Front matter (continued 3)
Reading edition
The proposal under the general scheme was, that the churches should be erected from voluntary contributions, but that the Government should grant a small endowment to each congregation towards its annual expenses. To promote this part of the scheme, a deputation was sent to London, to solicit the support of the Prime Minister and other influential members of the Government. At first it seemed as if Lord Melbourne and his cabinet would cordially agree to the proposal, but vehement opposition being offered to it by the dissenters, a change soon came over the spirit of their dream. Unwilling to offend an important section of their supporters in Scotland, they resolved, as a sort of compromise, to appoint a commission that should go over the country, take evidence as to the amount of the existing provision for the religious wants of the people, and report the results from time to time. It was a great disappointment to Dr. Chalmers that in this way a long delay would have to take place, and still more that the personnel of the commission showed a tendency unfavourable to the scheme. The commission buckled to their work, and at intervals issued reports which in the main bore out the contention of Dr. Chalmers. Then it was announced that a measure would be introduced; by and by it was said that that measure was abandoned. Dr. Chalmers and his friends were more favourably received by Sir Robert Peel and other leading Conservatives; but as they were not in power at the time nothing was done. The vacillating conduct of the Whig Government made no favourable impression on Chalmers: among his friends he was ready enough to proclaim, in his Fifeshire dialect, 'I have a moral loathing of thae Whugs.'
But if there was disappointment from the Government, there was extraordinary encouragement from the people. In 1838 he was able to announce to the General Assembly, as the fruit of four years' labour, that there had been added to the Establishment nearly two hundred churches, and that upwards of £200,000 had been contributed for their erection. It was a result wholly unprecedented, and on all hands was regarded with amazement, and as a most wonderful testimony to the eloquence and energy with which he had advocated the cause. Worn out, and much in need of rest though he felt himself to be, he was induced to remain for some time longer at the head of the committee, and among other labours he added that of a tour over the whole country, in which he advocated his plan with his usual eloquence. But, in the Forties, the shadow of the conflict between the civil and ecclesiastical courts had fallen on the Extension Scheme, and it began to languish. In the course of his convenership the progress of the undertaking had been as follows:—
In 1835, 62 churches, £65,620 1 11-¾ In 1836, 26 " 32,359 12 6-¾ In 1837, 67 " 59,311 6 0 In 1838, 32 " 41,183 1 1-¾ In 1839, 14 " 52,959 14 14-¾ In 1840, 15 " 36,055 8 8-¾ In 1841, 6 " 18,252 6 6- --- ------------------ Total, 222 " £305,741 11 3-½
Unhappily, a painful controversy arose among the home-churches out of the effort to obtain a national endowment for the new parishes. Nonconformists, for the most part, viewed the application with great dislike, and opposed it tooth and nail. It was bad enough, in their view, that a particular church should be maintained from the public funds, and enjoy peculiar social privileges; but it was not to be borne that it should receive a further grant of public money, of which, of course, nonconformists would have to pay their share. The right way to support ministers, according to the New Testament, was by the voluntary contributions of the people. This, moreover, was a benefit to the people themselves; it led them to take a greater interest in their church, and to attach more value to its ministrations. Thus it happened that every church-extension meeting was more or less an anti-voluntary meeting, the speakers who pled for the scheme vehemently upholding the principle of an establishment. Of the younger men who fought on this ground with Chalmers, none was more strenuous than the late Dr. Guthrie. But Guthrie lived to change his view; and in an autobiographical fragment he tells us, that even when he was denouncing the voluntary system, in his secret heart he honoured, and even envied, the men whose living was derived solely from the freewill offerings of their people.
The great objection of Chalmers to the voluntary system was that it was inadequate. He held it incapable of making provision for the wants of a whole community, and especially incapable of those aggressive efforts that were needed for bringing in the masses who had fallen from the profession of religion. In planting churches, voluntaryism acted on the principle of attraction, aiming mainly at drawing in those who were more or less in sympathy with itself, and disposed to accept its ministrations. The theory of an established church, on the other hand, demanded a provision for the whole of the population, and supplied a ministry whose duty was to look after all the people, and ply them with the offers and the injunctions of Christianity. It was to make the practice and theory of the church in some degree to correspond that he had undertaken and prosecuted his great church-extension movement.
For the nonconformists themselves he always cherished a profound regard, and a grateful sense of the invaluable service they had rendered to the country when the Gospel was seldom preached elsewhere. Of this he had given signal proof when he took sittings in a congregational chapel for his family at St. Andrews. Nothing could have been further from his desire than to drive nonconformists into a corner, or make them feel that they stood in the way of his more comprehensive enterprise. Yet many of them did feel, and could hardly fail to feel, that they were obstacles to the working of a complete territorial scheme. They were like squatters or interlopers in a territory allocated and divided among regular settlers. Unconsciously Dr. Chalmers stimulated a feeling among the Established clergy that they, and they only, were the rightful spiritual guides of the people; a spirit of which he himself was wholly destitute, but which was highly agreeable to human nature, and in many cases rears its arrogant head at the present day.
It was a favourite argument of the voluntaries that an established church could not be a free church; it was subject to the authority of the state, and could not be free, as the nonconformists were, to obey its divine Head in all things. This position Chalmers and his friends resolutely denied. The alliance between church and state was an alliance between two independent powers, each of which was supreme in its own department. In forming a connection with the state, the church did not surrender one particle of its independence; it remained as free as ever to follow the guidance of its divine Head in every point where He had expressed His will. Nay, this freedom was expressly secured by the statutes of the realm. It knew to its cost how eager the rulers of the country had often been to deprive it of its freedom, and at every important crisis of its history, when it renewed or revised its alliance with the state, it had taken care that its freedom should be expressly conceded. It was while the voluntary controversy was at its height that the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical courts became acute, for this very question, the independence and freedom of the church, was the great bone of contention. When the decisions of the Court of Session and the House of Lords were given, it became only too apparent that, in the judgment of the civil courts, the church did not possess the independence it had claimed. This was a dreadful, a shattering blow to Dr. Chalmers, and when it was authoritatively declared, notwithstanding all his intense partiality for an established church, he at once severed his alliance with the state. The main ground on which he acted was, that a church enthralled to the state could never be that beneficent instrument, that powerful moral agent, for which he valued it,—could never be the means of training the people in those holy ways, those high moral and spiritual habits, on which their highest welfare depended.
