CHAPTER V

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY

1828-1843

It was but natural for Chalmers, in entering on his new duties as

professor of divinity in the University of Edinburgh, to rally all his

energies for a task so important--to be performed, too, in so commanding

a sphere. The course of theology through which he had to conduct his

students occupied three sessions, and for each consecutive winter it was

necessary for him to produce a fresh set of lectures. Happily the

subjects discussed in his first session were already familiar to

him--natural theology and the evidences of Christianity. What was

necessary for him in this session, was to expand, complete, and combine

materials that, in a very limited measure, he had already used at St.

Andrews.

A greater contrast can hardly be imagined than the divinity class-room

under his predecessor and under himself. The last professor was a

striking illustration of what the essential dulness and lifelessness of

Moderatism could produce when matured and crowned by old age and

infirmity. Two years before the appointment of Chalmers, a deputation of

students, including the late Principal Cunningham and Dr. Wilson of

Bombay, had waited on the professor, requesting him (but in vain) to

provide a substitute, as his voice could not be heard. Naturally the

attendance had fallen to a fraction, and utter lifelessness prevailed.

With the appointment of Chalmers, an enthusiasm sprang up unprecedented

in the history of the university. 'The introductory lecture,' says Dr.

Hanna, 'was delivered amid rapturous applause, and, with scarcely any

sensible abatement, the excitement of that first meeting was sustained

throughout the whole of the succeeding session.' Besides the regular

students of the church, a very large body of amateurs attended the

course. From these the professor exacted no fee; but at the end of the

session, through the Rev. Robert Morehead, an episcopalian clergyman,

they asked his acceptance of a sum of money, and, in an elaborate

address, expressed the delight and benefit with which they had listened

to the course.

In subsequent years, Dr. Chalmers re-wrote his divinity lectures, and

after his death these were published in two volumes, entitled,

_Institutes of Theology_. Besides delivering his own lectures, it was

his practice to comment on his textbooks,--Butler's _Analogy_, Paley's

_Evidences_, and Hill's _Lectures in Divinity_, his notes on these now

forming a separate volume of his _Posthumous Works_.

Most Calvinistic treatises on systematic theology start from the divine

point of view, setting forth the nature of God; and, on the basis of His

Sovereignty, explaining his relation to man. Chalmers preferred to

start with the actual condition of man, the diseased and disorganised

state into which he had fallen, and to rise from that to the provision

which God had made for his recovery through Jesus Christ. It is not

difficult to see what led him to prefer this order. In his course of

moral philosophy, he had come to an abrupt and impassable barrier.

Natural ethics gave abundant proof that man's moral nature was

disordered, and that he had lost fellowship with God; but it threw no

light on the awfully important questions how that nature was to be

healed, and how that fellowship was to be restored. The answer to these

questions, as Chalmers often insisted, must come from a higher source.

It was tantalising to a teacher of moral philosophy to have to leave man

in this predicament, and to be restrained from dwelling on the response

of revealed theology to his eager questionings. And hence, when

revealed theology became his theme, Chalmers was eager to set forth at

once the point of junction between the two theologies, to show how the

revealed took man up at the point where nature left him; in a word, to

bring the remedy of revelation into connection with the disease of

nature. If, in general, this order is more acceptable to Arminian than

Calvinistic divines, this was not Chalmers's reason for preferring it.

We have seen that the sovereignty, the all-sufficiency and universal

operation of God, was the first theological truth that took a powerful

hold of his mind, even before he became reconciled to evangelical

doctrine. That hold it retained ever after. The root of Calvinism, or,

we should rather say, of Paulinism and Augustinianism, was planted at

the beginning in the very heart of his being.

But, from the eminently practical character of his mind, it was not his

habit to put the higher doctrines of Calvinism in the forefront of his

preaching, or even of his theology. Man must be dealt with as a

responsible being; his responsibility must ever have its place beside

God's sovereignty. It would be ruinous to handle either of these

doctrines in such a manner as to destroy or even impair the force of the

other. The combination of the two was one of the great objects of his

theological teaching.

Chalmers's style of theological discussion was very unlike the common.

It was not fashioned on the anvil of the schoolmen. There was a

remarkable combination in it of the philosophical and the popular. His

mind was deeply philosophical, delighting in first principles, and eager

to concatenate truth, to establish comprehensive laws, to reconcile

apparently conflicting doctrines, and to bring what seemed unreasonable

into harmony with reason. But his style was so diffuse and flowing that

he appeared to want the exactness and correctness of a philosophic mind.

Moreover, he could not confine himself to the strictly intellectual

aspects of theology; he could not but include its moral and practical

aspects. In bringing out the practical bearings of doctrines, he was

liable to become somewhat declamatory.

