Thomas Chalmers

All must see, whatever their own opinion of the case, that it could only have been considerations of extraordinary force that constrained Dr. Chalmers to forgo that connection with the state which he had so long held to be indispensable for the successful work of the church, and to cast her on the voluntary offerings of the people. From the hour when the noble ambition to turn Scotland into a spiritual garden first filled his soul, the aid of the state had appeared a sine quct, non to the accomplishment of this great object. What then induced him to part with it? Only because he was profoundly convinced that the subjection which the civil courts demanded would prove fatal to its spiritual life and power, fatal to its spirit of enterprise and activity, fatal to that largeness of heart and confidence of success which were necessary for great undertakings, and fatal to its own character as a consistent and fearless witness for the supremacy of the church's head. If it should flinch in its hour of trial, it deserved to be flung aside as a dishonoured and useless thing. If the decisions of the Court of Session and the House of Lords had been less extravagant, if they had even left to the church a vestige of power to give effect to the voice of the people in the settlement of ministers, and in the other matters involved, Chalmers would still have clung to the connection of church and state. It was simply the extravagance of the claims of the civil courts to supreme jurisdiction that placed Chalmers among the leaders of the Disruption, for he did not take the strong view that some of the other leaders took of the divine right of the question. Whether he was sanguine enough to hope that the Free Church disestablished would be able to do for Scotland all that might have been done by a free Established Church, he certainly believed that, in the circumstances, the Free Church was by far the more likely body to grapple with the enterprise that had ever floated before him. Writing to Sir George Sinclair in 1841, he said, 'Looking to the Christian interests of Scotland, I believe that more good could be done by the instrumentality of a disendowed church than by an established church exposed to such interferences as those of the Court of Session during the last few years.' And, under this belief, what remained of his life was devoted to the building up and strengthening of the Free Church, in the earnest hope that much of the blessing for which he had longed and worked and prayed so intensely would in this way be realised for his country.

From the heated atmosphere of public controversy we make a pleasant transition when we accompany Chalmers on the visits he paid from time to time to London and other places, and when we sit by him in the privacy of his home. We see something of the spontaneous outflow of both mind and heart; we are charmed with his genuine humanity, his interest in life, his humour and simplicity, and, in his devotional hours, with his profound humility and intense aspiration after holiness. He was not much of a traveller, and he lost not a little thereby. All that he ever saw of the Continent was Paris and its environs. Had it been his lot to gaze on the sublimities of the Alps; had he looked on the city of the seven hills, and wandered by the Po and the Tiber; had he pursued his way to Egypt and the East, and familiarised himself with those objects that bore, in his own phrase, so much of the 'hoar of antiquity'; had he visited Berlin, and Leipsic, and Halle, and Tübingen, and become familiar with the working of the German mind, he would have experienced new developments of soul and spirit, and cut off all ground for the estimate of Carlyle that he was a man of narrow culture. It is remarkable that the United States seem never to have come within his horizon till about the very end. But when he did travel, no man could have enjoyed travelling more, whether his attention was turned to the objects of nature or of art, or whether he regaled himself with the society of new and interesting friends.

With a loyal and lively remembrance of his family, he continued the habit of writing journal-letters to his wife and daughters, giving the fullest details of all that he saw and heard. Usually his journeys to London were occasioned by church business, and on these occasions he had little to say except of any interesting persons that he met. But as he came in contact with not a few of the greatest celebrities of the age, and invariably received much attention from them, these brief notices are very interesting. Sometimes he would quite captivate an Englishman, and lay the foundation of a lifelong intimacy and correspondence. With all the members of the Earlham family that he met (the Gurneys) he was greatly taken; but one of them, Joseph John Gurney, became so attached to him, and so delighted with his conversation and character, that we might almost apply to him the language of Scripture on the attachment of Jonathan to David. The Chalmeriana of Mr. Gurney remind us of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Quaker though Gurney was, there was but one subject on which there was any serious difference of opinion between them – the desirableness of a connection between church and state. Gurney had given no little study to the 'evidences,' and his views corresponded to those of Chalmers. Of the gifts and mental power of Chalmers he had the most exalted opinion; all the more was he struck with his remarkable humility, his entire freedom from the airs of a great man.

