Thomas Chalmers

Whatever we may think of his outlet from the insoluble problem of political economy, we must recognise with admiration his overwhelming sense of the value of this Christian education and training with a view to the highest welfare of mankind. This indeed was the reigning idea of Chalmers, pursued steadily throughout his whole life, alike in his sermons, his books, his scientific researches, his practical schemes, his intercourse with his fellows, and, we may add, his communion with his God. If ever a life had unity, it was that of Chalmers. To get men impregnated with the spirit of Christ, and alive to the lessons of His Gospel was, one way or other, his continual aim. Not only did he strive to bring individual men into contact with Christ, so that they should receive salvation, and partake of spiritual life, but he desired that all the influences that played on society should be such as to encourage the Christian spirit and Christian habits. National education without Christianity was a blunder not to be thought of. The rulers of the state ought to encourage the church as the highest instrument of good to the people. The division of the country into parishes and districts was important as securing a more efficient ministration of Christianity to every section of the community. A rate-supported system of relief to the poor was atrocious, because it hindered the exercise of Christian habits, it deadened the very charity which it professed to promote. Interference with the spiritual function of the Christian church was an evil not to be endured; it was putting chains on the great instrument of the world's emancipation; it was arresting the one great force through which all things were to be made new. Daily, and almost hourly, it was the prayer of Chalmers that he might be guided from above in all his efforts to bring individuals and the community alike under Christian influence and Christian habits. And it was the practice of these private devotions that brought to him the wisdom, the strength, and the patience with which he laboured at the utmost stretch of his powers, and without intermission, for the Christian good of his country.

But we must now glance at some of his labours in connection with the church during the period now under review. In 1832 we find him occupying the chair of the General Assembly, and signalising his year of office by bringing about, in conjunction with Lord Belhaven, the Lord High Commissioner, the abolition of a practice of Sabbath dinners and Sabbath breakfasts that had hitherto prevailed. Next year, as a member of Assembly, he introduced the celebrated measure known as the Veto, but without success, his proposal being rejected by a majority of twelve. As the evangelical revival advanced, dissatisfaction with the law of patronage advanced apace. When the Reform Act came into operation, it was felt to be but reasonable that as the voice of the people was now to be heard in the choice of their rulers, it ought to be heard likewise in the choice of their ministers. To give them this voice was the object of the veto law. Even under the law of patronage there was a provision by which the presentee must have a 'call' from the people; but it had never been settled what this call meant, and in practice it had degenerated into a mere form. It was thought by some that it would have been wiser for the church to define the call; but the 'veto' was preferred, because it was held to imply a smaller measure of change. It made it the law of the church that if a majority of male heads of families, being communicants, objected to the settlement of a presentee as their minister, the presbytery were not to take him on trial for ordination. It appeared to Dr. Chalmers that it would have been well for the church before passing this law to have the authority of the Legislature in her support, but he was assured by lawyers of the highest eminence, including the law officers of the Crown, that there could not be a doubt as to the legal right of the church to enact this measure. Next year it was again brought forward, the motion in its favour being made by the first Lord Moncreiff. On this occasion it was carried, and became the law of the church; but events showed that it would have been well had the advice of Chalmers been followed before it was enacted; for it was on the very question of the competency of the church, as by law established, to enact it that the great conflict arose which, ten years after, rent the church in two.