Another peculiarity was his fondness of illustration, the product, as it

seemed, of the poetical rather than the philosophic faculty. The result

was that, as a philosophic theologian, Chalmers hardly got justice. And

since his day philosophic theology has passed into a quite different

groove. He was just beginning to know something of German philosophy

when he died. He was greatly interested in it, and had he survived, he

would in all likelihood have given much of his attention to it. But he

could only have known it at second hand, and any discussion of it in

these circumstances must have been of but secondary weight. And now

that the German standpoint has become so common, the theology of Dr.

Chalmers, as well as that of his successor, Principal Cunningham, has

fallen into the background. But it would not be easy to say how much is

missed by even philosophical students when they give the go-by to his

writings.

The academical and other honours conferred on him had more respect to

his position as a preacher and a philanthropist than a professor of

theology. In 1830 he was appointed one of her Majesty's chaplains for

Scotland, the letter from Sir Robert Peel in which the announcement was

made to him saying emphatically that the honour was conferred in

consideration of his high character and eminent acquirements and

services. At the Disruption, when he ceased to be a minister of the

Established Church, he resigned this appointment. It was but the other

day that it transpired that her Majesty wished him to continue to hold

it. But such was his conscientiousness that, though the salary was

placed at his credit by the Queen's Remembrancer till his death in 1847,

no part of the salary was ever drawn either by him or his family. In

1834 he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Institute of

France, and in the following year he received the degree of D.C.L. from

the University of Oxford. Such honours as these last were without a

parallel in the case of any Presbyterian minister. About the same time

he was elected a Fellow, and thereafter a vice-president, of the Royal

Society of Edinburgh. Among other honours, he was asked by the

Bridgewater Trustees to write one of their eight treatises on natural

theology, the subject assigned to him being 'The Adaptation of External

Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.' This essay

was afterwards merged in his work on _Natural Theology_. In his visits

to Oxford and Cambridge he received almost unbounded attention from the

most distinguished men in both universities, and in his intercourse with

them he had much enjoyment. At Cambridge he could not restrain his

delight at being entertained in the college of Newton--a name which held

an extraordinary place in his regard. In recognition of his appointment

as a corresponding member of the French Institute, he visited France in

1838, and read a paper to the Institute on the 'Distinction, both in

Principle and Effect, between a Legal Charity for the Relief of

Indigence and a Legal Charity for the Relief of Disease.'

The right treatment of pauperism continued to exercise his mind and to

draw forth his testimony on every available occasion. In 1829 he was

summoned to London to give evidence before a Parliamentary Committee on

the Irish Poor-Law. His view was ever the same. A compulsory rate

created a spirit of dependence, and thereby tended to the increase of

pauperism and the degradation rather than the elevation of the people.

It was often said that comfort tended to the improvement of character.

His belief was the very opposite; it was character that tended to the

increase of comfort. His success in Glasgow led him to believe that the

same system would succeed in Ireland. He had sought to stimulate

friendship and kindliness among all classes, so as to induce them to

help one another in times of need; nothing had had a greater effect in

diminishing pauperism. This was far too valuable and efficient a weapon

to be carelessly thrown away.

But to all his schemes for remedying pauperism there came a death-blow

in 1844. In 1840, Dr. Pultney Alison of Edinburgh, a medical

practitioner of great eminence and not less benevolence, published a

pamphlet in which he drew a painful picture of the miserable condition

of the poor, especially in many parts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and

strongly urged the necessity of an ampler provision for them, secured by

law, though one result of this would be the increase of the cost of

Scottish pauperism from L150,000 to L800,000 per annum. Chalmers did

what he could to counterwork Dr. Alison. When the British Association

met in Glasgow in 1840, he contributed a paper on the subject, and the

public interest was so great that the meeting where it was discussed had

to be adjourned to a church. He delivered several lectures to his

students, which were afterwards collected and published in a volume.

But the absorbing interest which had arisen in the Church question that

was now under vehement discussion, and other causes, chilled the

interest of the public in pauperism; and in 1844 a measure was enacted

by Parliament, in opposition to the views of Chalmers. To him it seemed

that even though an immediate improvement in the condition of the poor

might be thus obtained, it must be at the sacrifice of many of the

virtues that went to elevate them.

In the political world two great questions were agitating the community

about the time when Chalmers came to Edinburgh--Catholic Emancipation

and the Reform Bill.