Another new acquaintance with whom he was greatly charmed was the Rev. Charles Bridges, of Old Newton, Suffolk, the author of The Christian Ministry and the Exposition of the 119th Psalm. Of his visit to his house he said: 'The breath of heaven is here; without, a scene of beauty that to the eye of sense is altogether delicious, and within, a sanctuary of love and holiness… I never witnessed such closeness and efficiency of pastoral work as he exemplified in his addresses to the mothers of families. He makes a real business both of the Christianity of his own soul and the Christianity of his family and parish, watching over the souls of all as one who must give an account.' It was the very singular quality of Chalmers, that while he could hold kindred fellowship with so many kinds of men, it was with the holiest and most devoted of God's servants that he found himself in closest sympathy. He could find points of contact with Sir James Mackintosh on ethics, with Malthus on the law of population, with Daniel O'Connell on the Irish poor-law, or with Dr. Whewell on physics, because he had a genuine interest in all their pursuits, and considered that they all had a bearing on the welfare of man. But such pursuits were but outworks: the citadel itself was under charge of men like Mr. Bridges. Their specialty was to deal with the very essence and marrow of truth, and especially that great redemptive scheme by which alone the world could be truly blessed; they lived under the shadow of the tree of life, whose leaves were for the healing of the nations.

It was later in life (1845) that he made the acquaintance of Professor Tholuck of Halle; but, though both were old men, there was all the warmth and joyousness of youth in their short fellowship. Dr. Rutherfurd Russell, in whose house he met Tholuck, related that 'he seated himself on a low chair close to the learned German, and listened with an air of genuine docility to all he said, throwing in a characteristic observation now and then, always, however, in the way of encouragement, never of contradiction… Tholuck turned to his host, and said, in German, that he had never seen so beautiful an old man… The result of the interview was an amount of mutual confidence and esteem, as deep and sincere as it was mutual… The day before Tholuck's departure, Dr. Chalmers called upon him, and found him at his midday repast. He sat with him only for a few minutes and said little, but looked at him steadily, with an expression of constant interest and affection. He rose to take leave, and, instead of taking him by the hand, he threw his arms round his neck and kissed him, while "God bless you, my dear friend!" broke with apparent difficulty from his overcharged heart. After he was gone, it was noticed that a tear had gathered in the eye of him who had received the apostolic benediction and seal of brotherhood from one he loved and venerated so much. His only observation was a half-muttered, half-spoken, Eben ein Kuss– even a kiss.'

The visits to London were not always on controversial business. On the accession of William IV. in 1830, he formed one of a deputation from the Church of Scotland appointed to present a congratulatory address. He saw many public men, and was introduced to a few. His description of Talleyrand, then French ambassador, is graphic: 'I gazed with much interest on the old shrivelled face, and thought I could see there the lines of deep reflection and lofty talent. His moral physiognomy, however, is a downright blank.' His letter to his family, giving an account of the presentation, is full of little touches, showing, among other things, how well he appreciated the incidents that are specially interesting to the female mind. Far from desiring to magnify his own importance, he dwells in a humorous way on the defects of his toilet. 'My Geneva gown did not lap so close as I would have liked, so that I was twice as thick as I should be, and it must have been palpable to every eye at the first glance that I was the biggest man there – and that, though I took all care to keep my coat unbuttoned and my gown quite open. However, let not mamma be alarmed, for I made a most reputable appearance, and was treated with the utmost attention.'

After being presented to the King, the deputation paid their respects to Queen Adelaide. When she ascended the throne, 'the most beautiful living sight,' says the Doctor, 'I ever beheld burst upon our delighted gaze. The Queen, with twelve maids of honour, in a perfect spangle of gold and diamonds, entered the room. I am sorry I cannot go over in detail the particulars of their dresses; only that their lofty plumes upon their heads and their long sweeping trains upon the floor had a very magnificent effect… On each side the throne were maids of honour, officers of state, the Lord Chancellor, a vast number of military gentlemen, and, among the rest, the Duke of Wellington.'