It was impossible for Dr. Chalmers to be long in Edinburgh without having his attention turned to the religious wants of the people there. In the course of a local controversy, carried on with much bitterness, regarding the 'Annuity Tax' – an unpopular impost for defraying the salaries of the city ministers – a proposal had been made to abolish collegiate charges, and thus reduce the number of ministers from eighteen to thirteen. Chalmers had strongly protested against the proposal, and claimed in the interest of the city that the ministers set free from collegiate charges should be intrusted with new parishes, wherever additional churches were needed. Under the Town Council, things had been so managed that the incomes of the clergy had sunk to £400 a year; and the idea of new charges was unpopular, because the Council would have had to provide churches; this opposition grieved Chalmers, and the only consideration that comforted him (as he wrote to a friend) was the increased readiness of the friends of the church to contribute for its extension. For himself, he had hitherto been working in the Cowgate, in the hope that a new parochial charge would be set up for that district. But at the time (1834), the Town Council had refused to make the necessary arrangements for that purpose, although a few years later, the parish of St. John's was erected, and Dr. Guthrie appointed to it. Meanwhile, Dr. Chalmers resolved to transfer his attention to another needy and neglected district – the suburban village of Dean, or Water of Leith. He had good hopes that he would be able to erect a parochial economy there. The Assembly of that year had appointed him convener of a committee for church accommodation; and in the summer, besides encouraging local efforts, he tried to collect a central fund, for which in July he had made a beginning, having raised the sum of £1677, 10s. He had begun, as he said, with the higher kinds of game – dukes and marquises, but by and by he would come down to parochial associations and subscriptions of a penny a week. He believed that the 'ditchers' of the country properly cultivated might be found as productive as the 'dukes.' Anyhow, the moral influence would be greater, because every man that gave a penny a week would be sure to feel a lively interest in the cause.

And this was the beginning of that great scheme of church extension which for several years engrossed his energies, as it proved also the forerunner of his Free Church Sustentation Fund, which has proved such a monument of his financial sagacity and skill.

From Glasgow an important proposal had been made by his friend and former coadjutor, Mr. William Collins, that steps should be taken at once to add twenty churches to the Established Church. Thirteen years before, Chalmers had made the same proposal, but it had been scouted as visionary. Evidently his influence had been telling on the community. It was no longer a devout imagination. Mr. Collins and his friends resolved to take no steps in the way of building, till £20,000 should be subscribed. In the month of October that amount was realised. The success of this local effort gave a great impulse to the general scheme.

The proposal under the general scheme was, that the churches should be erected from voluntary contributions, but that the Government should grant a small endowment to each congregation towards its annual expenses. To promote this part of the scheme, a deputation was sent to London, to solicit the support of the Prime Minister and other influential members of the Government. At first it seemed as if Lord Melbourne and his cabinet would cordially agree to the proposal, but vehement opposition being offered to it by the dissenters, a change soon came over the spirit of their dream. Unwilling to offend an important section of their supporters in Scotland, they resolved, as a sort of compromise, to appoint a commission that should go over the country, take evidence as to the amount of the existing provision for the religious wants of the people, and report the results from time to time. It was a great disappointment to Dr. Chalmers that in this way a long delay would have to take place, and still more that the personnel of the commission showed a tendency unfavourable to the scheme. The commission buckled to their work, and at intervals issued reports which in the main bore out the contention of Dr. Chalmers. Then it was announced that a measure would be introduced; by and by it was said that that measure was abandoned. Dr. Chalmers and his friends were more favourably received by Sir Robert Peel and other leading Conservatives; but as they were not in power at the time nothing was done. The vacillating conduct of the Whig Government made no favourable impression on Chalmers: among his friends he was ready enough to proclaim, in his Fifeshire dialect, 'I have a moral loathing of thae Whugs.'

But if there was disappointment from the Government, there was extraordinary encouragement from the people. In 1838 he was able to announce to the General Assembly, as the fruit of four years' labour, that there had been added to the Establishment nearly two hundred churches, and that upwards of £200,000 had been contributed for their erection. It was a result wholly unprecedented, and on all hands was regarded with amazement, and as a most wonderful testimony to the eloquence and energy with which he had advocated the cause. Worn out, and much in need of rest though he felt himself to be, he was induced to remain for some time longer at the head of the committee, and among other labours he added that of a tour over the whole country, in which he advocated his plan with his usual eloquence. But, in the Forties, the shadow of the conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical courts had fallen on the Extension Scheme, and it began to languish. In the course of his convenership the progress of the undertaking had been as follows: —

