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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

DEPOSITED BY THE

LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

THOMAS CHALMERS.

From a Portrait by Thomas Duncan, R.S.A., A.R.A.

THOMAS CHALMERS
PREACHER PHILOSOPHER
AND STATESMAN

MRS. OLIPHANT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Sire gtrbwsibe frtsss, Cambribge
1893

THOMAS CHALMERS.

CHAPTER I.

Towards the end of last century, on the 17th March,
1780, Thomas Chalmers was born, the fourth son
and sixth child of a well-to-do and comfortable family
occupying a solid and substantial house at the west-end
of the village of Easter Anstruther, popularly called
Anster, in Fife. His father, John Chalmers, was a " dyer,
ship-owner, and general merchant," a man of homely
competency, a Scotch burgher, member of the Town
Council, and elder in the Church, the most respectable
and substantial of rural tradesmen, with links of alliance
which attached him to the higher classes, territorial
and clerical, in the district. The house still stands,
and is more or less an object of curiosity and veneration
as the birthplace of the great Dr. Chalmers, and I
remember the half-contempt with which my questions
about an old tenement once belonging to an ancestor
of my own were received in the village. "Ye'll be
wanting Dr. Chalmers' house ? " the women at their
doors said, eyeing with amazement the stranger who
B

2 thomas Chalmers.
sought another shrine. It stands within sight and
sound of the sea, not far from the little harbour where
the ships of which John Chalmers was part-owner,
fishing-boats, or merchant smacks, or perhaps a whaler
on its return from Greenland, lay. Anster was not the
prosperous town it had been a hundred years before,
in the days when Maister James Melville, who has
left one of the most graphic of diaries behind him,
chronicling many national events, was minister; nor was
it an emporium of salted herrings, giving large, if not
very lovely, occupation to husbands and wives alike,
and filling the streets with busy industry and ancient
and fish-like smells in the season, as it is now. But
there was enough of leisurely traffic to keep life going
in a way of homely comfort, nobody being very rich,
nor any very poor. The old and feeble were supported
by the little revenue supplied by the " Plate " at the
church door, where every worshipper placed his offering
as he entered, often no more than a penny, but not to
be omitted save at peril of self-respect and good report
— and by the neighbourly kindness of the well-to-do;
while the old sailors had their little pensions from the
Sea-Box, and the fisher-folk rejoiced in the summer
harvest of the "drave" or shoal of herrings, which, I
have heard an old Fife lady say, came by a special
arrangement of Providence along with the new potatoes,
and filled the cottages on "the head of the cliffs with
food and gladness. Now the drave furnishes herrings
to be salted and packed in barrels, and the new potatoes
are sent off by railway to Edinburgh and Dundee.
For some things, certainly, the old times were better,
more abundant and comfortable in their way, if money
was scarcer and luxuries fewer.

HIS CHILDHOOD. 3
Tom Chalmers went naturally with his big and little
brothers — there were nine boys in all — to the parish
school, which was not in very effective keeping at the
time, and where he was remembered as "one of the
idlest, strongest, merriest, and most generous-hearted
boys in Anstruther school." That he fought as well as
played there can be no doubt in such a vigorous
atmosphere, but there is a pretty anecdote of the sturdy
independence and sense of the little lad, who is said
to have taken refuge in a cottage when a " bicker " was
going, on, in which sharp and cutting mussel-shells were
the missiles. " I'm no for powder and shot," he said.
A more remarkable, and indeed quite singular, little
scene occurred, we are told, still, earlier, at three years
old, when he was found in his nursery, in the dark,
pacing up and down and repeating to himself the cry
of David, " Oh, my son Absalom : oh, Absalom, my son,
my son 1 " — the wonderful story, and that wonderful
outcry of passion and anguish, having somehow caught
the child's ear at an age almost too early to be
conceivable as touched by such profound emotion
at all.
That he should have declared his determination to
become a minister at a very early age was not wonder
ful, for the minister was at once the most influential
person in it, and the head of the village hierarchy,
occupying a position which naturally attracted the
first stirrings of childish ambition. But it cannot
even be considered certain that it was from any special
aptitude or progress in his work at school — where there
was apparently more flogging than teaching' — that young
Tom Chalmers was sent with his elder brother, "William,
to the University of St. Andrews, when he was eleven

4 THOMAS CHALMERS.
years and a half old. This wonderful proceeding was
common in Scotland at the time, though excessive in
his case, his brother having the advantage of thirteen
years of age, and being therefore quite matured and fit
for graver studies. John Campbell, afterwards Lord
Campbell and Lord Chancellor, entered the University
at a still earlier age. The urchin in his little red gown
could not spell, and no doubt was " Fifish — a wee by
the East-Neuk," and spoke the broadest dialect of his
country, the accent of which was a thing he never
overcame, even at the height of his fame. A grave
chronicler describes him as "volatile and boyish and
idle in his habits, ill-prepared by previous education
(at eleven and a half!) for reaping the full benefit of a
college course." The sturdy little fellow played golf
and football for his first two sessions, which were of six
months each, the whole academical year in Scotland, and
this no doubt did him more good than the lectures on
Latin of " that distinguished philosophical grammarian,
Dr. John Brown." However, in his third year, when
he was " rising " fourteen, the boy settled down to his
work, and his biographer, Dr. Hanna, tells us St.
Andrews was " his intellectual birthplace." Mathe
matics was the branch of study which chiefly attracted
him, and in that he attained considerable distinction.
But his rapidly-developing mind became soon the
scene of those whirlwinds and tempests of thought
which have been supposed to be the special charac
teristic of our own age, but which no doubt accompany
the progress of every new and inexperienced thinker
animated by that sense of new discovery and original
impulse which is the inheritance of youth. It is in
vain to assure the boy that others have trod that path

YOUTHFUL STCJDIES. 5
before him; his own fresh impressions are always,
to his mind, the first that have ever been received.
Younger Chalmers doubted, and soon dropped, Calvinism, ,
in which he had been brought up. His father's some
what stern religion had always seemed to him severe,
and now no doubt had the air of an old-fashioned
system, a part of the old Toryism and unbinding
character of the elder race. In the livelier University
circles of St. Andrews, a religion more intellectual, more
liberal, conforming to the standards of the Church as
necessity required, but indifferent and superior to them,
was at that time in vogue, and philosophy had much
stronger claims upon the educated and progressive than
religion. '' We inhaled," Chalmers himself said in later
years, " not a distaste only, but a positive contempt for
all that is properly and peculiarly gospel, insomuch that
our confidence was nearly as entire in the sufficiency of
natural theology as in the sufficiency of natural science."
The young student became deeply engaged with the
study of Godwin's Political Justice. He began to doubt
the sincerity of those who held the orthodox side, and
cavalierly declared that he " had not been paying atten
tion, but thinking of something else," during a brilliant
lecture upon those contemned principles. In short, in
his old-fashioned way, and by a technique somewhat
different, he passed in the self-confidence of his young
soul through the same phase of mingled questioning,
scepticism as to others and immense faith in his own
judgment, which we of the nineteenth century have
been in the habit of claiming as specially our own.
It developed, however, into something very individual
in the large and ardent spirit of the young philosopher.
From Godwin's Political Justice he stepped by some

6 THOMAS CHALMERS.
turn of the mental balance into Jonathan Edwards'
Treatise on Free Will, which he studied "with such
ardour that he seemed to regard nothing else, and
would scarcely talk of anything else." This tremendous
system, which to many minds suggests nothing but an
inexorable bondage, more strong than iron or steel,
more terrible than the Fates, influenced the mind of
Chalmers in a different and characteristic way. " He
rose to the sublime conception of the Godhead as that
eternal, all-pervading energy by which this vast and
firmly-knit succession was originated and sustained, and
into a very rapture of admiration and delight." He
refers almost with awe, in his journal many years later,
to this condition of mental ecstasy, which must seem a
very strange thing to those who entertain the common,
it may almost be called vulgar, conception of Calvinism
as of a system in which nothing is thought of but
reprobation and everlasting torture. This is, at least, a
new view for the reader of the present day.
" I remember (Chalmers says) when a student of
divinity, and long ere I could relish evangelical senti
ment, I spent nearly a twelvemonth in a sort of mental
elysium, and the one idea which ministered to my soul
all its rapture was the magnificence of the Godhead,
and the universal subordination of all things to the one
great purpose for which He evolved and was support
ing creation." Alluding (his biographer adds) to this
singular period in his mental history, he has told a
member of his family that not a single hour elapsed in
which this overpoweringly impressive imagination did
not stand out before the inward eye, and that his custom
was to wander early in the morning into the country,

YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 7
that amid the quiet scenes of nature he might luxuriate
in the glorious conception.
A young man capable of such a solemn rapture is
no doubt a very rare figure among the crowds of young
men at any university : and such feelings must have
been kept sedulously within the privacy of his reticent
Scotch nature, which would have " thought shame "
to unfold its inner emotions to any eye, only to come
forth when the long levels of time had made the early
landscape fair, and opened his mouth in the desultory
narrative of recollection to those most near and dear.
His biographer remarks upon a journal kept in the
summer of 1796, which is full of the most practical
details of a journey, with many and accurate notes as
to the locks in the Forth and Clyde canal, then the
new and admired way from Edinburgh to Glasgow :
" Left to his own unaided conjecture," says Dr. Hanna,
" the reader of this journal might rather have imagined
the writer to be some honest burgher's son, who, going
to settle as a merchant in the south, was keeping his
eyes quite- open to all the new objects which met him
by the way, and looking at them with a very shrewd
and penetrating glance." This is, in fact, exactly what
Thomas Chalmers was, as he pursued his leisurely journey
by canal and smack to Liverpool, where his merchant-
brother received the large-limbed student, whose mind
was filled with the practical ideas of the home at Anster,
where there were so many sons to put forth in the world :
and who felt no natural need to give out the rumbling
thunder of his half-developed mind, in which he dwelt
apart, his thoughts communicable to " the quiet scenes of
nature," but not in any book or to any human ear.

8 THOMAS CHALMERS.
It was the habit of the time that the members of
the University should " assemble daily in the public hall
for morning and evening prayers, which were conducted
by the theological students." Clerical education in
Scotland is much more distinctively professional than
on the other side of the Tweed, and the divinity
students are made to prepare for their future occupation
from the very beginning of their special studies. At
the present time it is the practice that a sermon should
be preached by each in the critical presence of his
professor and classmates, periodically during the session,
which must be a trying ordeal. Still more trying in a
church, where every prayer was expected to be an
individual composition, must have been this ordeal, to
which in the present day we cannot help attaching a
suspicion of irreverence, as if a prayer intended for the
ear of the Almighty, with expressions of devotion and
supplication representing the voice of the people, might
be criticized and commented upon as if it were an
oration in the ordinary sense of the word. This, how
ever, is a drawback to the freedom of individual prayer
so strongly insisted upon by the Scotch Church, which
is inevitable. When Chalmers, in his turn, conducted
these services, his prayers made, we are told, " a power
ful impression." The people of St. Andrews flocked to
the hall when it was known that he was to officiate.
" The wonderful flow of eloquent, vivid, ardent descrip
tion of the attributes and works of God, and still more
perhaps the astonishingly harrowing delineation of the
miseries, the horrid cruelties, immoralities, and abomin
ations inseparable from war, which always came in more
or less in connexion with the bloody warfare in which
we were engaged with France, called forth the wonder-

YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 9
ment of the hearers," we are told by one of them,
after fifty-two years. Chalmers was only sixteen when
this strange trial of his power was made.
Dr. Hanna quotes from one of his college essays a
striking passage which shows that the young man's
style was not remarkable only in prayer : for the page
which we sltall here repeat represents already very
fairly the measured and dignified diction, with a
flavour of Johnson and the elder age still in it, which
was capable of being expanded by natural fervour into
that eloquence which made him in his day one of the
greatest of preachers. It is on a subject congenial
at all times to that perfervid disposition which has
always been characteristic of the Scot — though how
that quality, attributed to the ancient Celtic race, could
have become so essential a part of the modern Anglo-
Saxon Lowland character, wholly apart from and in
imical to the Celt, is a problem which might task the
best powers of the ethnographist. Are there warm
embers in the very soil of Fife— that most modern,
rational, and discreet of counties — which communicate
the old fire of contending Picts and Scots, to what is
called in modern phrase the canny Scotchman ? At
all events the appropriateness of the old description
is very apparent still. Young Chalmers, somewhere
between sixteen and eighteen, discoursing of enthusiasm
in his old note-book for the ear of his professor, wrote
as follows —
"How different the languor and degeneracy of the
present age from that ardour which animated the
exertions of the primitive Christians in the cause of
their religion ! That religion had then all the impressive

10 THOMAS CHALMERS.
effect of novelty. The evidences which supported its
divine origin were still open to observation. The miracles
of Christianity proclaimed it to be a religion that was
supported by the arm of Omnipotence. The violence
of a persecuting hostility only served to inflame their
attachment to the truth and to arouse the intrepidity
of their characters. Enthusiasm is a *virtue rarely
produced in a state of calm and unruffled repose. It
flourishes in adversity. It kindles in the hour of
danger and rises to deeds of renown. The terrors of
persecution only serve to awaken the energy of its
purposes. It swells in the pride of integrity, and great
in the purity of its cause, it even scatters defiance
among a host of enemies. The magnanimity of the
primitive Christians is beyond example in history. It
could withstand the ruin of interests, the desertion of
friends, the triumphant joy of" enemies, the storms of
popular indignation, the fury of a vindictive priesthood,
the torments of martyrdom. The faith of immortality
emboldened their profession of the gospel, and armed
them with the contempt of death. The torrent of
opposition they had to encounter in asserting the religion
of Jesus was far from repressing their activity in His
service. They maintained His cause with sincerity,
they propagated it with zeal, they devoted their time
and their fortune to its diffusion. Amid all their
discouragements they were sustained by the assurance
of a heavenly crown. The love of their Redeemer
consecrated their affections to His service, and enthroned
in their hearts a pure and disinterested enthusiasm.
Hence the rapid and successful extension of Christianity
through the civilized world. The grace of God was
with them. It blasted all the attempts of opposition.

YOUTHFUL STRUGGLES. 11
It invigorated the constancy of their purposes. It
armed them with fortitude amid the terrors of persecu
tions, and carried them triumphant through the proud
career of victory and success."
Dr. Hanna tells us that a whole lifetime after, at the
crowning point of his career, the old man eloquent took
up these boyish words and poured them forth over the
heads of the little army whom he was about to lead
forth, if not to fight and triumph, at least to sacrifice
and renunciation — with an effect impossible to describe.
When his education was nearly drawing towards its
close, the last year of his theological studies requiring
only a residence of three months at the University, it
was thought well that the youth, then eighteen, should
take a tutorship, and so begin to help himself. Up to
this time the circumstances of his family had made it
unnecessary that the boy should, as so many boys did,
maintain himself in the long interval of his studies —
the yearly vacation of six months or, more. But there
were fourteen children of his father's house, and it was
more creditable, according to all the wholesome ideas
of his time, that he should now begin to exert himself.
The history of this tutorship is told with great gravity
by Dr. Hanna, and it is certainly a powerful example of
the woes and slights which extremely impatient merit
refuses to take from the unworthy ; yet the character
of the youth, and his stand for himself, illuminated by
his future fame, gives a humorous aspect to the story.
He had ten children to teach, the eldest of whom, about
fifteen, had already been two years at college, but set
a very bad example to his juniors, none of whom had
the least regard for the position of their boy -tutor. His

12 THOMAS CHALMERS.
hours were " from seven till nine in the morning, from
ten till twelve in the forenoon, from two till three, and
from four till six ; " and he was treated with a contumely
that stung his youthful pride and independence.
" The people of the house don't seem to know the
place in which a tutor should stand : hence a cold,
contemptuous reserve which I was never accustomed
to, and which exposes me to the most disagreeable
feelings. The vexation of mind that arises from this
circumstance is much heightened by the difficulties of
my employment. My predecessor, as I have reason to
believe, in compliance with the wishes of the female
part of the family, allowed his pupils several improper
indulgences : hence they had contracted habits quite
incompatible with the order and discipline which ought
to be observed, and I was obliged to have recourse to
strong measures in order to root them out. This gave
offence, I thought, to the ladies of the house, and I
ascribed to this in great part their high looks and
sour, forbidding deportment. I have been a stranger
to real enjoyment since I came here. I place my
happiness in the reciprocal returns of friendship and
goodwill; but this is to me a solitary desert, and I
have nothing in it wherewith to call forth my affections."
In a letter to his father his grievances are repeated
in the same serious and indignant tone. "In conse
quence of the low idea they have got of the respect-
due to a tutor, it is impossible for me to talk with
freedom and confidence. I have observed more than
once my attempts to participate in the conversation
discountenanced by the frown of superior dignity.

YOUTHFUL INDEPENDENCE. 13
Hence those who frequent the house — many of whom
would bow full low in your dining-room — regard me as
unworthy of their notice, and return my salutations
with cold indifference." Wounded feelings of this
description have rarely been expressed with so much
lofty and serious indignation, and while wholly sympa
thizing with him, we find it difficult to suppress a
smile at the solemnity of eighteen, which desires not to
express any exaggerated sentiment, but to " endeavour
to make propriety the standard of my conduct," and
begs to be advised how best, while preserving a respect
ful demeanour, he can "act his part with dignity and
effect." The last straw was added to his burden when
he discovered that his employers were in the habit of
having supper-parties in which he was not included.
The idea that he is thought " unworthy of supping in
the same room with the family " fires his blood. " My
pupils often have this privilege when there is company,
whilst I, regarded as inferior to them, have supper in
my own room ! "• Flesh and blood could not stand this
indignity, and the fiery youth took a characteristic way
of vindicating himself. " Whenever he knew that there
was to be a supper from which he would be excluded,
he ordered one in a neighbouring inn, to which he
invited one or more of his own friends."
"To make his purpose all the more manifest, he
waited till the servant entered with his solitary repast,
when he ordered it away, saying, 'I sup elsewhere
to-night.' Such curiously- timed tutorship suppers were
not very likely to be relished by Mr.  , who charged
him with unseemly and unseasonable pride. ' Sir,' said
he, ' the very servants are complaining of your haughti
ness. You have far too much pride.' ' There are two

14 THOMAS CHALMERS.
kinds of pride, sir,' was the reply. 'There is that pride
which lords it over inferiors: and there is that pride
which rejoices in repressing the insolence of superiors.
The first I have none of, the second I glory in.' "
The large youth of eighteen, thrilling with so pas
sionate a sense of injury, flinging his thunderbolt at
the " insolent superior " with all the tragic gravity of his
age, affords a whimsical picture. It was no laughing
matter to young Tom Chalmers— with the sense of his
substantial father, as good as any man, behind him, and
of the contemptible guests who would "bow full low"
in that father's dining-room, yet dared to insult the
son : but the scene is full of unconscious humour. If
the little rebels of that school-room were ever heard of
in after life, it would probably be from the circumstance
that Chalmers in his youth was once their tutor. And
the scene altogether throws a curious light on the
mental condition of another young Scotchman, a little
later in the generations. Thomas Carlyle, petted and
honoured by the Bullers, yet never quite able to make
up his mind that these kind people really meant
nothing but kindness, had the shadow of that other
kind of tutorship so deeply impressed upon his mind,
that he never got quite free from it, or escaped from
the doubt that a profound scorn, more refined than in
the case of the Scotch bourgeois yet equally derogatory,
was at the bottom of their supposed condescension
to himself. The one incident lends a subtle light of
interpretation to the other.
Chalmers, however, soon withdrew from the position
in which he was thus exposed to contumely, and at
the age of nineteen entered upon the exercise of his
legitimate profession, being licensed as a preacher, the

'A LAD 0' PREGNANT PAIRTS.' 15
first step in the Scotch Church, in 1799. It was not
lawful to admit any probationer before the age of twenty-
one " except " as was provided by law, '' such as for rare
and singular qualities shall be judged by the general
and provincial assemblies to be meet and worthy there
of." Upon this condition the friends of young Chalmers
took their stand, one Fife minister, whose name is not
preserved, asserting his claim as "a lad o' pregnant
pairts." The description is picturesque, and nothing
could be more entirely justified. But the privilege thus
accorded was not hastily entered upon. He was not
possessed at this time of his life by strong religious
feeling of any kind. The mind which had been rapt
in intellectual ecstasy by the noble conception of one
great, all-pervading Godhead, and
" One divine far-off event
To which the whole creation moves,"
had relapsed into calm, uninspired by anything more
emotional than mathematics. He was no heaven-
devoted priest or apostle. The life and energy of a
robust young man, full of ambition, eager for achieve
ment, was in all his veins. He settled in Edinburgh for
the next two winters, hoping for pupils by whom to pay
his expenses, and though not successful in that point,
evidently maintaining himself, by the aid of " any
little thing that may offer," and the hospitality of a
relative " whose conduct is distinguished by all the
regard of a parent," the young man announced in his
solemn phraseology. Apparently, between the calm
of this period and the year of enthusiasm above-
described, there had intervened a period of great
mental struggle, doubt, and uncertainty. He had been

16 THOMAS CHALMERS.
licensed to preach the gospel while in this condition of
miserable questioning as to whether there was any
gospel to preach. The books that undermined his faith,
and the considerations which restored it, are both
old-fashioned to this generation. We have gone on to
other methods, but the result is the same. He changed
his intense conception of God for an unwilling and
horror-stricken adoption of the system of natural law
which seemed to make God unnecessary : then recovered
his faith by a gradually growing conviction that the
adaptation of means to an end, visible through all the
universe, could only be the work of a Supreme and All-
understanding Being. One of his friends gives a brief
account of the trouble of mind in which this internal
tempest involved him. He was "in a state of great
excitement and unhappiness." " One very common ex
pression in public prayers, and which showed the state
of his mind at the time, ' Oh, give us some steady
object for our mind to rest upon,' was uttered with all
his characteristic earnestness and emphasis." This
ordeal, which so many of the finest minds go through,
is not, however, dwelt upon in his biography. There is
very little information on the subject. In later years
he referred to it occasionally, but without detail. To a
correspondent who consulted him on the subject, being
at the time in a state of " philosophical scepticism," he
recommended Beattie's Essay on Truth, a now forgotten
work, as " the book to which I was most indebted for
my deliverance," as well as the lectures of Professor
Robison. And he added a strenuous recommendation
to prayer even in the midst of this chaos. " Under all
the difficulties and despondencies of such a state I
would still encourage you to prayer," he says. " Cry as

YOUTHFUL STRUGGLES. 17
you can : with real moral earnestness and a perseverance
in this habit, light will at length arise out of darkness."
He himself acted in this same way, so inconsequent if
any real inability to believe in God existed in the
chaos. " He was exceedingly earnest in seeking the
light of truth at that time in his private devotion, and
was often on his knees at the bed-side after I had gone
to bed," says the friend, who seems to have known most
of this unhappy interval, in the close intimacy of a
companion who shared his bed-chamber. There are
many strange things in the minds of those who "say
in their heart there is no God," all manner of indig
nations, accusations, resentful passion against the Being
who they allege does not exist — but few, perhaps, more
wonderful than this, the appeal to Him who is not, to
prove and justify Himself !
It had all, however, come to an end, both the ecstasy
and the misery : and this large, impetuous, awkward
young soul, stumbling upon the brink of life, had secured
to himself a standing-ground of more or less satisfactory
religion or belief, enough to satisfy the requirements of
his mind for the moment, putting aside the question
out of the number of problems which there was an
absolute necessity to solve. He did not want to be
thrust into work which would require a more intimate
consideration of these problems. " I find my time so
profitably employed that I would be sorry for any inter
ruption for the winter," he writes to his father; the
interruption meaning a living which, as may be read '
between the lines, the Chalmerses confidently expected
to come through the means of the landed family, supreme
in the district, whose political ambitions Mr. John
Chalmers had served in his capacity of Provost of
C

18 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Anstruther. A glimpse at an entire world of ancient
habits and hopes is given in a fierce letter written by
the young man, apparently on the downfall of some of
these hopes. These were the days before Reform, when
the little town councils of the small burghs formed all
the constituency, and an election was almost a personal
transaction between the half-dozen men in a town, who
were probably swayed by the strongest individual among
them, and the neighbouring county potentate, who
sought their suffrages for himself or his nominee. This
is not in the least degree to say that the bailies and pro
vosts were venal, and sold their trust. No doubt John
Chalmers of Easter Anstruther thought like his laird
and landlord, and was very probably the most sincere
politician of the two ; but as it was upon his constancy
to his principles that Sir Robert's election depended,
there was nothing more natural than thftL. Sir Robert
should remember- the- circuTHstSncewhen a piece of
patronage fell into his hands. It was a succession of
events which seemed the- most natural in the world.
Did one of the Anstruther churches, Kilrenny or
Sellardyke, fall vacant while young Tom Chalmers
drove along his mathematical chariot in Edinburgh,
deprecating any " interruption" ? Something like this
must have occurred, we imagine, from the fury of a letter
in which he pours out his anathema upon the " family
which politically had been deeply indebted to his
father," the sting of being passed over having, it would
seem, burnt out his dislike of the *' interruption." It is
thus that the young man writes to a friend of his own
age, always in the grandiose diction on which our own
slipshod familiarity of language throws an almost comic
light—

POLITICAL FEELING. 19
" The country here bears with it every symptom of
decay, a languishing trade, an oppressed tenantry, a
rapacious gentry. Excuse my croaking. I love to un
burden myself of those unpleasant feelings which weigh
down my spirit. With what eagerness, with what
patriotic ardour, would I take up arms in defence of
my country — would I lend all my efforts to oppose a
threatened invasion, were I conscious of defending a
righteous order of things. With what reluctance and
disgust must I concur in what are called the exertions
of patriotism, when ! observe none interested but a set
of insolent oppressors, who display their loyalty, not by
rewarding its friends, but by persecuting its enemies —
not by encouraging the pure virtue of public spirit,
but by crushing all attempts at even an innocent
freedom of observation and thought ! Ah, my dear sir,
if you felt that burden of indignation which oppresses
my feelings when I behold the triumph of successful
villainy, the contempt which attends the simplicity of
virtue, the base ingratitude of those who have availed
themselves of the interest and exertions of unsuspicious
friends ! I swear at this moment I feel a sentiment
of superiority which I .would not forego for all the
luxurious pleasures, all the flattering distinctions of
wealth. I heave with a secret aspiration of contempt
for the unprincipled deceit, the mean hypocrisy of our
dignified superiors. But I go too far. The great whom
I have had the misfortune to be connected with are
not only a disgrace to rank, but a disgrace to humanity.
They are by no means a fair specimen; and I must
still consider it as my duty to resist the inroads of
foreign enemies. It would be well, however, for the
great to reflect on their critical and dependent position

20 THOMAS CHALMERS.
—to abolish that putrid system of interest which
threatens to extinguish all the ardours of a generous
and patriotic sentiment, to adopt a more just and liberal
conduct to inferiors."
All this fiery declamation presumably means only that
the reigning lord of Balcaskie had given a vacant living
or other appointment away to some other supporter, who
probably had an equal right to the gift in the same way.
We doubt whether a Socialist of the present day could
speak more strongly. All the vehemence of disappointed
youth is in the outburst — and the swaying round of
the balance of disturbed reason enough to make the
young man feel that it is still his duty to resist invasion,
even though the Anstruther family has not redeemed
its pledges, is almost too humorous to be real. Yet
we remember to have heard language of a very similar
kind from the lips of old people conscious of having
served the ends of some county magnate, and of having
been overlooked when a return was possible. Is the
feeling extinct in the present day, despite of all the
safeguards of household suffrage and the ballot, on one
side, and universal examination on the other ? We
doubt if it will ever be extinct. In the absence of the
expected preferment, young Chalmers entered upon the
duties of his profession — having, as we have seen, no
overwhelming desire to take them up — as assistant
to the parish minister of Cavers, in Teviotdale, to which
he was recommended by the friendly zeal of one of his
college comrades, who had held the appointment before
him. He remained there for about a year, acquiring
a little experience in parish work, which he performed
punctually, though without any deep sense of its im-

BEGINNING LIFE. 21
portance. His heart was in the class-rooms at St.
Andrews, and all his ambitions fixed upon a chair
there, for the attainment of which he used every
energy, especially when the appointment vacant was
that of Mathematical Assistant — an appointment very
different from that of parish minister, but one which
roused the hopes of the young man much more warmly
than any prospect of a mild country living. As it
happened, he attained both at a stroke, having been
appointed at once to the mathematical post for which
he longed, and to the little rural parish of Kilmany.
Those were the days in which pluralities of a wealthier
description abounded in the Church of England, and
when it was still possible to hold two posts at a time,
even in Scotland, the National Church being in a state
of great quiescence — " Moderate " to its fingers' ends,
and ea-sily satisfied with the respectable fulfilment of
necessary duties. Chalmers himself had as yet no
strenuous religious feeling. He writes of himself,
while at Cavers, that he had been " much resorted
to of late " for assistance on " sacramental occasions."
These were the infrequent but high ceremonials of the
Scotch Church, the "Communion Seasons," celebrated
once in the year or half-year, by which the whole
population was moved as by one of the Jewish feasts,
and scenes were sometimes beheld such as justified the
tremendous satire of Burns's Holy Fair. They were
still occasions by which the rural populations dated the
course of events, times of almost convivial meeting, and
of much hospitality and social enjoyment, even in the
sober atmosphere of the Manse, when young Chalmers
informed his father of the fact that he was " much
resorted to." " This, in so thinly-peopled a country,