In 1837, on the accession of Queen Victoria, he was intrusted with an address from the University of Edinburgh, which, he tells us, after kissing her hand, he forgot to present till he was checked by one of the lords-in-waiting, when he turned and put it into her Majesty's hand. His opinion of the young Queen is interesting to us, after sixty years' acquaintance with our Sovereign: 'A most interesting, girlish sensibility to the realities of her situation, with sufficient self-command, but, withal, simple, timid, tremulous, and agitated, that rendered her, to me, far more interesting, and awoke a more feeling and fervent loyalty in my heart than could have been done by any other exhibition.'

In the summer of 1833, after four years of almost incessant labour, he treated himself to a two-months' holiday, in pursuance of an old ambition which he had fondly cherished to visit all the cathedrals of England, and survey the country round them from the top of their towers. There was hardly one of the cathedrals that did not in some way excite his admiration. Canterbury and Ely seem to have come in for a special share. Though black and rusty with age, Canterbury, with its tower between two hundred and three hundred feet high, and a fabric studded with massy buttresses of high-wrought Gothic, was a splendid structure. 'But my admiration, though high, was greatly heightened on seeing the interior, which is the most perfectly beautiful of all I can recollect, consisting as it does of a stately vista of confronting arches and pillars, with an effect greatly enhanced by the contraction of the sides towards the east end, and the dying away of the columnar vista into narrower and narrower recesses.' At Ely, 'aided by the printed guide, I studied the whole of this elaborate and highly ornamental pile with a particularity and a feeling of satisfaction greater than I had ever before experienced… Expatiated over this noble edifice for hours… Dined with Mr. Evans at four, but made one more round of the cathedral before dinner.' On every occasion he was ready for the ascent of the cathedral stair, even where such a climb was unusual; once, he tells us, after the guide had refused to go further, how he came on some jackdaws' nests on the steps, the owners being very much amazed at the sight of visitors. Nor did one climb in a day always suffice. On 5th August he climbed the tower of Boston Church in the morning, and that of Lincoln in the afternoon – the one 351 steps, the other 336. At this time he was an elderly and not very lightly-built man of fifty-three.

Some gentlemen's mansions, like Haddon and Chatsworth, were visited with much interest. But Chatsworth, with all its wonders, did not impress him so much as some other castles. What he liked was a grand baronial residence, befitting the time when the owner was really the head of his people, ready for any expedition which the public interest required, and not merely a landlord drawing his rents. Places that had a connection with great men were peculiarly attractive. We have noticed his reverence for Trinity College, Cambridge, as the abode of Isaac Newton. Kingston, near Canterbury, acquired a classic character, because the rector's wife was great-grandniece of Bishop Butler, and showed him a snuff-box, a memorandum-book, and an annotated Greek Testament, which had belonged to the author of the Analogy.4 In the immediate neighbourhood of Kingston was the church where Richard Hooker ministered. House and church were accordingly visited. And when he came to Sunderland, its great interest was that Dr. Paley had been its rector, and that he saw the study in which he wrote, the room in which he died, and the field around which he took excursions on horseback. Newton, Butler, and Paley were among the very chief of Chalmers's instructors and friends.