It was partly in order to advance his church-extension scheme, but more especially to maintain the true theory of a church establishment, and the church's independence in its union with the state, that he delivered in the Hanover Square Rooms, London, in April and May 1838, that series of lectures on the 'Establishment and Extension of National Churches' which raised his fame as an orator to its very highest pitch. 'Nothing,' wrote the late Dr. Begg, who accompanied him, 'could exceed the enthusiasm which prevailed in London. The great city seemed stirred to its very depths.' At the fourth and fifth lectures, an American clergyman who was present wrote that he found the room densely packed long before the hour, and evidently for the most part by the higher classes. 'Dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, baronets, bishops, and members of Parliament were to be seen in every direction. After considerable delay and impatient waiting, the great charmer made his entrance, and was welcomed with clappings and shouts of applause that grew more and more intense till the noise became almost deafening.' 'The concluding lecture,' says Dr. Hanna, 'was graced by the presence of nine prelates of the Church of England. The tide that had been rising and swelling each successive day now burst all bounds. Carried away by the impassioned utterance of the speaker, long ere the close of some of his finest passages was reached, the voice of the lecturer was drowned in the applause, the audience rising from their seats, waving their hats above their heads, and breaking out into tumultuous approbation.'
An event that somewhat disturbed the line of Dr. Chalmers's argument for the freedom of the church had taken place just before he left Edinburgh. On the 8th March 1838, the Court of Session, in giving judgment on the famous Auchterarder case, found the veto law of the church to be illegal and ultra vires, and began to take steps for the reversal of all that the church had done in connection with it. The judgment had not become final, for it was subject to appeal to the House of Lords, and in his lectures Dr. Chalmers made no reference to it. But when, in 1839, the House of Lords affirmed the decision of the lower court, and when Lords Brougham and Cottenham, in expressing their views, scouted alike the principle of the veto and of the independence of the church (although Lord Brougham had at one time strongly commended the veto), Dr. Chalmers made a full statement of his views in the General Assembly. Before that time he had been disposed to think that if the judgment of the Court of Session should be affirmed by the Lords, the best course for the church would be to give up the veto, reserving power to judge of each case by itself, and act accordingly.
In such a case as that of Auchterarder, for example, where the presentee had been vetoed by 287 out of 300 male heads of families and called only by two, the presbytery might have decided that in these circumstances the call was really no call, and therefore the presentee could not be taken on trial. But, according to the views expressed by the judges, this course would have been as illegal as the veto itself. Dr. Chalmers therefore moved that, while the Assembly would make no claim to the temporalities of Auchterarder, they would still maintain the principle that no minister be intruded on an opposing congregation, and that a committee be appointed to confer with the Government, in order to prevent any further collision between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. A magnificent speech of three hours was delivered in support of this motion, which, after a long discussion, was carried by a majority of forty-nine. It has been remarked, that never was the eloquence of Chalmers more Demosthenic than in his orations for the freedom of the church. And this intense regard for her freedom was no new notion of his: so far back as 1814, in a speech in the Assembly on the plurality question, he had maintained that 'the church had power to reject a presentee for any reason, or for no reason at all.' To Chalmers, the enforced intrusion of unacceptable presentees was not the only, perhaps not even the chief, interference with the liberty of the church. When it was decided that the church had no power to erect new parishes or to give their ministers the usual status of her clergymen; and, likewise, that she had no power to readmit into her pale any of those who in former years had left it,—cases in which no shadow of temporal interest was involved—it seemed to him that such restrictions on her liberty were not only intolerable, but that they tended completely to shatter her efficiency.
Of the four years of long and weary negotiation that followed the passing of this resolution, we have no space to write at any length. Alongside of negotiations with Government there ran a stream of decisions both by the civil and church courts which greatly complicated the situation. New cases of intrusion occurred, pre-eminent among which was the case of Marnoch, where the presentee was vetoed by 261 out of 300 male heads of families, and had the name of but a single parishioner attached to his call. For insisting on his settlement, the seven members of presbytery who took this course were first suspended and then deposed.
As to negotiations with Government, a considerable share of the interviews and correspondence fell to Dr. Chalmers. With Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, he did not hit it off. On a former occasion, as Chalmers himself told Dr. Gordon, when his lordship heard of a deputation from the Scottish church, he expressed a hope 'that that d—d fellow Chalmers was not among them.' Unable to make anything of the Whigs, Chalmers and his friends now turned to the Tories, who at one time seemed friendly, but with them, too, negotiations finally broke off. In these negotiations there was a painful episode between Dr. Chalmers and Lord Aberdeen. A bill introduced by his lordship did not come up to what Chalmers understood him to have promised, and he was unable to support it. Lord Aberdeen complained bitterly, and in the House of Lords accused the Non-intrusion Committee of giving an unscrupulous report of their conversations with him, and he believed they had behaved in the same way to the Government. For Dr. Chalmers he had a special gibe. 'A reverend gentleman, a great leader in the General Assembly, having brought the church into a state of jeopardy and peril, had left it to find its way out of the difficulty as well as it could.' Evidently these were the words of a man who had lost his temper, and forgot what was due in courtesy, to say nothing of charity, to absent men. Unfortunately his son and biographer, Sir Arthur Gordon, has made the matter worse by a vulgar charge against Dr. Chalmers, that he was overborne by the violent men in the non-intrusion committee, and, being afraid of losing his leadership, succumbed to them, and had not the moral courage to avow his change of opinion. Dr. Chalmers was not in the habit of succumbing to any one, for no one stood more independently on his own judgment; and, as to trimming and shuffling, his whole life showed him to be incapable of such conduct. The event proved who was in the right; Lord Aberdeen afterwards carried his bill, which proved a miserable failure. As Dr. Donald Fraser has remarked, it had to be given up as a nuisance. And then, under a Conservative Government, came the abolition of patronage!3
Chalmers had now had experience of both the great political parties, and with equally disappointing results. His grand project of a church commensurate with the necessities of the country (so far as these were not provided for by the nonconformists) was nearly as far off as ever. But his experience in raising money for church extension gave him hope in another direction. When he knocked at the door of the Whigs on behalf of church extension he was refused. When he knocked at the door of the Tories, he found that they might have endowed the church, but they would have enslaved her. They viewed the church 'as an engine of state, not as an instrument of usefulness.' He was now about to knock at the door of the people; and he cherished no little expectation that through them he would yet succeed in his scheme of making Scotland a spiritual garden.
