, that an entrance examination should be instituted, and that a gymnasium, or, as we now call it, a secondary school, should be attached to each of the universities, for instruction that would qualify for the entrance examination. Modern opinion has so far transcended the modest proposal of Chalmers, that instead of a preparatory school in each university seat, the demand is now for adequate secondary schools scattered over all the land.

It was a very congenial thing for Chalmers to advocate in this way the elevation and ample equipment of our universities. His old love of science and general culture had never died in him, although he had learned to give them a secondary place, and to feel profoundly that the first duty and the chief interest of man concerned his relation to the great God, without whom nothing could be great, nothing strong. But the spirit of Chalmers was stirred within him as often as he thought of the great leaders of science, and their splendid achievements in astronomy and in other departments. The very name of Newton sent a thrill through every fibre of his being, and roused the desire to follow in his steps, as well as to see every youth around him inspired by his spirit, and by all that was noble in his example. Speaking of the universities of England, which were more successful than the Scottish in cultivating particular branches, but gave less complete attention to learning as a whole, he said, 'We cannot conclude this passing notice of the universities of England without the mention of how much they are ennobled by those great master spirits – those men of might and high achievement – the Newtons, and the Miltons, and the Drydens, and the Barrows, and the Addisons, and the Butlers, and the Clarkes, and the Stillingfleets, and the Ushers, and the Foxes, and the Pitts and Johnsons, who within their attic retreats received that first awakening which afterwards expanded into the aspirations and triumphs of loftiest genius. This is the true heraldry of colleges. Their family honour is built on the prowess of sons, not the greatness of ancestors.'

It remains for us to take a glance at some of the more miscellaneous engagements of Chalmers during this period, including his journeys, his speeches in public, the new friendships he formed, his spiritual progress, and his letters to his family and friends.

In the autumn of 1826, after his hard work in Glasgow, Dr. Chalmers treated himself to the rare luxury of a ramble in the south of Scotland. The character of the man was singularly shown in the objects that attracted him as he proceeded from place to place. In the neighbourhood of Kelso, he stopped his gig opposite Roxburgh Castle, and running up to it, feasted his eyes, even in the midst of rain, on an old-remembered scene – 'one of the most glorious panoramas I ever beheld, where the blended beauties of Teviot and Tweed were concentred upon the environs of Kelso and the Palace of Fleurs, with the seats and plantations of other grandees.' But it was places with an historical association that charmed him most. The church of Anwoth, Samuel Rutherford's early home, greatly delighted him. The church, which was like that of Kilmany, but smaller, still remained, but a new one was in course of erection; the manse had just been pulled down. Sir Walter Scott could not have more emphatically denounced such Gothicism, and the soul of Chalmers sympathised deeply with some of the masons that had refused to perpetrate the barbaric act, and had been dismissed from their occupation in consequence. To see Rutherford's 'witnesses,' he went up among the hills and inspected the stones which he once called to witness against some of his parishioners who were indulging in amusement on the Sunday. Not less enthusiastic was he at Kirkmabreck, where Dr. Thomas Brown, the son of the minister, was buried. At Dumfries he visited Mrs. Burns, the widow of the poet, with whom he had a pleasant conversation, and whom he was pleased to see so comfortable. Among the gentlemen whose acquaintance he made was Mr. Cunninghame of Lainshaw, a well-known writer on prophecy, and Mr. Buchan of Kelloe, in Berwickshire, whose house was 'just delicious.' When the panorama of Berwickshire suddenly burst on him, he was overwhelmed. Perhaps what strikes one most in his account of this and other journeys is his readiness to be pleased, his power of finding enjoyment in everything. There is not a single cynical remark in all his narrative, not a flout, nor a grumble, nor a bitter word; he is always happy.