Not less characteristic of the man were the free and friendly relations into which he entered with some of the common people who were thrown in his way. Usually he travelled on the stage-coach, but occasionally he hired a carriage, and not unfrequently a gig, with the driver at his side. He had the feeling that he would enjoy his holiday all the more if it were mingled with a little study. Accordingly we find that, when passing slowly in his gig over some monotonous part of the road, he would pull from his pocket a grave book, like Mede's Latin Lectures on Prophecy, and have a spell of theological reading. But his eye seemed always to be open to any object of interest, whether in the scenery or in the places he passed. With his driver he entered into friendly relations, although he sometimes found him a very dolt. At Huddersfield he hired a gig to carry him through some of the remarkable scenes of Derbyshire. The driver was a grave, silent, and simple lad of twenty-two, and he made a practice of taking him with him to the caverns and other places of interest that he visited. At the Peak Cavern he had to change his coat and hat, 'and a worse coat or a worse hat I never saw on the back or head of any carter or scavenger in the land, insomuch that I was a spectacle to the children of the village, who shouted and laughed behind me, and even the driver of the gig could not restrain his merriment. I always take him to the sights along with me; first, because I found a great ignorance of Derbyshire curiosities in Huddersfield, and I want to make him more enlightened and enlarged than his fellow-citizens; secondly, because I always feel a strong reflex or secondary enjoyment in the gratification of other people, so that the sympathy of his enjoyment greatly enhances my own; and thirdly, because I get amusement from the remarks of his simple wonderment and not very sagacious observations; and it has now passed into a standing joke with me, when leaving any of our exhibitions, that "there is no such fine sight to be seen at Huddersfield."' At Chatsworth, the Doctor gave the lad his hat and silver-headed cane to carry; he followed at a respectful distance, while his master went before with a book in his hand, taking notes of whatever was memorable. He found afterwards that his picturesque appearance and unusual employment had excited much speculation among other visitors as to who he was, and that the conclusion to which they all came was that he was a foreign nobleman. At Matlock he parted with his driver, who, he found, could hardly read; he warned him that many perish of lack of knowledge, and that he must learn to study his Bible, which was able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

Chalmers did not always show the same patience and consideration for his fellow-travellers. Once, in Yorkshire, waiting at the door of the coach-office, he found himself beside a herd of swine, whose motions and operations he studied with interest; on the top of the coach he found a company much of the same order – 'fat and unintelligent, with only pursy and vesicular projections on each side of their chins, and a superabundance of lard in their gills, whose manners well-nigh overset me, overloading our coach with their enormous carcasses, and squeezing themselves, as they ascended from various parts of the road, between passengers already in a state of compression, to the gross infraction of all law and justice, and the imminent danger of our necks.' It was enough, he said, to make any man a Tory. Naturally, Chalmers had much of the passion which bursts out in this bit of sarcasm; but, before the end of his letter, he feels that he has gone too far, his better nature asserts itself, and he gives utterance to a milder spirit. 'I feel it wrong to nourish contempt for any human being: "Honour all men," is the precept of Scripture. We should not despise any of those for whom Christ died; and the tendency to do so is one of those temptations to which refinement and knowledge are apt to expose us, and which ought to be resisted.' The 'old Adam' was not extinct; but at the bottom of his heart Chalmers wished him destroyed.

Even with a London barber he could have a merry time. To be sure the barber began the fun, for he undertook, by clipping out all the white hairs and leaving only the black, to make his client look forty years younger. This greatly tickled the Doctor, and he proceeded to compliment the barber's profession, inasmuch as, though he heard universal complaints of a bad hay-crop, his haymaking in the metropolis went on pleasantly and prosperously all the year round. On the completion of the job, the man assured the Doctor that he looked at least thirty years younger. 'I told him how delighted my wife would be with the news of this wonderful transformation, and gave him half a crown, observing that it was little enough for having turned me into a youthful Adonis. We parted in a roar of laughter, and great mutual satisfaction with each other.'