Dr. Chalmers concurred cordially with the measures taken by the church to resist, or at least protest against, the encroachments of the civil courts. He approved of the Claim of Right as affirmed by the Assembly in May 1842. He preached the opening sermon at a convocation of ministers in November 1842, and was a leading counsellor at that remarkable gathering where from four to five hundred ministers pledged themselves to leave the Establishment if no measure of relief were passed by the Legislature. His view, as to the duty of the church, when no such measure of relief was provided, was as clear as day. Amid the numberless perplexities that for years past had caused such anxious consultations and fears lest a wrong step should be taken, he found it an unspeakable relief that the path of duty in the last and most important step of all was so clear. And so, on the famous 18th of May 1843, Dr. Chalmers was at the side of the Moderator, who happened to be his own colleague in the university, Dr. Welsh; the names of both were subscribed to the Protest that was laid on the table of the Assembly; and when Tanfield was reached, and a General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland was constituted, its first act was to call to its chair the man whose reputation throughout the Christian world was by far the highest, and whose influence in bringing about the Disruption had been by far the greatest. Regarding that Assembly, Chalmers wrote to his sister, 'Never was there a happier Assembly, with a happier collection of faces, than in our Free Church, with consciences disburdened, and casting themselves without care and with all the confidence of children on the Providence of that God who never forsakes the families of the faithful.'
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.
But the event in his personal history that touched him more than anything else during this period was the completion of his sixtieth year, on 17th March 1840. It was a favourite thought that the seventh decade of life ought to be turned into a kind of Sabbath, and spent sabbatically, as if on the shore of the next world, or in the outer courts of the heavenly tabernacle. In the case of his mother the last years of her life had had something of this character, and Dr. Chalmers longed for a like experience. Deep in his soul lay the desire for direct and deliberate communion with God, for he not only believed in such communion as the greatest privilege of the human spirit, but he knew that it brought to the worshipper an actual communication of divine influence, so far as the creature was capable of receiving the divine. 'Oh that my heart were a fountain of gracious things,' he wrote in his diary on his sixtieth birthday, 'which might flow out with gracious influence on the heads of my acquaintances, and more particularly of the members of my family!'
So far as the seventh decade had been looked forward to as a time of rest, the hopes of Dr. Chalmers were wholly frustrated. The seven years that yet remained to him, if not the very busiest of his life, were years of peculiar tension, anxiety, and disappointment—things far more trying to the vital energies than work itself. The Church Extension scheme had to be worked out at home under the depressing influence of disappointment of Government help; and then came the crisis of the conflict with the civil courts,—the negotiations with Government, the taunts of Lord Aberdeen, the sickness of hope deferred, and, finally, the shattering of the national church. Though the Disruption brought quieter times, it did not bring the rest and freedom from care for which Chalmers longed; the entire fabric of the Free Church had to be set up, and especially the Sustentation Fund; his longing for rest was but the chase of an ignis fatuus that seemed always to lead him deeper and deeper into the fray.
Notwithstanding all, however, as time advanced, and his fame became more and more established, no change ever took place in the simple and humble demeanour of his spirit. 'I never saw a man,' said Joseph Gurney, 'who appeared to be more destitute of vanity, or less alive to any wish to be brilliant.' In one of his home letters he gives his reason for refusing all requests for his autograph: he could not bear anything that might imply his desire to be considered a great man.
But, though rest and leisure seemed further away than ever, Dr. Chalmers was determined that his seventh decade should not altogether want its sabbatic character. For this end, he resolved to make a far more systematic and earnest study of the Scriptures. In October 1841 he began two series of readings—a daily and a Sabbath portion. To impress the lessons of each passage the more on his mind, he made use of his pen, and carefully recorded the first, freshest, and readiest thoughts that the passage read suggested to him; not with any view to publication, nor with any idea of composing a commentary, but simply for his own edification. The Sabbath lessons, being a chapter for each Sabbath day from the Old Testament and one from the New, were more elevated and spiritual than the daily; and his remarks were often in the form of a direct address to God. This practice was continued with undeviating regularity, no matter where he might be, or however much engaged. If the volumes in which he entered his remarks were not at hand, he would write them in shorthand, and carefully extend them afterwards. In some of his meditations he would express in the frankest manner the most hidden thoughts and feelings of his soul. It is remarkable that one who, in his ordinary intercourse with men, seldom unveiled his feelings, and did not appear in any special degree to be under the influence of the unseen, should, nevertheless, in his communings with God, have shown such frankness and such an intense desire for divine guidance, and grace to enable him to follow it. Dr. Hanna well remarks, 'Behind the outer history of his life there lay that inner spiritual history which made the other what it was. His correspondence, his speeches, his published writings, and his published acts, which furnish such ample materials for unfolding the one history, are absolutely barren as to the other. We know of no other individual of the same force and breadth of character who, in all his converse, public and private, with his fellow-men, spoke so little of himself, or afforded such slender means of information as to his own spiritual condition and progress; and yet it would be difficult to name another of whose deeper religious experience we have so full and so trustworthy a record.'
It was the troubles of the church, and the profound responsibility therewith connected, that so powerfully stimulated his desire for fellowship and guidance from on high. Only those who lived at the time can realise the exceeding bitterness of the tone of many opponents, shown both by word of mouth and through the press; and their readiness, if any prominent churchman should make a slip, to pounce upon him and hold him up to the reprobation of the public. It is a mode of treatment that has not yet become obsolete. Some sally of Dr. Chalmers's had in this way brought a nest of hornets about him—'Yet I am supported in a way that is marvellous under every visitation.' Under April 2, 1840, he writes in his journal:—
'An utter prostration of spirit from the speech of Lord Aberdeen.'—'April 3. Recovered my spirits, but not my spirituality. 'June 8. Sadly engrossed with the Dean of Faculty's charge against me. My God, uphold me!'—'June 21. Have not yet recovered the shock of Lord Aberdeen's foul attack on me in the House of Lords. May I live henceforth in the perpetual sunshine of God's reconciled countenance!'—'July 5. A letter yesterday from Dr. Gordon, enclosing one from Lord Aberdeen, which will require a strenuous exercise both of wisdom and charity. My God, guide and govern all my movements!'—'July 17. Hurt by a report in the Witness of Lord Aberdeen's saying in the House that after having brought the church into jeopardy, I had left them to find their way out of it as they could. Recovered from this. Desire to roll all over upon God.'