Chalmers was a strenuous advocate of Catholic Emancipation. It did not

seem to him just, as a general principle, to exclude any body of the

people from a share in the government of their country on account of

their religious opinions. Not only so, but he had a strong conviction

that the effect of such exclusion was to create a prejudice against the

religion of their opponents and prevent them from giving an impartial

consideration to the arguments in its favour. In urging his views at a

public meeting in Edinburgh, he rose to a height of eloquence that

carried his audience by storm. As long as the Roman Catholics were

excluded from political privileges they would not listen to any

arguments against their faith. But let this injustice be removed, let

them be admitted to the same platform as the rest of the community, and

he looked for a change. And what might they not expect if the Bible

were to become a familiar book to their Catholic brethren, and they were

to receive its lessons with open and candid minds? The very thought

seemed to open a most interesting and hopeful vista, well adapted to be

expanded and enforced by his gorgeous eloquence. But even had he known

that expectations of this sort were groundless, he would still have

advocated emancipation simply as a matter of justice.

On the question of the Reform Bill he did not take the popular side.

His opposition to it comes on us as a surprise. We should have expected

that a man whose motto was 'Honour all men,' who had already befriended

Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Corporation Test Acts, and

who was afterwards an advocate of the repeal of the Corn-Laws, would

have approved of the very moderate degree of political privilege implied

in the ten-pound suffrage. In a speech in the Presbytery of Edinburgh,

Dr. Chalmers once said: 'I have already professed myself, and will

profess myself again, an out and out and, I maintain it, the only

consistent Radical. The dearest object of my earthly existence 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.' But, though he offered no active

opposition to the measure, he did not approve of it. In this he seems

to have been actuated by various motives. In the first place, he did

not think that this was the true way to elevate the people. He had

always maintained that it was mainly by a moral and Christian education,

by the cultivation of right principles and habits, that their true

welfare was to be secured, and he dreaded anything that might lead them

to value material or political benefits more than this. Further, he had

a dread that any loosening of the old foundations of society might

encourage a spirit of anarchy and recklessness which would ultimately

bring the country to ruin. He knew that such a spirit slumbered, and

more than slumbered, in many breasts, and he was opposed to any measure

that would give it the slightest encouragement. He did not reckon on any

abatement of discontent from the extension of the suffrage, and did not

believe that the political appetite would be satisfied with anything

short of a social revolution. So great were his fears, that on one

occasion he expressed his apprehension that if the government then in

office were to be removed, anarchy would immediately take possession.

Nothing would have surprised or alarmed him more than to be told that by

and by a Conservative Government would bring down the suffrage to a much

lower point than the then Reform Bill proposed. But still more would he

have wondered had he learned that fifty years after his death, and under

all these radical changes, so far from the country being abandoned to

anarchy, the law-abiding habit of the people would be as strong as ever,

and the foundations of society as firm.

When the great question of the Corn-Laws came up at a later period,

Chalmers was in favour of the repeal; not chiefly for any important

economical results that he expected from that step, but because it

would, as he used to say, 'sweeten the breath of society.' He would

have been surprised at the remarkable commercial results which the

abolition of the Corn-Laws, and the institution of the system of Free

Trade have produced on the resources of the country.

In addition to these considerations, another ground of his opposition to

the Reform Bill was his respect for an aristocracy and the influence of

an aristocracy, as contributing important elements to the welfare of a

country. He held that 'in every land of law and liberty, with an order

of men possessing large and independent affluence, there is better

security for the general comfort and virtue of the whole than when

society presents an aspect of almost unalleviated plebeianism.' But,

'it is not for the sake of its ornaments and its chivalry alone that we

want the high rank of our aristocracy to be upholden.' It was for the

spirit that they circulated through all ranks--a more noble spirit, he

thought, than either France with its 'Citizen King,' or the United

States with their universal social equality, could inspire. In his

intercourse with the aristocracy, it was the best and most congenial of

them that admitted him to their society, and nothing charmed him more

than to find a combination of rank and wealth with Christian principle

and philanthropic activity, along with the charm of refined and gentle

but unassuming manners. Such movements as the Reform Bill he deemed

hurtful to the influence of the aristocracy, and therefore

disadvantageous to the welfare of the country. It was a different set

of aristocrats, and a different kind of policy he had to criticise when,

on occasion of his last visit to London, he gave evidence to a

Parliamentary Committee in connection with the hardships suffered by

congregations of the Free Church from the refusal of sites by

aristocratic landowners.