His tour in France was undertaken in 1838, on occasion of his reading his paper to the French Institute, and lasted about a month. He was struck with the airiness and brightness of Paris, and the apparent leisureliness of the people as compared with London; he remarked, too, how inferior the equipages were to those of England. Among other persons of mark whom he met with were Guizot, who told him that the combination of the moral and economical was wholly unknown in France; Mignet, Madame de Staël, and the Duc and Duchesse de Broglie, with all of whom, and many of their friends, he had most agreeable intercourse. The duke had borne a distinguished part in political history; he was a sort of head of the Liberal party, but with the utmost aversion to noise and violence. The duchess, a daughter of Madame de Staël, was a lady of many gifts and of eminent piety. The company of such persons, aristocratic yet simple, cultured yet humble, and deeply interested in the welfare of the people, was a great enjoyment to Dr. Chalmers. But, vanity of vanities! a few months after his visit, the duchess was cut off by sudden illness, and the bright and happy home of the family made desolate. Dr. Chalmers expressed his sympathy in a very tender letter to the afflicted duke.

Along with Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, whom he found at Paris, he made a short provincial tour, embracing Evreux, Broglie, Alençon, Lemans, Tours, Orleans, Malesherbes, and Fontainebleau. The scenery pleased him much; it was the kind he liked best, for he did not so much care for the sublimely picturesque as for fertile valleys and well-wooded uplands. While in France, he was much interested in the law of succession, especially to landed property, and its effects on the condition of the people. He had supposed that, by giving rise to endless subdivision of the land, the law must bring down the people to a very low standard of living. In point of fact, he found it less disadvantageous than he had thought. On one point he was more convinced than ever, that to elevate a country, moral and economical forces must go together.

We must now glance at Chalmers in his family and inner life during this busy and trying period of his life. A man who is forming new acquaintances by the hundred, and is constantly receiving the enthusiastic applause of thousands, is in no small danger of two things – of letting his home-affections become somewhat languid, and of neglecting his inner life. But in the case of Chalmers, we can find no evidence of either of these results. Shortly before his departure from St. Andrews, his domestic affections had been profoundly stirred by the death of his mother; and hardly had his first session in Edinburgh closed, when he was called to follow to the tomb the remains of Alexander, his youngest and favourite brother. His journal for 25th April 1829 has the following entry: 'It was a large funeral. The sun shone sweetly on the burying-place. I was like to give way, when, after leaving the grave, I passed Mr. Fergus; neither of us could speak. Oh that God would interpose to perpetuate the impressions of this day! This is the fifth time within these few years that I have been chief mourner, and carried the head of a relative to the grave. But this has been far the heaviest of them all.'

Dr. Chalmers himself had an alarming illness in 1834, though, happily, it passed without serious results. He had been at a meeting of the Presbytery of Edinburgh, at which he had vehemently opposed the proposal of the Town Council to curtail the number of the city ministers; and he had been greatly excited by the thought that the real welfare of the people should be obstructed and hindered by the very men who professed to be their friends. It was on this occasion that he proclaimed himself a Radical, the only consistent Radical among them. 'The dearest object of my earthly existence,' he then said, 'is the elevation of the common people – humanised by Christianity, and raised by the strength of their moral habits to a higher platform of human nature, and by which they may attain and enjoy the rank and consideration due to enlightened and companionable men. I trust the day is coming when the people will find out who are their best friends, and when the mock patriotism of the present day shall be unmasked by an act of robbery and spoliation on the part of those who would deprive the poor of their best and highest patrimony. The imperishable soul of the poor man is of as much value as the soul of the rich; and I will resist, even to the death, that alienation which goes but to swell the luxury of the higher ranks at the expense of the Christianity of the lower.'

Dr. Chalmers was moved in the very depths of his soul – for the proposal of the Town Council was a blow at the ruling idea of his heart – and he delivered himself of these sentiments with such overwhelming energy that his friends at the moment trembled for the consequences. As he was walking homeward after the meeting, on hailing a friend and taking his arm, he suddenly stopped short, and said he felt very strangely. His sensations were giddiness, and a numbness on the right side, as if he were going to fall. It was but too evident that he had sustained a slight attack of paralysis. When medical aid was obtained, it was seen that the muscles on the right side of his face were slightly paralysed, and his speech somewhat affected. Sensation over the right side was very much impaired, but the mind was wholly untouched. Rest and the ordinary treatment soon restored him, and in a short time he was able to resume all his ordinary studies and avocations.