Alongside of these appeals to God for grace and wisdom in public life, numberless passages occur in which one knows not whether to admire more his profound humility or the intensity of his aspirations for a more heavenly condition:—
'1841, May 17. Cannot but remark how I gravitate to ungodliness. Why are my thoughts when alone and not studying so little occupied with God? And oh that in company I might appear more for His glory! Assist me to do this in my family, and let me watch my opportunities for doing Christian good.... Let me carry about with me a distinct confidence in forgiveness through the blood of Christ, and with earnest desire of showing forth His praise and learning His doctrine, let me try how this confidence will work in me. The fruits of righteousness so produced will arise from the sense of my own nothingness, and have Christ alone as their origin.'—'July 10. Am I not too light-hearted and too luxurious, and altogether too self-indulgent? Certain it is that in and of myself I am altogether vile and worthless, and would need, in dependence on grace alone, to have more of watchfulness unto prayer, more of self-denial, and a far more tender sense of the evil of ungodliness than habitually and practically belong to me.'—'July 4. Never am I in a better frame than when dwelling in simple faith on Christ's offered righteousness, and making it the object of my acceptation. O Lord, I pray for more and more of the clearness and enlargement of this view; and grant me the spirit of adoption. Oh that I could attain the experience of him who says, "I have believed, therefore have I spoken"!'
One is constantly reminded in reading the private journals of Dr. Chalmers of the 119th Psalm, with its remarkable combination of profoundest humility and intense and holiest longing for conformity of heart and life to the will of God. And it does not surprise us to learn that the text of Scripture which he felt to describe his own case most correctly was the verse (20), 'My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judgments at all times.'
CHAPTER VI
NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH
1843-1847
Gifted and mighty men though many of the leaders of the Disruption were, Chalmers towered high above them all. With the multitude his illustrious name gave a dazzling éclat to the movement; with the thoughtful the fact that a man of his sagacity, patriotism, and caution, and strong proclivity to an established church, should have thrown himself heart and soul into the non-intrusion cause, created the conviction that it must be supported by very weighty considerations. What but the strongest sense of fatal injury to the church could have induced him, after electrifying London with pleadings for a national establishment of religion, to forsake his own, and become practically a voluntary? No man felt his responsibility for the Disruption more deeply than Chalmers; and no man laboured more assiduously in behalf of the Free. Church, in the creation of which he had had such a share. To the General Assembly of 1843 he gave in the Reports of the Sustentation and Building Committees, both of which were very encouraging. The months of August and September were spent in a tour to the east and north of Scotland, on behalf of the Sustentation Fund. In October he attended an extra meeting of the General Assembly at Glasgow, opening it with a sermon from Nehemiah xi. 16. In November he had to enter on his duties as Principal and Professor of Divinity in the Free Church Theological Institution, now known as the 'New College.'
It was natural for him to be very much cheered by the numberless letters and visits of congratulation that came to the Free Church from every quarter. When even those who had as voluntaries been his most inveterate opponents in his church endowment effort, came with their warm and most brotherly salutations, a new hope of union sprang up that rekindled hope for the highest welfare of Scotland.
Speaking to the General Assembly held at Glasgow in the autumn of 1843, he said:—
'I confess to you that I was much interested by the arrival, by one post after another, of those addresses and resolutions from various churches, of whose very existence I was not aware till I received their letters. And I think that every man, whose heart is in the right place, will be delighted with such movements. They are movements quite in my own favourite direction, because one and all of them are movements of convergency; or, in other words, movements which point in the first instance to union, and, as soon as possible and prudent, I trust their landing-place will be incorporation. There is among them one very pleasant address, signed by—I have not had time to count the names,—but I believe some of the youngsters of my family tried a more wholesale method of arriving at a probable estimate of the amount of support thus given to the Free Church; instead of numbering, they measured it, and found it about seventeen yards long.... I have felt exceedingly delighted with these communications. I must say that I consider it as infinitely more characteristic of the religion which we profess—the religion of peace and charity—that instead of each denomination sitting aloft and apart upon its own hill, and frowning upon each other from their respective orbits, they should hold kindly and mutual converse, and see each other eye to eye, while they will discern, to their mutual astonishment, if not how thoroughly, at least how substantially, they are at one. I just conclude with observing that now is the time to rally about the common standard all that is pure and vital in Protestantism; for now it is that we shall have to make head against a new form and revival of Antichrist, whether in the form of Popery—naked Popery, or Popery in disguise, even that Antichrist which threatens to shake a most withering mildew over the whole of Christendom.'
The same views were expressed with equal emphasis at a general meeting, held about the same time, in commemora tion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Westminster Assembly. And when the Evangelical Alliance was projected, he wrote a pamphlet in its favour, expressing a strong desire that it should be called the Protestant Alliance, and that it should have for its double object the protection and promotion of the cause of Protestantism; and, in his own familiar and favourite line, the work of a great Home Mission.
Among the eminent strangers who visited Scotland about this time none excited a livelier interest in Dr. Chalmers's mind than Dr. Merle D'Aubigné, who came in 1845, when in the full flush of his fame as the popular historian of the Reformation.
At the Disruption there was a vast amount of work to be done, for it would have required more than seven hundred churches to accommodate all the congregations that adhered to the Free Church. There were, besides, many cases of peculiar difficulty, caused chiefly by the refusal of proprietors to grant sites for churches and manses on their properties, a refusal which on vast estates like those of the Duke of Sutherland or the Duke of Buccleuch would have amounted to an absolute extinction of the church. Dr. Chalmers, however, under the influence of his strong desire for a sabbatic decennium, kept clear of the ordinary work of the church, excepting the Sustentation Fund and his college lectures. As for the college itself, it was mainly in the hands of Dr. Welsh, until his lamented death in 1845, when Dr. Chalmers felt constrained to become convener of the College Committee. Among other services, Dr. Welsh took in hand to provide for a college building, which it was proposed to erect from the contributions of twenty subscribers of £1000 each. This was a serious undertaking at a time when the wealthier friends of the church had been straining all their energies for the Building, Sustentation, and Mission Funds. But the whole sum was speedily contributed in the way proposed, and though in the end the price of the site and the cost of the building amounted to more than double the sum named at the beginning, the whole was ultimately provided. Such liberality for college purposes was due in a great degree to the profound regard in which Dr. Chalmers was held, and in a somewhat less degree to his colleague Dr. Welsh.