Undoubtedly the main activity of Chalmers during his Edinburgh life was

connected with the work of the church. But before proceeding to this, it

may be well to advert to his literary activity, which, amid all his

other occupations, was very remarkable. We have already noticed his

Bridgewater treatise, afterwards reconstructed in his _Natural

Theology_. We have also noticed his volume on the subject of the

Poor-Laws. It was during this period that he completed and published in

four volumes his _Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans_, which had been

begun but not finished as pulpit discourses in Glasgow; regarding which

the late Mr. Isaac Taylor gave his judgment that they would probably be

the most enduring of his writings. In this period likewise he collected

and edited his whole works, amounting to the goodly number of

twenty-five volumes. Of a large number of his pamphlets, introductory

essays, articles in reviews, and other miscellaneous writings, our space

allows us to say nothing. But the work of this period which Chalmers

himself thought most of was, his treatise in two volumes on _Political

Economy_. The subject had an attraction for him ever since his

attendance on certain classes in the University of Edinburgh in

1799-1801. His first published volume had been on one of its topics. In

the University of St. Andrews he had given a course of lectures upon it.

It may seem strange that, after his change of views and intense

consecration to spiritual work, he should still have felt so lively an

interest in a subject usually considered the driest and most secular in

the whole round of the sciences. But, as he remarked in his preface,

there were two ways of presenting political economy. One was merely to

expound its doctrines; the other, along with this, to consider its

applications. It was with this latter object in view that Dr. Chalmers

bestowed so earnest attention on the subject. On the doctrines of

political economy, indeed, he held and expounded many original

views,--views which were treated with undeserved contempt by the

_Quarterly Review_, but of which so high an authority as Mr. Stuart Mill

wrote in a very different spirit. Accepting it as the great aim of

political economy to make the most of a country's material resources,

and advance to the utmost the comfort and prosperity of its people, Dr.

Chalmers urged with great earnestness that all its methods were in

themselves incompetent to secure this end. Without due provision for

the moral and spiritual nature, the true welfare and the true comfort of

men could never be achieved. Besides this, he held that society was ever

tending to a condition which could not but defeat the very ends which

political economy had in view. It was the constant tendency of

population to increase, and thus outgrow production--outgrow the

provision for the supply of its material wants. However much production

might be increased, it could not be increased in the ratio of

population, so that at length a time must come when, in spite of every

expedient, destitution must set in. The only safeguard against this was

to raise the intelligence and the moral habits of the people, to inspire

them with a desire for a more civilised kind of life, to give them a

taste for higher enjoyments, and induce them to cultivate the industry,

the skill, and the self-control by which these might be attained. But

how would this check population? Dr. Chalmers was in this respect in

sympathy with Malthus; he wished to check early and improvident

marriages, and the best means of doing this was to elevate the standard

of living, so that marriage should be delayed until the means of

reaching this standard were realised. It must be owned, we think, that

this was a one-sided view. There are undoubted moral risks of a very

serious kind involved in the delay of marriage until an age when the

passions have somewhat cooled down. It was the habit of Chalmers to let

his mind dwell at one time on but one aspect of a subject, and not give

full weight to counterbalancing considerations. Most readers will agree

thoroughly with him in his view that improved taste and enlarged views

must bring in their wake increased comfort and a higher social standing;

but the system of political economy that rested on the Malthusian

principle is not entitled to be placed much higher than other systems;

and the only security for moral improvement lies in that Christian

education and Christian influence on which Chalmers laid so much stress,

and which came not from political economy, but from the Gospel of Jesus

Christ.

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

L400 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 L1677, 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 L20,000 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 L200,000 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, L65,620 1 11-3/4

In 1836, 26 " 32,359 12 6-3/4

In 1837, 67 " 59,311 6 0

In 1838, 32 " 41,183 1 1-3/4

In 1839, 14 " 52,959 14 14-3/4

In 1840, 15 " 36,055 8 8-3/4

In 1841, 6 " 18,252 6 6-

--- ------------------

Total, 222 " L305,741 11 3-1/2

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]

[3] Sir Arthur Gordon allows (1) that under the unworthy influence of

the then Dean of Faculty (Hope) Lord Aberdeen was induced to omit

certain provisions he had at first inserted; and (2) that the then

Lord Advocate (Sir W. Rae) said in public that the Government

measure would exceed in liberality even the liberal measure

proposed by the Duke of Argyll. In the course of Sir Arthur's

narrative we find the astounding statement, that though Lord

Aberdeen sat as an elder in the Assembly from 1818 to 1828, he

never once received the Sacrament in a Presbyterian church!

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.'

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 Tuebingen, 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.

[4] When asked to record in this Testament his opinion of Butler, he

declined, because he did not feel worthy of the honour, but, being

pressed, he wrote as follows: 'Butler is in theology what Bacon is

in science. The reigning principle of the latter is that it is

not for man to theorise on the works of God; and of the former

that it is not for man to _theorise_ on the ways of God. Both

deferred alike to the certainty of experience, as being paramount

to all the possibilities of hypothesis; and he who attentively

studies the writings of these great men will find a marvellous

concurrence between a sound philosophy and a sound faith. July 3,

1833.'

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 Stael, 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 Stael, 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, Alencon, 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.

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.'