In 1835, 62 churches, £65,620 1 11-¾

In 1836, 26 " 32,359 12 6-¾

In 1837, 67 " 59,311 6 0

In 1838, 32 " 41,183 1 1-¾

In 1839, 14 " 52,959 14 14-¾

In 1840, 15 " 36,055 8 8-¾

In 1841, 6 " 18,252 6 6

–

Total, 222 " £305,741 11 3-½

Unhappily, a painful controversy arose among the home-churches out of the effort to obtain a national endowment for the new parishes. Nonconformists, for the most part, viewed the application with great dislike, and opposed it tooth and nail. It was bad enough, in their view, that a particular church should be maintained from the public funds, and enjoy peculiar social privileges; but it was not to be borne that it should receive a further grant of public money, of which, of course, nonconformists would have to pay their share. The right way to support ministers, according to the New Testament, was by the voluntary contributions of the people. This, moreover, was a benefit to the people themselves; it led them to take a greater interest in their church, and to attach more value to its ministrations. Thus it happened that every church-extension meeting was more or less an anti-voluntary meeting, the speakers who pled for the scheme vehemently upholding the principle of an establishment. Of the younger men who fought on this ground with Chalmers, none was more strenuous than the late Dr. Guthrie. But Guthrie lived to change his view; and in an autobiographical fragment he tells us, that even when he was denouncing the voluntary system, in his secret heart he honoured, and even envied, the men whose living was derived solely from the freewill offerings of their people.

The great objection of Chalmers to the voluntary system was that it was inadequate. He held it incapable of making provision for the wants of a whole community, and especially incapable of those aggressive efforts that were needed for bringing in the masses who had fallen from the profession of religion. In planting churches, voluntaryism acted on the principle of attraction, aiming mainly at drawing in those who were more or less in sympathy with itself, and disposed to accept its ministrations. The theory of an established church, on the other hand, demanded a provision for the whole of the population, and supplied a ministry whose duty was to look after all the people, and ply them with the offers and the injunctions of Christianity. It was to make the practice and theory of the church in some degree to correspond that he had undertaken and prosecuted his great church-extension movement.

For the nonconformists themselves he always cherished a profound regard, and a grateful sense of the invaluable service they had rendered to the country when the Gospel was seldom preached elsewhere. Of this he had given signal proof when he took sittings in a congregational chapel for his family at St. Andrews. Nothing could have been further from his desire than to drive nonconformists into a corner, or make them feel that they stood in the way of his more comprehensive enterprise. Yet many of them did feel, and could hardly fail to feel, that they were obstacles to the working of a complete territorial scheme. They were like squatters or interlopers in a territory allocated and divided among regular settlers. Unconsciously Dr. Chalmers stimulated a feeling among the Established clergy that they, and they only, were the rightful spiritual guides of the people; a spirit of which he himself was wholly destitute, but which was highly agreeable to human nature, and in many cases rears its arrogant head at the present day.

It was a favourite argument of the voluntaries that an established church could not be a free church; it was subject to the authority of the state, and could not be free, as the nonconformists were, to obey its divine Head in all things. This position Chalmers and his friends resolutely denied. The alliance between church and state was an alliance between two independent powers, each of which was supreme in its own department. In forming a connection with the state, the church did not surrender one particle of its independence; it remained as free as ever to follow the guidance of its divine Head in every point where He had expressed His will. Nay, this freedom was expressly secured by the statutes of the realm. It knew to its cost how eager the rulers of the country had often been to deprive it of its freedom, and at every important crisis of its history, when it renewed or revised its alliance with the state, it had taken care that its freedom should be expressly conceded. It was while the voluntary controversy was at its height that the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical courts became acute, for this very question, the independence and freedom of the church, was the great bone of contention. When the decisions of the Court of Session and the House of Lords were given, it became only too apparent that, in the judgment of the civil courts, the church did not possess the independence it had claimed. This was a dreadful, a shattering blow to Dr. Chalmers, and when it was authoritatively declared, notwithstanding all his intense partiality for an established church, he at once severed his alliance with the state. The main ground on which he acted was, that a church enthralled to the state could never be that beneficent instrument, that powerful moral agent, for which he valued it, – could never be the means of training the people in those holy ways, those high moral and spiritual habits, on which their highest welfare depended.