In May 1827 he went to London to open the new church of Mr. Irving in Regent Square. This took place on a Friday; the prayer which Mr. Irving offered was forty minutes in length, and it was an hour and a half ere Chalmers was allowed to begin. He preached again on the Sunday, the crowd comprising Mr. Peel, Lord Bexley, Lord Farnham, Lord Mandeville, Mr. Coleridge, and many other notables. At this time he made the acquaintance of Mr. Coleridge, with whom he spent three hours at the Gillmans' house in Highgate; but while he marvelled at the flow of conversation, he said he could only catch occasional glimpses of what he would be at. He had a pleasant talk in the House of Commons with Mr. Peel, who showed a great interest in his views on pauperism, the college commission, and likewise in his sermons, all of which he said he had read. He had some intercourse with Macaulay, and heard Brougham; saw also Sir Francis Burdett (father of Lady Burdett-Coutts), a conspicuous radical politician of the day.

Among home friends, Chalmers remained as simple, unsophisticated, and kindly as before. 'Of all men,' said Mrs. Grant of Laggan at this time, 'he is the most modest, and speaks with undisguised gentleness and liberality of those who differ from him in opinion. Every word he says has the stamp of genius; yet the calmness, ease, and simplicity of his conversation is such, that to ordinary minds he might appear an ordinary man… He is always powerful, always gentle, and always seemed quite unconscious of his own superiority.' About the same time, Mrs. Grant received a visit from her friend, Sir Walter Scott, and it is interesting to observe the resemblance she saw between the two men. 'His good-nature, good-humour, and simplicity are truly charming. You never once think of his superiority, because it is evident he does not think of it himself. He, too, confirmed the maxim that true genius is ever modest and careless.'

In the autumn of the same year he paid his first visit to Ireland. He had been asked to preach, and crowds as usual thronged to hear him. He was greatly interested in the Giant's Causeway and the surrounding scenery, and seems to have relished the new aspect of character which Ireland furnished. But the place which had the deepest interest for him was Gracehill, a Moravian settlement, where his wife had been educated, and in the cemetery of which was the tomb of her mother. To be on the spot where his mother-in-law, whom he had never seen, departed this life; to converse with the physician that had attended her in her last hours; and to walk through the school-house where his wife had received her education, thrilled his susceptible nature; it was with reluctance that he tore himself from these 'bowers of sacredness.' We can hardly conceive a warmer or more delicate tribute to his wife, or a clearer evidence of his affection for her and her family.

We have already adverted to some of his appearances in the General Assembly, but to these we must now add a remarkable pleading, in 1828, in favour of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The royal assent had just been given to a bill repealing these Acts, but so vital did the matter appear to Dr. Chalmers, that he proposed that the Assembly should present a humble Address to his Majesty, expressing its satisfaction that it was no longer requisite to take the sacrament as a qualification for civil office. In his speech he compared the old law, viewed as a buttress to the Established Church, to those wooden props which one sometimes sees leaning obliquely against the walls of a house, – creating the impression that when a house needs such props, it is one of the craziest in the street. Yet he was careful to affirm his high regard for an established church in itself, apart from such miserable buttresses. His motion was lost by 123 votes to 77, but in spirit the Assembly agreed with him.

As he was making his speech, his eye met that of Edward Irving, who was sitting opposite him, and who was wild on the opposite side. Irving was then delivering lectures on prophecy in Edinburgh to enormous audiences. Already he was manifesting symptoms of that disordered judgment which ultimately carried him so far astray, and Chalmers was sorely troubled.

As to his dealings with his own family, the same warmth of heart continued to show itself toward them which his earlier years had manifested. When his sister Isobel, next younger to himself, was dying, in the middle of his first session at St. Andrews (January 1824), he charged himself with her case as if it were his chief interest, and for a twelve-month wrote letter after letter to her, pressing on her with equal tenderness and earnestness all that bore on her spiritual welfare. He was greatly cheered to learn that she was full of peace and joy in believing, and able to sustain with cheerful patience the sore pains that accompanied her illness. Her life closed with the closing year, and with her declaration that Jesus was fulfilling to her His latest promise, for He was now coming to receive her to Himself.