22 THOMAS CHALMERS.
necessarily subjects me to long journeys, which I find,
however, to be a pleasant and healthy relief from the
labours of study. I don't think," he adds, " I will ever
allow myself to be so carried away with the attractions
of science as not to intermingle a sufficient degree of
exercise and amusement."
It is whimsical to hear of " exercise and amusement "
in the midst of the hard labours of mathematical
science, as being attained by those ministrations on
"sacramental occasions," which were the most solemn
moments of the Church. But no doubt the Jewish
feasts too were not only the highest ceremonials of
worship, but also the periods of completest social enjoy
ment, in that old economy from which we have borrowed
so much.
The young man who expressed himself with such
straightforward honesty as to the " ploys " peculiar to
his clerical profession, was settled, in the year 1&02,
when he was exactly twenty-two years old, in the
parish of Kilmany, and in his mathematical chair — with
the short interval of a few winter months, in which he
devoted himself exclusively to the latter, between. It
was but a deputy professorship he held, the professor
dejure being alive and watchful, though unable to fulfil
the duties of his post; but the appearance of the young
enthusiast, scattering fire and flame amid the high and
dry teachings of the University, was too remarkable a
disturbance of all routine to be taken very peaceably.
He burst into the dry fields of geometry like a meteor
lighting up those arid plains till they blossomed like
the rose. Dr. Hanna gives us several quotations from
those early lectures, which are astonishing in their
dignified and somewhat elaborate style and fervent

THE PRAISE OF MATHEMATICS. 23
enthusiasm. " Mathematics," he says, " have been con
demned as contracting the best affections of the heart,
chilling the ardours of its benevolence, blasting its
heavenward aspirations."
"Dr. Johnson, who possessed the powers of genius
without its liberality, and who appears to have cherished
an immovable contempt for mathematics, has directed
all the powers of his ridicule against the ludicrous
peculiarities which he is pleased to ascribe to mathe
maticians. He conceives a fire raging in a neighbour
hood and spreading destruction among many families :
while all the noise and consternation is unable to disturb
the immovable composure of a mathematician, who sits
engrossed with his diagrams, deaf to all the sounds of
alarm and of distress. His servants rush into his room,
and tell him that the fire is spreading all around
the neighbourhood. He observes simply that it is
very natural, for fire always acts in a circle — and
resumes his speculations. You may be afraid to en
counter a study which begets such insensibility. Let
me tell you that your apprehensions are groundless,
that it is not the effect of this- study to divest you of
all that is human, or to congeal the fervours of a
benevolent or devoted heart. I appeal to the example
of our illustrious countryman. Amid the splendour of
his discoveries, and the proud elevation of his fame,
Newton rejoiced in all the endearments of friendship.
In the spirit of a mild and gentle benevolence he
maintained an inviolable serenity. It is said of him
that he had the modesty of a child. In the society of
his friends, the consciousness of his superiority seemed
to desert him. His eye beamed with inexpressible

24 Thomas chalmers.
benignity — he indulged in all the luxury of affection,
and could descend to the sportful effusions of familiar
intercourse. His fame went abroad throughout all the
world : but he would not confide his happiness to the
treacherous breath of applause. He founded it on a
more secure foundation. He felt it in the affectionate
homage of those friends to whom his worth endeared
him. He felt it in the consciousness of an unblemished
life, in the overpowering impressions of adoring piety.
Newton, we invoke thy genius ! May it preside over
our labours, and animate to the arduous ascent of
philosophy. May it revive the drooping interests of
science, and awaken the flame of enthusiasm in the
hearts of a degenerate people. May it teach us that
science without virtue is an empty parade, and that
that philosophy deserves to be extinguished which
glances contempt on the sacred majesty of religion ! "
The young man who uttered these large sentences
with all that force of parallelism which the eloquence
of Scotland has taken from the Hebrew po.ets, and an
enthusiasm which rose through every successive period —
with his broad local utterance and the inspired awkward
ness of his large gestures as he leant over his desk,
himself carried away by the impulse which he longed
to communicate — filled St. Andrews with wonder and
dismay. There was plenty of humour and frolic in the
old University. The professors, many of them witty
men and jovial, the students a little "wild," playing
many pranks which were not perhaps quite consistent
with decorum, were all equally startled by this new voice
which rang into all the echoes, proclaiming the most
abstruse of studies as if it had been poetry, and claim-

TOLERANCE FOR YOUTH. 25
ing attention as if the youth still labouring for utterance
had been a prophet and a sage. " God forbid," he said,
on another occasion, when the winter had changed into
spring, and the young men's fancies lightly turned
towards the links and the sea-shore, and all manner of
diversion instead of work — "God forbid that I should
interrupt the harmless amusements, or blast the inno
cent gaiety of youth. Let the morning of life be con
secrated to enjoyment. May cheerfulness gladden your
early years, and may your lives retain the uncorrupted
simplicity of virtue. I have too ardent and sincere
an -affection for youth to look with an eye of severity on
their amusements, or to throw a damp over the sportive
gaiety of their dispositions. Let me never interfere with
their enjoyments, but to convince them that a life
of unlimited indolence will entail upon them all the
miseries of languor and disgust; to convince them of
the necessity of exertion ; that industry invigorates the
faculties and preserves them from decay ; that activity
sustains the energy of character ; that the preparations
of youth decide the respectability of manhood, and
enrich the mind with the fairest treasures of cultivation
and science and morality."
The sage who thus spoke had just attained the vener
able age of twenty-three : but that was maturity itself in
the fervent development of his mind, and in contrast
with the youths who crowded around him, many of them
mere school-boys in age, some, let us hope, capable of
being fired with the spirit of their instructor : but the
older professors, who stirred up no enthusiasm and spoke
no such burning words, did not like this strain, which
was so unlike the ordinary prosings of academical dis
course. Least of all did the special professor, whom

26 | THOMAS CHALMERS.
young Chalmers " assisted," like it ; and his manner of
showing his dislike was in the highest degree insulting.
He gave certificates, we are told, to the students whom
he had not instructed, and of whose progress he was
ignorant, without consulting their real teacher. That
teacher was as hot of temper, and as determined to put
up with no indignity, as he had been when a boy-tutor
five years before. While the public examination was
going on, which " it was the practice in St. Andrews to
have at the end of each session in presence of the pro
fessors," the young Assistant in Mathematics stepped
forward before he began his examination of his pupils,
and "broke out into a severe invective against Pro
fessor Vilant." " It was amusing," says Hanna, " to see
the academic board. Old Mr. Cook, irritated and vexed ;
Mr. Hill, puffing and fidgeting; Dr. Playfair, getting
up twice or thrice and tugging the speaker by the arm ;
Dr. Hunter, with unvarying countenance, his eyes seda-
tively fixed on the floor; Dr. Rotheram, laughing and
angry by turns." It is not to be wondered that the
Assistant in Mathematics got his dismissal on the spot !
He was on the whole, and by every authority, at
this period of his career an unmanageable youth. His
ordination to the cure of souls at Kilmany was to take
place in May, and his father, in Anster, a very grave
and profoundly religious man, looking on at all this
with very serious eyes, was anxious that his hot-headed
Tom should spend the little interval between the
breaking-up of the classes, in the end of April, and
this solemn ceremony, at home. The old gentleman
thought that rest and quiet, and the subdual of all
such hot emotions in the calm of the paternal house,
would be the best preparation for taking those vows

ORDINATION. 27
upon him; but our young man was not of that
mind. His own desire was to spend the interval in
Edinburgh, which he did, asserting his intention with
some petulance. "I confess I like not these views of
religion which suppose that the business, or even the
innocent amusements of the world, have a dangerous
tendency to unsettle the mind for serious and elevating
exercises. I feel that the solitude of a few days
would be to me a painful and unmeaning solemnity," he
says. He felt no desire to watch his arms ere he should
receive the spiritual knighthood. All that was plain
sailing enough to his impatient spirit What he wanted
was to explain his position to his friends in Edinburgh,
and to taste the sweets of intellectual intercourse before
he bound himself down to his country parish. It may
be supposed with what grave looks and shaken heads
this letter would be received in Anster, and how
many prayers would rise for the rebellious young man,
who probably did not pray for himself.
He seems, however, to have made a very hearty and
genial young minister, taking a lively, natural interest
in the setting up of his new house — the first house he
had possessed of his own — and careering through his
little landward parish of a hundred and fifty families
with, to use his own phrase, " his affections flying before
him," and winning all hearts. Such a man, large in
movement, hearty in speech, full of local interest and
accent, both in language and atmosphere, is always
popular in a Scotch parish. But while he roamed about
the soft uplands of Kilmany, between Forth and Tay,
bis mind was full of warlike thoughts. "Acquainted
with every family, and familiar at every fireside," he
already was making friends wherever he moved ; but

28 THOMAS CHALMERS.
it was not wonderful that having done so much he
should feel that there was little to do for his abounding
energies in that mild, parish, while so much lay outside.
And he would not be beaten : that was the one thing
impossible. His head was full of ambition, and his
heart of a natural desire for companionship and intel
lectual sympathy, not to say that the wrongs, or what
seemed to him the wrongs, of his dismissal from St.
Andrews were hot within him. His rapidly-formed
resolution to return to the scene of his humiliation,
and re-assert and vindicate himself by opening private
mathematical classes there, roused St. Andrews again
as by the sound of a trumpet. He was coming back,
the young rebel, to beard the lions in their den, and
pluck the beards of the professors ; and fury and
dismay rose in the bosom of the United Colleges. It
was such a thing as never had been done before, and
every tradition was outraged by it. But for this he
cared nothing, in his determination to show himself a
better man than any of them. He had to beard more
than the professors — the distinct opposition of his good
father, who cared little for St. Andrews or its lecture-
rooms, but much for Kilmany and the claims which his
parish had upon its minister. The young man's special
pleading on this point is remarkable. He assures his
father in his letters that " no minister finds it neces
sary" to devote his whole time to his parish. He
himself has quite as much time on his hands unem
ployed as will be taken up by his mathematical classes.
" With regard to non-residence, it will only be for six
months," during which time his two neighbours will
attend to any incidental duty. In short, his heart was
set on his scheme of returning to St. Andrews and

STRONG LANGUAGE. 29
proving his superiority to all censure, and neither the
opposition of the University, nor the grieved disapproval
at home, had any effect upon him. He drove, like Jehu,
furiously over every obstacle. One of the professors,
supposed to have said that Mr. Chalmers had promised
not to return as a teacher to St. Andrews as a condition
of his appointment to Kilmany, was required at once to
contradict the report. Not doing so, he was attacked in
the street by the young rebel. " I said to him I was
sorry, from the proceedings of last night, to be under
the necessity of pronouncing him the author of a false
and impudent calumny." Strong words, and no doubt
uttered with all the heat and vehemence of his nature ;
but strong language of this kind, especially in self-defence,
is a thing which has never been objected to in Scotland.
Notwithstanding the boldness of the attempt against
the whole University and its power and influence — or
perhaps in consequence of that boldness — the young
man's rebellion was very soon accepted and supported
more or less by the community. Before long he set up
a class of chemistry, which was quite a new thing, and
mitigated the disapproval of the authorities.
" He had three classes of mathematics as well as this
class of chemistry to prepare for and conduct. He had,
besides, the pulpit of Kilmany to supply, going out
generally to the manse every Saturday, and returning
early every Monday; yet he wroteto his father as if
he had now got into and was breathing the proper
element of his being. ' My hands are full of business.
I am living just now the life I seem to be formed for —
a life of constant and unremitting activity. Deprive
me of employment, and you condemn me to a life of
misery and disgust.' "

30 THOMAS CHALMERS.
This strong, laborious force to which inaction was
despair, and which rejoiced as a bridegroom to run its
race, ended finally by overcoming all opposition. The
lectures thus established in despite of every authority
carried away all who listened to them. The natural
fire of his high spirit, and the swelling of heart and style,
amounting almost to passion, with which his sentences
rolled on, in themselves a little formal yet instinct with
this rising tide of vigour and life, at once excited and
held fast all hearers. He was unconscious as yet, if we
may so speak, of the higher mysteries as well as of the
discouragements of life. He felt himself able to do
whatever might become a man, and he had not a doubt
of the power of others to do so also, if the matter were
but set before them, and all the great inducements and
high impulses towards virtue, nobleness, independence,
and the splendid paths of philosophy set before them.
" What enterprise," he cries, " is too daring for the
intrepidity of philosophical speculation ? Who can
presume to restrain the flights of human curiosity ?
Who can control the proud and aspiring energies of
the mind ? Who can stop the. ambitious excursions of
philosophy ? " Then the orator changes his tone with
all the native instinct of art, and sets forth with a
skilful subdual yet exaltation the contrast between
human weakness and greatness, the one so profound
and pitiful, the other so illimitable and great.
" I know nothing more calculated to illustrate the
triumphs of the human mind than to contrast its
gigantic efforts in the walks of speculation with the
extreme helplessness and infirmity of our physical
constitution. Man is the being of yesterday : he is a

FERVOUR AND FAITH. 31
flower which every blast of heaven can wither into
decay: the breath of his life is a thin vapour which
every wind can dissipate into nothing : his inheritance
is the gloom of a silent grave, where he will sleep with
the dust of his fathers. He is the poor victim of
passion and of infirmity: from the feeble cry of infancy to
the strength and independence of manhood a thousand
ills pursue him — a thousand anxieties torment his
repose. He at one time labours under the hardness of
poverty : at another pines away in the infirmity of
disease : at another weeps the treachery of violated
friendship : and at another mourns the awful desolation
which death makes among friends and among families.
Yet amid this wild war of accident and misfortune he
has displayed the triumph of his energies : he has given
his few peaceful moments to the study of philosophy :
he has sent abroad his penetrating eye, and caught the
finest tokens of magnificence, simplicity, and order : he
has enriched science with a thousand truths, and
adorned the walks of literature with a thousand
delicacies." " What to me is this quintessence of dust ? " says the
musing poet; but to young Chalmers it was much, it
was everything, the mightiest engine, the most powerful
agent, the conqueror and the governor of the world.
This ornate speech, of which he had so soon attained
the secret, was no doubt more then, than even in his
later years, marred to the fastidious by the broad accent
and cadenced chant of Fife, and by various peculiarities
of manner, the rude and simple gestures of natural
eloquence, the impetuous force of delivery, which made
the veins stand out on his forehead, and the foam fly

32 THOMAS CHALMERS.
from his lips. But in his native county, the tone, the
movement, the overpowering vehemence and earnestness
were no drawbacks, but rather the reverse. They
showed the sincerity, the profound conviction of the
speaker, to whom his philosophy had all the excitement
and charm of poetry and music, transporting his spirit,
making his heart beat and his bosom swell. " And
although," says Dr. Hanna, "strong personal feeling
was at times expressed (as when he accused an aston
ished Don of a false and impudent calumny), such a
genial humanity breathed about hiin who uttered it,
that the very professor upon whom his stroke at first
seemed to fall the heaviest, was one of the first to extend
to him the forgiving hand of friendship." This was
exceedingly creditable to the professor, more so, we think,
than to the "genial humanity'' which was so bent upon
self-vindication. Perhaps, however, quiet St. Andrews,
not an exciting place at any time, was grateful for the
sensation which stirred up everybody, and gave all the
freshness of a standing controversy to be discussed in
every corner, and which moved small and great, in
the little stagnant town. An attempt to bring the
young minister to book for his neglect of his parish,
on the other hand, came to nothing; and the young
man, with the wind in his sails, rushed successfully and
impetuously on.
We may instance one or two examples of that old-
fashioned fervour of style at which we smile nowadays,
in occasional utterances in the pulpit and out of it,
of this youthful minister and " canny Scotsman." The
reader will be glad to hear that his patriotism had quite
recovered the shock given it by the misbehaviour of
the gentry referred to on our earlier pages. Those were

PATRIOTISM. 33
the days when invasion was a possibility which fired
the British blood, when scenes were enacting such as
those which are described by Sir Walter Scott in the
Antiquary, and the three kingdoms (or at least the
two kingdoms) were ringing with expressions of
defiance. " We'll boldly fight, like heroes bright,
For honour and applause ;
And defy the French, with all their art,
To alter our laws,"
was the outcry of popular song. And a still more
martial utterance came from the pulpit of Kilmany,
where the young minister stood like a battalion, shouting
forth the voice of battle. He ended his sermon, no
doubt, in the midst of that half-sob of labouring breath
with which the crowd follows the solemnity of such a
climax. " May that day when Buonaparte ascends the throne
of Britain be the last of my existence ; may I be the
first to ascend the scaffold he erects to extinguish the
worth and spirit of the country ; may my blood mingle
with the blood of patriots, and may I die at the foot of
that altar on which British independence is to be the
victim ! "
These words have an almost ludicrous aspect to the
reader now in their tragic sincerity; but it must be
remembered that "Buonaparte" had ascended many
thrones in the sight of a terrified world, and that the
most sober lookers-on anticipated nothing less than
a desperate struggle for freedom. Chalmers joined the
volunteers, not only as their chaplain, but enrolled on
the fighting force as a lieutenant, and no doubt would
have scented the battle from afar with all the passion of
D

34 THOMAS CHALMERS,
the war-horse. The only incident, however, of his military
service is one which breathes the soul of kindness. He
met, we are told, an old acquaintance in Kirkcaldy, where
the volunteers assembled, in great poverty and distress ;
and turning over in his mind how to help the poor man
and his family, organized at once, in his panoply of war,
a course of chemical lectures — chemistry being then, we
may appropriately say, his cheval de bataille and favourite
subject — the proceeds of which gave to the sufferers a
new start in life. Thus was Chalmers' campaign con
ducted, if not against Buonaparte — whom he would no
doubt have assailed single-handed had the necessity
arisen — but against other perennial usurpers against -
whom the true patriot can always do battle,
Another instance of the young man's grandiloquence
is also one that touches the heart, and may remind the
reader of that other great Scotsman, who, amid all the
imperial subjects he treated in his life, never found more
splendid tones of almost lyrical, impassioned laudation
and lamentation than those he poured forth over his
own old peasant father, a humbler personage still than
good John Chalmers of Anster. Thomas had received
from his elder brother in England a communication of
some importance, desiring him to inform their father that
James had joined the Church of England. This Thomas
declined to do, declaring that " your apostasy from the -
Kirk would have horrified him."
"But whatever I say," exclaims the young minister,
" may the vengeance of heaven pursue me if I feel
contempt for that man who has passed through the
world unstained by its corruptions, who has walked the
manly career of independence and honour, who has
escaped the infection of a degenerate age, and can boast

GRANDILOQUENCE. 35
a mind that has retained its integrity amidst all the
seductions of policy and interest. Such is the character
of our good father. May the Great Spirit bear up the
weight of his old age, and blunt the arrow that gives
it rest!"
There could not be a better expression of a son's
admiration and respect, and no doubt it was most
fully deserved ; which does not diminish an absurd
recollection penetrating our mind of the voice of the
songster — " May I perish if ever
I plant in that bosom a thorn.''
After all these solemnities, however, we may quote as
a relief the following pleasant account of the wandering
of two young ministers about the pleasant country from
one genial manse to another, two light-hearted young
men, in the height of June, and amid the unquestioning
hospitality and open hearts, which all who are familiar
with rural Scotland know to exist there still. Chalmers
had been paying his first visit to London, and on his
return stopped to see Mr. Shaw of Roberton, his early
friend and first patron, who had procured for him his
earliest clerical employment. It is the latter who tells
the tale —
" I proposed when he left to accompany him to Dr.
Hardie's, about six miles distant, whence he intended to
get to Pennycuik next day. We set out accordingly
on a Monday after breakfast. The next morning I
expressed a wish that we should go as far as Galashiels,
and call on Dr. Douglas, to which he consented on
condition that it should be only a short call. There,
however, we were induced to spend the day. Next

36 THOMAS CHALMERS.
morning we took our departure on the way to Peebles ;
but in passing the hospitable residence of a family with
whom I was intimately connected, I prevailed on him
to call, and being much delighted with our kind
reception, we remained till next morning. On our way
up the Tweed I suggested calling on my friend Nicol,
of Traquair, whose manse was situated only about half
a mile off the road. ' Well, sir,' was" the reply, ' but it
must be only for a minute or two, as I must get to
Pennycuik this night.' There, however, we spent the
day most comfortably; and in the evening were so
delighted with the music of the piano, that we could
not refrain from dancing a few merry reels. At last
Chalmers took hold of my arm and exclaimed, 'It's
out of the question my getting home this week. You
have a good horse, so you must just proceed to-morrow
to Kilmany, and I will go back to Roberton." '
In all this Chalmers has appeared in the first flush
of natural strength and impetuosity, a man of ex
traordinary talents, energy, and force of character,
impressing himself with a sense of greatness upon all
who came in contact with him, but with great im
patience of any restraint, a high temper, a readiness
to resent and avenge every real or supposed affront,
and a determination to carry his point and have his
own way, which had as yet yielded to none of the
subduing influences of life. As minister of the little
rural parish of Kilmany, he had in fact not occupation
enough for his fervent spirit, and his comprehension of
his office was a very small and circumscribed one,
requiring little beyond the letter of his prescribed
functions. His proud assertions, over and over, again

NATURAL SCIENCE. 37
repeated, that nobody suffered from his absence, and
that all the duties of his parish were performed, though
he was there, during one winter at least, only from
Saturday evening to Monday morning, are actually the
indictment against him, not so much as an offender
against ecclesiastical law as against every ideal of a
clergyman's work. "There is almost no consumption
of individual effort in the peculiar employment of a
minister," he says in those days when philosophy was the
inspiration of his existence, and the quiet of the rustic
manse and church unendurable to a mind eager for work,
for applause, and for the exercise of those fiery faculties
which he felt to be burning away in utter waste, but
capable of lighting up the world. That a young man
of genius should feel in this way will be surprising to no
one, or that he should turn against the bondage which
held him fast and confined him to the composition of
a few sermons and the society of a few country folk.
After the first winter, however, he does not seem to
have attempted to keep up the mathematical classes at
St. Andrews, which were intended as a vindication of
his powers against the censure of the authorities,
though he continued, and poured out his fervent spirit
in a course of lectures on Chemistry, by which,
without exhibiting himself any longer as in violent
opposition to his University, he could yet keep up his
intellectual interests and occupy himself with congenial
work. Even in quiet Kilmany the young minister
in his zeal pursued the same subject, showing the
astonished cottagers all manner of wonderful things.
"Our minister," said one woman to another, "is
naething short o' a warlock : he was teaching the folk
to clean claes butt (without) soap." "Eh, woman!"

38 THOMAS CHALMERS.
said another, with true practical humour, "I wish he
would learn me to mak' parritch butt meal ! "
When these occupations failed him, or rather when
he had exhausted the moderate interest which could be
aroused on such subjects, he took to literature, and
flung himself into an ''Inquiry into the extent and
stability of national resources," a subject which at that
time was calling forth much interest. It was in the
middle of the great war, when the resources of Great
Britain were tried to their utmost, and Chalmers'
object, a most singular one to our present modes of
thinking, was to show that the country might maintain
its greatness altogether independently of trade and
manufacture. Britain Independent of Commerce was the
title of a pamphlet published just before the treatise
of the minister of Kilmany, in which he set himself to
consider " the case of a country secluded from all foreign
intercourse." The chief point of interest in this work
is the curious side glimpse it gives us into the con
stitution of the time. It is a position in which we can
hardly by any effort of imagination place ourselves.
The argument is confusing from this very incapacity of
the mind to enter into such an impossible supposition. -
These little islands, not then described as separated
from an open continent only by the " silver streak " of
natural defence, but with a fierce and stormy sea en
veloping all their borders, and alone preserving them
from an invader who had ranged over almost every
other country in Christendom — standing fiercely on
their defence, and endeavouring to demonstrate to
themselves the sufficiency of their insulated position,
alone and self-supporting in face of the world — afford
us a picture so strange that it is almost impossible to

A STATESMAN BORN. 39
realize it. Yet the argument was lofty and patriotic,
and it can never be left altogether out of the question
that such a position might recur again, unlikely though
it seems. Some practical suggestions, one in respect to
the levying of an income-tax, another as to the treat
ment of soldiers (" Let Government go to market and
enlist for a term of years : let it no longer be a slavery
for life "), show how statesmanlike was the mind then
casting about in the silence and solitude of the little
country parish for something to occupy it. Had Chal
mers been born in another class, had Parliament and
the Councils of State been his natural sphere instead of
the more confined circles of the parish and presbytery,
we might have seen a patriot Prime Minister as power
ful as Pitt, endowed with a weighty and impressive
eloquence to carry forward the large schemes of his
ever-working intelligence, and the power of sweeping
an entire country with him in the force of his mighty
enthusiasm. It has always seemed to us that this was
his natural sphere. We cannot agree in the view that
a man of genius, in whatever form his genius shows
itself, should be accepted as the natural leader of his
time. Burns, notwithstanding all that his illustrious
countryman may say, would have excited little con
fidence in us as a king of men ; but Chalmers has
every indication of having been born to that office.
He exercised it royally for a time in a lesser sphere,
but he was fitted for its exercise on the highest scale
had the opportunity ever fallen into his hands.
His larger aspects were not without recognition in this
first stage of his life. His first appearance in the General
Assembly, the parliament of Scotch Churchmen, was
made in 1809, when he made a speech on one of the

40 THOMAS CHALMERS.
least attractive of subjects, on the Augmentation of
Stipends, a matter not only interesting to him as a
Social Economist, but coming home with special warmth
to his business and bosom from the fact that he was
himself in the agonies of an application for augmenta
tion. It was no doubt also a subject of great moment
to the body of ministers whose practical well-being was
affected by the regulations on that point. The speech
of Chalmers had a great effect. He was unknown to
the Church save in his own district, and burst upon
the Assembly, which he was afterwards to sway with
so much force, as a revelation. " Do you know anything
of this man ? " asked one of the fathers of the Church.
" He is surely a most extraordinary person ; " and such
was the general opinion. "Beseech Chalmers of Kil
many to publish his speech," said the well-known
Dr. Andrew Thomson. A breath of sudden fame rose
about the young man. At the same time he was asked
to become a contributor to the Edinburgh Fneyclopcedia,
and undertook, in addition to an article on " Trigono
metry," the " Christianity," a curiously differing subject ;
which, so strong was the impression he had already
made, was given up to him by much older and more
experienced, as well as more orthodox, men. Thus
far had his reputation risen in the course of six
or seven years. He was now twenty-nine (1809),
approaching maturity, full of ambition, energy, and
strength. But this beginning, so full of expectation and promise,
was also in one way an ending. It was the conclusion
of the first chapter of his life. Amid all his studies
and works the young minister had scarcely claimed,
even to himself, to be a religious man, or one to whom

A GREAT CRISIS. 41
the spiritual life was of high importance. He did his
duty so far as he understood it, preached his best, held
visitations and examinations according to the practice
of the Church and time, was always kind, ready to
help, with an open house and a friendly w.ord for all
who did not palpably cross his path or thwart his will.
But there now came a time when clouds gathered over
the prosperous firmament. Death appeared in the
family at Anster. One after another of his brothers
and sisters died, some in the family home, one at sea.
He was brought to the verge of that passage which
leads either in light or in darkness to that which eye
hath not seen nor ear heard, and saw those whom he
loved pass beyond with that aching incapacity to
follow them even in imagination, which only those who
have watched at death-beds know; and he had him
self a severe and lingering illness, which looked as if
it might have had the same termination. All these
things shook the confident young soul which had
hitherto thought of nothing but the questions of science,
and the onward sweep and rush of a high career. He
was brought to a sudden stand before these mysteries.
He could no longer impose his vehement will upon the
world, and carry everything before him. Something
more was in the tragedy of life than had been dreamt
of in his philosophy. What was it ? He had come to
that crisis which occurs to most men one time or other
in their lives. What was before him was no longer
plain sailing. What was behind did not give him the
satisfaction he had felt in it before. The incomplete
ness, the dissatisfaction of existence, its jarring tone
among the calm accords of nature, came suddenly upon
him like a lion in the path. He could not pass it by,

42 THOMAS CHALMERS.
or turn aside, or flee. The difficulty had to be met and
solved somehow, or he must cease to live.
Sometimes such a crisis is stumbled through and
passes without anything happening in particular, and
the stream flows on again; but the minister of Kil
many was not of the common clay to which this is
possible. He had to sound to the depths of his own
mental and moral uneasiness by stress of nature. The
first result was an anxious, even pathetic, struggle to
make a better man of himself. Every little impatience,
every hasty word, and it was his nature to say many,
became a subject of penitence and of prayer. Instead
of his old confident sweep of life, he began to pause at
every step, to take himself to task, to wrestle with the
defects of his impetuous character, which would be
always pressing to the front. Indeed, that hasty, spon
taneous, exuberant nature would seem to have had
much to correct. One of his constantly-recurring
subjects of regret and humiliation was his behaviour in
the home circle at Anster, where now the parents were
old and worn-out and slow to comprehend. " I have
little or no indulgence for the infirmities of the aged :
and nothing galls me more than to be obliged to repeat
the same thing to the deaf and careless," he cries with
a moan to himself over his irritability, which is half-
tempered by a sense that his impatience is not without
excuse. But the spectacle of a man thus fighting down
his faults, living in a perpetual struggle against them,
is a curious and scarcely an inspiriting one. The light
turned inward reveals often much that is not actually
there, if we may use such a phrase— the shadows that
are momentary and fleeting standing out under its
illumination like solid masses of gloom.