It was partly in order to advance his church-extension scheme, but more especially to maintain the true theory of a church establishment, and the church's independence in its union with the state, that he delivered in the Hanover Square Rooms, London, in April and May 1838, that series of lectures on the 'Establishment and Extension of National Churches' which raised his fame as an orator to its very highest pitch. 'Nothing,' wrote the late Dr. Begg, who accompanied him, 'could exceed the enthusiasm which prevailed in London. The great city seemed stirred to its very depths.' At the fourth and fifth lectures, an American clergyman who was present wrote that he found the room densely packed long before the hour, and evidently for the most part by the higher classes. 'Dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, baronets, bishops, and members of Parliament were to be seen in every direction. After considerable delay and impatient waiting, the great charmer made his entrance, and was welcomed with clappings and shouts of applause that grew more and more intense till the noise became almost deafening.' 'The concluding lecture,' says Dr. Hanna, 'was graced by the presence of nine prelates of the Church of England. The tide that had been rising and swelling each successive day now burst all bounds. Carried away by the impassioned utterance of the speaker, long ere the close of some of his finest passages was reached, the voice of the lecturer was drowned in the applause, the audience rising from their seats, waving their hats above their heads, and breaking out into tumultuous approbation.'

An event that somewhat disturbed the line of Dr. Chalmers's argument for the freedom of the church had taken place just before he left Edinburgh. On the 8th March 1838, the Court of Session, in giving judgment on the famous Auchterarder case, found the veto law of the church to be illegal and ultra vires, and began to take steps for the reversal of all that the church had done in connection with it. The judgment had not become final, for it was subject to appeal to the House of Lords, and in his lectures Dr. Chalmers made no reference to it. But when, in 1839, the House of Lords affirmed the decision of the lower court, and when Lords Brougham and Cottenham, in expressing their views, scouted alike the principle of the veto and of the independence of the church (although Lord Brougham had at one time strongly commended the veto), Dr. Chalmers made a full statement of his views in the General Assembly. Before that time he had been disposed to think that if the judgment of the Court of Session should be affirmed by the Lords, the best course for the church would be to give up the veto, reserving power to judge of each case by itself, and act accordingly.

In such a case as that of Auchterarder, for example, where the presentee had been vetoed by 287 out of 300 male heads of families and called only by two, the presbytery might have decided that in these circumstances the call was really no call, and therefore the presentee could not be taken on trial. But, according to the views expressed by the judges, this course would have been as illegal as the veto itself. Dr. Chalmers therefore moved that, while the Assembly would make no claim to the temporalities of Auchterarder, they would still maintain the principle that no minister be intruded on an opposing congregation, and that a committee be appointed to confer with the Government, in order to prevent any further collision between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. A magnificent speech of three hours was delivered in support of this motion, which, after a long discussion, was carried by a majority of forty-nine. It has been remarked, that never was the eloquence of Chalmers more Demosthenic than in his orations for the freedom of the church. And this intense regard for her freedom was no new notion of his: so far back as 1814, in a speech in the Assembly on the plurality question, he had maintained that 'the church had power to reject a presentee for any reason, or for no reason at all.' To Chalmers, the enforced intrusion of unacceptable presentees was not the only, perhaps not even the chief, interference with the liberty of the church. When it was decided that the church had no power to erect new parishes or to give their ministers the usual status of her clergymen; and, likewise, that she had no power to readmit into her pale any of those who in former years had left it, – cases in which no shadow of temporal interest was involved – it seemed to him that such restrictions on her liberty were not only intolerable, but that they tended completely to shatter her efficiency.

Of the four years of long and weary negotiation that followed the passing of this resolution, we have no space to write at any length. Alongside of negotiations with Government there ran a stream of decisions both by the civil and church courts which greatly complicated the situation. New cases of intrusion occurred, pre-eminent among which was the case of Marnoch, where the presentee was vetoed by 261 out of 300 male heads of families, and had the name of but a single parishioner attached to his call. For insisting on his settlement, the seven members of presbytery who took this course were first suspended and then deposed.