It must be owned that Dr. Chalmers was not satisfied with the success of the Sustentation Fund. It had been adopted not only unanimously but enthusiastically by the whole church, and considering all that had to be done for other purposes, it was marvellous that in the first year it amounted to £68,700, enough to furnish fully £100 to six hundred ministers. That, however, was but two-thirds of the amount which Chalmers had named as the minimum payment to each minister from this fund. And, besides, there were many additional ministers to be provided for, needed by the new adhering congregations; and moreover,—and this was never absent from his thoughts—there was to be considered the vast home-mission work needed in order to realise his lifelong desire to overtake the whole spiritual destitution of the country. It was the inadequacy of the Sustentation Fund to realise this further object that was the chief cause of his disappointment. Moreover, he found in the machinery of his scheme a serious leak, which bade fair to ruin it. Every congregation was to receive an equal dividend for its minister from this fund, whatever might be the amount of its own contributions. In order that this provision might work satisfactorily, it was necessary that congregations should make an equal effort for the fund. But it was soon found that many congregations were steeped in selfishness, and, while drawing their equal dividend, their contributions were but a fraction of what they should have been. Chalmers had calculated on a brotherly spirit and a brotherly conscience, which he now found were often wanting. He became alarmed for the future, and proposed a modification of the original arrangement, to the effect that no congregation should receive from the fund more than its own contribution and a half more. But it was too late. The fund had been constituted on the footing of an equal dividend, and there was a strong opposition to the change. Chalmers remonstrated by word of mouth and by pamphlets on the 'Economics of the Free Church.' All that the Assembly would allow was that the new plan should be tried with new congregations. But as the new congregations were generally comparatively poor, the result was something like starvation to their ministers; and, after a short trial, the plan was given up. But no one could deny the serious nature of the evil that Chalmers had pointed out, and for many a long year there were perplexed discussions as to the remedy. Even now, though the leak has been abundantly dealt with, it has not been quite overcome. In his remonstrances, Chalmers showed more vehemence than was perhaps reasonable, considering that it was the defect of his own original scheme that caused the difficulty. But his vehemence was due to the conviction that came home so strongly to him, that the Sustentation Fund could not become the instrument of carrying out his dearly-cherished project,—of recovering the whole waste-places of Scotland, and making them parts of the vineyard of the Lord. The thought saddened him, and it led him to speak more disparagingly of what the Free Church had accomplished, and what the Sustentation Fund had accomplished, than was altogether deserved.
After experiencing three disappointments—from the Whigs, and the Tories, and the Free Church, it might have been supposed that, all eager as he was for rest and quiet, he would now let the matter alone. But no. There remained one other step. By an experimentum crucis, by a demonstration of what, under the divine blessing, could be done by his scheme in as unfavourable a district as could be found, he might yet vindicate it in the eyes of all men; he might leave behind him a monument which would be a perpetual rebuke of the languor and listlessness of the church; a perpetual encouragement to similar undertakings, and a perpetual testimony to the maxim of John Eliot, the apostle of the North American Indians, which he used often to quote, that 'prayer and pains can do everything.'
This was the origin of the West Port experiment. Writing on 26th July 1844, just fourteen months after the Disruption, to his friend Mr. Lennox of New York, the munificent founder of the Lennox Library and the Lennox Hospital, New York, between whom and Dr. Chalmers there had sprung up a very cordial friendship, he said: 'I have determined to assume a poor district of two thousand people, and superintend it myself, though it be a work greatly too much for my declining strength and means. Yet such do I hold to be the efficiency of the method with the divine blessing, that perhaps, as the concluding act of my public life, I shall make the effort to exemplify what as yet I have only expounded.'
To prepare the way and interest the public in his scheme, he delivered four lectures, in which the methods and advantages of territorial schools and churches were set forth with his usual force. Free Church feeling was running very hieh at the time, and Dr. Chalmers was at great pains to show that his undertaking was dictated solely by a regard to the good of the people. 'Who cares,' he asked, 'about the Free Church, compared with the Christian good of Scotland? Who cares about any church but as an instrument of Christian good? For be assured that the moral and religious well-being of the population is of infinitely higher importance than the advancement of any sect.'
The district selected was of the worst description—a fourth part of the whole population being paupers, and another fourth street beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The population amounted to upwards of 400 families, of whom 300 had no connection with any church. Of 411 children of school age, 290 were growing up without any education. The plan of Dr. Chalmers was to divide the whole territory into twenty districts, containing each about twenty families. To each district a visitor was appointed, whose duty was to visit each family once a week, under directions printed by Dr. Chalmers to show the specific object of the visitation. A school was provided, and the visitors were instructed, in the first instance, to show an active interest in the young, and exhort the parents to send their children to the school. A small fee was exacted, on the principle that what was paid for would be more valued, and that a more regular attendance would be secured.5 The visitors were instructed to meet with Dr. Chalmers every Saturday evening, the first meeting taking place on 27th July 1844. On the 6th November, Dr. Chalmers held his first meeting with the people, telling them all he would do for them, and all that they were expected to do for themselves. On 11th November, when the school was opened, there were 64 scholars; in the course of the year there were 250. On the 22nd December, public worship was commenced by Dr. Chalmers in a tan-loft. The attendance was not encouraging after all the visiting that had been going on—only about a dozen adults, and these mostly old women. In April 1845, the services of the Rev. W. Tasker were secured as missionary-minister, and before the end of the year the nucleus of a fair congregation had been formed. A library, a savings-bank, a washing-house, and a female industrial school were added to the parochial equipments. Dr. Chalmers preached and worshipped often in the loft, met with the visitors, and addressed the people as new features were added to the scheme. 'When he was a hearer merely,' says Mr. Dodds, 'one would see him near the pulpit, in a crowd of deaf old women, who were meanly clothed, but were following the services with unflagging attention and interest. His eye was upon every one of them, to anticipate their wishes and difficulties. He would help one old woman to find out the text; he would take hold of the psalm-book of another, hand to hand, and join her in the song of praise. Any one looking at him could see that he was in a state of supreme enjoyment.' And most earnestly did he pray for a blessing on the work, and that it might be the forerunner of many such undertakings.
'We would give Thee no rest, O God, until Thou hast opened the window of heaven and caused righteousness to flow down that street like a mighty river.' 'Let such a memorial of Christian philanthropy be set up in that place as to be a praise and an example both in the city of our habitation and in other cities of the land.' 'Reveal to me, O God, the right tactics, the right way and method of proceeding in the management of the affairs of the West Port. Oh that I were enabled to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan which are there!' 'O my God, give me the power of ordering matters aright in the West Port.... And more especially, O God, let me understand Thy will in regard to the right place and performances of a female agency.' 'Draw close the affections and affinity between Mr. Tasker and the families of the West Port.... Do Thou guide and encourage him, O Lord.... Oh may he not only be himself saved, but may he be the instrument of salvation to many; and may both he and I be carried in safety, and at length with triumph, to that prosperous termination for which we are jointly labouring!'