CHANGE OF SPIRIT. 43
The result of this struggle, continued through more
than a year, was that Chalmers at last found the secret
which solves all these mysteries, the redemption and
the Saviour, which he had preached in conventional
words for years without ever realizing the force of
what he himself said. The records of conversion are
many and various, and it is a little difficult through
his journals and self-communions to come to the point
at which the path turns, and the troubled wayfarer,
painfully stumbling out his own darkling road, • at
last reached that strait and narrow way in which he
found life and freedom. His own account of the final
crisis is the best that can be given. It is contained in
a letter to his brother —
" I stated to you that the effect of a very long
confinement, about ten years ago, upon myself was to
inspire me with a set of very strenuous resolutions,
under which I wrote a journal, and made many a
laborious effort to elevate my practice to the standard
of the Divine requirements. During this course, how
ever, I got little satisfaction and felt no repose. I
remember that somewhere about the year 1811 I had
Wilberforce's View put into my hands, and as I got
on in reading it, felt myself on the eve of a great
revolution in all my opinions about Christianity. I
am now most thoroughly of opinion, and it is an opinion
founded on experience, that on the system of 'Do
this and live,' no peace, and even no true and worthy
obedience, can ever be attained. It is ' Believe in the
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' When
this belief enters the heart, joy and confidence enter
along with it. The righteousness which we try to work

44 THOMAS CHALMERS.
out for ourselves eludes our impotent grasp, and never
can a soul arrive at true or permanent rest in the
pursuit of this object. The righteousness which by
faith we put on secures our acceptance with God, and
secures our interest in His promises, and gives us a
part in those sanctifying influences by which we are
enabled to do, with aid from on high, what we never
can do without it. We look to God in a new light —
we see Him as a reconciled Father : that love to Him
which terror scares away re-enters the heart, and with
a new principle and a new power, we become new
creatures in Jesus Christ our Lord."
This sudden apprehension and warm adoption into
his life of principles so well known, upon which he
had been nursed from his cradle, and which he had
vaguely preached for years, was the turning-point in
Chalmers' career. The ambitious young mathematician,
eager for work, finding nothing that occupied his
exuberant energies in the career of a minister, and
continually dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new,
turned from all that tumultuous though innocent past
with disgust, and flung himself with impetuosity un
subdued, though the current of its outflow was changed,
into the occupations of a fisher of men, a devoted
pastor and priest, having no thought but the saving
of souls. It was in all the emotion of this new en
thusiasm, transformed by the love of Christ which had
taken possession of his soul, that the remaining part of
his life at Kilmany was passed. He formed soon after
what can be called nothing but a romantic friendship
with a young man across the Tay, in Dundee, with
whom he maintained a close religious correspondence ;

LEAVING KILMANY. 45
and the rebound of his overwhelming spiritual impulse
made many other such links around him, in the fervour
of the new life. Two youths of his parish, with the
inspiration of his ardent addresses in their minds,
walking and talking together upon the Gospel message,
found for themselves a little oratory in a wood, "under
the shade of a branching fir-tree," to which, by the
practice of years, they made a little private pathway
of their own, through the copse and undergrowth, and
where they prayed together in a mutual ecstasy of
faith and adoration. Thus the new leaven worked,
and the soft and homely natural scenes of the rural
parish became identified to many with the highest
devotion of Christian thought.
During his stay at Kilmany, Chalmers, after many
resolutions against it — chiefly as would seem on account
of his own conscious impatience of character and fear
of finding any close companionship become irksome to
him — married, his scruples being vanquished in the
ordinary happy way by that love which scorns all
foregone conclusions. He spent a little more than ten
years in this first charge, which thus witnessed the
complete equipment of his life. • He left it at the age
of thirty-four, in full manhood and development, and
plunged at once into the wars and tumults of a very
different and much-widened sphere.

CHAPTER II.
Chalmers had no gradual ascent to the highest place
which was possible to any member of a clergy in which
the degrees of an ecclesiastical hierarchy are unknown.
From the rural seclusion of Kilmany he made but
one step into a position of the highest influence and
importance in Scotland. "Presbyterian parity," the
equality which is supposed to reign among all the
ministers of the Scotch Church, is of course neutralized,
as every rule of equality always is, by the unfailing laws
of nature : and no archbishop could have a more elevated
place in the estimation of the province over which he
reigns than had the young Fife minister who came from
his native county with its accent strong upon his lips,
and its homely rural customs in his life, to rule as with
a flaming sceptre the crowds, both rich and poor, of the
opulent and energetic city, which is in its way a me
tropolis too, supreme in the wealth, the industry, and the
energy of Scotland as Edinburgh has always been in
law and literature. The Glasgow of those days was not
much more than half as populous or as rich as now,
when it is beyond dispute the second city in the empire.
But it was as great according to the standard of the
day, and full of all the warring elements of national life —

ELEMENTS OF REVOLUTION. 47
the exceedingly rich, capitalists and merchant-princes
who had brought their wealth from afar, who had
woven it out of Indian cotton, and forged it out of iron
and steel, if not with the actual sweat of their brows,
at least with labour as incessant and much more anxious
than that of the artisans who were their coadjutors in the
work : and of these coadjutors themselves, the so-called
poor, always a little embittered by the contrast between
their poverty and the wealth of their employers, always
at the mercy of any demagogue who assured them that
it was they who made the money which the others en
joyed — a dogma so false, yet so true and bewildering to
the half-educated mind which has no power of grasping
so large and difficult a subject, and does not possess
that highest reason which can understand and bow to
inevitable law. This rich and solid city, one of the
most luxurious on the face of the earth, held thus con-.
tinually in its bosom the embers of a fire which might
blaze up at any provocation and for a moment overturn
all the bulwarks of peaceful life — a danger which was
then so much the greater since reform had not yet
begun to operate among them, and the masses had no
way, save by the useless roar of attempted revolution, to
make themselves heard at all. It is still too much the
case that these masses settle in crowded lairs, crammed
together as cattle are no longer allowed in the interests
of their masters to be crammed ; while the other part of
the community " expatiate," as Chalmers himself would
have said, in the surrounding paradise of western woods
and waters. But yet attempts have been made since
then in a hundred different ways to liberate and elevate
them, which nobody had thought of when Chalmers
went to Glasgow. He went there with his head full

48 THOMAS CHALMERS.
of this great social question, and of an immense and
ardent desire to go forth among the poor, and seize
by sheer force of affection and brotherhood these often
rebellious, almost always discontented, roughly-resistant,
and suffering throngs. His advent altogether upon
that crowded scene was an extraordinary one. Glasgow
is nothing if not hospitable, and the new minister of
the historic " Tron " might have dined out at the
most luxurious of civic feasts every day. He might
almost have dispensed with a table of his own. He
might, as he would himself have said, have " eaten
of the fat and drank of the sweet," to the gratitude
and enthusiasm of the Glasgow citizens, to whom
"the doctor's" presence at their board was an honour
and delight. But this he vehemently defended himself
from, before he would consider the question of their
"call" at all. He would not have his time encroached
upon by invitations, by calls, by what is called social
intercourse on a large scale. This was the first of his
stipulations. Turtle and champagne were no part of
his programme. If his old violence of temper ever
broke forth, it was when he was wooed and besought
and pressed beyond patience to the tables of his rich
parishioners. Patience was not at any time his leading
virtue, and his resistance to these civilities was almost
fierce; but he "drank tea" with pleasure in a poor
house in the interval between his afternoon visitation
through the crowded " Lands " of the Gallowgate, and
the evening address which he, whom thousands crowded
to hear, gave to the unkempt folk he had gathered
together on almost every day of the week. This was
the spirit in which he went from the little country
parish, where he knew every individual soul, to the

HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE. 49
great bustling, noisy metropolis of Western Scotland,
where the wealthy Glasgow citizens pounced upon him,
delighted with the glory and joy of having the famous
orator of the time in the midst of them. Their disap
pointment in this respect must have been extraordinary,
for it was with nothing less than a gesture of disgust
that he turned from their endless feasts.
This is perhaps the best place in which to quote the
following portrait of Chalmers, at the height of young
manhood, aged thirty-five, which is painted for us by
no less admirable a hand than that of John Gibson
Lockhart, then himself a very young man at the outset
of his brilliant career.
" At first sight his face is a coarse one, but a mysteri
ous kind of meaning breathes from every part of it
that such as have eyes to see cannot be long in
discovering. It is very pale, and the large, half-closed
eyelids have a certain -drooping, melancholy weight
about them, which interested me very much, I under
stood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive
in their mode of falling down at the sides, although
there is no want of richness and vigour in their central
fulness of curve. The upper lip, from the nose down
wards, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a
sort of leonine expression of firmness to all the lower
part of the face. The cheeks are square and strong
in texture, like pieces of marble, with the cheek-bones
very broad and prominent. The eyes themselves are
light in colour, and have a strange, dreamy heaviness
that conveys any idea rather than that of dulness, but
which contrasts in a wonderful manner with the dazzling
watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their

50 THOMAS CHALMERS.
sockets, and illuminated into all their flame and fervour
in some moment of high entranced enthusiasm. But
the shape of the forehead is perhaps the most singular
part of the whole visage ; and indeed it presents a
mixture so very singular of forms commonly exhibited
only in the widest separation, that it is no wonder I
should have required some little time to comprehend
the meaning of it. In the first place it is, without
exception, the most marked mathematical forehead I
have ever met with, being far wider across the eyebrows
than either Mr. Playfair's or Mr. Leslie's, and having
the eyebrows themselves lifted up at their exterior ends
quite out of the usual line, a peculiarity which Spurz-
heim had remarked in the countenances of almost all
the great mathematical or calculating geniuses, such for
example, if I rightly remember, as Sir Isaac Newton
himself. Immediately above the extraordinary breadth
of this region, which in the heads of most mathematical
persons is surmounted by no fine, points of organization
whatever, immediately above this in the forehead there
is an arch of imagination carrying out the summit boldly
and roundly in a style to which the heads of very few
poets present anything comparable; while over this
again there is a grand apex of high and solemn vener
ation and love such as might have graced the bust of
Plato himself, and such as in living man I have never
beheld equalled in any but the majestic head of
Canova. . . .
"Neither, perhaps, did the world ever possess any
orator whose minutest peculiarities of gesture and voice
have more power in increasing the effect of what he
says— whose delivery, in other words, is the first and
the second and the third excellence of his oratory,

CHARACTERISTICS. 51
more truly than is that of Dr. Chalmers. And yet,
were the spirit of the man less gifted than it is, there
is no question these, his lesser peculiarities, would
never have been numbered among his points of ex
cellence. His voice is neither strong nor melodious ;
his gestures are neither easy nor graceful, but, on the
contrary, extremely rude and awkward ; his pronunci
ation is not only broadly national, but broadly provincial,
distorting almost every word he utters into some
barbarous novelty which, had his hearers leisure to
think of such things, might be productive of an effect
at once ludicrous and offensive in the highest degree. . .
I have heard many men deliver sermons far better
arranged in regard to argument, and have heard very
many deliver sermons far more uniform in eloquence,
both of conception and of style ; but most unquestion
ably I have never heard, either in England or Scotland,
or in any other country, any preacher whose eloquence
is capable of producing an effect so strong and so
irresistible as his."
It was on a very striking and interesting occasion
that the little group of notables from Glasgow made
their way to the northern corner of. Fife to hear the
minister with whose voice all that portion of the country
was beginning to ring. It was on a Sunday in October
— "a brilliant autumn day" — and the whole country
side had gathered to hear the minister of Kilmany
preach the funeral sermon of another young minister,
his own contemporary and class-fellow, John Henry of
Bendochy, whose health had been ruined by his most
heroic exertions to save the crew of a vessel wrecked
on the gloomy reefs of St. Andrew's Bay. This young

52 THOMAS CHALMERS.
man, while still a divinity student, had brought ashore
man by man, through a tempest which the most ex
perienced seaman did not dare to face, the entire crew,
seven sailors, of the wrecked boat ; and though he lived
long enough to complete his studies and enter upon
the work of his profession, he died shortly after his
appointment. These circumstances no doubt increased
the usual crowd which streamed after Chalmers wher
ever he preached, and which was so great on this
occasion that the Glasgow visitors lighted upon a very
curious scene. The little parish church of Beudochy
could not hold half the multitude, and a window of
the church was accordingly taken out and a temporary
platform made with boards placed across the sill, from
which the preacher could be heard, not only by the
erowded assembly within the church, but by the
throngs who could get no further than the churchyard.
The scene was so solemn as well as picturesque, that it
is half profane to allow such a ludicrous suggestion to
steal into our minds, but it is difficult not to think of
a London manager coming down by stealth to judge
of the qualities of a provincial performer, when we
think of those grave men from the West mingling
among the crowd", with their minds full of the " Tron,"
and the desire to secure for their great city the best
preacher in Scotland. What contrast could be greater
than the glow of the ruddy October sunshine, the
peaceful security of the rural landscape, and the grave
of the young hero at their feet, whose valour had
brought him to that speedy termination of human
work and effort? The effect of the great oration
which followed, and which held that throng spell-bound,
is said to have been indescribable. " I have heard

FAMILY FEARS. 53
many eloquent men," says a spectator, " but this I
have never seen equalled or even imitated." The
Glasgow inquirers stole away awe-stricken like the
rest, and overwhelmed by excitement and emotion,
but afterwards spared no pains till they succeeded in
transferring the minister of Kilmany to their own
much greater and more influential sphere.
The Tron Church of Glasgow, filled with the wealthiest
men in Scotland and surrounded by the most interest
ing and the most dangerous crowd, was something
more than a bishopric to the aspiring and energetic
soul of the young parish minister. Of ambition, in
the vulgar sense of the word, Chalmers would seem
to have been wonderfully free — even of that loftier
kind which finds animation and inspiration in the
prodigious influence of leadership and the enthusiasm
of a crowd. That such a man having attained such
a position should have flung it by again in a few
years for the retirement of St. Andrews, would be
incredible if his impatient and somewhat arbitrary
character had been mingled with vanity or any love
for the intoxicating atmosphere of the multitude.
And he hesitated at first whether it was or was not
his duty to leave his little rural sphere, even for a
place in which his opportunities of work would be so
much greater. We are not told what the homely,
anxious parents in Anster, ever afraid lest Thomas
should be uplifted by the applauses of men, thought
of the matter ; but there was one of his many brothers
and sisters who had a distinct opinion of his own on
the subject. James Chalmers, the eldest of the family,
who occupied the position of head clerk in a merchant's
office in London, and was evidently as strong in his

54 THOMAS CHALMERS.
character and definite in his views as the younger
brother, whom at the height of' his fame he would
never go to hear, declaring cynically that he had heard,
" and did not think much of him — half-an-hour after
he was born ! " James did not like the idea of Glasgow,
and gave Thomas the benefit of his opinion roundly,
as follows —
" I am much concerned to learn that the allurements
of the perishable mammon are likely soon to have an
effect upon you, and make you resign all your earthly
comforts and domestic quiet ; but I still hope that you
will look before you leap, and think better of the
business before you accept of any nonsense that may
be offered. A situation of an additional £100 a year
may perhaps be held out to you, but you should take
into the account how far that situation may expose
you to expenses exceeding the addition of income which
it renders, what company and connexions it may lead
you into, how far it may incroach upon the time which
you have hitherto allotted for study, or devoted to
the pleasures and endearments of domestic life, what
effect the sudden change from a quiet country life to
the din and bustle of the great city is likely to have
upon you, and how far you think you can relish the
formal and empty fal-lal of refinement when compared
to the honest but humble society to which you have
been accustomed at Kilmany. Besides, Kilmany is
the place where you began your" career. The Rev.
Mr. Chalmers of Kilmany is known: his fame is far
spread, his character is respected, his reputation es
tablished, and his abilities acknowledged and admired.
But the Rev. Mr. Chalmers of Glasgow is another

BROTHERLY ADVICE. 55
person : he has to begin the world afresh : and there
is no doubt but he will be considered in the literary
as well as the religious world as a very different person
from his Reverence of Kilmany. Shining abilities are
naturally looked for and expected to be met with at
the seat of learning, and of course are not estimated
so highly as when they proceed from humble life.
Think of all these things, and consider also how greatly
it will add to your character, that instance of self-
denial which your refusal of the offer will not fail to
impress upon the minds of all who know you and have
heard of you. Keep fast by what you have got, and
be contented still to remain the minister of Kilmany,
and leave Glasgow to those hunters after the world
and vain glory who may be disposed to throw themselves
in its way. Never you mind the call of the Lord, as
it is called. I have no other view than your own happi
ness : for I am convinced that if you do accept this
offer, you sacrifice your comfort and happiness for ever.
You will have no time for study : you will be deprived
of all the comforts of a home, for you will be con
tinually carried down a current of formal visits and
complimentary calls and invitations and botherations
of all kinds."
This ingenious but perverse argument is one which
used to be almost universal in Scotland ; the idea that
a man might honestly see it to be his duty to leave a
humbler sphere for a greater ons — when he was a
clergyman — being, in the opinion of the common people,
sheer hypocrisy and falsehood. "Would he feel it to
be the call of the Lord if it was to a smaller stipend ? "
the satirist used to say with conscious superiority : we

56 THOMAS CHALMERS.
do not know if he does so still. It was a curious evidence
of the high ideal which, in lack of any special devotion
to it in their own persons, these critics fixed upon the
minister as a necessary consequence of his profession.
It gives us, too, a wonderful view of the elevated con
ception then formed of a section of society which we are
not in the habit of considering as at the height of refine
ment, by the unmoneyed classes. Chalmers himself, in
his answer to this letter, hopes that his wife will be
wiser than to allow herself to be "seduced by the
example of female acquaintances," and to " step down
from the dignified simplicity of a minister's fireside and
mingle in all the extravagances of parties and second
courses, and splendid drawing-rooms, and the whole
tribe of similar abominations." Few Scotch ministers
nowadays are likely to consider an additional dish or a
highly-decorated drawing-room as abominations, or as
inimical to the dignified simplicity of the manse. There
are some things in which social habits have certainly
changed very much. The alarm which Chalmers felt
for the vortex of gaiety and pleasure into which he felt
that nothing but a determined resolution would prevent
him from plunging, and the extreme fascination of
Glasgow elegance and luxury, was indeed his only
difficulty in accepting the new appointment. The
thought of the dinner-parties filled his soul with
panic, while the prodigious work upon which he was
about to enter conveyed nothing but exhilaration to
his mind.
When he finally took up his residence in Glasgow he
describes himself as "teased with invitations," "beset
with polite attentions " ; but these proved to be by no
means the only troubles with which he had to contend.

GLASGOW SOCIETY. 57
The extreme amount of secular business thrown upon
his shoulders was still more galling and persistent than
the attentions of society. " What think you of my
putting my name to two applications for licences to sell
spirits, and two certificates of being qualified to follow
out the calling of a pedlar in the course of yesterday ? "
he asks one of his correspondents.
" This, sir, is a wonderful place ; and I am half enter
tained and half provoked by some of the peculiarities
of its people. The peculiarity which bears hardest
upon me is the incessant demand they have on all
occasions for the personal attendance of the ministers.
They must have four to every funeral, or they do not
think it has been genteelly enough gone through. They
must have one or more to all the committees of all the
societies. They must fall in at every procession. They
must attend examinations innumerable, and eat of the
dinners consequent upon these examinations. They
have a niche assigned them in almost every public doing,
and that niche must be filled by them, or the doing
loses all its solemnity in the eyes of the public. There
seems to be a superstitious charm in the very sight
of them. I gave in to all this at first, but I am
beginning to keep a suspicious eye upon these repeated
demands ever since I sat nearly an hour in grave
deliberation with a number of others upon a subject
connected with the property of a corporation, and that
subject was" a gutter, and the question was whether it
should be bought and covered up, or let alone and left
to lie open."
His first impression of Glasgow as a whole was not

58 THOMAS CHALMERS.
indeed at all favourable. He began his residence alone,
without the society of his wife, in the height of summer,
when all who can do so leave a town which never has
been particularly attractive in itself. " I can give you
no satisfaction," he wrote to a correspondent in Fife,
"as to my liking or not liking Glasgow. Were I to
judge by my present feelings, I would say that I dislike
it most violently. What is to come out of it I know
not, but I may at least say that all around me yet
carries the aspect of desolation." No doubt he was
surrounded by the smaller officials, eager to secure, in
the absence of more considerable personages, his first
favour and notice : and all the disagreeables of change,
and the pangs of regret, and the doubts as to whether
he had done wisely, overwhelmed him in the lodging
which had neither the appearance nor the society of
home. But the circumstances ameliorated, and so did
his feelings, and perhaps the first evidence and proof
that he had taken kindly to his new position was in
the touching little episode of another romantic friend
ship, the account of which comes in strangely with one
of the most effective of literary expedients —
" The sound as of a hidden brook,
In the leafy month of June " ;
in the midst of the hurry of public business, the
excitement of oratory, and the atmosphere of crowded
churches with which this period of his life was full.
The object of this friendship was a young man bearing
the unremarkable name of Thomas Smith, who was,
" so far as was known to Dr. Chalmers, the first-fruits
spiritually of his ministry in Glasgow" — a mild, well-
educated youth, in all the beautiful fervour of youthful

A YOUNG SAINT. 59
piety, no doubt enthusiastically attached to the already
great man in the fervour of strength and manhood and
genius, who took *>his pupil and friend into his big
heart. This young man became so dear to Chalmers
that he records a prayer in his journal, " Oh, my God,
save me from all that is idolatrous in my regard for
him ! " They met daily, and took their walks together,
discoursing between themselves of the love of God and
the life of Christ, like the two who once upon a
memorable morning walked over the hills of Judea to
Emmaus; and again in the evening, when the hard-
worked minister, whose days had been full of incessant
labour, looked for the coming of the young disciple as
for one of the chief refreshments of his life, and when
the hour of intercourse was spent chiefly in mutual
prayer. Nothing could be in greater contrast with a
daily existence full of the labour and cares of a large
parish, where already questions not only of religion but
of Christian economics and a statesman's large views
and plans for the advantage of a troubled and suffering
world were in the mind of the elder, than this ideal yet
enthusiastic intercourse with the young soul, irradiated
already by visionary gleams of heaven and the shadows
that foretell an early grave. When these constant
meetings were interrupted by more pressing duties on
the one hand, and increasing ill-health on the other,
letters full of anxious human affection as well as
spiritual communion went daily from the minister's
study, in the intervals of business and parish visitors
and composition, to cheer the young saint on his death
bed. Chalmers had not been quite a year in Glasgow
when this touching little episode came to an end. The
young man died in that ethereal sanctity and perfection

60 THOMAS CHALMERS.
which is so beautiful in youth, when the beloved of God
and man are taken away into the brighter sphere to
which all their thoughts have tended. The minister
came back from a visit to Fife to find that his spiritual
child, his young squire and retainer, had gone suddenly
from all his surroundings of anxiety and suffering.
" Floods of tenderness " filled his soul. He was not a
man whom we should have supposed open to such
absorbing friendship, and there is a quaint stiffness in
the " My dear sir," which is the warmest address in
these singular letters. This was the custom of the self-
restrained Scotch nature, which other nations find it
so difficult to understand, though the correspondence
is glowing with affection and feeling. Even in writing
to his wife, and especially when telling her how neces
sary her society is to him, and how desolate he is
without her, Chalmers has no other expression of
devotion to give than the "Yours most truly," which we
use in the most formal letters. And yet, if the phrase
is taken in its real sense, what more could any husband
say to any wife ?
Nobody who has been in Glasgow will have forgotten
the long crowded street, full of every imaginable variety
of squalid crowd, sometimes hazy with sunshine,
oftener gleaming with dark wetness from pavements
and roofs, with a tall steeple standing out from the
mists and throngs at the end — the Trongate and the
Tron Steeple, as familiar to local regard as the Salt-
market, which Bailie Nicol Jarvie has made immortal.
The "comforts o' the Sautmarket" are very problematical
now, and already, in Chalmers' day, the well-to-do
classes had surged away from the old city centre, not
withstanding that the old college was still in the grimy -

SUNDAY MORNING. 61
depths of the town, keeping a certain hold upon a
locality now given over to the swarming tenements of
the poor. It was in the Tron Church, a building of the
usual Scotch fashion, closely seated with pews and
surrounded with galleries, that Chalmers began his
work in Glasgow. It is a church-going town, and the
crowd of worshippers that streams along the streets of
a Sunday morning is as remarkable as any civic pro
cession — a steady, largely-flowing flood pouring on in
certain well-indicated directions to church and chapel,
with a breadth of respectability and well-doing which
is imposing. There, alas ! as elsewhere, the dark depths
of population behind, the streets and. "lands" where
•men yawn in their shirt-sleeves, and women bustle
among their children, in a Sunday idleness more pro
ductive of brawls than of comfort, contributes little at
any time to the stream of church-goers which skirts,
without ever being able to carry along with it, that
inert mass, often apathetic, and sometimes resistant to
all such influences. The appearance of Chalmers in
the pulpit of the Tron Church moved all that was
accessible in Glasgow with a thrill and new impulse of
curiosity and interest. The fame which he had brought
with him, the great impression which he had already
produced wherever he had been heard, excited the
population more than any great actor would have done,
but perhaps with a not much differing sensation.- There
is, or at least at that period was, nothing which stimu
lated and roused the mind of Scotland like a sermon ;
it has been, from the time of Knox at least, the chief
intellectual enjoyment of a keenly critical community,
which has found in that weekly occurrence not only
the exhibition of power and skill which all men love

62 THOMAS CHALMERS.
to watch, but the additional and still warmer interest
of a personal share in the event, an awakening of all
the critical faculties, an extended and universal dis
cussion in which iron sharpeneth iron throughout a
whole population. Even the dullest of preachers affords
more or less this constantly-recurring diversion and
occupation to his hearers : and it is needless to say that
Glasgow streamed towards the Tron Kirk till every
opening to it became almost inaccessible, and not only
the seats but standing ground within frequently con
tained almost twice the number for which they were
intended. Sometimes the closed doors were burst in
by force by the pressure of the multitude assembled
outside, and possession seized as by an invading army.
Sometimes the entrance of the preacher himself, whose
name had drawn this multitude together, had to be
made as over a breach riven in the mass by the body
guard around. In London, when the great orator from
the North made his appearance there for the first time,
this happened on several occasions ; but even in
Glasgow, which owned him, and had frequent oppor
tunities of hearing him, the same thing occurred again
and again.
He was now at the very summit and climax of life
and genius — the mezzo di cammin — able for all things,
shrinking from no work except those secular encum
brances of his position, sitting on committees and signing
certificates, which as a waste of time raised in him
characteristic tempests of indignation and resistance.
The enthusiasm which filled the community passes
description, or rather we should say, it is described again
and again by spectators of each different scene with a
confused use of superlatives, which produce in words

WEEK-DAY SERMONS. 63
something like the " great stour " with here and there
a sword gleaming through, which Sir Walter considered
the best manner of representing a battle. Nor was
this confined to the Sunday services alone. The Glas
gow merchants, waiting in the Tontine reading-rooms
not far from the Tron that they might rush out at
the first tinkle of the kirk-bell, and secure a place
for the great weekly sermon at the height of the
working-day; the students, who claimed remission of
the fine for non-attendance at their classes, on the
ground that they had gone to hear Dr. Chalmers;
the busy people of every condition who snatched an
hour at noon from the midst of their labours to hear
the great voice in their midst — all these details are
as picturesque as remarkable. The Tron Kirk was
for the time being the centre of the city, as the old
cathedral of St. Giles had once been in Edinburgh,
giving forth not only Christian doctrine, but the
highest criticism of life. The Astronomical Discourses,
in which the glories of the amazing universe were
shown to "utter forth a glorious voice," and proclaim
not that man is too petty for the regard of God,
but that the Divine Guardian of the world cares also
for countless infinitesimal multitudes as well, and that
the exclamation, " What is man that Thou art mindful
of him ? " is the adoring voice of faith, and not the
scepticism of the philosopher : the Commercial Dis
courses, treating of homelier yet all-important subjects,
of good faith, honesty, and honour in trade, as well as
of mercy and temperance and judgment to come : and
many great occasional addresses called forth by events
of the moment, pealed out amid the silence of that
crowd, with every man's breathing suspended as the

64 THOMAS CHALMERS.
great sentences rolled forth, not in the necessary service
of Sunday — the Sabbath sermon, an inherent part of
life— but in the middle of the week, in the voluntary
Thursday morning assembly, in an hour which was
worth money, the severest of all tests, to that energetic
and money-making community. " Every breath is
held, every cough suppressed," says one witness, " every
one, riveted himself by the spell of the impassioned
and entrancing eloquence, knows how sensitively his
neighbour will resent the very slightest disturbance.
Then by and by there is a pause; the speaker stops
to gather breath, the moment is embraced, there is free
breathing, suppressed coughs get vent, postures are
changed, there is a universal stir as of persons who could
not have endured the constraint much longer." The
unconscious sound as of a great sigh bursting frgm the
overcharged bosom of the multitude w1_>en the great
oration came to an end, is described by many, the stir
of recovered identity when the spell is broken which
had welded the mass into one.
We may quote here, not as a specimen of his elo
quence, but as a proof of the boldness and vehemence
with which Chalmers denounced a positive evil, the
following passage from his great sermon on the " Dis
sipation of large cities." Spectators speak of " the
breathless, the appalling silence" with which this
sermon was listened to : but there is in the following
passage a certain unconscious touch of humour, some
thing at least which conveys to us such a sense of the
perturbation of some of the audience thus struck in the
full centre of their shields — as to excite that faculty
which in the midst of the most solemn circumstances is
often capable of calling forth an involuntary smile.