As to negotiations with Government, a considerable share of the interviews and correspondence fell to Dr. Chalmers. With Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, he did not hit it off. On a former occasion, as Chalmers himself told Dr. Gordon, when his lordship heard of a deputation from the Scottish church, he expressed a hope 'that that d – d fellow Chalmers was not among them.' Unable to make anything of the Whigs, Chalmers and his friends now turned to the Tories, who at one time seemed friendly, but with them, too, negotiations finally broke off. In these negotiations there was a painful episode between Dr. Chalmers and Lord Aberdeen. A bill introduced by his lordship did not come up to what Chalmers understood him to have promised, and he was unable to support it. Lord Aberdeen complained bitterly, and in the House of Lords accused the Non-intrusion Committee of giving an unscrupulous report of their conversations with him, and he believed they had behaved in the same way to the Government. For Dr. Chalmers he had a special gibe. 'A reverend gentleman, a great leader in the General Assembly, having brought the church into a state of jeopardy and peril, had left it to find its way out of the difficulty as well as it could.' Evidently these were the words of a man who had lost his temper, and forgot what was due in courtesy, to say nothing of charity, to absent men. Unfortunately his son and biographer, Sir Arthur Gordon, has made the matter worse by a vulgar charge against Dr. Chalmers, that he was overborne by the violent men in the non-intrusion committee, and, being afraid of losing his leadership, succumbed to them, and had not the moral courage to avow his change of opinion. Dr. Chalmers was not in the habit of succumbing to any one, for no one stood more independently on his own judgment; and, as to trimming and shuffling, his whole life showed him to be incapable of such conduct. The event proved who was in the right; Lord Aberdeen afterwards carried his bill, which proved a miserable failure. As Dr. Donald Fraser has remarked, it had to be given up as a nuisance. And then, under a Conservative Government, came the abolition of patronage!3

Chalmers had now had experience of both the great political parties, and with equally disappointing results. His grand project of a church commensurate with the necessities of the country (so far as these were not provided for by the nonconformists) was nearly as far off as ever. But his experience in raising money for church extension gave him hope in another direction. When he knocked at the door of the Whigs on behalf of church extension he was refused. When he knocked at the door of the Tories, he found that they might have endowed the church, but they would have enslaved her. They viewed the church 'as an engine of state, not as an instrument of usefulness.' He was now about to knock at the door of the people; and he cherished no little expectation that through them he would yet succeed in his scheme of making Scotland a spiritual garden.

Dr. Chalmers concurred cordially with the measures taken by the church to resist, or at least protest against, the encroachments of the civil courts. He approved of the Claim of Right as affirmed by the Assembly in May 1842. He preached the opening sermon at a convocation of ministers in November 1842, and was a leading counsellor at that remarkable gathering where from four to five hundred ministers pledged themselves to leave the Establishment if no measure of relief were passed by the Legislature. His view, as to the duty of the church, when no such measure of relief was provided, was as clear as day. Amid the numberless perplexities that for years past had caused such anxious consultations and fears lest a wrong step should be taken, he found it an unspeakable relief that the path of duty in the last and most important step of all was so clear. And so, on the famous 18th of May 1843, Dr. Chalmers was at the side of the Moderator, who happened to be his own colleague in the university, Dr. Welsh; the names of both were subscribed to the Protest that was laid on the table of the Assembly; and when Tanfield was reached, and a General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland was constituted, its first act was to call to its chair the man whose reputation throughout the Christian world was by far the highest, and whose influence in bringing about the Disruption had been by far the greatest. Regarding that Assembly, Chalmers wrote to his sister, 'Never was there a happier Assembly, with a happier collection of faces, than in our Free Church, with consciences disburdened, and casting themselves without care and with all the confidence of children on the Providence of that God who never forsakes the families of the faithful.'