We have no space to dwell further on the history of the West Port. The sweep of the experiment was complete. On 19th February 1847 a new church was opened; and on the 25th April, one month before his death, Dr. Chalmers administered the Lord's Supper to the congregation. On that occasion he said to Mr. Tasker, 'I have got now the desire of my heart; God has indeed answered my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in peace and die.' And he wrote to Mr. Lennox, 'I wish to communicate what to me is the most joyful event of my life. I have been intent for thirty years on the completion of a territorial experiment, and I have now to bless God for the consummation of it.'
It may be well to add that under Mr. Tasker and his successors the cause has prospered greatly. After being enlarged twice, the original church still proved too small, and a new and spacious building was erected a little way off. The congregation now numbers upwards of 1300 communicants. Of course it is not wholly territorial; people that have become attached to a church cannot be driven out of it when they leave the neighbourhood; but the old building is still retained as a mission church, and the territorial work continues. In the Free Church in Edinburgh the experiment was repeated many times, new territorial churches in poor and needy districts having been erected at Holyrood, Pleasance, Back of Canongate (Moray), Cowgate, Cowgate Head, and Fountainbridge. In Glasgow there have been many more, and several in the other large towns of Scotland. The Established Church has striven with great success to have its extension churches endowed, thereby carrying into effect the original idea of Chalmers. And yet, in spite of all this, the aim of Chalmers is as far from being realised as ever. With the increasing population, the number of persons, in our large towns especially, who have no connection with any church is larger than in Chalmers's time. And, alas! the wave of scepticism and of secularism that is passing over us intensifies the evil and magnifies the difficulty.
In connection with his public labours, it only remains for us to advert to his work as professor of theology during the last few years of his life. It had long been his desire to reduce his lectures to a form that would convey the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian revelation. When he began his Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ and Sabbaticæ, he began at the same time to condense and reconstruct his lectures; the two works advanced pari passu; the devout study of the Scriptures went hand in hand with the endeavour, in the spirit of the Baconian philosophy, to present the substance of their contents. Hence arose his Institutes of Theology—a work which has received far too little attention since German theology began to supersede our own, but which may one day, in some future age, be valued as it should.
But the great merit of Chalmers as a professor lay in the enthusiasm with which he inspired his students. It would have been hard indeed for any conscientious youth to be under him and not feel his soul quickened, at least occasionally, to a sublime ardour, and fired with a new ambition. So wonderful was his influence, that at the Disruption nine-tenths of those who passed through his classes stood by his side. The present writer, though he spent but one session under him before the Disruption, can bear testimony, not only to the intellectual and spiritual impulse he gave, but to the subtle sympathy which drew his students to share his church views, though he never alluded to them in the class, and to the enthusiasm with which they listened to him in the General Assembly. He well knew that in the Free Church the mass of the ministers would be but poorly paid, and that there was all the greater reason why they should be well equipped by superior scholarship, and especially by superior piety, for their office. And in this he was highly successful. After three sessions in the Free Church College, he could testify that the students of his last session stood the highest of any he had known, not only in general proficiency and scholarship, but also in their sense of divine things, and devotedness in heart and spirit to the great objects of the Christian ministry. In his later years, it was his practice to invite his students to private interviews for spiritual conversation and prayer.
On 4th June 1846, he laid the foundation-stone of the Free Church College. It had been considered a great stroke of policy that the most commanding site in the city had been secured for the building. The writer of this sketch, who was present on the occasion, remembers his grand appearance after the ceremony, when his noble head appeared above a confused pile of stones and timbers; and, producing a scrap of paper covered with shorthand hieroglyphics, he apologised, with a broad smile, for taking to 'the paper,' seeing it was but a scrap, whereas if he were to speak extempore, his remarks might become an 'interminable rigmarole.' Not a little of the short speech was addressed to the workmen engaged in the building. That dear object of his life, to raise the working population to a higher level of life in the best sense of the word, came back on him in all its strength. Within the walls to be erected, there would be, he said, no false theories of equality taught or countenanced; but there was one equality between man and man that would be strenuously enforced,—the essential equality of human souls; it would be taught that, in the high count and reckoning of eternity, the soul of the poorest of nature's children, the raggedest boy that ran along the pavement, was of like estimation in the eye of Heaven with the greatest and noblest of the land. The young men in that college would ever be taught that, though their education might fit them for the company of princes and peers, it would be their peculiar glory to be visitants of the poor man's humble cottage, and to pray by the poor man's dying bed. 'Heaven grant that the platform of humble life may be raised immeasurably higher than at present, and through the whole extent of it—that the mighty host who swarm upon its surface, brought under the elevating power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and so rescued from grovelling ignorance and loathsome dissipation, may rise to a full equality with ourselves in all that is characteristic of humanity, and take their place, along with us, side by side, on the footing of kindred and companionable men.' He then made a graceful allusion to the young queen, who had mercifully escaped one of those horrible attempts on her life that occurred in the earlier part of her reign; prayed that she might long continue to adorn her exalted position, and concluded by calling for three cheers on her behalf. Thus the college of the Free Church was founded on a cordial recognition of both ends of the social scale: with benevolent wishes for the working multitude on the one hand, and a cordial and loyal tribute to the Sovereign on the other.
The last of the public services rendered by Dr. Chalmers to the Free Church consisted of a paper on the education question, and of his evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons on the refusal of sites. It was about the time when the question of national education was coming full into the arena of discussion; and, at the request of Mr. Fox Maule, afterwards Earl of Dalhousie, Chalmers, who had given much attention to the subject, recorded his views in a short paper. The difficulty was about the introduction of religion. Dr. Chalmers's view was substantially that which was subsequently acted upon: he advised that there should be no legislative enactment on the subject of religion, but that the regulation of this should be left to the governing bodies of the several schools. Not that religion was unimportant, but the very reverse; but because the Christian church was so divided that it could be far better seen to by the local managers. To this he added a conscience clause; the result being substantially the system which prevails in Scotland at the present day. He took occasion to add, 'We despair of any good being done in the way of Christianising our population but through the medium of a government themselves Christian, and endowing the true religion, which I hold to be their imperative duty, not because it is the religion of the many, but because it is true.'
It was in the last month of his life that he set out for London, to meet the Site Committee. On the 9th May 1847 he preached in Marylebone Presbyterian Church, 'with more comfort than I ever did in London.' After replying to the questions put by the committee through Mr. Maule, he encountered an onslaught from Sir James Graham, who came armed with a bundle of papers containing speeches, etc., of Chalmers, by means of which he thought to entangle him. After his long examination before Sir James appeared, Chalmers was somewhat exhausted, but he roused himself, and met him in the spirit of a practised warrior. The only point of importance raised by Sir James arose out of the London lectures, in which he had spoken very favourably of the Church of England. 'I told him that I did not advocate the Church of England; that I felt more hopeful of it then than now, when like to be overrun by Puseyism; that even then I denounced its figment of an Apostolical succession, and, without directly attacking its Erastianism, spoke of our own independence, and in terms which provoked the jealousy of English churchmen,' etc. etc. But a great part of the examination concerned the voting of women at the election of office-bearers and the like; a paltry question, as Dr. Chalmers called it, having no sort of reasonable connection with the refusal of sites. 'We concluded,' Dr. Chalmers wrote to his wife, 'in a state of great exhaustion, yet with an erect demeanour and visage unabashed.'