CRITICISM OF LIFE. 65
" We have our eyes perfectly open to that great
external improvement which has taken place of late
years in the manners of society. There is not the same
grossness of conversation. There is not the same im
patience for the withdrawment of him who, asked to
grace the outset of an assembled party, is compelled
at a certain point in the progress of conviviality, by the
obligations of professional decency, to retire from it,
There is not so frequent an exaction of this as one of
the established proprieties of social life. And if such
an exaction was ever laid by the omnipotence of custom
on a minister of Christianity, it is such an exaction as
ought never, never to be complied with. It is not for him
to lend the sanction of his presence to a meeting with
which he could not sit to its final termination. It is
not for him to stand associated for a single hour with
an assemblage of men who begin with hypocrisy and
end with downright blackguardism. It is not for him
to watch the progress of the coming ribaldry, and to
hit the well-selected moment when talk and turbulence
and boisterous merriment are on the eve of bursting
forth upon the company and. carrying them forward to
the full acme and uproar of their enjoyment. It is quite
in vain to say that he has only sanctioned one part of
such an entertainment. He has as good as given his
connivance to the whole of it, and left behind him a dis
charge in full of all its obligations; and therefore, be they
who they may, whether they rank among the proudest
aristocracy of our land, or are charioted in splendour along
as the wealthiest of our citizens, or flounce in the robes
of magistracy, it is his part to keep as purely and indig
nantly aloof from such society as this as he would from
the vilest and most debasing associations of profligacy."

66 THOMAS CHALMERS.
"While uttering these words," said the reporter,
" which he did with peculiar emphasis, accompanying
them with a flash from his eye and a stamp of his
foot, he threw his right arm with clenched hand right
across the book-board, and brandished it full in the
face of the Town Council, sitting in array and in state
before him. Many ejres were in a moment directed
towards the magistrates. The words evidently fell
upon them like a thunderbolt, and seemed to startle
like an electric shock the whole audience."
Perhaps it was on a similar occasion that he penitently
records in his journal, " Preached in the Gorbals in the
afternoon, and exceeded. Oh, for self-command in the
pulpit ! " With such a man, so unsubdued by any fear
of men, in the pulpit, in the exercise of that boundless
freedom of the preacher, whom nobody can without
scandal interrupt or contradict, it may be imagined what
were the feelings of the public authorities of Glasgow,
when the minister of the Tron Church, a year after
his appointment, gave forth as his text the words of
the Apostles : " It is not reason that we should leave
the Word of God and serve tables." In this sermon he
entered into a detailed account of all the extraneous
public duty with which the time of a clergyman was
occupied and his mind distracted, the candidates for
places, each surrounded by a crowd of backers up, the
"printed forms with long blank spaces which the
minister would have the goodness to fill up," and " how
of all his doings in this department the simple achieve
ment of seventy signatures in a day was all that his
dizzy recollection had been able to retain." How far
he succeeded in getting free of this constant inter
ruption there is no information to show, but as he

INDEPENDENCE. 67
possessed in a very special degree the talent of an
administrator, and speedily filled his parish with what
he himself called a lay agency, men inspired and
guided by him, it is to be supposed that he managed to
place some of his secular work on their willing shoulders. .
He was the master of the situation in every way, having
in the first place that strong bulwark of a clergyman's
independence, his position as a member of an Established
Church, which no local opposition or displeasure could
affect, and also the individual command which was
given him by his indifference, so far as his own feelings
were concerned, to the great sphere in which he was
placed, and the longing of his heart for a quieter and
less laborious position. He compares in his journal on
many occasions the temptations of what he calls vanity,
the desire of personal distinction which he could not by
all his efforts shut out of his heart ; but the man who
could estimate popularity as he does in the following
paragraph, which evidently gives a very true account
of his feelings, must always have retained an almost
fierce independence. He would seem to have had
something like a personal disgust— what we call in
Scotland a scunner — for the sensation of a crowd. He
had been representing to his Sunday-school teachers
and other agents the noble popularity, " the popularity
of the heart, the only popularity that is worth aspiring
after," when he is led into this outburst —
"There is another, a high and far-sounding popu
larity which is indeed a most worthless article, felt by all
who have it to be greatly more oppressive than gratify
ing, a popularity of stare and pressure and animal heat,
and a whole tribe of other annoyances which it brings

68 THOMAS CHALMERS.
around the person of its unfortunate victim — a popu
larity which rifles home of its sweets, and by elevating
a man above his fellows, places him in a region of
desolation, where the intimacies of human friendship
are unfelt, and where he stands a conspicuous mark for
the shafts of envy, malice, and detraction — a popularity
which, with its head among storms and its feet on the
dangerous quicksands, has nothing to lull the agonies
of its tottering existence but the hosannahs of a
drivelling generation."
There are perhaps few "victims" of this kind of
reputation who are more sensible of its disadvantages
than the popular preacher — which is not to say that he
may not be very sensible to its-battery : but the " stare
and pressure and animal heat" always seem to have
stirred up the natural impatience of Chalmers' ever
vehement character in an unusual degree. It was not
only in Glasgow that he was exposed to these com
plimentary miseries. His reputation was now so uni
versal that his appearance in Edinburgh, at the General
Assembly, called forth an equal interest. That Scottish
parliament is little understood out of its native realm,
nor the importance and dignity in many cases of its
deliberations, nor the attention it calls forth from all
classes of the community, during its brief sitting of
about ten days in the month of May. That interest, or
at least that dignity, has no doubt sadly suffered since
there have been two General Assemblies, dividing not
only the Church, but the entire ideal of a Church ; but
in Chalmers' early days the Church was unbroken, and
the Assembly was in a very true sense the Scotch
parliament, with a sway over many things of the utmost

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY. 69
importance and necessity. In the Assembly of 1816
there occurred a great debate on the subject of
pluralities — in which Chalmers' was specially interested,
and in which he took a remarkable part. It began
" at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and did not close till
half-an-hour after midnight," one spectator describing
how he "stood an entire round of the clock," from
eleven a.m. till eleven p.m., to listen. In anticipation
of this debate the strangers' gallery was occupied by
an anxious audience at eight in the morning, and the
crowd was so great that even the accommodation
provided for members of the house was invaded. The
speech of Chalmers was the central point of the
discussion, which, we are told, was " conducted by both
parties with great spirit and ability ; " and he concluded
his address by an appeal full of eloquence, that nothing
should be permitted to draw a parish clergyman from his
first duty to' his people and district. "Who would view
without alarm," he cried, "that neglected population
which scowled upon you as you passed with an out
landish stare, who had never spoken to a clergyman in
their life, and who were perfectly amazed when he
began to put a few plain questions to them ? " This
subject filled the mind of the minister of the Tron,
who carried with him night and day the thought of
his own duties in that respect, with constant ponderings
how to accomplish them, now the first problem in the
world to his anxious consciousness. Among his audience
on this occasion Avas the man in Scotland of whom the
literature of the age stood in most fear — the famous
writer, Francis Jeffrey, then editor of the Edinburgh
Review, a critic accused of slaying poets right and left
wherever he turned. " I know not what it is," said this

70 THOMAS CHALMERS.
high authority, "but there is something altogether
remarkable about this man. It reminds me more of
what one reads of as the effect of the eloquence of
Demosthenes than anything I ever heard."
A day or two after Chalmers preached " before the
Lord High Commissioner" in the High Church, the
then sadly encumbered and gloomy St. Giles, which has
now been restored to its original proportions. The Lord
High Commissioner is a functionary generally chosen
from among the highest nobility in Scotland, whose
duties are to represent the Queen by occupying a sort of
throne in the Assembly meetings, where, however, only
the most formal recognition is accorded to him, and
with the deliberations of which he has nothing to do.
It is one of the compromises which abound in British
law, an acknowledgment on the one side_of respectfuL
loyalty, and a token on the other of sa&ei-ion and
privilege, but totally without any other meaning and
effect. The Scotch reader is impatient that such ex
planations should be given ; but we think it is necessary
for the English, and still more the American looker-
on, who might easily suppose that some sort of influence
or active share in the deliberations or conclusions of
the Assembly were involved in the position of her
Majesty's representative, whose office is purely formal
and ornamental — picturesque, indeed, in a high degree,
for he not only goes to the Assembly " in state," with
a procession, in a place not much given to such celebra
tions, but he holds levies and entertainments in old
Holyrood, to the great advantage of the pictorial side
of life. This is, however, a digression. The High
Church was surrounded as by a besieging army hours
before the time of service on the occasion of Chalmers'

SERMONS ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS. 71
sermon there; and was taken possession of in the
same way by the charge of the crowd, and at the
risk of life and limb. An almost forcible entrance
had to be made for the Commissioner himself, the
judges, magistrates, and other persons in authority ;
and again we hear of the hush of almost unearthly
silence when the preacher began his discourse, the
" suspiration of forced breath " when he paused for a
moment, the stir and rustle of movement, speedily
hushed again to that stillness in which the jar of a door
or the slip of a book sounded like thunder and seemed
like a crime — with, at the end — an addition still more
remarkable — "a suppressed but perfectly audible mur
mur of applause, an occurrence unprecedented in the
course of the delivery of a sermon, but irresistible in
order to relieve our highly excited feelings." The
sermon was one of those called Astronomical, and from
the text, " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? "
An effect still greater was produced next year in
London, where he went in May 1817, with the purpose
of preaching the anniversary sermon for the London
Missionary Society — the same anniversary sermon in
which, some years after, Edward Irving broke forth from
all conventional bonds, scorning instead of exalting the
machinery of missionary societies, and holding up the
very different model of an apostolical missionary with
out house or wife or remittances, before the astonished
gaze of all the committees. Irving was not as yet
visible within this horizon of the religious world ; but
he is singularly brought to the mind of the reader by
the text used by Dr. Chalmers on this occasion, which
was from the fourteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians :
" Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that

72 THOMAS CHALMERS.
believe, but to them that believe not : but prophesying
serveth not for them that believe not, but for them
which believe. . . . But if all prophesy, and there come
in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is con
vinced of all, he is judged of all : And thus are the
secrets of his heart made manifest ; and so falling down
on his face he will worship God, and report that God
is in you of a truth." The words seem like a sort of
unconscious prophecy of the excitement which was
shortly about to rise over what was to some an extra
ordinary revelation from on high, and with others
prompted the bewildered inquiry of the text, "Will
they not say that ye are mad ? " The Surrey Chapel
was crowded " from seven in the morning," four hours
before the service began, and as usual the throng was
swept into absorbed attention for an hour and a half,
breathing but as the preacher breathed, and stirring
only when he paused to rest. " Old Rowland Hill stood
the whole time at the foot of the pulpit, gazing on
the preacher with great earnestness, and whenever any
sentiment was uttered which met his approval, signify
ing his assent by a gentle nod of his head and an
expressive smile." One of the Glasgow friends who
had accompanied Dr. Chalmers to London, his publisher,
Mr. Smith, the father of the youth whom he had loved
and mourned, sent home an account full of enthusiasm
and excitement. " I write," he says, " under the ner
vousness of having heard and witnessed the most
astonishing display of human talents that perhaps ever
commanded sight or hearing. Dr. Chalmers has just
finished the discourse before the Missionary Society.
All my expectations were overwhelmed in the triumph
of it. Nothing from the Tron pulpit ever exceeded

IX LONDON. 73
it; nor did he ever more arrest and wonder-work his
audience. I had a full view of the whole place. The
carrying forward of minds never was so visible to me :
a constant assent of the head from the whole people
accompanied all his paragraphs, and the breathlessness
of expectation permitted not the beating of a heart
to agitate the stillness." It would be hard not to
sympathize with the elated disciple, companion, and
satellite, to whom the success of " the doctor " in this
vast new sphere conveyed something of that delight
of the showman which we all feel when either scenery
or personage connected with ourselves does its duty
and overwhelms the rest of the world with admiration.
Mr. Smith was a highly-favoured showman indeed, and
describes how " we were introduced at the meeting of the
Royal Society, where we saw all the most distinguished
philosophers of the nation, and were also in the House of
Peers during the debate on the Catholic question. . . .
In every particular we were highly gratified." "The
doctor came off with great Mat," he says on another
occasion. Meanwhile the doctor's brother James, with a
force of characteristic obstinacy more common in fiction
than in real life, pursued his dogged way from his office
in the city, and the Jerusalem coffee-house, where he
took his relaxation, to his sober home at Walworth,
and never once diverged from his daily path to hear
Thomas preach, his dour Scotch pride and contempt of
the applauses of the crowd embodying a higher family
faith and estimation than any amount of enthusiasm.
When Chalmers preached again, it was no longer
the Dissenting bodies alone which were stirred to their
depths, but Society, always susceptible and eager for
a new sensation, which rushed to the Surrey side and

74 THOMAS CHALMERS.
to the distant wilderness of London Wall to hear the
new wonder. " All the world wild about Dr. Chalmers,"
says the great Wilberforce, who himself made a party
with Canning and Huskisson to hear the great Scotch
preacher, and records the emotion of the former, as
does also another spectator, Lady Elgin: "I saw it
myself." "I was surprised," Mr. Wilberforce says, "to
see how greatly Canning was affected ; at times he was
quite melted into tears." " The tartan," he is reported
to have said, "beats us all." On another occasion
Wilberforce and various great ladies had to get into the
church where Chalmers officiated, through a window,
treading a plank which the fine people dared with
almost more than manly courage, while the preacher
himself had the greatest difficulty in getting in at all.
It is curious, amid all the inflation of these reports,
and in sight of the shining faces of his attendants, to
read what Chalmers himself said, impatient and dis
gusted as he had always been by the pressure of the
crowd : " I pronounce London to be intolerable," he
writes to the brother James, who contemplated these
proceedings with grim humour from the calm of Wal
worth, delighted to feel himself out of it. " I have had
to issue a whole swarm of refusals to your London
applications, and I believe that the insufferable urgency
to the place will drive me away from it as soon as I
have liquidated my engagements to two societies."
This impatience is highly characteristic of the man, but
much unlike the usual temper of the popular preacher.
His impetuous intolerance indeed on these points must
have often conveyed the idea of high temper and
egotism to the crowds of disappointed Church function
aries, for whose benefit he would not consent to make

THE RETURN JOURNEY. 75
himself wretched. " Stare, pressure, and animal heat "
revolted him throughout his life, and he turns his back
upon his triumphs with an angry loathing, which half
irritates the reader — for should not any man be grateful
for human admiration and applause ? — but with a long-
drawn breath of relief on getting free, which at once
changes his aspect. He arrived in London on May
12th, the day before his first appointment to preach,
and he left it on the 26th, the day after the last. A
fortnight of adulation and " urgency " was more than
enough, and society had no charm to hold the impatient
Scot, longing, if not for quiet, which was unattainable,
at least for his own work done in his own imperious
way. On their rambling and devious way homewards —
there were of course no railways in those days, and
the pleasant, tedious journey was accomplished in a
post-chaise, and capable of every kind of prolongation
and detour — the little party, consisting of " the doctor,"
his wife, and Mr. Smith, traversed a great part of the
west of England, and penetrated into Wales. The
remarkable points in the journey, according to Mr.
Smith, were Bristol, where Hannah Moore was visited,
and John Foster the essayist, we fear a much-forgotten
name, was " beyond all our expectations marvellous ; "
and Liverpool, where "kindnesses were almost over
whelming," and where they were much with Mr.
Gladstone, a rich and liberal merchant there, in whose
household apparently neither the doctor nor his com
panions noted a small boy of eight, who was destined
one day to rule his country, and make much commotion
in the world. It is needless to repeat here any further
echoes of the applauses that followed the great preacher

76 THOMAS CHALMERS.
in his flight from town and its urgencies. The voice,
however, of the well-known Robert Hall, himself so
great in the same way, is worth hearing. He speaks
of "the unrivalled and unbounded popularity which
attended you in the metropolis," with a perception that
there were drawbacks to this popularity which diminished
its acceptability. " When you consider, however," he
adds, " the thousands who have probably benefited by
the unparalleled energy of your pulpit ministrations,
you will be the more easily reconciled to the incon
venience inseparable from high celebrity. The attention
which your sermons have excited is probably unequalled
in modern literature, and it must be a delightful
reflection that you are advancing the cause of religion
in innumerable multitudes of your fellow-creatures,
whose faces you will never behold till the last day."
This testimony to an "unparalleled, unequalled, un
rivalled, and unbounded" popularity came from no
ignorant observer; and even if we allow a little for
the fervour of mutual admiration and the habit of
panegyric, it is still of the greatest weight. It was
well for Chalmers that he found the greatest comfort
in his impatient spirit in being well rid of all these
superlatives. All this, however, was not the chief occupation of
his life at the climax of his career, which we fix
as the time of his residence and work in Glasgow,
from his thirty-fifth to his forty-third year. These
popular triumphs were but the surface, a brilliant
and dazzling one indeed of his great existence, but
yet always to his own consciousness inferior to the
real and strenuous object of it. He would not have
been human had he not felt a certain enjoyment in

THE PROBLEM AT HOME. 77
the triumphs of his own eloquence and the consciousness
of being able to sway at once the greatest and the
simplest audience, whatever assemblage of his fellow-
men he was brought face to face with, and could
address with that voice and accent so full of imperfec
tions, so unattractive to the cultured ear, yet which
moved to enthusiasm, to rapture, to tears, the highest
minds in England as well as the denizens of the Gorbals
and Gallowgate; but yet, as we have seen, Chalmers,
if not indifferent to his own power, was more impatient
of its immediate results, less tolerant of the roar of
popularity and the acclamations of the crowd than any
orator that has ever been known. When he fled from
the brazen trumpets and bellowing shouts of fame with
the puckers of revolt upon his brow, and a fastidious
disgust of all the noise and flurry depicted on a counten
ance which had no claim to extreme refinement, it
was not the more congenial applauses of his rich and
devoted adherents in Glasgow that he was thinking
of, nor the sway of the ecclesiastical parliament, nor
even the kindly crowds of the Tron Kirk. His whole
soul was set upon a problem to which nobody as yet had
found the solution — how to reach those darker crowds
behind who knew nothing of the Tron Kirk or any
other, where the labouring man, little known to his
neighbours of the more comfortable classes, and eluding
every evangelical effort, lay open to the foolish teaching
qf any demagogue, and all the impossible schemes of
revolution : and the labouring woman toiled her life out
in dirt and sorrow, without even that noisy alleviation
of existence : and their children grew up untaught to
an ever-worsening instead of bettering fate. These
were the scenes to which he hurried home, and these

78 THOMAS CHALMERS.
the possible hearers of whom he was thinking when
the London mob pressed about him with that stare
and bustle which he loathed. The Surrey Chapel and
the Scotch Church in Swallow Street were not fashion
able resorts, but still less paradisical were the Gallow
gate and the Saltmarket, upon which unsavoury, un
manageable regions the great preacher's heart was set.
We may add, before entering upon the narrative of his
great raid upon that darkest Glasgow, and the wonder
ful if temporary result of his labours, some brief account
of the literary work which he produced during his
incumbency of the Tron Kirk. Sermons in general
are perhaps scarcely to be called literary work : but
the astronomical discourses are very little like ordinary
sermons. There is all the glow and expansion about
them which was natural to a mind full of the loftiest
conception of his subject, and to a style in which some
lingering trace of Dr. Johnson is combined with that
large use of parallelism which constant occupation with
the Bible in the noble diction of our Authorized Version
does much to produce. Something, too, quite peculiar
to himself, is in that effect, as of a swelling bosom and
a long-drawn breath, with which these parallels fill
and sweep along, rising to a climax which makes the
reader too hold his breath, and half realize what must
have been the excitement of the hearer to whom they
came in all their first warmth and fervour. The
effect is so strong, the swelling and inflation (in the
better sense of the word) — or since that is suspect it
may be more suitable to" say dilation — of feeling and
style alike so overwhelming— that even in the quiet
and critical calm of a library, the reader feels himself
carried along by it as by a great personal influence.

AN ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSE. 79
No better or more popular instance can perhaps be
selected to give an example of his style and its remark
able and growing expansion, the high crescendo of an
instrument more great than any resounding brass or
tinkling string, than the comparison between the
revelations of the telescope and microscope which
occurs in the second of these discourses, that upon the
" Condescension of God." His first sermon had been
upon the wonderful words of the Psalmist, words
perhaps first uttered in the vale of Bethlehem by the
young shepherd who kept his flock under all the glories
of an Eastern sky — and we know no evidence save
those of arrogant conjecture against this authorship:
but repeated consciously or unconsciously by every
serious soul penetrated by the splendour of creation, in
sight of the same wonderful spectacle, of which the
furthest north does not diminish the beauty. " When
I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the
moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what
is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? or the son of
man, that Thou visitest him 1 " This is the subject of
the entire series. It was intended to meet the argument
of the sceptic, that in this vast universe the idea that
God should have fixed so extraordinary an attention
as is involved in the gospel scheme upon one insignifi
cant atom in His creation, was untenable.
" It was the telescope that, by piercing the obscurity
which lies between us and distant worlds, put In
fidelity in possession of the argument against which
we are now contending. But about the time of its
invention another instrument was formed which laid
open a scene no less wonderful, and rewarded the

80 THOMAS CHALMERS.
inquisitive spirit of man with a discovery which serves
to neutralize the whole of this argument. This was
the microscope. The one led me to see a system in
every star ; the other leads me to see a world in every
atom. The one taught me that this mighty globe, with
the whole burden of its peoples and its countries, is but
a grain of sand on the high field of immensity; the
other teaches me that every grain of sand may harbour
within it the tribes and the families of a busy popula
tion. The one told me of the insignificance of the
world I tread upon; the other redeems it from all its
insignificance : for it tells me that in the leaves of
every forest, and in the flowers of every garden, and in
the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming
with life and numberless as are the glories of the
firmament. The one has suggested to me that beyond
and above all that is visible to man there may lie fields
of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry
the impress of the Almighty's hand to the remotest
scenes of the universe ; the other suggests to me that
within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided
eye of man has been able to explore, there may lie a
region of invisibles ; and that, could we draw aside the
mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses,
we might then see a theatre of as many wonders as
astronomy has unfolded — a universe within the com
pass of a point so small as to elude all the powers of
the microscope, but where the wonder-working God.
finds room for the exercise of all His attributes, where
He can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and
animate them all with the evidences of His glory. By
the telescope they have discovered that no magnitude,
however vast, is beyond the grasp of the Divinity ; but

AN ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSE. 81
by the microscope we have also discovered that no
minuteness, however shrunk from the notice of the
human eye, is beneath the condescension of His regard.
The one is constantly widening the circle of His terri
tory ; the other is as constantly filling up its separate
portions with all that is rich and various and exquisite.
In a word, by the one I am told that the Almighty is
now at work in regions more distant than geometry has
ever measured, and among worlds more manifold than
numbers have ever reached; but by the other I am
also told that, with a mind to comprehend the whole,
in the vast compass of its generality, He has also a
mind to concentrate a close and a separate attention
on each and all of its particulars : and that the same
God who sends forth an upholding influence among
the orbs and the movements of astronomy, can fill the
recesses of every single atom with the intimacy of His
presence, and travel in all the greatness of His un
impaired attributes upon every one spot and corner of
the universe He has formed.
"They, therefore, who think that God will not put
forth such a power, and such a goodness, and such a
condescension on behalf of this world as are ascribed
to Him in the New Testament, because He has so
many other worlds to attend to, think of Him as a
man. They only find room in their minds for His one
attribute of a large and general superintendence, and
keep out of their remembrance the equally impressive
proofs we have for His other attribute of a minute and
multiplied attention to all that diversity of operations
where it is He that worketh all in all. And when I
think that, as one of the instruments of philosophy has
heightened our every impression of the first of these
G

82 THOMAS CHALMERS.
attributes, so another instrument has no less heightened
our impression of the second of these, then I can no
longer resist the conclusion that it would be a trans
gression of sound argument, as well as a daring of
impiety, to draw a limit around the doings of this
unsearchable God; and should a professed revelation
from heaven tell me of an act of condescension in
behalf of some separate world so wonderful that angels
desire to look into it, and the Eternal Son had to move
from His seat of glory to carry it into accomplishment,
all I ask is the evidence of such a revelation; for, let
it tell me as much as it may of God letting Himself
down for the benefit of one single province of His
dominions, this is no more than what I see scattered in
numberless examples before me, and running through
the whole line of my recollections, and meeting me in
every walk of observation to which I can betake myself;
and now that the microscope has unveiled the wonders
of another region, I see strewed^around me, with a pro
fusion which baffles my every attempt to comprehend
it, the evidence that there is no one portion of the
universe of God - too minute for His notice, nor too
humble for the visitations of His care."
In another discourse he sets before us, with the same
expansion of word and thought, the position of man, the
spectator in this great universe. He describes the
amazing width of prospect which is opened up by the
"little organ of the eye" —
" It is this which enables him, by the act of a single
moment, to send an exploring look over the surface of
an ample territory, to crowd his mind with the whole

AN ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSE. 83
assembly of its objects, and to fill his vision with those
countless hues which diversify and adorn it. It is this
which carries him abroad over all that is sublime in the
immensity of distance ; which sets him, as it were, on an
elevated platform, from whence he may cast a surveying
glance over the arena of innumerable worlds; which
spreads before him so mighty a province of contempla
tion that the earth he inhabits only appears to furnish
him with the pedestal on which he may stand, and from
which he may descry the wonders of all that magnifi
cence which the Divinity has poured so abundantly
around him. It is by the narrow outlet of the eye that
the mind of man takes its discursive flight over those
golden tracks where, in all the exhaustlessness of
creative wealth, lie scattered the suns and systems of
astronomy. " But how good a thing it is for the philosopher to
be humble even amid the proudest march of human
discovery, and the sublimest triumphs of the human
understanding, when he ttdnks of that unsealed barrier
beyond which no power, either of eye or telescope, shall
ever carry him ; when he thinks that on the other side
of it there is a height and a depth and a length and a
breadth to which the whole of this concave and visible
firmament dwindles into the insignificancy of an atom
— and above all, how ready should he be to cast every
lofty imagination away from him when he thinks of the
God who, on the simple foundation of His word, has
reared the whole of this stately architecture, and by the
force of His preserving hand, continues to uphold it;
and should the word again come out from Him that
this world shall pass away, and a portion of the heavens
that are around it, shall fall back into the annihilation

84 THOMAS CHALMERS.
from which He at first summoned, them — what an
impressive rebuke does it bring on the swelling vanity
of science to think that the whole field of its most
ambitious enterprises may be swept away altogether,
and still there remain before the eye of Him who
sitteth on the throne an untravelled immensity which
He hath filled with innumerable splendours, and over
the whole face of which He hath inscribed the evidence
of His high attributes in all their might and in all their
manifestations. " But man has a great deal more to keep him humble
of his understanding than a mere sense of that
boundary which skirts and which terminates the
material field of his contemplations. He ought also to
feel how within that boundary the vast majority of things
is mysterious and unknown to him, that even in the
inner chamber of his own consciousness, where so much
lies hidden from the observation of others, there is also
to himself a little world of incomprehensibles ; that if
stepping beyond the limits of this familiar home he
look no further than to the members of his family, there
is much in the cast and colour of every mind that is
beyond his power of divination; that in proportion as
he recedes from the centre of his own personal experi
ence, there is a cloud of ignorance and secrecy which
spreads and thickens and throws a deep and impene
trable veil over the intricacies of every one department
of human contemplation; that of all around him his
knowledge is naked and superficial, and confined to a
few of those more conspicuous lineaments which strike
upon his senses; that the whole face, both of nature
and of society, presents him with questions which he
cannot unriddle, and tells him that beneath the surface

AN ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSE. 85
of all that the eye can rest upon there lies the pro
foundness of a most unsearchable latency ; and should
he in some lofty enterprise of thought leave this world
and shoot afar into those tracks of speculation which
astronomy has opened — should he, baffled by the
mysteries which beset his footsteps on earth, attempt an
ambitious flight towards the mysteries of heaven— let
him go, but let the justness of a pious and philo
sophical modesty go with him : let him forget not
that from the moment his mind has taken its ascending
way for a few little miles above the world he treads on,
his every sense abandons him but one — that number
and motion and magnitude and figure make up .all the
bareness of its elementary informations — that these
orbs have sent him scarce another message than that
told by their feeble glimmering upon his eye, the
simple fact of their existence — that he sees not the land
scape of other worlds, that he knows not the moral
system of any one of them, nor athwart the long and
trackless vacancy which lies between does there fall
upon his listening ear the hum of their mighty
populations." Another very noble and touching passage from the
discourse entitled " Sympathy felt for man in distant
places of Creation," begins with the hypothesis that this
earth is probably the only sphere astray in all the
immense universe. " For anything we know, every
planet that rolls in the immensity around us may be a
land of righteousness: and be a member of the house
hold of God : and have her secure dwelling-place within
that ample limit which embraces His great and
universal family. But we know at least of one

86 THOMAS CHALMERS.
wanderer, and how wofully she has strayed from peace
and purity." Following out this idea, he represents
the universal feeling which would be excited by such
an exception to the rule —
" And here we cannot but remark how fine a harmony
there is between the law of sympathetic nature in
heaven and the most touching exhibitions of it on the
face of our world. When one of a numerous family
droops under the power of disease, is not that the one to
whom all tenderness is turned, and who in a manner
monopolizes the inquiries of his neighbourhood and the
care of his family ? When the sighing of the midnight
storm sends a dismal foreboding into the mother's heart,
to whom of all her offspring, we would ask, are her
thoughts and her anxieties then wandering ? Is it not
to her sailor-boy, whom her fancy has placed amid the
rude and angry surges of the ocean ? Does not this,
the hour of his apprehended danger, concentrate upon
him the whole force of her wakeful meditations, and
does not he engross for a season her every sensibility
and her every prayer ? We sometimes hear of ship
wrecked passengers thrown upon a barbarous shore,
and seized upon by its prowling inhabitants, and
hurried away through the tracks of a . dreary and
unknown wilderness, and sold into captivity, and
loaded with the fetters of irrecoverable bondage, and
who, stripped of every other liberty but the liberty of
thought, feel even this to be another ingredient of
wretchedness, for what can they think of but home ?
and as all its kind and tender imagery comes upon
their remembrance, how' can they think of it but in the
bitterness of despair ? Oh, tell us when the force of

AN ASTRONOMICAL DISCOURSE. 87
this disaster reaches his family, who is the member of
it to whom is directed the full tide of its griefs and of
its sympathies ? Who is it that for weeks and for
months usurps their every feeling, and calls out their
largest sacrifices and sets them to the busiest expedients
for getting him back? Who is it that makes them
forgetful of themselves and of all around them ? and
tell us if you can assign a limit to the pains and the
surrenders which afflicted parents and weeping sisters
would make to seek and to save him ?
"Now conceive, as we are warranted to do by the
parables of this chapter, the principles of all these
earthly exhibitions to be in full operation around the
throne of God. Conceive the universe to be one secure
and rejoicing family, and that this alienated world is
the only strayed^ or only captive member belonging to
it, and we shall cease to wonder that from the first
period of the captivity of our species down to the
consummation of their history in time, there should be
such a movement in heaven : or that angels should so
often have sped their commissioned way on the errand
of our recovery : or that the Son of God should have
bowed Himself down to the burden of our mysterious
atonement : or that the Spirit of God should now, by
the busy variety of His all-powerful influences, be
carrying forward that dispensation of grace which is to
make us meet for re-admission into the mansions of the
celestial. Only think of love as of the reigning prin
ciple there : of love as sending forth its energies and
aspirations to the quarter where its object is in most
danger of being for ever lost to it : of love as called
forth by this single circumstance to its uttermost
exertion, and the most exquisite feeling of its tender-

88 THOMAS CHALMERS.
ness ; and then shall we come to a distinct and
familiar explanation of the whole mystery: nor shall
we resist by our incredulity the gospel message any
longer, though it tells us that throughout the whole of
this world's history — long in our eyes, but only a little
month in the high periods of immortality — so much of
the vigilance and so much of the earnestness of heaven
should have been expended on the recovery of its guilty
population." We may add the solemn warning with which at the
end of this series the preacher addressed the crowded
and remarkable audience which had sat at his feet during
their delivery. It was a very remarkable audience
indeed — the most busy, the most energetic citizens of
one of the greatest centres of industry and enterprise
in the empire, laying aside work and plans and
accounts in the very heart and freshness of the work
ing-day, in order to listen to these great speculations
and penetrate with the preacher into the arcana
of the heavens, and the almost more impressive
mysteries of the human heart. The picture that is
given us of the reading-room opposite, and the
Glasgow merchants, newspaper in hand, waiting for
the moment to cross the street and take up their places
in the familiar Sunday pews, so seldom occupied in the
busy morn of a working-day, is very curious and
characteristic ; and it would have been strange indeed if
these men, and the hosts of clerks and tradesmen who
were set free for the same purpose, should not have
felt at least a momentary elevation of mind as if they
themselves had made a palpable advance, and a certain
complacency in the sacrifice which they had made and

THE APPLICATION. 89
the great thoughts which they had shared. The
preacher, as he wound up this series of discourses,
compares first the emotion excited by music, by " the
deep and solemn oratorio," and then the influence of
habits of piety, and finally the temporary chastening
and impression of sorrow which brings many for a time
to perceive the beauty and like the consolations of
faith. But he adds —
" The deep and tender impression of a family bereave
ment is not religion : the love of established decencies
is not religion. The charm of all that sentimentalism
which is associated with many of its solemn and affecting
services is not religion. The man whom death has
widowed may abandon himself to the movements of that
grief, which for a time will claim an ascendancy over
him ; and amongst the multitude of his other reveries
may love to hear of the eternity where sorrow and
separation are unknown. He who has been trained
from his infant days to remember the Sabbath may love
the holiness of its aspect, and associate himself with all
its observances, and take a delighted share in the
mechanism of its fomis. But let not these think, be
cause the tastes and sensibilities which engross them
may be blended with religion, that they indicate either
its strength or its existence within them. We recur to
the test. We press its imperious exactions upon you.
We call for fruit and demand the permanency of a
religious influence on the habits and the history. How
many are there who take a flattering unction to their
souls, when they think of their amiable feelings and
their becoming observations, with whom this severe
tpuchstone would, like the head of Medusa, put to flight

90 THOMAS CHALMERS.
all their complacency ! The afflictive dispensation is
forgotten, and he on whom it is laid is practically as
indifferent to God and to eternity as before. The
Sabbath services come to a close, and they are followed
by the same routine of week-day worldliness as before.
In neither the one case nor the other do we see more
of the radical influence of Christianity than in the
sublime and melting influence of sacred music on the
soul; and all this tide of emotion is found to die away
from the bosom like the pathos or the loveliness of a
song. "The instances may be multiplied without number.
A man may have a taste for eloquence, and eloquence
the most touching or sublime may lift her pleading voice
on the side of religion. A man may love to have his
understanding stimulated by the ingenuities or the
resistless urgencies of an argument : and argument the
most profound and the most overbearing may put forth
all the might of a constraining vehemence on behalf of
religion. A man may feel the rejoicings of a conscious
elevation when some ideal scene of magnificence is laid
before him : and where are these scenes so readily to be
met with as when led to expatiate in thought over the
track of eternity, or survey the wonders of creation, or
to look to the magnitude of those great and universal
influences which lie within the compass of religion ? A
man may have his attention riveted and regaled by
that power of imitative description which brings all the
recollections of his own experience before him : which
presents him with a faithful analysis of his own heart :
which embodies in language such intimacies of
observation and of feeling as have often passed before
his own eyes or played within his bosom, but had never

THE GREAT TEST. 91
been so truly or so ably pictured to the view of his
remembrance. We will venture to say on the strength
of these illustrations that as much delight may emanate
from the pulpit on an arrested audience beneath it,
as ever emanated from the boards of a theatre; and
with as total a disjunction of mind too in the one case
as in the other from the essence or- the habit of religion.
We recur to the test : we make our appeal to experience ;
and we put it to you all whether your finding upon the
subject does not agree with our saying about it, that a
man may weep and admire and have many of his
faculties put on the stretch of their most intense
gratification, his judgment established, and his fancy
enlivened and his feelings overpowered, and his hearing
charmed as by the accents of heavenly persuasion,
and, all within feasted by the rich and varied luxuries
of ar^mTeTfec'tluai "Dmaquet. Oh, it is cruel to frown
unmannerly in the midst bf-go much satisfaction ! But
T-niust not forget that truth has. her authority as well as
her sternness, and she forces me to affirm that after
all has been felt and gone through, there might not be
one principle -which lies at the turning-point of conver
sion that has experienced a single movement, not one
of its purposes be conceived, not one of its doings be
accomplished, not one step of that repentance, which
if we have not we perish, so much as entered upon, not
one announcement of that faith by which we are saved
admitted into a real and actual possession by the inner
man. He has had his hour's entertainment, and willingly
does he accord this homage to the performer, that he hath
a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument —
but in another hour it fleets away from his remembrance,
and goes all to nothing like the loveliness of a song."

92 THOMAS CHALMERS.
These sermons were completed and ready for pub
lication in January 1817, when Chalmers had been
about a year and a half in Glasgow. The publication
of sermons is not considered a very lucrative branch
of the publishing trade, and Mr. Smith, Chalmers' first
publisher, had proposed the adoption of the usual
method in such cases, publication by subscription.
It was not a suggestion that pleased the preacher. "It
is far more agreeable to my feelings," he said, " that
the book should be introduced to the general market
and sell on the public estimation of it, than that the
neighbourhood here should be plied in all the shops
with subscription papers, and as much as possible
wrung out of their partialities for the author." As it
turned out, there was little need indeed for any such
proposal. The little volume was published on the
28th January, and in April six thousand copies""'bad
been sold, with an increasing demand for more. Witjn.-
in the year the publication had run into nine editions
of more than two thousand each. " Never previously,
nor ever since, has any volume of sermons met with such
immediate and general acceptance," s&ys Dr. Hanna.
" The Tales of my Landlord had a-Tnonth's start in the
date of publication, and even with such a competitor it
ran an almost equal race. Not a few curious observers
were struck with the novel competition, and watched
with lively curiosity how the great Scottish preacher
and the great Scottish novelist kept for a whole year
so nearly abreast of one another." The world had
become unaccustomed to think of sermons which were
literature, and which presented that "loveliness of a
song" which their immediate audience had so fully
recognized, and the ready acceptance of such a happy

THE CRITICS. 93
combination was at once apparent. Curiously enough,
the critics, or at least the specially religious critics,
assailed a book which gave so little occasion for any
cavilling. In the Eclectic Review, John Foster, the
essayist, a writer then of the greatest reputation, found
fault with the author of the Astronomical Discourses
"for dragging into notice a stale and impotent objection
against the truth of the Christian religion, and giving a
wide spread by his discourses to an argument which, so
so far as we can find, is almost unknown." The British
Review had " never encountered this argument against
the Christian doctrine," or had "given it no heed on
account of its apparent inconsistency," whatever may
have been meant by that. "It may be doubted
whether the objection to which he has devoted his
powers ever obtained a currency sufficient to render
it deserving of so elaborate a refutation," said the
Christian Observer. The Monthly Review, bolder still,
denounced the discourses as " impotent in point of argu
ment, and vicious in point of style." " The doctor," said
this critic, " has acquired an ephemeral reputation, but
it can only be ephemeral, at least in the southern part
of our island, for it possesses none of the constituents
of lasting fame. His mind is. neither vigorous nor
comprehensive ; his sentiments are often grovelling and
intolerant ; and his diction never permanently attracts
by real beauty or nobly elevates by true sublimity."
The authorities in pure literature were happily of
another mind. The vigorous and eloquent critic of
Blackwood's Magazine, Christopher North, as he chose
to call himself, a writer little given to sermons, but
open to almost everything truly noble in contemporary
letters, took up this subject in another strain.

94 THOMAS CHALMERS.
"The objections which he combats," says this prince
of criticism, " are not so much the clear, distinct, and
decided averments of infidelity as they are the
confused, glimmering, and disturbing fears and appre
hensions of noble souls bewildered among the magni
ficence of the universe. Perhaps there is no mind of
any strength, no soul of any nobility that has not often
in the darkness of the night been beset by some of
these majestic terrors. We may never have communi
cated them even to our dearest friends, for when they
are gone they are unutterable; like the imagined
shadows of ghosts, they come and go silently and
trackless; but an awe is left in the haunted mansion
of the soul, and with all the deepest gratitude of a
perturbed imagination we listen to the holy and the
lofty voice which scares away the unholy visitants, and
once more fills the midnight stillness with dreams of a
peaceful and of a heavenly happiness."'
We cannot but feel after such a sentence how much
more real is the inspiration of kindred genius than that
of professional criticism, and that true Art has a wiser
and finer comprehension of most subjects than religious
or any other brethren. Another critic, less great than
Wilson, but of a very keen and penetrating discrimin
ation, added his testimony in a similar tone. " We
remember," Hazlitt says, "finding the volume in the
orchard of the inn at Burford Bridge near Boxhill,
and passing a whole and very delightful morning in
reading it without quitting the shade of an apple-
tree." Orchards and apple-trees are no longer very
common characteristics even of country inns, and
the combination is piquant when we think of this

UNIVERSAL POPULARITY. 95
particular volume lying out in the summer atmosphere
for such a reader. " These sermons," he adds, " ran like
wild-fire through the country." We fear that if not
forgotten now, they have at least fallen much out of the
knowledge of the younger generations, all occupied with
the abounding prelections, smart "New" criticism, and
complacent explanation of everything, which are their
own. But no one worthy will find this volume, if not
in an orchard yet in a library, without falling under
that spell more or less, and receiving from these faded
pages the echoes of a noble voice.

CHAPTER III.
This record, with all its excitements and labours,
and the hum of a multitude which goes through it,
was however the merest surface of Chalmers' life. His
thoughts were occupied far less with the people who
crowded the Tron Kirk and besieged others, creeping in
through church windows and clambering over scaffold
ings to hear him, than with those who had no desire
to hear him, who stood behind in gloomy or ignorant
indifference, unmoved by the impulse which swept
all other classes towards that point of attraction.
It was not the mere fact of their indifference which
stimulated him, though that is an incitement not
unknown to those who achieve easy triumphs on every
side but one. There was, however, a far deeper motive.
When Chalmers came to Glasgow he was in every
fibre of his being a countryman, a country minister,
accustomed to that universal rural acquaintance and
influence which even the most easy-going head of
a rural parish must die or else attain. And his
was no easy mind taking things quietly, but a masterful
and sympathetic spirit unable to let things or people
alone. In his early days, before he had yet discovered
how much higher and more vital a message he had

PARISH ECONOMY. 97
to deliver, he had insisted upon opening the wonders
of chemistry to his gaping rustic folk, and teaching the
old wives of the village to make a pot boil without
fire. Now he had a much greater work in hand,
and it galled his spirit to think that there were
thousands of his people, his own parishioners, those
over whom he felt himself ordained, whom he never
saw, and did not know, and could not reach by any of
the usual means. The weavers of the Saltmarket
had no seats in church. They came to no meetings, if
not to a revolutionary assemblage now and then
on the Green; and showed themselves in no public
places, if not on a summer evening saunter across
that Green, where their minister was far too busy
to. go. But it irked him to his very soul to be
spending his strength, almost ornamentally, as it were,
making the sound of one who played cunningly upon
an instrument to add an additional pleasure to the well-
off and prosperous, while his true charge, his real object,
lay untouched. The parish economy of Scotland is
unlike that in the other parts of the British Islands.
It is a very marked and individual system, democratic,
oligarchic, whatever name may please the reader
best. The minister is at its head, but he is no
absolute sovereign reigning alone. His power is shared
and his actions in many ways controlled by the Kirk
Session — consisting of elders ordained, like himself, with
a solemnity little short of his own vows, to rule and
guide, and aid in all things the parish priest. Heaven
forbid that we should attribute that title savouring of
popery and sacerdotal pretension to the Scotch minister !
Yet religion and humanity are bigger than system
and doctrine, and the office is one and the same. The
H

98 THOMAS CHALMERS.
elders in the ideal system are like Electors Palatine
round their emperor. In many actual cases they
are merely his agents, if not like an ill-humoured
churchwarden here and there, his critics and opponents
among the people. In a careless age they were
chiefly the guardians of the Plate,, an institution
also purely Scottish. This is a vessel placed in
the church porch, into which, great and small, every
worshipper as he enters places his customary and en
tirely voluntary coin; while two respectable figures
stand behind, lending the dignity of their presence to
the old-world familiar practice — sometimes with a little
ostentation of not observing whether the coins are silver
or copper that most abound, more often with the
indifference of habit performing their part as it has
been performed for some three hundred years. We
who remember the childish flutter of excitement, what
ever else might be wanting, to have one's penny ready for
the plate, when one was hardly high enough to reach it,
would rather part with much impedimenta of doctrine
than see that plate disappear from the church door,
with its attendant warders — the kindly elder who gives
a grave smile to his little acquaintances as they pass,
or the solemn elder of whom they are afraid.
It may be that a stranger might pass that homely
object by without any thought of the significance of the
Plate. It means more than an offertory, more than the
embroidered bag or brass trenchard which goes the
round of the congregation, the "alms and oblations"
which are for general purposes, and mean no long-
established and weighty institution. The big Suisse
and the fine lady who perform la quite in a French
cathedral are not half so imposing. The Plate was

THE PLATE. 99
instituted to mean, and did still mean in Chalmers'
days, the whole system of public charity in Scotland, a
better Poor-Law, a nobler beneficence than any re
presented by assessments. The childrens' pennies, the
sixpences of father and mother — that oSfering which
Scotch families blushed to omit, and in the utmost
penury still managed to maintain — were indeed for
several centuries all that Scotland knew as a permanent
provision for the poor. It was nothing for those who
gave, but with the aid of stern independence and
neighbourly kindness, it was sufficient for those who
received, and had been so for many generations before
Chalmers. It was enough for Kilmany — enough even
for Anstruther — combined with the private benefit of a
sea-box or other institution of mutual help among the
sailors. To Chalmers it seemed that it was enough for
the Tron parish or any parish in the world. In these
days the Poor-Laws were under hot discussion, and in
the very act of being re-formed in England ; while in
Scotland they were only beginning to be thought of,
to be introduced in big towns where the poor had
outgrown the revenue of the Plate. When Chalmers
came upon the scene, a complicated system of charity
existed in Glasgow by which he thought much harm
was done, and wholesome primitive virtue injured or
destroyed among the people. Among the many im
patiences of his strong and somewhat imperious, though
always brotherly, soul, was an indignant antipathy to
have questions of personal profit combined with those
of religious instruction. Dr. Hanna tells an amusing
story of his reception of a visitor who introduced
himself as under great distress of mind owing to his
inability to satisfy himself of the Divine origin of

100 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Christianity, and especially of the trouble he had to
understand what is said of Melchizedek. Chalmers
addressed himself seriously to this problem, and when
he had to all appearances impressed if not convinced
the doubter, the latter declaring himself much relieved
in mind, suggested that he was very badly off, and
that perhaps a little money  "Not a penny, sir,
not a penny ! " cried the indignant divine, suddenly
enlightened. " It's too bad ; too bad ! And to haul
in your hypocrisy on the shoulders of Melchizedek."
A similar sentiment is in the following grave account
which was made before a committee of the House
of Commons on the subject of the Poor-Laws. He had
been questioned as to the state of his parish on his
arrival in Glasgow, and had described his withdrawal
altogether from the management of its pauperism,
finding that quite false in principle and alien to his
character as a Christian teacher. " In the eyes of the
population," he said, "the minister stood connected, not
merely with the administration of this compulsory fund,
but with the administration of a great many such
charities as we call mortifications in Scotland, which are
endowments for indigence left by benevolent citizens,
who generally constitute the clergy their trustees."
"Among the earliest movements I made through
the families, I was very much surprised at the un
expected cordiality of my welcome, the people thronging
about me, and requesting me to enter their houses. I
remember I could hardly make my way to the bottom
of a close in the Saltmarket, I was so extremely
thronged by the people: but I soon perceived this
was in consequence of my imagined influence in the

VISITATION OF PARISHIONERS. 101
distribution of these charities ; and I certainly did
feel a very great recoil, for it was so different from
the principle upon which I had been received with
cordiality in my country parish, where the topic of
their temporal necessities was scarcely ever mentioned.
I therefore resolved to dissever myself from the
administration of these charities altogether. I soon
made the people understand that I only dealt in
one article, that of Christian instruction, and that
if they chose to receive me on this footing, I should
be glad to visit them. I can vouch for it that the
cordiality of the people was not only enhanced, but
very much refined in its principle after this became
the general understanding : that of ten thousand entries
made of different times into the houses of the
poor of Glasgow, I cannot recollect a dozen instances in
which I was not received with welcome."
Thus it was odious to him at all times, and in all
circumstances, that Christian instruction should be
sought for the sake of pecuniary relief, or a petition
for a little money hauled in on the shoulders of
Melchizedek. He had his own great way of making
prayer and alms aid each other in the succour of the
people, but it was not this; and that the Church should
interfere with the money levied from the ratepayers,
or the minister become the official dispenser of public
charity, was not only to him a false principle, but an
odious imposition. His doctrines and views on this
point might even seem severe to the reader. He was
not alone a parish minister, but a moral philosopher,
a political economist, a born statesman and legislator.
From one point of view he was a determined, even

102 THOMAS CHALMERS.
harsh, opponent of public charity. The reader must
again be reminded that the time of which we are
writing was that in which the old Poor-Law of England,
with its facile allowances and large measure of outdoor
relief, was being remodelled, and the country was ring
ing with discussions upon the subject, some strongly
defending that mode of action, and some insisting that
parish relief should be made not an easy but a dis
pleasing thing, dispensed not by means of little subsidies
spent at home, which raised no feeling of degradation,
but by the stern workhouse and all its separations and
humiliations. Dr. Chalmers was in favour of neither,
and his- views, which we shall immediately quote, were
of the most distinct and determined character.
" We have long thought," he says, in the preface to
his Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, " that
by a legal provision for indigence two principles of our
moral nature have been confounded, which are radically
distinct from each other — distinct both objectively in
the ethical system of virtue, and subjectively in the
laws and workings of the human constitution. These
two principles are humanity and justice, whereof the
latter is the only proper object of legislation — which,
by attempting the enforcement of the former, has out
stepped altogether its own rightful boundaries. It is
right that justice should be enforced by law, but
compassion ought to go free ; and the mischief that
has practically ensued from the violation of this obvious
propriety strikingly evinces the harmony of the abstract
with the concrete in the constitution of our actual
world, insomuch that derangement and disorder will
inevitably follow wherever the natural laws of that

POOR-LAWS. 103
microcosm, which each man carries in his own heart,
are thwarted by the dissonancy of those civil or political
laws by which it is so often vainly attempted to improve
on the designs of the great Architect, when the in
ventions of man are suffered to supersede the great
principles of truth and nature in the mechanism of
human society.
" Pauperism, in so far as sustained on the principle that
each man solely because he exists holds a right on
other men or on society for existence, is a thing not
to be regulated, but destroyed. Any attempt to amend
the system which reposes on such a basis will present
us with but another modification of that which is
essentially and radically evil. Whatever the calls may
be which the poverty of a human being may have on
the compassion of his fellows, it has no claim whatever
upon their justice. The confusion of these two virtues
in the ethical system will tend to actual confusion and
disorder where introduced into the laws and adminis
tration of human society. The proper remedy, or
remedy of nature, for the' wretchedness of the few is
the kindness of the many. But when the heterogeneous
imagination of a right is introduced into this depart
ment of human affairs, and the imagination is sanctioned
by the laws of the country, then one of two things
must follow — either an indefinite encroachment on
property so as ultimately to reduce to a sort of agrarian
level all the families of the land ; or, if to postpone
this consequence a rigid dispensation be. adopted, the
disappointment of a people who have been taught to
feel themselves aggrieved, the innumerable heart
burnings which law itself has conjured up, and no
administration of that law, however skilful, can appease.

104 THOMAS CHALMERS.
"If the many thousand "applicants for public charity
in England really do have a right to the relief of their
wants, why should not that right, as a right, be fully
and openly and cheerfully conceded to them ? Why
should they be scared away from the assertion of this
right by any circumstances of hardship or degeneration
or violence to the affections of nature being associated
therewith ? Should the avenue to justice be obstructed,
and that too by the very pains and penalties which
are laid on those who trample justice under foot ? Yet
every approximation of an alms-house to a jail, of
a house of charity to a house of correction, but ex
emplifies this grievous paralogism ; nor can we wonder,
when the rulers of England have led its people so
grievously astray, that elements of conflict are now
afloat which destroy the well-being and even threaten
the stability of society.
"' It is playing fast and loose with a people, first to
make a declaration of their right, and then to plant
obstacles in the way of their making it good. There is
an utter incongruity here of the practice with the
principle which betrays a secret misgiving as if the
principle was not felt to be a sound one. The truth
is, that it is such a principle as will not bear to be fully
and consistently acted upon. The economy of a legal
provision for the poor can only be upheld in a country
by a compensation of errors, an expedient which might
do in mathematics, but which can never be made to
do prosperously or well in the management of human
nature." It is amazing to hear this sweeping condemnation
of a system and a principle which we have all been

THE REMEDY. 105
accustomed to see in full action, and to recognize from
our cradles ; nor is it less astounding to discover that
the system which this man of genius, sense, and insight
proposed to substitute for it, was that of a Scotch
parish, the old economy of the middle ages, wrought to
a kind of perfection (imperfect he would have no doubt
admitted in the carrying out, as are all things human)
in the sixteenth century, when the Scotch reformation
was accomplished in fire and flame. The spectator of
to-day will probably laugh at the " devout imagination,"
as the nobles of the Reformation laughed grimly at
John Knox ; but we can none of us refuse to allow that
the evils which Chalmers anticipated have been more
or less carried out, that the " encroachment on property,"
which he spoke of as probable yet problematic, has now
come to a very advanced state of propagation, as a
doctrine at least, and " the agrarian level " becomes
daily a more firmly established ideal and hope among
the masses, who are more and more sure of their right
to be supported when ' in want, and more and more
angry and impatient with the degradation and insults
of the workhouse. As for Chalmers' remedy, he proved
its success triumphantly for several years in circum
stances as little adapted to be regulated by so simple
a theory as can be conceived, which gives him at least
as good a right to be heard on the matter as any man
can have. We must now proceed to give, as well as is
possible, an account of what he attempted and what he
accomplished in the parish of St. John — to which, a
newly-separated district erected into a parish of "at
least ten thousand inhabitants composed almost entirely
of operatives," he was "translated," according to Scotch
phraseology, with the express purpose of making his

106 THOMAS CHALMERS.
great experiment, the magistrates of Glasgow having no
power to interfere with the economy of the old parishes,
but being "prepared to go so far along with Dr.
Chalmers as to enable him in this new parish to try
those schemes of reformation which he was known to
have so much at heart." First, however, we may
attempt to show how he had spent his four years of
previous work, from 1815 to 1819, in the parish of the
Tron, though that was not the independent kingdom
and territory over which he ruled, the noblest kind of
despot, in the later period of his career in Glasgow.
The Tron was bound in all the bonds of those re
strictions which had grown .up about a city parish, with
all its " mortifications," hospitals, and municipal rights
and duties, and it was not there that the great
experiment could be made.
Chalmers, though a philosopher and social economist,
and, in the higher sense of the word, politician —
moral politician, if we may invent a phrase — was
above all a Christian minister, to whom the work of
religious instruction was the great and only work,
to which all others were subservient. His economy
was indeed part of his Christianity, as he sets forth
in the preface, which we have already quoted, to
his Christian and Civic Economy. No two classes
of men stand more apart from each other, he says,
than the clergyman, whose office it is by prayer and
labour to build up a high average character for the
people, and the economists, whose office it is to investi
gate the law of dependence between character and
comfort. "Nevertheless," he adds, "it is not the less
true that between a high tone of character and a high
rate of wages there is a most intimate alliance ; and

THE METHOD OF CHALMERS. 107
while it is for the economists alone to speculate aright
on the action and reaction of these two elements, it is
for the ministers of the gospel alone, by the influence
of that faith which they teach, to elevate the morality
of the common people, and so to carry into practical
fulfilment that glorious connexion which is ever found
between a well-principled and a well-conditioned
peasantry." The parish of the Tron lies in the very
heart of Glasgow, in what no doubt was once the
merchants' centre, the Saltmarket, as already noted,
being part of it; but is now, and already was in 1815,
occupied by working-people, from the comfortable artisan
to the lowest labourer. The people were lodged in
large houses let in flats and subdivision of flats, accord
ing to the system still practised in Glasgow, as in all
foreign countries. It is a system which has been intro
duced into England in some small degree in later days,
but except in fashionable mansions, or in model lodging-
houses, has not attained any acceptance. Great houses
-of five or six storeys, inhabited by tribes of people,
wholesome and unwholesome, clean and dirty, decent
and the reverse, with dark staircases seldom attended
to, reeking with humanity in its least pleasing atmo
sphere and emanations, each the common habitation of
a crowd of families, were the homes of this overgrown
parish. The church was thronged Sundays and week
days, whenever Chalmers preached, by crowds which
had nothing to do with these rabbit-warrens of popu
lation — the "best people" in Glasgow, the merchant
princes, the great manufacturers, the professors, students,
clerks, all the intelligent portion of the community;
but by very few of the parishioners, who would have
been sadly disconcerted, had they been in the habit of