We conclude with a glimpse of his more private life in the few years preceding his death. Unwearied as he ever was in his endeavour to cultivate the affections of his children, and impress them with the most serious responsibilities of life, his interest in them seems only to have deepened as they grew up. He began a series of monthly letters to be addressed to each in succession, and carried it on for a considerable time. Two of his six daughters were married, but they were not excluded from the privilege of his fatherly correspondence. And by and by, a grandson, Thomas Chalmers Hanna, was old enough to receive letters fitted to interest him, and draw his affections to so loving a grandfather. It is strange, indeed, that any biographer of Chalmers should have represented him (as Mrs. Oliphant has done) as not showing social affection. 'My ever dear Anne,' 'My dearest Eliza,' 'My dearest Grace,' were his ordinary salutations, and the spirit of the letters corresponded to the address. Very touching is his letter to his eldest daughter on the death of a beloved infant. As for his grandson, he just revels in affection. 'Tell Tommy how much I love him, and pray for his being good.' On occasion of his last visit to London, he visited the widow of his brother James, and prayed with her; a likeness of his brother was shown him, and impressed him so much that it haunted him for days. This was the brother that had held himself so much aloof both from him and all the family.
In his last visit to his native Anstruther and its neighbourhood, in 1845, his unchanged and unchangeable affection for the scenes and friends of his youth showed a marvellous freshness and tenacity. Many are the stories of his pleasure in recalling memorials of the past. He hunted up an old schoolfellow, a tailor, and told him that he had been the first to acquaint him with the form of the earth. He congratulated another schoolfellow, who, like himself, had suffered from smallpox, that while other people's faces were 'aye getting the waur, theirs were always getting the better o' the wear!' He sought out the place where Lizzie Green's water-bucket used to stand, where he and his heated playfellows had often been allowed very kindly to slake their thirst. But most pathetic was his visit to the house of Barnsmuir. When he was some twelve or fourteen years old, the eldest daughter of that house had been in the habit of riding into Anstruther on a little pony, and Chalmers had conceived a deep and tender attachment to her, like that of Lord Byron for his Mary Duff. The young lady was married while he was at college, and she had died many years before this visit. At his special request her youngest sister met him at Barnsmuir. In the house, the remembrance of that early love came upon him with singular power; he asked respectfully about her life and death, and learned with deep emotion that she had died in the full Christian hope, and that some of his letters to her sister had soothed and comforted her. He then asked if there were any portrait of her, and being shown a profile, gazed on it with great earnestness, fixed his own card on the back of it, and, gazing on it again, gave expression to his strong affection, and burst into a flood of tears. It was a touching proof, as his biographer has said, that he was as much distinguished for the tenderness and tenacity of his attachments as for the brilliance of his gifts.
Dr. Chalmers was ever very simple, and yet in some respects singular, in his habits of life. Abstemious he was to a degree; ever watchful lest he should at any time be in a condition of body that would interfere with the activity of his intellectual and spiritual nature; at times, at least, practising total abstinence, and always great moderation in both food and drink. It was his usual practice to spend the early part of the day in composition and study; he so carefully excogitated his subjects that he was ever ready to use his pen, never obliged to loiter in order to form his plan or shape his thought, but able to write rapidly as soon as the pen was in his hand, and seldom or never correcting. His handwriting was anything but elegant, yet very characteristic; the upright letters, the firmness of each stroke, and the continuity of the whole indicating decision, force, and flow. So exact was his view, that he could calculate for weeks and months beforehand the rate of his progress and the day when each piece of writing would be finished. His remarkable calculating or counting faculty was brought into operation in what we should call fantastic ways. In stropping his razor, he would begin with two strokes, next day three, and so on till he reached a maximum number; then he would reverse the process and gradually diminish till he came back to two. In walking he put his staff to the ground regularly at each fourth step; counting, if he chose, the number of his steps, and able to keep count even if he should meet a friend and walk with him in animated conversation. When he lived in Inverleith Row he delighted to find new routes to the university, and ascertain and record their several lengths. One day, as he told a favourite student, he had been trying to find a near road between Comely Bank and Inverleith Row, but got entangled, as he put it in his original way, 'in the accessories of a farmhouse, where I was set upon by a mastiff, and so obliged to turn back.' We have noted his delight in ascending cathedral towers, and his invariable habit of counting the steps. At any famous stream he would lap the water, thus making the connection more intimate between the stream and himself. His love of order was remarkable, though one might not have supposed it from his general manner. It was through the power of orderliness that he was able to achieve all he did within the compass of his life. By varying his employments,—now writing, now visiting or attending meetings, now travelling, now preaching or lecturing, now entertaining friends, now reading and pondering, he kept himself comparatively fresh, and seemed at all times ready for new work. 'Nulla dies sine lineâ' might have been his motto, had it not been that every day had half a dozen linea in place of one.
His reading, after he became a professor, was considerable, partly in theological books, partly in books of practical religion, and to a small extent in general literature. So little direct sign of anything Shakespearean is there in his writings that it rather surprises us to find him recording towards the end of his life that he had completed an entire perusal of the great dramatist, as well as of Milton and Gibbon. He considered Shakespeare 'an intellectual miracle, the greatest man that ever lived.' His favourite piece was Midsummer Night's Dream, showing, as Dr. Peter Bayne has remarked, 'that after all the struggles and worries of his life, he still walked in the aerial gaiety, the many-tinted, summerlike beauty, the genial though keen sagacity of that poem. It is a very remarkable circumstance, telling of a gentleness of nature, a kind, gleesome humour, an exuberant, unstrained force and freshness of intellect, rarely seen among theologians.'
In the prosecution of his incessant labours, he was no doubt considerably helped by his sense of humour. He knew well the relaxation and the refreshment derived from a good laugh. Many a humorous story he used to tell. One of his favourite stories referred to a boor who was getting married, but was such a dolt that he could not give an answer to the questions of the minister. One of the man's neighbours who was present, chagrined at such want of manners, and desiring to give the fellow a needed lesson in etiquette, gave him a slap on the back, and said, 'Ye brute, can you no' boo to the minister?' And it mattered not if the story told against himself. When the astronomical discourses were delivered, Dr. Chalmers came on an honest woman who had been hearing one of them, and was curious to know what she could make of it. 'Weel, sir,' said the woman, 'I canna say that I understood ye a'thegether, but, O sir, there was something unco suitable and satisfyin' in your psalms!'
During his visit to London in connection with the Site Committee in May 1847, he had greatly enjoyed his intercourse with many friends—among them Isaac Taylor, James Hamilton, Baptist Noel, Mr. Morell, and Thomas Carlyle. He described Carlyle as 'a strong-featured man, and of strong sense. We were most cordial and coalescing, and he very complimentary and pleasant; but his talk was not at all Carlylish; much rather the plain and ordinary conversation of good, ordinary common-sense, with a deal of hearty laughing on both sides.' Chalmers greatly lamented the alienation which he saw between the churches and the body of literary and scientific men. He enlarged on 'localism' and the West Port; nothing was too hard for 'localism.' Carlyle remarked afterwards to a friend, 'What a wonderful old man Chalmers is! or, rather, he has all the buoyancy of youth. When so many of us are wringing our hands in hopeless despair over the vileness and wretchedness of the large towns, there goes the old man, shovel in hand, down into the dirtiest puddles of the West Port of Edinburgh, cleans them out, and fills the sewers with living waters. It is a beautiful sight.'
After a flying visit to Brighton, where he preached for one of his former students, he proceeded to Gloucestershire, and spent a happy time with his ever dear sister Jane. On Sunday he preached his last sermon in the Independent chapel of the Rev. Mr. Dove, from the text Isaiah xxvii. 4, 5. A brief visit was paid at Darlington at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Backhouse, 'a most delicious abode.' He was profoundly interested in Mrs. Backhouse's account of the heavenly state of mind of her father for some time before his death; while Mrs. Backhouse was herself deeply struck with the very same spirit in him. During this visit the whole of his journal letters had been addressed to his wife; on Thursday (the 27th) he wrote to her, 'This is my last sheet. To-morrow evening I expect to see you by the favour of Him whose right hand preserves us continually, and for whose grace on us all I ever pray.—I ever am, my dearest Grace, yours most affectionately, Thomas Chalmers.'
He arrived at his house in Morningside on the Friday evening (2 8th May), apparently in his usual health and strength. On the following morning, at breakfast, his conversation was as lively and vigorous as ever. The forenoon of the Saturday was occupied in preparing the College Report, which he was to give in on Monday to the General Assembly. On the Sabbath morning he conversed freely with the Rev. Mr. Gemmel, who was staying at his house; afterwards with Dr. Cunningham; then attended afternoon service in Morningside Free Church, and on his way home called on Mrs. Coutts, an old Fifeshire friend, of high Christian character. Part of the evening was spent in writing to his sister, Mrs. Morton, and in conversation with Mr. Gemmel. His family never saw him more genial and happy. After worship, he bade his family remember that they must be early to-morrow; then he waved his hand and said, 'A general good-night.'
On the following morning he was found dead in bed. It seemed likely, from the state of the body, that his spirit had departed soon after he lay down. There was not the slightest trace of struggle, either on the face or in the attitude of the body. Never did death give a lighter touch.
In a funeral sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Alexander, the mode of his departure was beautifully idealised. He recalled a passage in one of Dr. Chalmers's sermons, in which he fancies a man 'standing on the margin of this green world,' and feeling himself very closely bound to 'the region of sense, and of life, and of society'; but suddenly arrested by seeing some happy island of the blest floating past, 'in the light of its surpassing glories, and its sounds of sweeter melody, and a purer beauty resting on every field': discerning also in its inhabitants 'a peace, and a piety, and a benevolence that put a moral gladness into every bosom, and united the whole society in rejoicing sympathy with each other, and with the beneficent Father of them all'; observing, moreover, signals of welcome for himself, and an open pathway of communication to the island; insomuch that he is captivated by the sight; earth becomes a wilderness, and 'the land of invitation' attracts him with irresistible power.
'With this grand passage in my mind,' said Dr. Lindsay Alexander,' I could not but fancy him who uttered it, as realising at the moment of his departure some of the features of the case here supposed. I pictured to myself how, when the premonitory touch of the Destroyer broke his slumbers, he might imagine for a moment that he had been summoned to his appointed work, and how, casting his eye upon the materials he had prepared, he might begin to turn, with no reluctant emotion, his thoughts upon the duties with which he was charged; but in an instant another scene burst upon his view; a brighter radiance than that of the morning sun fell upon his brow; sweeter voices than those of wife or child broke upon his ear; a grander career of service than any earth could furnish stretched before him; the hand of One more glorious far than any child of man hung out to him the signals of welcome; and, as he gazed, he acknowledged the superior claims of that brighter world, and laid himself meekly down, and so his spirit passed rejoicingly away, leaving his earthly tabernacle with a smile upon the lips, and not one shade of suffering on the brow.'
On that Monday morning, the General Assembly met to receive his College Report. When the sad news came, the shock was so overwhelming that it would have been impossible to look at business, even if respect for his memory had not demanded an adjournment. As men recovered somewhat from the first shock, the sense of bereavement, of impoverishment, of widowhood, grew the greater. There were many men of extraordinary gifts in that Assembly, but who was there to be named with him?
An unprecedented concourse of mourners, much greater than had ever been seen at an Edinburgh funeral, followed his body to the grave. And from every pulpit, and from other quarters innumerable, the most respectful and cordial tributes were paid to his memory. It was felt that since the days of Knox no such man had been known in the Scottish church. His greatness was shown alike by what he was and what he had done. He seemed to combine the orator and the statesman, the ecclesiastic and the patriot, the philosopher and the poet, the scientist and the saint. No man had ever been so run after as a pulpit orator. No man of his day had ever conceived so great undertakings or done so much to realise them. His two hundred churches astonished every one; his Sustentation Fund astonished still more. With theology in the forefront, his horizon included philosophy, physical science, social science, political economy, and literature; and for each and all of these he found a place and a use in the Kingdom of God. And with all his greatness he was simple as a child. Like his Master, 'he made himself of no reputation'—never sought great things for himself. The world, and even the church, hardly knew how near he lived to God—how much he had of the saint. He was known to be very affable and affectionate, but the depth and tenderness of his affection, especially for his own family, were hardly suspected. When it was announced that, with all his gifts and graces, he had passed from among his brethren, it seemed as if the brightest star in the firmament had ceased to shine.