108 THOMAS CHALMERS.
coming to their parish kirk, by such an invasion. But
they had not been in the habit of coming, and their
silent existence, lying all around, invisible, scarcely
represented at all, while their parish minister poured
out- his best to others, was a thing intolerable to that
minister if to no one else. It is to be remembered that
the Tron Church was built for the very clas.ses who
occupied it, who were drawn back into the centre of
the city to hear the great preacher, but who had long
departed from the region where it stood, the centre of a
population which had ebbed away. If not Dr. Chalmers
but an ordinary man had been there, it would have
been partially empty — the official church of magis
trates and a few old-fashioned people, not of the existing
Saltmarket and Gallowgate. But nevertheless the
parishioners were there, and it was the duty of the
minister to know every one of them, according to all
the rules of a Scotch parish. From this rule Chalmers
had no thought of withdrawing. He was obliged to
modify it : he could not pause in every house to exhort
or to pray : but neither could he neglect his first
duty. He visited every house, inquiring into its
religious habits, which generally were nil, and into the
condition of its children, who were or were not at
school, and so with a kind word and grasp of many
hard-working hands, passed on to neighbour after
neighbour, inviting them to meet him in the evening
of that or another day in a convenient room close at
hand. In this way all his afternoons and most of his
evenings were occupied. He kept the morning for
study and composition, dined not later than three
o'clock, after a custom not unusual in those days, and
then " sallied forth and expatiated at the bottom of the

IN THE SALTMARKET. 109
Saltmarket till seven." On another day, after hard
work in his study till two, he took a stroll through a
neighbour's garden, then " came back to my beefsteak,
and after it I had another round of visitation at the
head of the Green, and after going amongst the houses,
drank tea with a Mr. M'Leary, and assembled the people.
in a weaver's, who came to the amount of a hundred
and twenty-five hearers. This is truly gratifying work,
and I feel that if unmolested I shall have great pleasure
in it. The cordialities, of the people are quite un
bounded." On another day he " had a visitation along
with Mr. C. Went through Norris's Land. Drank a
hurried tea in the parish with Mr.. Ure, and went back
to Norris's Land at eight, where I held forth to a motley
assemblage of a hundred people at least. I had great
freedom and satisfaction in this work."
The same account is repeated day by day. It is
taken from a series of journal letters to his wife, then
absent : and the time of the year was high summer,
when all the genteel persons and good society in Glas
gow were absent too, and the smells and close air of the
" Lands," which is the name given to the great tene
ment houses in Scotland, would be at their height.
"Met Mr. John Brown, elder, and took him and Mr.
Montgomery to a visitation in the proportion of the latter.
Went through two hundred and thirty people, and drank
tea at Mr. Brown's, then at eight delivered an address
in one of the liouses to an assemblage consisting of
eighty-five people. Have great comfort in this work."
His glee in getting off from a number of tourist visitors
to hurry " to the Saltmarket, where I spent four or five
hours among my old people ; " his sudden remark, accom
panied by no special tenderness — (for he signs himself,

110 THOMAS CHALMERS.
as already remarked, " Yours truly " to his wife — as,
indeed, what could a -man say more ? — and writes to
his most beloved friends as " My dear sir ") — " Nothing
but the complete filling up of my time by useful
employment would render our separation tolerable ; "
-his wrathful indignation at the meeting of a society
which had lost him "two complete days, one in pre
paring for it, and another exhibiting for it. You will
see how utterly this distraction is at variance with my
best and dearest, and, I think- most valuable objects "
— show us the man in the manner and with the object
of his existence in a remarkable way. They are not
like the similar letters of Irving, full of the tender
revelations of a high-toned and sensitive spirit; but
their brief and unadorned record gives us a view into a
life which is full of duty, and love of that duty, without
a single word of self-consciousness or expansion. The
other is the more lovable and attractive. It may be
doubted whether this is not the highest record.
But this hurried kind of visitation by no means
satisfied the ardent apostle. " I know," he said to a
respectable elder, toiling after him up a long dark
stair, "that if you were to speak your mind, you
would say that we are putting the butter very thinly
upon the bread." He himself longed to "expatiate,"
according to his own humorous solemnity of expres
sion, , among the closes and wynds as he had done
among the green lanes at Kilmany, making every
cottager a friend, and becoming learned in all the
beautiful obscure thinkings and all the quaint whims
and prejudices of an uneducated but intelligent people.
What he desired was to know the weavers and cotton-
spinners as he had known John Bonthron and all the

'EXPATIATING.' Ill
worthies of the East-Neuk. That, however, was im
possible to one man, and he soon perceived that without
a large body of coadjutors very little could be done.
An English rector might have gathered round him a
-troop of curates, but this was entirely out of the
thoughts or possibilities of a Scotch minister, to whom
indeed the help of an "assistant" was presently prof
fered, but who knew what he believed to be a more
excellent way, not only of reaching the poor, but of
linking them with their more fortunate neighbours.
Before his second year in Glasgow he had presided at
the ordination as elders, of a new class, not the respect-
' able seniors of a comfortable and satisfied community,
but men like himself, still young and eager, full of
work and full of fight, and pervaded by the enthusiasm
of the leader, who had roused them to a fuller con
ception of the nobler duties of life, and the claims upon
them of the neglected and poor. His address to these
elders at their ordination — which was a rite little less
solemn than the ordination of the minister himself, and
preceded by the same vows — is admirable in its practical
advice, which is such as every worker among the poor
might well lay to heart. He reminds them first of the
duty of spiritual instruction and help, which, according
to all Scotch Church law and tradition, was the first
duty of the elders as well as of the clergy, but proceeds
afterwards to counsel them as to their intercourse in the
way of benevolence and help-giving with the population
under their care. At a period when service of this
kind is- so much more general, these advices are well
worthy repetition. The reader will remark that they
were not addressed to a humble company of district
visitors, but to men, some of whom were of the first

112 THOMAS CHALMERS.
consequence in their great community, and holding an
office fully recognized there.
" I shall venture on three observations relative to this
department of your services.
" My first is that the poor will feel themselves greatly
soothed and conciliated by your ready attention, by
your friendly counsel, by your acts of advice and
assistance as to the conduct of their little affairs, by
the mere civility and courteousness which mark your
transactions with them, and that these will positively
go further to gladden their hearts and endear your
person to them, than all the money you may find it
necessary to award for the support of their indigent
families. " My second remark is counterpart to my former one.
It will be said that by this unrestricted facility of
manner you will lay yourselves open to the inroads of
the unworthy and undeserving. In answer to this, I
ask if there be not room enough in a man's character
for the wisdom of the serpent along with the gentleness
of the dove ? That we may ward off the undeserving
poor, is it necessary to put on a stern and repulsive
front against all the poor who offer themselves to our
observation ? The way I apprehend is to put forth
patience and attention, and to be in the ready attitude
of prepared and immediate service for all cases and
applications in the first instance : to conduct every
examination with temper and kindness — and surely it
is possible to do this and at the same time to conduct
it with vigilance. Exercise will soon sharpen your dis
crimination in these matters, and when you have.got at
a thoroughly ascertained statement of the claim which

RELATIONS WITH THE POOR. 113
has been advanced, and you find it is not a valid one,
then put forth your firmness, then make a display of
calm and settled determination, then show your people
that you have judgment as well as feeling, and that
you know how to combine the habit of justice to the
public by not squandering their money on unsuitable
objects, with the habit of sympathy for genuine distress
and of ready attention to the merits of every appli
cation. . . . Your people will not like you the worse
when they see you acting in a sound, judicious, and
experimental way with them. They know how to
appreciate good sense as well as we, and they admire
it, and they actually have a liking for it. They are
scandalized when they see kindness lavished on the
unworthy. Though they like attention and sympathy,
they have a greater esteem for them when they see
them conjoined with the wisdom of judgment and a
good understanding; and in proportion as you evince
yourselves to have the faculty of rejecting those claims
which are groundless, in that very proportion will a
real sufferer esteem that act of preference by which
you have had the discernment to single out his claim,
and the benevolence most soothingly and most sympa-
thizingly and most amply to provide for it.
" I have just one remark more to submit to you. I
know not a more interesting case that can be submitted
to you in this way than when an applicant proposes
for the first time to draw relief from a public charity.
This he is often compelled to do from some temporary
distress that h sings over his family; and if the emer
gency could be got over without a public and a degrading
exposure of him who labours under it, there would
both be a most substantial saving of the public fund
I

114 THOMAS CHALMERS.
and a most soothing act of kindness rendered to the
person who is applying to you. I am very far from
urging anything upon you. I merely throw this out
as a hint and suggestion. If by your own influence,
or that of your friends, work could be provided for a
man in such circumstances, or some private and delicate
mode of relief be devised for him, then I know not
in what other way you would more effectually establish
yourselves as the most valuable servants of the public,
and as the best and kindest friends of your own
immediate population."
Long ago, in ancient Florence, there was an order of
men bound in love and honour to the Service of the
Poveri Vergognosi — the shamefaced poor — those to
whom asking was not easy nor the bread of charity
sweet. Might not these advices have been given forth
from their dignified head-quarters to the mediaeval
gentlemen in their cloaks and plumes who undertook
this most Christian of offices ? Dr. Chalmers would not
have found it easy to recognize his like among the
slaves of Papistry and in the depths of what he would
have called the Dark Ages, nor could the honest
Glasgow elders have made any show among* the, civic
nobles of the old Republic; but let us thank heaven
that makes the differences always so much less than
the resemblances, and vindicates the nobler motives,
the higher instincts of our nature everywhere in all
ages and all complexions of mankind.
Notwithstanding the work thus begun, however, and
the assistance thus secured, Chalmers could do little
more than shape his plans for after action, and try the
mettle of his blade in the Tron Kirk. The reader

THE TERRITORIAL SCHEME. 115
must recollect that in those days none, or very few,
of the countless agencies now at work in every poor
parish or district of every English or Scotch city
existed at all. Sunday-schools, of which so many of
us are half-contemptuous now by dint of over-familiarity,
were rare. There was in Glasgow a Sabbath-school
Society which planted a school here and there at the
pleasure and convenience of the few teachers, but
without any special connexion with any church or
district. Chalmers saw the capabilities of the instrument
thus lying at his hand, and with a swift glance of his
statesmanlike genius, perceived how it could be used with
some real effect. The very earliest adaptation of what
was afterwards entitled, with a little Scotch grandilo
quence, the Territorial scheme, was caught at and taken
up by a flash of insight in this simplest way. Instead of
a school for general and languid use, or even a parish
Sunday-school dedicated to the 11,000 people over
whom he had charge, he planted one of his men-at-arms
in a Glasgow close — or " land " — to devote himself to
that- little corner of the alas ! very stony and neglected
vineyard. The idea seized possession of him in the
following way. He had secured a new Sabbath-school
teacher, and set out to find him pupils, accompanied
by an elder.
" They secured a room at the entrance of a long close.
After going through the families living in this single
lane, and summing up the number of children, there
were found to be twenty-eight who had promised to
attend. 'I think,' said Mr. Thomson, 'that we have
got plenty.' The idea of a separate school in and for
a single close pleased Dr. Chalmers amazingly. ' Yes,'

116 THOMAS CHALMERS.
he exclaimed, ' this is the true local plan : we will
just fix R  down to this close : we will make it his
parish .-. let him visit all the families here and look
after all the children : that will be an effectual preaching
of the gospel from door to door.' "
This was the nucleus of all his future undertakings ;
he had caught the principle ; the parish system, yet
something more minute and more practicable than any
mere general parish system in a population of 11,000
people. His Sunday-schools multiplied on every hand,
and in every little district — or " proportion," as he called
them, loving always a bigger word : and wherever these
little schools were established, there was a little theo
cracy at once established also, a world within the world,
a little section of society taken possession of by the
Church, with all the charities both of earth and heaven
brought to bear upon it. What good these Sunday-
schools accomplished of themselves we need not inquire,
but the voluntary teacher coining and going, suggesting
and urging the week-day school as well, finding places
for the elder boys, encouraging economy, promoting
order, gaining confidence, was a still greater advantage.
It furnished him at once with the idea of the future
agency for a greater undertaking still.
Chalmers had been four years in Glasgow when he
was appointed to the new parish of St. John's, formed
especially for him, that he might have the independence
necessary to carry out the great schemes which had
been forming in his mind. It is needless to say that
nobody but a very exceptional man would have induced
the magistrates of a great city to take such a step, and
virtually deliver over a portion of their town to his

A NEW BEGINNING. 117
sovereign sway — which, along with the fact that his
great scheme continued to exist only while the force
of the original impulse lasted, places his experiment
more or less in the position of a Utopia, though one
that such another man, as influential, as powerful, and
as clear-headed, might again carry out. He had, as
we have seen, been greatly moved by the subject of
the Poor-Laws as lately remodelled in England, dis
approving of them highly on principle, and feeling that
kindness, and not legal right — sympathy and compassion
and brotherhood, not doles of money, nor the dreadful
expedient of a workhouse — -were the things to neutralize
and more or less abolish destitution and want. His
system was, in administrating, to abolish public charity
altogether, an idea that will seem very strange to the
reader, habituated as we are now to the ideas and
theories against which Chalmers so stoutly struggled.
It was in the end of September 1819 that he entered
iuto possession of his kingdom, he and the large body
of " Agents," his court and officials, all bent upon making
this wilderness blossom as the rose. The new parish
was not only one of the largest, it was the very poorest
parish in the city. Weavers, labourers, factory-workers,
and other operatives made up its population. The
radical and revolutionary element, which was in one
of its ebullitions at this time, was very strong in it.
The people who came to church were not a hundredth
part of the population. There were no schools, nothing
at all of the machinery of a parish, no foundation to work
upon — but only a mass of poor houses, poor families,
cognizant of little in Christianity but vague, half-
superstitious hopes of consolation in sickness and help
in want. The tradition of the seemliness and use of

118 THOMAS CHALMERS.
the minister's presence at a death-bed, as a sort of
passport and warrant of a good end, was almost as
strong among them, though so different, as the desire
of the Irish peasant for his priest to send him
assoilzied on the same dread journey: but religion
meant little more to them than this. That the
subsidies of public charity were of supreme importance
in such a district, it is unnecessary to say. Chalmers,
however, accepted the living on the condition that all
connexion with these public charities should be broken
in the new parish. He demanded that it should be
severed from the rest of the city in respect to all
assessments and public provision for the poor, as if it
had been removed a hundred miles away, and that the
entire control of the parish should be made over to
himself and his session, so far as its pauperism was"""
concerned. He gave up all interest and all claim to
any share in the poor-rates or general funds of the
city, and undertook on his part to provide for every
need of this kind in his parish, so as " never to add
to the general burden." It was a very extraordinary
bargain to be made between a modern municipality
and a city incumbent, and we repeat that nothing but
the extraordinary faith which all Glasgow had in this
man, and the influence he exercised over mind and
imagination, could have made it possible. But it was
done — with no doubt many speculations of the profane
as to the chaos in which this devout imagination must
result. To provide for the " submerged " of that population
of 10,000 poor and labouring people, subject to all
the fluctuations of daily work and those accidents
which constantly convert the poor, who can just keep

THE PARISH REVENUE. 119
the wolf from the door and no more, into recipients of
charity, Chalmers, for all his revenue, had the Plate
at the church door. No poor-rate was levied in that
parish, nor even any spasmodic effort made by a great
subscription to provide an extraordinary fund. The
Plate and no more : the unasked, natural offering, to
which every one was accustomed — not emphasized even
by so much as the sending round of a bag, or what in
Scotch country parishes is called " the ladle " : the
entirely voluntary, unfelt, infinitesimal contribution of
every one, from the smallest child proud of its halfpenny
to the respectable shilling of manhood well-to-do.
There are many changes nowadays in the outward
forms of piety in Scotland, attempts to harmonize its
sober absence of ritual to the higher organization of
public religious services on the other side of the Tweed,
but we hope that if the tradition of three hundred
years needs any strengthening, the memory of Chalmers
and his great experiment will always be enough to.
protect the Plate, that wise and simple institution,
so entwined with every association, and so harmonious
with its place and sphere.
"My confidence in a successful result is not at all
founded on the expected magnitude of my future
collections, but upon the care and attention with which
the distribution of the fund will be conducted. ... At
the same time, I can also with such an arrangement
stimulate more effectually than before the liberality of
my congregation ; and with this twofold advantage I
am hopeful, not merely of being able to overtake the
whole pauperism of St. John's, but of having a large
surplus applicable to other objects connected with the

120 THOMAS CHALMERS. '
best interests of the population in that district of
the city."
These are Chalmers' words in anticipation of the
new regime which he was about to inaugurate. He
stipulated besides that this ideal kingdom of his should
be guarded by the usual "law of residence" between
parish and parish. "I am quite willing that- every
parish should have protection by this law from the
ingress of my poor, in return for the protection of
my parish from the ingress of theirs." At the same
time he desired that it should be distinctly under
stood that, " I do not consider the revenue of the Kirk
Session to be at all applicable to those extraordinary
cases which are produced by any sudden and unlooked-
for depression in the state of our manufactures. Nor,
if ever there shall be a call, for pecuniary aid on this
particular ground, do I undertake to provide for it out
of our ordinary means, but will either meet it by a
parochial subscription or by taking a full share of any
such general measures as may be thought expedient
under such an emergency."
All these stipulations and conditions were the cause
of a great deal of turmoil, agitation, and struggle. The
magistrates freely granted that the pauperism of St.
John's should be taken off the general fund and provided
for within the parish : but to surround that parish with
a cordon of protection from the invasion of paupers
from other places, and to give up all control of its
revenue and expenditure, was a thing over which both
the Municipal Court and the public officials of charities
hesitated long. It was, however, accomplished at last,
and Chalmers and his "agency," his elders and deacons

THE SCHEME BEGINS. 121
(the latter an order founded upon the suggestion of
St. Peter " to serve tables," i. e. to attend to the external
economy of the community, and without any spiritual
charge, which is the Scotch and Presbyterian meaning
of the word), got fairly into possession of their kingdom,
and began the great experiment over which no doubt
many a heart quaked, but not that of the leader, in
whose determination and confidence every man of his
helpers took refuge as in a citadel of boundless certainty
and strength.
We are led to dwell upon this scheme and its
triumphant realization all the more from the fact that
all theories and efforts of this kind are of supreme
interest at the present moment, when we are every day
brought more and more closely in contact with those
great problems, the solution of which is the chief public
anxiety of the age. There are almost as many theories
nowadays on the subject as there are charitable societies
and benevolent persons ; yet we do not seem to come
any nearer to the root of the trouble. And we do not
know that there is much possibility, in an age which
has piled upon all its movements many more impedi
menta in the shape of conventional systems and
burdens since the age of Chalmers, of renewing such
a great experiment, which indeed in all its conditions
is Scotch, and closely connected with the parochial
system which once was the pride of the northern
kingdom, but which like other thiugs has, we believe,
been modified in many respects by a closer connexion
with its powerful neighbour. But at all events the
subject is one which is of the highest interest to all
who have to deal with the questions of poverty and
its help and relief. To Chalmers the whole matter was

122 THOMAS CHALMERS.
founded on religion, and by that only was made a
practicable scheme. His agents were men all pene
trated by that form of duty and love to one's neighbour
which is the other side, the reflex and natural issue,, of
duty and love to God. The homely statement that
"between a high tone of character and a high rate of
wages there is a most intimate alliance," was the
inspiration of leader and followers alike. The " high
rate of wages" was secondary in an almost infinite
degree to the other, but yet naturally proceeded from
the other along with every other virtue and advantage.
It was a scheme for reducing and eventually destroying
pauperism — that is true : but it was first a scheme for
making men Christians, in the sure and certain hope
that everything good would follow — one of the efforts
continually repeated, continually foiled, but never, thank
heaven, wholly given up, to persuade the world that the
one great and simple expedient of being good, which it
will never consent to try, is the solution of the great
problem and the only one. " What need of war and
bloody crusades against the Moslem ? " said our old and
clear father in God, Francis of Assisi ; " let me but go
and convert them." "I will be good," said the little
Princess Victoria in the awe of hearing that she was
to be queen. It is the phrase of the nursery, though
even there how hard to carry out ! It is the only answer
to all our questionings. " Let him that sinneth, sin no
more." Alas, a Utopia more hard to establish than any
conventional one ! Yet the aim of all wisdom, however
we may differ as to how it is to be brought about.
The manner in which Chalmers organized his parish
was as follows. It was divided into twenty-five districts,
or proportions as they are called, each embracing from

PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS. 123
sixty to a hundred families, and each placed in charge
of an elder and deacon, the first for spiritual help, the
second for temporal. The whole management of the
pauperism of the parish was confided to the deacons.
In each district was also planted one Sabbath-school
at least, sometimes more, the number of teachers being
between forty and fifty. There were thus about a
hundred persons employed day by day in the parish,
" all for love and nothing for reward," knowing every
body and everybody's circumstances, behind the scenes
of all that teeming life, and ready for every office of
kindness and watchfulness. We are told of one gentle
man, a wealthy merchant, with a beautiful house amid
the woods and waters which even then were so ready
of access, near Glasgow, who spent "two hours every
day " in his proportion — and he Avas but an example of
many. It must be remembered, however, that the aim
of all this, as over and over again repeated by Chalmers,
was not as in so many instances to coddle and caress
a chosen and favourite population with excessive kind
ness, which is a thing not unfrequently seen, and
perhaps a greater danger in a well-managed parish
ruled by kindness, than neglect. The autocrat of St.
John's was as kind as heaven, but as inexorable as fate.
His object was not to keep his poor people fictitiously
comfortable, but at any cost, even of discomfort, even of
complaint, to keep them independent, to preserve them
by every strenuous art from becoming poor in the
technical sense of the word, or depending on charity at
all. It was an object very apt to be misunderstood,
and indeed very difficult to understand at all, by those
to whom the limp ideal of religious charity had been
almost indiscriminate giving. Chalmers hated giving

124 THOMAS CHALMERS.
almost as a miser does, though for ends so different.
His whole scheme of charity was to extinguish charity.
His " agents," each man in his sphere, were inspired to
this instead: to find work where work was wanting,
to stimulate mutual help and self-denial, to administer
private aid, neighbourly, in secret, removing obstacles,
tiding over a special emergency, as friend may do with
friend — and above all to save the poor from the shame
of pauper-allowances and receiving of alms. There
was of course, as in all undertakings of a similar kind,
disappointment on one hand and impatience on another
to be encountered and surmounted. But fortunately
an idea so great, accompanied by all the friendly human
warmth of constant contact, has a way of penetrating
a crowd, and it was not long before the reservations
as well as the bounties of the new system were under
stood. Some curious instances in which tender Charity
thus stood by with a blank countenance, pretending an
austerity which on the surface seemed almost unkind,
in order to let finer influences work, are very remark
able. There is something of the imagination of a
poet in this mode of dealing with the vulgar details
of penury, very apt to be misconceived, yet very noble
when the secret was known. Chalmers had the ad
ditional power of not being afraid of misconception or
popular reproach. The following instances are from
the notes of one of the workers —
"Typhus fever made its deadly inroads into a weaver's
family, who, though he had sixpence a day as a pension,
was reduced to extreme and obvious distress. The case
was reported to Dr. Chalmers, but no movement towards
any sessional relief was made— entire confidence was

AUSTERE KINDNESS. 1*25
cherished in the kind offices of the immediate neigh
bourhood. A cry, however, of neglect was raised, an
actual investigation of what the man had received in
the period of his distress was undertaken, and it was
found that ten times more than any legal fund would
have allowed him had been supplied willingly and with
out any sacrifice to the offerers. — A mother and daughter,
sole occupiers of a single room, were both afflicted with
cancer, for which the one had to undergo an operation :
the other was incurable. Nothing would have been
easier than to have brought the liberalities of the rich
to bear upon such a case ; but this was rendered un
necessary by the willing contributions of food and service
of those living near this habitation of distress, ' Were
it right,' asks Dr. Chalmers, ' that any legal charity
whatever should arrest a process so beautiful ? ' I
never, during my whole' experience in Glasgow, knew
a single instance of distress which was not followed by
the most timely forthgoing of aid and sympathy from
the neighbours. I never found it otherwise, though I
have often distinctly observed that whenever there was
ostensible relief obtruded upon the eyes of the popu
lation, they did feel themselves discharged from a re
sponsibility for each other's wants and released from
the duty of being each other's keepers. One particular
case of distress met the observation of the Female
Society at Glasgow, which society operates upon the
general population, and with a revenue of some
hundreds a year, from which it can afford very little
in each individual instance, besides the impossibility of
having that minute and thorough acquaintance with
the cases that obtains under a local management. I
remember having heard that a lady, an agent of that

126 THOMAS CHALMERS.
society, went up-stairs to relieve this widow, and gave
all that the Female Society empowered her to give,
which was just five shillings. The people, observing
this movement, felt that the poor womau was in suffi
cient hands, and that they were now discharged from
all further responsibility, so that the opening-up of
this ostensible source of relief closed up far more
effectual sources that, I am sure, would never have
failed her."
With this seeming sternness, but constant watch
fulness, the system was carried on with the most
triumphant and extraordinary success. Objection after
objection was answered in the most overwhelming way
by practical results. Thus one argument — which was
that though the wealthy people who thronged to hear
Dr. Chalmers on every available occasion filled the
Plate with unusual offerings, that source of supply
would cease when another less remarkable man occupied
his place — was met, being foreseen, by the appropriation
solely of the offertory (we apologize in such a connexion
for using a word quite foreign to Scotch customs, simply
because it is the most convenient) contributed at the
evening service, when the church was reserved for the
parishioners and the richer visitors were absent — " the
pennies of the poor " thus sufficing for the parish
charities. Another was that the doctor's scheme would
starve the poor out of his own parish, and drive them
into the adjoining districts — a possible insinuation
which he had also guarded against by requesting that
the law of residence should be rigorously enforced, his
own impression being that instead of an " afflux out of
his parish there would be an influx into it," and that

OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES. 127
" the poor themselves would be much better pleased
with a system which, while it would do nothing for the
idle and dissolute, brought human sympathy and kind
ness and all friendly aids to industry into the dwellings
of those who were in real want." His foresight was
fully justified : at the end of four years, it was found
that fifteen had removed out of St. John's parish
against the almost double number of twenty-nine re
moving into it, an evidence which could not be gainsaid.
The last remaining argument, which is one which we
are disposed to view with indulgence, was the plea of
objectors who attributed the success of the scheme to
" the extraordinary eloquence and zeal of its author,
and to the strenuous management of that select body of
agents which he had gathered from all quarters of the
city, and whom, by his presence and his impulsive
energy, he had kept working at a rate of vigilant
activity altogether unprecedented." Nothing could be
more reasonable than this supposition, but even that, it
appears, was not justified by the facts. The scheme
continued to be'worked for fourteen years after Chalmers
left Glasgow. The testimony of his successor, Dr. Mac-
farlane, comes in with an amusing touch of self-satis
faction on this point : " I was agreeably disappointed,"
says this good man, " at finding that Dr. Chalmers was
not the only person having sufficient influence to obtain
the aid of the respectable members of his congregation
in administering the affairs of the poor. I had not the
smallest difficulty in procuring a, sufficient number of
deacons for that purpose." The practical result was
that the pauper population of St. John's, which had cost
the city a yearly subsidy of £1400, was, under the new
scheme, provided for at a cost of £384 ; " or, deducting

128 THOMAS CHALMERS.
the expense for lunatics and deserted children, which,
owing to peculiar circumstances, had come to press
heavily upon the parish," £232— the largest sum being
not much more than a fourth part of the original ex
penditure. This remarkable result was indeed only a
small part of the advantages gained. " With an income
from collections not much exceeding £300 a year," says
the same Dr. Macfarlane, whom we have already quoted,
" we kept down the pauperism of a parish containing a
population of 10,000 ; and I know from actual obser
vation that the poor were in better condition, and,
excepting the worthless and profligate, who were refused
assistance, even more contented and happy than the
poor in the other parishes of Glasgow." An English
Poor - Law Commissioner, Mr. Tufnell, who visited
Glasgow in 1833, and made a thorough examination of
the condition of the parish of St. John's, adds to all this
his emphatic testimony —
" This system has been attended by the most tri
umphant success," he says, and adds a half-bewildered
statement of the causes of that success, which must
indeed have been curiously difficult for the official mind
to grasp. "This personal attention of the rich to the
poor seems to be one of the most efficient means of
preventing pauperism. It is a subject of perpetual
complaint that the poor do not receive the charities
of the rich with gratitude. The reason of this appears
to be, that the donation of a few shillings from a
rich man to a poor man is no subtraction from the
giver's comfort, and consequently is no proof of his
interest in the other's welfare. If the rich give their
time to the poor, they part with a commodity which the

'NATURE'S OWN SIMPLE MECHANISM.' 129
poor see is valuable to the givers, and consequently
esteem the attention the more, as it implies an interest
in their prosperity, and a feeling seems to be engendered
in their minds of unwillingness to press on the kindness
of those who thus prove themselves willing to sympathize
with them in distress, and to do their utmost to relieve
it. This feeling acts as a spur to the exertions of the
poor ; their efforts to depend on their own resources is
greater, and consequently the chance of their becoming
dependent on the bounty of others less."
Thus confused, and not knowing how to believe in,
yet forced to accept a conclusion so different from all
the usual laws as seen by a Poor-Law Commissioner,
the visitor attempts to explain, by sentimental reasons
curiously inadequate, what Chalmers calls " nature's
own simple mechanism," the " process so beautiful " of
mutual help, succour, and brotherly kindness, which the
economist and philosopher, being at the same time a
poet in deed if not in _ verse, would not allow to be
interfered with by miserable alms and doles of charity.
We do not pretend to say that Chalmers' great experi
ment was the origin of the wonderful parish agencies
which between that time and this have grown up
almost in every district of the United Kingdom; but
it certainly was so in Scotland, and very likely may
have had some share in pervading the atmosphere
further south with that fertile seed. Nowhere else,
however, was the same great effort of Christian states
manship ever accomplished or even attempted, perhaps
because nobody has ever had the courage to dare it, or
the influence to push aside obstacles out of the way,
and so make it possible to begin. And in point of
K

130 THOMAS CHALMERS.
fact these outside obstacles did push into the way
again when there was no longer any one powerful
enough to meet them. The stipulation as to the law
of residence was disregarded, and the parish of St.
John, notwithstanding that it had relieved the funds
of Glasgow to so great an extent, was called upon
to pay poor-rates for the benefit of the rest of the
city. Under these and other encroachments of the
authorities, which Chalmers, had he been there, would
no doubt have found means of staving off, the managers
of his system succumbed. The story of this brief but
brilliant experiment remains accordingly only an episode
in the history of the Church and the city, and as
remarkable a one as has ever been recorded.
In the midst of all our higher admiration of these
statesmanlike efforts for the good and elevation of the
people, one turns at the same time with a whimsical
relief to the doings of the young preacher who had come
to be " the doctor's " assistant in his pulpit and parish,
a certain tall, dark young man from the Border, Edward
Irving by name, who, it is told, receiving a legacy
at the moment when all these forces were in full
operation, took it out in small coins, which he placed
in a drawer, putting so much in his pocket every day
till the -little fund was exhausted, and sowing these
surreptitious shillings through the parish wherever he
moved. The wise doctor foresaw that too, and did not
object, loving the dew of kindness wherever it fell,
though he would have no formal irrigation of the
soil. In the meantime, by the side of all this deeply im
portant secular work, Chalmers' own exertions were
given to the spiritual instruction of his parish without

THE SPIRITUAL SIDE. 131
stint. An English clergyman of the present day,
possessed with the same- enthusiasms of work, would
multiply daily services and the administration of the
rites of the Church to an extent which would have been
inconceivable in that day. But at no time would the
Scotch Churchman think of this. His ideal is not
of daily matins in the church, but of daily " worship"
in the family. He would rather hear the wavering
psalm out of tune, the solemn, monotonous reading of
"the chapter," the confused prayer, half formal yet
much from the heart, rising from a poor room in
a Glasgow "land," than the finest Church service.
And that ideal still lingered in Scotland with all the
force of a tradition still unexhausted. When Chalmers
first set up his Sabbath-schools, the objection to them
was that they would interfere with home catechizing,
the spiritual instruction which it was the duty of
parents at their own firesides to give to their children.
Imagine the spiritual instruction likely to be con
veyed around the domestic hearth in St. Giles's or in
Clerkenwell ! and the Gallowgate was scarcely a more
refined abode. How strong, however, this feeling was
may be divined from an expression in a newspaper
report of the opening of St. John's Church. As we
have already said, there were three services there every
Sunday instead of the usual morning and evening
" diet of worship." The first two services were for the
great congregation which had followed Dr. Chalmers
from the Tron, as they would have followed him any
where, who paid a high rent for their pews, and thus
indemnified the authorities for the building and ex
penses of the new church, and consisted of the "best
families" in Glasgow and its neighbourhood. The last

132 THOMAS CHALMERS.
was for the parishioners of that very poor iocality.
This is how the Glasgow Herald, of the 27th September,
1819, recounts these details —
" From the intimations previously given, it was under
stood that the last of these services was meant for the
exclusive benefit of the inhabitants of the parish, who
are enabled by a wise and liberal arrangement on the
part of the magistrates and council to obtain as good a
right of occupation to the evening seats as is held by
any other sitters among the day congregations of our
city. The decidedly parochial aspect of the evening
congregation was scarcely, if at all, impaired by any
great admixture of hearers from the general and indis
criminate public. The impression was much heightened
upon observing that the great body of the population
on retiring from church, when they had reached the
bottom of Macfarlane Street, turned in nearly an un
broken stream to the east, along the Gallowgate, or in
the direction which leads to the main bulk of the parish
and its inhabitants. It gives us pleasure to observe
that the hour of meeting for the evening sitters is so
early as four in the afternoon, thereby giving to this
parochial diet the character and convenience of a day
service, and enabling the hearers to spend an unbroken
Sabbath evening in the bosom of their own families."
This reads almost like a satire in the present day,
when the highest hope of many anxious and hard
working religious teachers is to organize, with abundant
music and many details which suggest something like
a religious entertainment, evening services which will
'" keep the men out of the public-house." The Gallow
gate, we fear, did not even in these days present so

FEELINGS OF RELIEF. 133
many edifying scenes of family communion around
tranquil firesides as are implied in the above descrip
tion ; but it shows at least that at that time the ancient
tradition was not as yet entirely worked out.
And certainly, if incessant care and labour would
have made it again a living rule, Chalmers' labours
might have done so. When other people took their
holidays in the high summer, when Clyde and all its
beautiful coasts and outlets is so glorious, and every
loch along the west coast opens its little paradise
of woods and mountains for the refreshment of the
hard-worked toilers of the darker year, Chalmers
settled himself down, with an air of content and. a long-
drawn breath of relief and satisfaction in having got
rid of all dinner-givers and disturbers of his peace, to
the full enjoyment of the parish and its labours, the
Gallowgate, and the Saltmarket. His wife and children
even were away, and it is to this that we owe the
details of an existence which is as wonderful as any
other part of the story. Instead of going to the " Saut~
water" — which is, or used to be, the graphic Glasgow
description of sea-bathing quarters — " the doctor " with
glee " rented a small apartment within the bounds of
the parish." The description is a little grand, but what
it meant was one small prophet's chamber in " Mrs.
Hamilton's lodgings," the homeliness of which may bo
realized by the description. "I take one room from
her, and the bed is to be put up on Monday. I took
a lesson from you, and determined to settle beforehand
about the rent. She said that would be according to
the trouble, and condescended upon six or seven 1
1 It is amusing to note the Scotch peculiarities of phrase in
this sentence. .To " cast out " is to quarrel ; to " condescend upon,"

134 THOMAS CHALMER3.
shillings a week, but that we would not cast out. After
such a moderate condescension as that, I do think that
there is very little danger." Here, accordingly, the most
popular preacher in Scotland, the hero-leader of the
great city, whose name was known from one end of the
kingdom to the other, settled down while his wife was
absent, resorting to his own house only when parish
business called him to that, more habitable region.
" This," he says, " will be a mighty improvement in any
of my future parochial lodgments ; and I feel and per
ceive the mighty charm of being much among the
people in the capacity of their next-door neighbour."
We can scarcely wonder at the consternation of a
visitor — an old Anglo-Indian, Dr. Bell, the founder of
the Madras College in St. Andrews, and the system of
education which has its head-quarters there — when
ushered into this little room in the lodging-house,
where the minister of St. John's was still in bed. " Is
this the room of the great Dr. Chalmers ? " said the
astonished caller. How Chalmers occupied himself
there we shall now see.
"I spend four days a week visiting the people, in
company with the agents of the various districts over
which I expatiate. I last week overtook between 700
and 800 people, and have great pleasure in the move-

to come to particulars. A " diet of worship " is a religious service.
Dr. Chalmers was fond of describing himself as "expatiating" in
Ms parish, not as may be supposed in words as describing or
eulogizing it, but as roaming through it from street to street,
and house to house. Another still more curious twist of meaning
is when he speaks of the population of the Gallowgate as
"peasantry," using the word as if it included all classes of the
poorer inhabitants.

DAILY OCCUPATIONS. 13.',
ment. At nine I go out to family worship in some
house belonging to the district of my present residence,
where I assemble the people of the land or close vicinity,
and expect in this way to overtake the whole of that
district. I furthermore have an address every Friday
night to the people of my vicinity in the Calton
Lancastrian school-room, and a weekly address will be
necessary for each of the four weeks in St. John's
Church to the people whom I have gone over in regular
visitation. Add to all this the missionary meeting held
yesternight, and you will find that without one particle
of study I am in full occupation. My parochial oper
ations are now at their most interesting crisis, and I do
not feel that there is any church or congregation in
Scotland that should tempt me to abandon them.
There is a prodigious excess of day scholars (he had
already built one school in the parish), insomuch that
another fabric has been resolved upon, and measures
have been taken to prosecute a subscription for it
among the sitters, and we have already got four patrons
of £25 each. The subscription is still in its infancy,
and promises extremely well."
The meetings and services thus held for the benefit
of the persons visited during the day became a very
important part of the system, and were, according
to the following account, of the most interesting
description. " These local week-day undress congregations, assem
bled in a cotton-mill, or the workshop of a mechanic, or
the kitchen of some kindly accommodating neighbour,
had a special charm for Dr. Chalmers, and all alive to

136 THOMAS CHALMERS.
the peculiar interest and urgency of such opportunities,
lie stirred up every faculty that was in him while
he urged upon the consciences and hearts of such
auditors the high claims of Christian salvation. His
chosen and beloved friend, Mr. Collins, often accompanied
Dr. Chalmers to these evening meetings ; and we have
his reiterated and emphatic testimony that no bursts
of that oratory which rolled over admiring thousands
in the Tron Church or in St. John's even equalled in
all the highest qualities of eloquence many of these
premeditated but unwritten addresses in which, free
from all restraints and intent upon the one object
of winning souls to the Saviour, that heart which
glowed with such intense desires for the present and
eternal welfare of the working- classes unbosomed in
the midst of them all the fullness of its Christian
sympathies." We may quote here, however, Chalmers' own idea of
these working-classes, and what the object of his constant
labours among them was, which shows at once the high
ideal of his view, his hearty, human recognition of that
only equality which can really exist between man and
man, and his often-stated conviction of the dependence
of well-being on well-doing — the alliance between
" high character and high wages," according to its home
liest scientific statement. He was then pleading for
his newly-erected schools, which were apparently at
that time a new idea in Glasgow —
"There will, I prophesy, if the world is to stand, be a
great amelioration in the life of general humanity.
The labouring classes are destined to attain a far more

A HOPE AND PROPHECY. 137
secure place of comfort and independence in the common
wealth than they have ever yet occupied, and this will
come about, not as the fruit of any victory gained on
the arena of angry and discordant politics, but far more
surely as the result of growing virtue and intelligence
among themselves. I trust the time is coming when
humble life will be dignified, both by leisure and by
literature ; when the work of the day will be succeeded
by the reading and the improving conversations of the
evening ; when many a lettered sage, as well as many
an enlightened Christian, will be met with even in the
very lowest walks of society; when the elements of
science and philanthropy and high scholarship will so
refine throughout the general mind of the country as
to exalt it prodigiously above the level of its present
character and attainments."
What would Dr. Chalmers have thought, we wonder,
of Trades Unionism and those methods of attaining
"reading and improving conversation" which have
come less, we fear, through the influence of " growing
virtue and intelligence " than by more vulgar means,
universal debating clubs, and the flaming rhetoric which
makes out all poverty to be an injury and all property
an oppression ? Human prophecy purchases its gleam
of insight often by wonderful and wistful worlds of
mistake. But the wish and desires of the philan
thropist and reformer, the friend and lover of the poor,
was towards a higher ideal than any dreamt of in the
Trades Unions. He deprecates . the thought that the
object of his scheme of education was to "stir up a
restless appetite for being removed from one sphere of
earthliness to another sphere of earthliness."

138 THOMAS' CHALMERS.
"That object is to refine alike and to dignify alike
every condition of earthliness. It is to give us the
comfortable feeling, as we move through the swarms
of population that issue from the manufactory and
workshop, that instead of a rude mass of ignorance and
its companion profligacy, we are in fact passing through
a most respectable assemblage of human worth and
human accomplishment. This has been verified in
many individual instances, and did we only do what we
ought, it will be verified thoughout the whole mass in
the course of another generation. A most delightful
eminence of mental cultivation has been attained by
the ploughman of a country parish and by the mechanic
of a city parish. It is clear as day to all who have
been much in contact with those classes of society that
there are among them the full capabilities for thus
adorning their own condition with all the graces of
cultured and well-taught humanity. And I repeat it,
the main object of pouring a more copious and rich
supply of education among them, is not to furnish them
with the means of abandoning their status, but to
furnish them with the means of morally and intellectu
ally exalting it. It is not to raise them on the artificial
scale of life, but to raise them on that far nobler scale
which has respect to the virtues of the mind and the
prospects of immortality. It is to confer a truer
dignity upon each than if the crown of an earthly
potentate were bestowed upon him. It is to pour the
stores of knowledge into his understanding, and more
especially of that sacred knowledge by the possession
of which he becomes rich in faith and heir of that
kingdom which God hath prepared for those that love
Him,"

WISDOM AND MISTAKE. 139
Chalmers, however, was happier in some of his other
previsions than he was in this noble statement of his
hopes. It is the fault of human nature, and not of the
philosopher, if education has not done so much as ho
desired and anticipated for the labouring man. From
his two little schools in St. John's parish to the colossal
system of free education, what an immense and incal
culable progress! and yet it is to be feared that the
"delightful eminence of mental cultivation" which
Chalmers generously boasted to have seen attained by
ploughmen and mechanics, has not spread through the
whole mass as he fondly hoped it would. It has led to
what a smattering of education so often leads to — an
increase rather than a diminution of prejudice and
hasty conclusions and mistaken principles. But in
other ways his great sagacity and understanding carried
him forward to conclusions which legislators arrived
at much later, as well as to some which still are as
devout imaginations to the wisest. At a time when
the revolutionary spirit was abroad, and there was even
a miserable attempt at insurrection, and the great city
of Glasgow passed at least one day in the same mingled
hush of resolution and alarm whieh made the threat
ened outburst of the Chartists so memorable in London,
Chalmers was one of the first to suggest an expedient
not adopted till long after, but which has been so long
a part of the law of the land that we begin now, in this
inevitable whirligig of time, to question whether we
might not have been better without it. He writes as
follows to Mr. Wilberforce, in December 1819 — •
" It were greatly more desirable to sweeten the spirits
of the disaffected than to subdue them; and while I

140 THOMAS CHALMERS.
approve very much of certain minor expedients for this
object — such as the repeal of the cottage-tax and of the
taxes on the first necessaries of life to be commuted
into an income-tax upon the wealthier classes — yet
from my extensive minglings -with the people I am
quite confident in affirming the power of another ex
pedient to be such that it would operate with all the
quickness and effect of a charm in lulling their agitated
spirits. I mean the repeal of the Corn Bill. I have
ever been in the habit of disliking the interference
of the Legislature in matters of trade, saving for the
purpose of a revenue. The interference in question
is perhaps of all others the one by which Government
has incurred the greatest waste of popularity with the
least return of advantage to the country ; nor could
they take a readier step than by recalling this measure
to soothe the manufacturing districts of the country."
It was about a quarter of a century after this before
the Government, forced by one of the strongest of
popular movements, took the step which Chalmers
suggested. It was a step which had become inevitable
at the time — one wonders whether the time will ever
come when a reconsideration of this question will be
forced upon a legislature, more and more dependent
upon the multitude, by an agitated and excited people
again ?
Had we taken the character of Chalmers as an ideal
one, and here worked out its future career upon the
ordinary laws of human development, we should have
pictured him as accepting his reign in Glasgow as at
once the climax of his righteous ambition, and the large
sphere for which his large nature longed, He was not

What might have been expected, ui
the model of a mild and benevolent pastor and apostle,
nor was the ideal of a dispassionate legislator — occu
pied above all the tides of sentiment, with a profound
study of the best and highest principles upon which
men were to be ruled and guided for their own best ad
vantage — his. He was of an imperious nature, born to
command, not unready to fight, impatient of interrup
tion and misconception, accustomed to carry through
his purpose, whatever it was, with a high hand, to
mould everything around him to his will ; a natural
despot, though a most genial and friendly one. There
was not air enough for him to breathe (one would have
said) in any limited sphere; and that the bigness of
the enterprises in which he was engaged, the devotion
with which he was regarded, the surrounding and fol
lowing of just such men as this best class of Glasgow
citizens afforded him — men not too intellectual, but
recipient to the highest degree, open to the influences
of an eloquence which was powerful enough to draw
them out of themselves, and ready to catch fire at the
enthusiasm of great things to be done — was all that he
wanted and preferred. The strong practical side of his
nature, his capacity for almost endless work, was not
only called forth by a gigantic work to do, but by the
practical force as well as the ready response of his
friends, strong men like himself, who might have been
contemptuous of all the petty machinery of parish
economics, but sprang to the crusade on so large a scale
against those giant forces on the other side which make
a great city a hotbed of misery and crime. All this
was in favour of the continuance of Chalmers' imperious
and splendid career. He was a sort of Prince Bishop
of Glasgow, whom it was impossible to oppose, whom

142 THOMAS CHALMERS.
magistrates and municipality trembled before, and
who swept away like cobwebs every obstacle on his
great impetuous and imposing way. That he was, on
the other hand, the most reasonable man, ready to listen
to any practical suggestion, and respecting the ex
perience of his " agency " as a wise despot respects the
wisdom of his councillors, are facts which take nothing
from the great individuality of his character, which
was all heroic, the embodiment of irresistible and
characteristic force and power.
This is what we should have said, judging according
to the laws of human nature. Never was man so
qualified for his sphere. The size and impetus and uu-
controllableness of him, even his impatience and often
indifference to common methods, the great sweep and
wind of his going, seemed to fit him above all others for
this position, in which he was paramount and supreme.
And^we confess that all our ideas of what is life-like in
nature are suddenly confounded when we find this great
and energetic figure suddenly pause in the career thus
shaped for him, like a ship in full sail with the most
favourable winds sweeping her along upon her course,
yet arrested in a moment in mid seas, and turning aside
to some little haven where only the stress of storms
would naturally drive such a vessel. Such is the effect
produced upon the mind when we find Chalmers stop, at
the height of his noble venture and in the flush of his
triumphant success. It is hard to imagine even now
how it was. There had not come the faintest shadow
upon his success in any way. Wherever his voice was
heard it seemed to bring forth a crowd as from the
desert itself; whatever he laid his hand upon prospered.
In London, in Edinburgh— wherever he went — there

WHAT DID HAPPEN. 143
needed no trumpet to be blown before him, the mere
whisper of his name was enough. His little kingdom,
his ten thousand folk, were lifting gradually out of
chaos into a nobler life ; his little army was faithful
to a manj his great plan, working so that it bade fair
to vindicate every theory, and to prove the real way of
salvation from pauperism and want. Why, then, did
this great leader withdraw himself from his work,
throw down his truncheon of command, leave his forces
to the chances of a new general — not likely to be such
a man as himself, and certainly not possessed by the
scheme as he was who originated it — and withdraw
into the quiet, into seclusion from all that had charmed
and upheld him, the struggle with a national evil, the
heroic triumphs of a holy war ?
We are completely unable to give any answer to this
question. Dr. Hanna, the biographer of Dr. Chalmers
and his son-in-law, a man of admirable intelligence and
with perfect command of all possible information, does
not even attempt to throw any light upon this problem,
We can scarcely imagine that it was merely a caprice
of a mind so strong, and above the sway of circum
stances. Yet there was a class of circumstances by
which Chalmers was so fretted, and of which he was so
impatient, that they no doubt influenced him to some
degree in his strange decision. If he was impatient of the
public business of an official character which hampered
the path of a minister and occupied the time which
ought to be devoted to more sacred duties, he was still
more impatient of those hindrances which gather round
the social life of every man who has the misfortune to
be overwhelmingly popular, whose company is sought
in all directions, and whom everybody desires to meet.

144 THOMAS CHALMERS.
These troubles are generally surmounted with great
magnanimity by the ordinary popular preacher; but
to Chalmers they were an insufferable burden. He
had been afraid of them when he came to Glasgow, and
though he held in many cases his would-be entertainers
very much at bay, there were times when this was
difficult and his impatience overflowed. The following
notes from his journal will show what his feelings were
when this annoyance was coupled with the jealousy
which so easily arises in every such competition for
social favour —
" Mr. Falconer called between eleven and twelve. He
told me that he had been dining lately with Mr.  ,
who had complained bitterly of my neglect towards
his family, and compared it with my attentions to Mr.
B  , whom, by the way, I have only spent a single
hour with in the evening for a whole half year : and
Mr. Falconer concluded with recommending it to me to
make up for my bygone negligence. I should have
heard this with the utmost patience and charity, in
which I am sorry to say that I failed. I should bear
all things, and do all without murmurings or disputings,
and he meek and gentle with all men. But at the
same time it is obviously impossible that I can be
dragged or dragooned into Mr.  's house in his present
humour, or pay an attention extorted from one in the
spirit of a jealous exactor ; nor do I think it my duty
to dine at my hearers' tables whenever they choose to
let out an invitation. I must try to keep a charitable
spirit towards him; and I am sure that my absence
from his house bears no more reference to him
particularly than it does to the hundred others who

THE SMALL ANNOYANCES OF LIFE. 145
have kept asking and asking at me, and have just as
good a right to be angry as he that I have never
moved a single footstep to them. This is really a
vulgarism which must be abolished. . . . They have
conceived themselves to be grievously insulted by the
neglect of unconscious me, who all the while was
prosecuting my own affairs without the slightest
intention either of offending them or any other body
— who spoke when I was spoken to, and went to the
church when the bell rang."
This may be considered as a glimpse into the nature
of those smaller annoyances which are as the mos
quitoes of life. Chalmers had many other and better
reasons' for desiring a change from the overwhelming
occupations of his existence. He had pleaded vehe
mently against the official business which had threat
ened to overwhelm him in the beginning of his
Glasgow life, urging his conviction of the necessity for
time and study to a due performance of his duties as
a preacher ; while, on the other hand, he had felt his
duties as the pastor of so large a parish demanded
incessant labour, and would, if fully performed, leave
no time for anything else. In addition to this, latterly
he had been drawn into questions and thoughts of still
wider interest : he had been led by his scheme of legis
lation for St. John's to a study of the English Poor-
Laws and pauperism generally, to the consideration of
the character and necessities of city populations, and
to the mode of redemption from the ruin which he
believed to be involved in the charity of the State —
which were of larger scope than anything affecting a
single parish. How was he to reconcile all these con-
L

Mfi THOMAS CHALMERS.
flicting claims ? And throughout everything, both tho
immediate circle of parish duties and all the greater
schemes and subjects to which he folt his mind drawn
— he was hampered and hold down by chains of custom
and conventional necessity ; like Gulliver, bound to
earth by innumerable minute cords. He had indeed
succeeded in making of his parish a little kingdom,
ruled by an economy of its own; but whon he had
laid the foundations, and established tho framework
of that system, and overcome all those difficulties
which had been pronounced insuperablo, Chalmers'
great spirit longed for fresh woods and pastures new.
He had been offered flic charge of Stirling at an early
period of his Glasgow career, with a playful proviso
that the guns of the castle should be turned towards
his gates to keep all intruders at a distance : but he
had not entertained the idea of that or any other
proposal which would have interfered with the carrying
out of his great experiment. Later, when all the
weariness and conflicts — " tho fatigue and the sore
vexation of Glasgow " were beginning to tell, he was
offered by the magistrates of Edinburgh a church
vacant there, which he declined in tho following terms —
"You know that all my personal tastes and partialitios
are on the side of Edinburgh: nor, wore; it right
to indulge an earthly perspective, can I figure any
sort of beau id4al that more regales my imagination
than to retire from the fatigue and distfaction of
my present habits to the literature and intellectual
society of our cultivated metropolis, Any situation
of superior Christian usefulness to the one that I now
occupy, and which would at the same time afford

A BETREAT FROM PARISH WORK. 117
tranquillity and leisure for the prosecution of theological
learning, I should feel, in spite of all the ties that
bind mo to Glasgow, to be quite irresistible. But
this is what I cannot look for in the mere exchange
from one parish to another."
Chalmers, however, ended this letter of refusal
by a very significant note. He thanked the magistrates
of Edinburgh for their offer, and expressed his sincere
desire to do nothing which should "disoblige or alienate
a single individual among them." "The truth is," he
added, " that there is not u body of men in the kingdom
to whose patronage I should feel greater satisfaction in
being indebted for such a retreat from the manifold
activities of a parish as would not withdraw me at
the same time from the service of Christianity, but
only enable me to exchange the personal for the literary
labours of my profession."
This intimation that he would accept a professorship
— most of the chairs of tho Edinburgh University
being curiously enough in the gift of the Lord Provost
and Bailies — is very distinct, and it was not forgotten
when the time came. Whether it was through this, or
from any other hint of his wishes, that the Principal of
St- Andrews conceived the strange idea that a man so
popular and so great might be approached with the offer
of a modest chair, not even theological, in that small
University, we have no means of knowing. It seems,
without some such reason, the most presumptuous and
preposterous notion that so extraordinarily influential
and successful a man as Chalmers should give up
the really splendid and authoritative position which he
held as minister of St. John's to retire into the

148 THOMAS CHALMERS,
silence and gossip of a small community, and to
teach Moral Philosophy to a small number of very
youthful students, even though it was in his native
county, and the University from which he had derived
his own education. Preposterous as it was, however,
we can scarcely say less than that Chalmers "jumped
at " the proposal. He accepted it instantly, and without
hesitation. The income of the chair was £300 a
year, the most modest of stipends. On that side,
assuredly, the most malicious of critics could not say
that there was any inducement. Nor was there either
ambition or opportunity, as far as could be seen, to justify
the change. It might be in his power to add a
higher tone, to introduce a more religious feeling into his
expositions of the science of thought. But it was not
even to the sacred subjects, which he felt to be highest
in the world, that he could direct the minds of the
handful of young men who were to replace for him the
community of Glasgow, with all its far-reaching
influences, and the still infant scheme which might have
revolutionized the whole country and turned every
parish in Scotland into a more excellent way. We
confess that to ourselves the motives of Chalmers
in this step were inexplicable. Fatigue and vexation
there might be, but he was in the prime of life, forty-
two, a man of unbroken health and all the vigour
of a sturdy and unexhausted race. The reasons which
he gave to his astounded and distracted "agency"
were no doubt genuine enough, and the desire in
his mind to shake himself free of his labours and
cares was indisputable in its vehemence and sincerity ;
but still the step remains unaccountable. He told his
elders and deacons he was unable to combine a

HIS REASONS FOR CHANGE. 149
due attention to his sermons with the innumerable calls
of his personal and pastoral work. " My very last attempt
at exertion out-of-doors has been followed up by several
weeks of utter incapacity for fixed thoughts," he says.
He explains how he had been led into " the fields of civic
and economic speculation .... not because I knowingly
turned me away from the objects of Christian useful
ness, but because I apprehended that I there saw
these objects before me; but the field has widened
as I have advanced upon it, insomuch that I cannot
longer retain the office which I now hold without
injustice to my parish and congregation." Finally, he
added that he held "even a literary office in a uni
versity, through which the future ministers of our
parishes pass in numerous succession every year, to be a
higher office in the vineyard even of Christian useful
ness than the office of a single minister of a single
congregation." We cannot but feel something apologetic, even
something sophistical, in these reasons for his change.
And we return to the evident fact that it was the
determined will of Chalmers to make this change, and
that he did so with no sense of regret as for a great post
abandoned and a great work relinquished at the most
critical moment. Whether it might have been better
for Scotland had he wrought out his great experiment
and perhaps extended it over the country, an under
taking which would have been highly beneficial had it
been, as there is every reason to believe, successful,
not to Scotland alone — it is not for us to decide. There
are many who may think that the work which occupied
his later life was of more importance than this
great re-organization of the country; while there are

I'M) THOMAS CHALMERS.
also many upon whom the disadvantages attending
that work may more strongly impress themselves,
and who will feel that the rending asunder of tin;
venerable Church of Scotland was a kind of silent
revenge of time for tho abandonment of a more
beneficent revolution. We can only record what did
happen; but at this period of Chalmers' life with
a great dissatisfaction and inability to enter into his
motives, and with much regret.

CHAPTER IV.
It must be added, however, to the regrets and
astonishment which we have ventured to express, that
Chalmers' career in Glasgow was not unaccompanied
by disappointment, and that one of his schemes, the
building of a chapel-of-ease for the service of a section
of his great parish, with the hope that this might
eventually develop into an independent parish of its
own, did not in any way fulfil his hopes. It was, what
strikes us very strangely in these days, a proprietary
chapel built by shareholders, who hoped by this means
not only to serve the highest of causes, but to secure
a certain interest for their money. It is very curious
to find such a man as Chalmers not only embarking
in such a speculation, but setting it on foot. The
commercialism of his surroundings must have affected
his thoughts in a singular way to lead to such an
enterprise, and the wholo conception is marked with
that special unwisdom of the wise which is so much
more elaborate and less excusable than the foolishness
of the foolish ; for while tho chapel was erected in a
poor district, and for the benefit specially of the poor,
it was intendetl that the seat-rents should at once
provide a stipend for tho minister and pay the interest

152 THOMAS CHALMERS.
on the shares subscribed. Chalmers himself was the
largest shareholder, and consequently the greatest loser
by this curious scheme ; and the mingling of the just
but incongruous disappointment of an investor, with
the sorrow of a Christian philanthropist over an un
successful effort, is disagreeable and very disturbing to
the ideal. It was not till several years after his removal
from Glasgow that the failure became fully apparent :
when it was commented upon by himself in a letter of
great severity and sternness to the unfortunate minister
who, alas ! we must say it, had not made the enterprise
pay. We have' no right to omit this jarring note.
Glasgow was overwhelmed by the loss of the great-
preacher, who had done almost what he liked with
the economy and the heart of the city. The community
was wounded, angry, outraged, like a cast-off lover.
To leave that great field upon, the wants of which
he had expatiated so often, the swarms of helpers, the
well-organized band which he had formed to fight all
that penury and misery, the rich who gave almost
whatever he wanted, and the enthusiastic whose sym
pathy surrounded him like a genial atmosphere — for
what ? — a little University, a small town with its coteries
and gossip, a limited class-room, a little circle of only
half-understanding students — it was no wonder if the
greater sphere, the thronged and eager city, was
astounded, and could not believe its ears. One thing
could not be said, and that was the familiar and often-
repeated accusation constantly put forth against a
clergyman who leaves one position for another, that it
was the worldly considerations of increased income or
advantage that moved him. It was against his interest,
against his importance, a voluntary withdrawal from

THE HAPPY WARRIOR. 153
applause and fame. The great city was confused,
humbled, mortified, disappointed — there was a brief
interval almost of. estrangement, of hot discussion,
attack and defence. But finally every other sentiment
sank in one universal sense of loss and regret. When
he took his farewell of Glasgow, the soldiers had to be
called out to keep the church doors, which were being
carried by assault of the crowd. Every homage that
admiration and affection could give were heaped upon
him ; but he went away to his little Alma Mater, to his
insignificant class-room, to the quiet, and so far as was
possible, obscure place which he had chosen for himself,
through an atmosphere vibrating with the clamours and
magnetism of the multitude with a sigh of relief.
" Who is the Happy Warrior 1 — who is he
That every man in arms would wish to be 1
It is the generous spirit who, when- brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought '
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought."
Notwithstanding all his schemes of legislation, and
that great gift of eloquence which can never be so fitly
exercised as in the large atmosphere of the world, this
had been his ideal all his life.
It is curious to add that his study of political economy,
in which his mind was so deeply interested, and which
he twice brought forward publicly as one of his chief
reasons for withdrawing into the quiet and leisure where
he could pursue his investigations most fitly, dropped
from him almost as soon as he attained that leisure
and quiet. He published, indeed, the third volume of
the Christian and Civic Economy of Great Cities, in which
his view of various questions, still hotly debated at the
present moment, is full of interest, as of wisdom. His

154 THOMAS CHALMERS.
chief object was still the new Poor-Laws, and in particular
one regulation, much canvassed and criticized, by which
public charity was used to make up the wages of
working-men when subject to any depression of trade
or failure of work. This interference with the laws of
trade, and with the natural restrictions of supply and
demand, was against every principle of his philosophy,
and was denounced by him with great effect — so much
so that his biographer considers his publication to have
had much to do with the abolition of this rule. A
question more important still, and which now occupies
so much of the foreground of politics, the question of
Trades Unions, was then in its earliest dawn. The
repeal of the Combination Laws had made the league
of workmen for mutual support a possible thing. " For
a few months," says Dr. Hanna, unprescient of much
trouble to come,." the effects of this repeal were most
disastrous. Under the delusion that some new power
had been given to them of coercing their masters, the
workmen formed into monstrous combinations all over
the country, ceasing in some instances for weeks and
months together from all labour, and not only threaten
ing, but executing violence upon those who consented
to work. The alarm excited was excessive."
'Dr. Chalmers threw himself as an arbiter between
parties driven into a temporary and ill-judged warfare.
The occasion offered him a good opportunity for bring
ing forward some general speculations upon the proper
province of legislation in such questions, and upon the
natural and artificial influences by which the wages
of labour are regulated : upon the principle that nothing
should be ordained to be a crime by the legislature

OPINIONS UPON TRADE UNIONS. 155
which is not felt to be a crime by man's natural con
science — that workmen should be left as free in the
employment of their labour as their masters are in
the employment of their capital. Dr. Chalmers loudly
applauded the repeal of the Combination Laws. But
while he strongly urged that no law should be enacted
against combinations as such, he as strongly contended
that the severest penalties should be visited upon every
thing, whether in the form of threat or force, by which
the perfect freedom of the individual labourer was
violated." Thus Chalmers formed his opinions while yet the
materials of judgment were small, and the greatness
of the danger which now rends the foundations of
society unknown. What would he think now of those
" monstrous combinations " which threaten more and
more every day to become one of the greatest tyrannies
which the world has ever known — tyrannies which
would seem to be so strong a necessity of human nature
that under one form or another they are continually
reappearing, balking every law of freedom ? Strikes
were but infantile and struck no awe into the general
heart in those days; but the far-seeing judgment and
wise instincts of the man who saw that they were
inevitable conditions of a new rigime, yet sought to
secure the strongest safeguards for personal freedom,
so darkly menaced by them, are very remarkable.
But when he had published this volume, Chalmers
withdrew from a region in which he seemed so well
qualified to exercise a commanding influence. The quiet
for which he had longed, stifled and silenced him. He
withdrew from all the larger questions of public life. It

156 THOMAS CHALMERS.
is true that he never failed in personal labours, nor,
above all, in those, evangelical enterprises which were so
dear to his heart ; but even in these his sphere was small,
his work subdued and obscure. He had a class in his
house on Sundays, at first for the children of a district
in St. Andrews, which he worked like one of his faithful
retainers in Glasgow — and afterwards for the students ;
but nothing on a grander scale was possible in the' little
place which he soon found was no haven of rest. .All
around him were constituted rights, forbidding inter
ference : and the close contact of a small community is
not always made more easy or without friction by the
existence of a high level of intellectual life among
them. It does not seem to us that in any way the
experiment of Chalmers was a successful one, and
certainly one of the chief objects for which it was
made, dropped from him with that single publication,
and was seen no more.
This is not, however, to say that the five years of -his
residence in St. Andrews was either without fruit or
without comfort. Dr. Hanna tells us that his residence
in that very characteristic little town, so full of all the
traditions of Scotch humour, wit, and clear-headedness,
little given to sentiment, and much to strong expressions
and acute criticism, transformed the place, and created
a softened atmosphere of piety and fervour amid its
population, intellectual and otherwise. Dr. Chalmers, in
his own journals, scarcely however bears out this im
pression. The leisure and continual social intercourse,
so humorous, often full of the keenest interchanges of
satire and of jest, as well as of high thinking and
serious meaning, which we have learned to know in
later generations and to enjoy at se"cond-hand as one

ST. ANDREWS. 1.7
of the most characteristic phases of Scotch society, were
not. of a kind to please this large aud serious individual
soul, who could not be still, or saunter, or spend hours
iu talk : and though he loved a quiet round at golf,
and the free-and-easy comaients of the caddies de
scribing how ¦¦ the Principal tappit every ball," he soon
gave it up because he thought it impaired his power for
work. Perhaps it was a more common rule in St.
Andrews at that period to do in the way of work as
little as was indispensable, and enjoy the quiet life
which Providence had accorded, without being disturbed
by zealous dreams of toil uncalled-for. The religion
of the district was Moderate," that admirable title,
descriptive of a state of sober feeling, in which there
was. no doubt, much reserve of genuine belief aud piety,
but little demonstration of that faith which can move
mountains. It is a name which was used, and was
intended to be used, in a derogatory sense, an epithet of
contempt, and as such was bandied about in Scotland
till the use of it became a kind of anathema. We do
not take up the defence of that substratum of Scotch
religious character. It has always been in the back
ground, carrying out no ideal of the national imagin
ation. At all events it was at the very antipodes of
feeling from the vehement, absolute, and impatient
spirit of Chalmers, and this alone was enough to take
all the enchantment from the scene.
Amid this effaeement of himself and withdrawal from
the busy scenes which he had so largely filled, there
were, however, some appearances of note in the General
Assembly, where he began to take a more and more
important part. One great question, that of pluralism,
had been long a subject of the greatest interest to him.

158 THOMAS CHALMERS.
The pluralism possible to a Scotch minister was of a
very limited kind. He could not hold a string of
livings, as had been, during one dreary period, common
enough in the Church of England, nor add anything
like a fat prebend or cathedral stall to his cure. He
could, however, which was still less appropriate, as
involving a much greater amount of occupation and
labour, distinct from his most important charge, com
bine a professorship with his incumbency. Chalmers,
as the reader will recollect, had himself done so, and
had defended his position with all the vehemence of his
hot-headed youth, before he had realized what it was
to hold a cure of souls. He had opposed the con
junction with equal vehemence after the change in his
views, and had been for many years its strongest
opponent. At the end of his career in Glasgow the
question had been strongly revived by the appointment
of the Principal of the University there to the High
Church of Glasgow, a large and important parish. This
appointment was strongly opposed, and as strongly
defended, the Evangelical party in the Church, in which
Chalmers was already conspicuous as a leader, straining
every nerve against it : and the question was carried by
appeal from one Church Court to another, and finally
to the General Assembly, where the appointment was
sustained to the great grief of the reforming party.
Though there was at the moment little prevision of a
still greater controversy which was to follow, and which
was destined to shake the Church of Scotland to its
foundations, there was already a note of warning in the
speech of Chalmers on this occasion, which may be
remarked. The most persistent tradition of the Scotch
Church was that of her own self-government and

FORESEEING EVIL. lr.n
absolute authority in all internal matters. She had
never yet come into absolute collision with the State
on any of these questions, partly no doubt because of
the "Moderate" character, the cautious avoidance of
any such conflict, which had prevailed for a long time
within her borders. But the question of the appoint
ment of the Principal of Glasgow University to a city
church was precisely one which might have brought
about that collision, since, had the Assembly opposed it,
it was quite possible that the Glasgow authorities might
have pressed their nomination, and forced their pre
sentee into outward possession of what are called in
Scotland the "temporalities," the stipend, and the
ecclesiastical buildings, even in opposition to the
decision, hitherto considered in theory as supreme, of
the Church. " We can never dream," said Chalmers
in his speech on the subject, " that this final sentence,
if given in our favour, is not to be effective." It was
the first sound of the trumpet in a war which had not
yet begun. And he proceeds with a serious anticipation
of an inevitable conflict.
" But if it could possibly be otherwise — if on the plea
that the Church hath overstepped her boundaries, it
is found that there are a right and force in the mere
presentation which shall carry it over all your resist
ance, then I cannot imagine a feebler instrument, a
more crippled and incompetent machinery than our
Church is for the professed objects of its institution :
nor do I see how, if struck with impotency like this,
it can lift an arm of any efficacy to protect our Estab
lishment from many great evils, or to stay the progress
of a very sore corruption within our borders."

ICO THOMAS CHALMERS.
This question, however, had not as yet come among
the controversies of the ecclesiastical parliament. And
in the meantime the question of Pluralities was that on
which the position of Chalmers as leader was most
definite. He brought forward a motion for their
abolition in the following year, and it was in the course
of the debate which followed that a remarkable and
picturesque incident occurred. The discussion had
lasted one whole day till midnight, and the second day
was nearing its close, when one of the speakers on the
opposite side produced, and quoted from an anonymous
pamphlet, in which the author declared that from what
was to him the highest of all authority — the authority
of his own experience — he could assert that " after the
satisfactory discharge of his parish duties a minister
may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted
leisure for the prosecution of any science in which his
taste may dispose him to engage." It was a perfectly
legitimate use against himself of the early utterance
of his youth, an expedient which has been not un-
frequently resorted to in debate, but never, that we
can remember, with such an overwhelming force of
reply. Chalmers rose amid the breathless silence of
the House to make his defence. And this was what
he said —
" Sir, that pamphlet I now declare to have been a
production of my own, published twenty years ago. I
was indeed much surprised to hear it brought forward
and quoted this evening. But since that gentleman
has brought it forward in the face of this House, I can
assure him that I feel grateful to him from the bottom
of my heart for the opportunity he has now afforded me

A CULPRIT AT THE BAR, 16l
of making a public recantation of the sentiments it
contains. I now confess myself to have been guilty of
a heinous crime, and I now stand a repentant culprit
before the bar of this venerable Assembly. The cir
cumstances attending the publication of my pamphlet
were shortly as follows : As far back as twenty years
ago I was ambitious enough to aspire to be successor
to Professor Playfair in the mathematical chair of the
University of Edinburgh. During the discussion which
took place relative to the person who might be ap
pointed his successor, there appeared a letter from
Professor Playfair to the magistrates on the subject,
in which he stated it was his conviction that no person
could be found competent to discharge the duties of
the mathematical chair among the clergymen of the
Church of Scotland. I was at that time, sir, more
devoted to mathematics than to the literature of my
profession ; and feeling grieved and indignant at what I
conceived an undue reflection on the abilities and
education of our clergy, I came forward with that
pamphlet to rescue them from what I deemed an un
deserved reproach, by maintaining that a devoted and
exclusive attention to the study of mathematics was
not dissonant to the proper habits of a clergyman.
Alas, sir, so I thought in my ignorance and pride. I
have now no reserve in saying that the sentiment was
wrong, and that in the utterance of it I penned what
was most outrageously wrong. Strangely blinded that
I was ! What, sir, is the object of mathematical science ?
Magnitude, and the proportions of magnitude. But
then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes. I thought
not of the littleness, of time — I recklessly thought not
of the greatness of eternity ! " M

162 THOMAS CHALMERS.
The effect of this apology was extraordinary; the
House listened in profound silence, with mingled awe
and sympathy, to so impressive a confession. But he
did not carry his motion, though he increased that
enthusiasm and faith in him which was to become
more and more a power in the nation and the Church.
He was not happy, however, in his changed and
limited sphere. Doubts whether he had after all been
right in accepting it seem to have assailed him in the
quiet. " Visited with melancholy thoughts," he writes
in his journal, " when I dwell on the uncongeniality of
my present neighbourhood, on the prospect of next
winter, on the fancied decay of my talents, on the
decline of my circumstances (my regular income not
being adequate), and on the review of my splendid
correspondence a few years ago. Against all this I
desire to be fortified by the sublime hopes and associ
ations of eternity." He was not, however, left very
long in this partial obscurity; his influence, and the
public consciousness of the great power thus within
reach for great uses, grew in the progress of these quiet
years. After spending five years in St. Andrews, in 1828
Chalmers entered upon a new sphere. He had been
appointed to the Chair of Divinity in the University of
Edinburgh in the previous year. He declined, as he
always did, to seek the appointment in any way, but it
was so congenial to all his wishes that he had no
hesitation in accepting it when it was offered to him.
The student of his life cannot but feel a sensation of
relief and exhilaration when Chalmers thus returns to
the larger sphere for which he was in every way fitted.
The results of his five years in St. Andrews, if they
did not bring to him the comfort and repose he had

EDINBURGH. 163
hoped for, were in many other ways of high importance
and encouragement. His power of teaching and in
fluencing youth — the class which he thought of all
others the most important, the future clergy of the
country — was proved, and he had the gratification of
feeling that he had carried with him in the fullest
degree the enthusiasm and sympathy of the young men
about him, leavening their intellectual fervour with
profound Christian sentiment, and leading them into
the work he himself delighted in, the culture and
elevation of the poor. One remarkable result of his
work was the great number of his students — among
them the distinguished missionary, Dr. Duff — who
devoted themselves to missionary labours in India and
elsewhere. In Edinburgh Chalmers at once assumed his natural
place as a great leader of the Church and one of the
most important personages in Scotland. Not only were
his footsteps followed by crowds wherever he made any
personal appearance, but he was consulted with the
most remarkable deference by the public authorities
and the statesmen of the time. Appointments were
made by Government on the almost sole ground that
they were agreeable to this prince of the Church, and
his support and advocacy of the most important measures
were solicited by the highest functionaries of the realm,
in terms which show their consciousness of his authority
almost as if it were that of an independent power.
In this way his help was appealed to on the great
subject of Catholic Emancipation, and, still more re
markable, he was called to London to give his opinion
and aid to a Parliamentary Committee sitting in council
upon the great and never-exhausted subject of Irish

164 THOMAS CHALMERS.
distress, though his knowledge of Ireland was little
more than that which could be obtained on a holiday
journey. It is amazing when we look back to see how
strangely different from the present was the then state
of the country and the public questions which occupied
it. Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation
were both questions hotly discussed, and still capable
of different solutions to those which we have known all
our lives. The very conditions upon which our present
life is founded did not exist. The trade of the country
was bound by the Corn Laws, and by the existence of
many monopolies ; the Poor-Laws were a rife and con
tinual subject of discussion ; there were no factory
laws or regulation of labour. The Churches of England
and Scotland, the Universities, and many public ap
pointments, were defended (as was supposed) by the
Test and Corporation Laws, which made a participation
in the most sacred rite of Christianity, according to one
or another form, a necessary preliminary of office. It
is very difficult for us, amid the broader lines of our
present living, to realize that condition of affairs in
which all this network of bonds and restrictions caught
the feet at every turn.
Chalmers was one of the bold and manly reformers
who opposed them all. He wanted no pains and
penalties to surround the bulwarks of religion. He
desired no bondage of tariff or impost upon trade. He
had confidence in the force of both, but especially the
first, to make way against all resistance and all difficulty.
One of his early efforts in the Assembly after his settle
ment in Edinburgh was to lead that venerable body to
express publicly by an address of congratulation to the
King the gratitude of the Church and country for the

THE EFFECT OF RELIGIOUS DISABILITIES. 165
repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, a measure
which he spoke of as " this delightful Bill." He did
not succeed in this, but he at least expressed very
plainly his own sentiments and those of the ever-grow
ing party which looked up to him as its leader. Still
more notable was his utterance in respect to Catholic
Emancipation. Before the Bill was brought in he
received a letter from Sir James Mackintosh, anxiously
appealing to him for support, to which he replied with
characteristic appreciation of one side at least of the
matter : " I have never had but one sentiment on the
subject of the Catholic disabilities, and it is that the
Protestant cause has been laid by them under very
heavy disadvantages, and that we shall gain prodigiously
from the moment that, by the removal of them, the
question between us and our opponents is reduced to a
pure contest between truth and error." He amplified
this view of the subject, which was one perhaps not
taken very much account of by statesmen, at a great
public meeting in Edinburgh, to petition in favour of
the Bill—
" We are not hostile, neither are we indifferent to
the holy cause of Protestantism. I cannot answer for
others, but in vindication of myself, I can at least say it
is in the spirit of devotedness to that cause that I come
here, and because in this emancipation of Papists I
see for Protestants a still greater and more glorious
emancipation. The truth is, that these disabilities have
hung as a dead-weight around the Protestant cause for
more than a century. They have enlisted in opposition
to it some of the most unconquerable principles of
nature : resentment because of injury, and the pride of

166 THOMAS CHALMERS.
adherence to a suffering cause. They have transformed
the whole nature of the contest, and by so doing they
have rooted and given tenfold obstinacy to error.
They have given to one side the hateful aspect of
tyranny; while on theirs we behold a generous and
high-minded resistance to what they deem to be op
pression. They have transformed a nation of heretics
into a nation of heroes. We could have refuted and
shamed the heretic out of his errors, but we cannot
bring down the hero from his altitude ; and thus it is
that from the first introduction of this heterogeneous
element into the question, the cause of truth has gone
backward. It has ever since been met by the unyield
ing defiance of a people irritated but not crushed under
a sense of indignity; and this notable expedient for
keeping down the Popery of Ireland has only com
pressed it into a firmness and closed it into a phalanx
which, till opened up by emancipation, we shall find to
be impenetrable.
" Gentlemen would draw arguments from history
against us, but there is one passage in history which
they can never dispose of. How comes it that Pro
testantism made such triumphant progress in these
realms when it had pains and penalties to struggle
with ? and how came this progress to be arrested from
the moment it laid on these pains and penalties in its
turn ? What have all the enactments of the statute-
book done for the cause of Protestantism in Ireland ?
and how is it, when single-handed truth walked through
our island with the might and prowess of a conqueror,
so soon as propped up by the authority of the State
and the armour of intolerance was given to her, the
brilliant career of her victories was ended ? It was

THE PANACEA FOR IRELAND. 167
when she took up the carnal and laid down the spiritual
weapon — it was then that her strength went out of her.
She was struck with impotency on the instant that
from a warfare of principle it became a warfare of
politics. With the pains and penalties to fight against,
the cause of the Reformation did almost everything in
Britain. With the pains and penalties on its side, it
has done nothing and worse than nothing in Ireland,"
Chalmers' prophecy that when these restrictions were
removed the question, '' reduced to a pure contest be
tween truth and error," would soon be solved in the
most desirable way by the conversion of Ireland to a
more enlightened faith, has turned out to be one of
those devout imaginations which are not justified by
events ; but it was at least a noble and generous way
of considering a question which tore the nation asunder,
and which many good people regarded with very
different feelings. His ideas in respect to the condition
of Ireland — alas! a question so constantly discussed.the
problem of all recent generations, and still so far from
being settled — are more remarkable still. They are of
a character which never becomes old-fashioned, nor
perhaps ever ceases to be visionary. What Chalmers
advocated was the same rule which Bishop Berkeley
would fain have applied — the remedy for all things
which the world has never yet tried among all its
expedients — to make the people good, that simplest,
all-embracing, unquestionable remedy ! The great
Scotch preacher stood before the bar of the Committee
assembled to consider that question, and propounded
his case with the noble gravity of his strong con
viction. With what sentiments they listened to him,

168 THOMAS CHALMERS.
and what they thought of his method, we are not
informed; but it is interesting to quote what this
high optimist, this Christian reformer, said. One of
the questions immediately before the Committee was
the expediency of introducing the English system of
Poor-Laws into Ireland. Chalmers was not called
in the usual authoritative way, but invited, "if not
entirely inconsistent with other duties and engage
ments," to give them the benefit of his experience,
which, the question being so near his heart, he was
very ready to do. His examination proceeded as
follows —
" The population of Ireland being chiefly potato-fed,
which is a crop attended with great fluctuations and
casualties, do you consider that those fluctuations and
casualties would render a system of compulsory relief
advisable ? "
" Quite the reverse."
" In what respect do you consider the assessment
principle would be productive of evil under the circum
stances ? "
" I think it would just add to the recklessness and
improvidence of the people, and so land the country in
a still greater population without increased means of
maintaining them. If I may be permitted, I will
advert to a principle which I think may be called the
pervading fallacy in the speculations of those who
advocate the establishment of a poor-rate in Ireland,
and is founded on the observation of a connexion
between a high state of character and a high state of
economic comfort. It is quite palpable that so it is
in fact ; but there seems to be an important mistake

EDUCATION INSTEAD OF CHARITY. 169
in the order of causation. It is often conceived that
comfort is the cause, and character the effect ; now I
hold that character is the cause, and comfort the effect.
It does not appear that if you lay hold of a man thirty
or forty years old, with his inveterate habits, and im
prove his economic condition by giving him through a
poor-rate or otherwise three or four pounds a year
more, it does not appear to me that this man will be
translated thereby into other habits or higher tastes,
but he will dissipate it generally in the same reckless
and sordid kind of indulgence to which he had been
previously accustomed ; whereas, if instead of taking
hold of the man and attempting to elevate him by the
improvement of his economic condition, you take hold
of the boy and attempt to infuse into him the other
element, which I conceive to be the causal one, by
means of education, then you will, through the medium
of character, work out an improvement in his economic
condition. What I should advise is, that education
should be made universal in Ireland, and that you
should weather for a season the annoyance of Ireland's
mendicity, and the annoyance of that pressure which
I conceive to be altogether temporary. This appears
to me the only principle upon which Ireland can be
securely and effectually brought to a higher standard
of enjoyment, and into the state of a well-habited and
well-conditioned peasantry. I think that, if patiently
waited for, very great results might be looked for ere
another generation pass away ; but then the establish
ment of a Poor-Law would throw a very heavy obstruc
tion indeed on that educational process to which alone
I look for a permanent improvement in the state of
Ireland."

170 THOMAS CHALMERS.
It is this to which he turns again and again in
the course of his examination. High character first,
economical improvement afterwards. Improvidence,
over-population, everything, he conceives, is to be
ameliorated by these means ; not by emigration — except
as perhaps "an auxiliary to the cure" — not by any
artificial method. "The people are in an unedu
cated state, with perhaps no great infusion of Christian
principle in their minds ; it is this which produces
misery and a low economic condition." The thing for
England, for the Government, for all the friends of
Ireland to do was to make the people good — simplest
yet most impossible of all actions. If it could but . be
done, how certain the issue; how well to wait and
have patience with Ireland's mendicity or any other
trouble in the world ! But the speaker, who had but
a short time before confessed his misconception of two
magnitudes, had again fallen into the same blunder in
a far more magnanimous way. He had forgotten the
waywardness of human nature, that great incalculable
force which cannot be moulded according to any wish.
He had forgotten the fallibility of all human modes of
instruction. Nevertheless, his lofty and generous
opinions, his visionary yet so practicable advice remains,
like a unused lighthouse over those dark waters, catch
ing in all its reflectors, if not the lights of earthly
manufacture, yet the sunshine of heaven.
During this period, in January 1832, Chalmers
published what he wished to be his great work. " My
chief earthly ambition," he had written five years before
in the privacy of his journal, " is to finish a treatise on
Political Economy, as the commencement of a series
of future publications on Moral Philosophy and

THE REFORM BILL. 171
Theology. Consecrate this ambition and purge it of
all sin and selfishness, 0 God." This work embodied
"in still fuller force of expression those ideas and opinions
to which he had already given vent on every practicable
occasion, as his scheme for the redemption of the
country. It came into the world at an inauspicious
moment, just when the climax and outcome of a period
of great national agitation had produced the Reform
Bill^a measure in which, as in so many since, the mass
of an uneducated people believed as in a charm, which
was to bid not only all the tempests and clamours
of political trouble, but all the seethings of poverty and
distress, and all the problems of advancing yet crushing
civilization, cease. We are all well enough aware now
that the franchise does not do very much for any one,
and that the springs of well-being lie deeper down in
nature than anything that can be touched by a vote.
But it was the first time this panacea had been tried,
and it was not perhaps much wonder that in the per
plexity of men's minds it was looked upon as a cure
for all the troubles of the time. Chalmers was too
good a philosopher to put faith in any such easy method,
and therefore we are told that he was " not in favour of
the Reform Bill." It was the first measure for what
was supposed to be the good of the people of which he
had not been in favour, and no doubt his distrust of it
arose simply from his sense that as a panacea it was
naught, and touched none of the deeper principles in
which the springs of well-being and moral recovery
are. " He had studied long and closely the question how
the great mass of the labouring population of the country,

172 THOMAS CHALMERS.
in so many instances toil-worn and over-driven, could
be sustained in sufficiency and comfort, could be pre
vented from sinking, as he saw many of them doing;
into greater straitness of circumstances, and into the
necessity of severer toil. He heard it on all hands
asserted that this great change in the mode of electing
representatives was to effect a mighty amelioration upon
the economic condition of the people. He utterly dis
believed such assertions ; and more particularly as to
that class of the community on whose behalf his own
labours and sympathies had for years been expended.
He was satisfied that it was to build up the labouring
man of Britain in an egregious and misleading delusion,
to direct him to the mode in which the members of the
House of Commons were appointed, or to the measures
which they might adopt, as to the main fountain of
any great and permanent improvement in his economic
condition." There are few thinkers now who would be out of
accord with the conclusion of Chalmers on this question,
though the delusion has spread downwards in ever
wider and wider circles, and what is called the en
lightened working-man of to-day has gone back to the
wild folly of public workshops and employment provided
by the State, to take the place of all economic principles
whatever, and all the spontaneous action of wholesome
and independent life. But it is not for us to enter
into any discussion of such matters. We have the word
of John Stuart Mill, no mean authority, nor at all likely
to have any bias in favour of a Christian philosophy,
that " the simple explanation " of the fluctuations and
recoveries of wealth " was never given by any political

'EDUCATION IS THE SPECIFIC 173
economist before Dr. Chalmers, a writer many of whose
opinions I think erroneous, but who has always the
merit of studying phenomena at first hand, and express
ing them in a language of his own which often uncovers
aspects of the truth that the received phraseologies only
tend to hide." »
We are not called upon either to enter into any
discussion of this work, which was not received with the
popularity or respect which had attended the former
productions of Chalmers. The head of the country was
turned by its supposed great and intoxicating progress,
in the opening of the way which has had so many further
developments since — and it did not care, in its excite
ment, to hear the sober voice which bade it put no
trust in any external remedy. Dr. Chalmers' cure for
national ills was not a sudden and dazzling one. " The
highway to this is education." " Education is the
specific " are the sign-posts erected through these pages.
" Character is the parent of comfort, the best creator,
preserver, distributor of wealth." The country in the
flush of a new development, in the supposed triumph
of every liberal principle over the effete and antiquated,
was scarcely in a humour to accept such conclusions
as these. Whether they are to be relied upon even
now, and if the panacea of education will do more than
the other panaceas, it remains to be seen, and the
indications are perhaps not so hopeful as were the
prognostics of Chalmers. But it is a noble faith which
thus proclaims its unfaltering dependence upon a higher
revolution to come.
"It will be the aggregate effect of a higher taste,
a higher intelligence, and, above all, a widespread

174 THOMAS CHALMERS,
Christianity throughout the mass of the population ; and
thus the most efficient ministers of that gospel which
opens to them the door of heaven, will be also the
most efficient ministers of their temporal comfort and
prosperity upon earth. Next to the salvation of their
souls, one of our fondest aspirations in behalf of the
general peasantry is that they shall be admitted to a
larger share of this world's abundance than now falls
to their lot. But we feel assured that there is no
method by which this can be wrested from the hands
of the wealthier classes. It can only be won from them
by the insensible growth of their own virtue. The
triumph will be a glorious, but to be effectual and
enduring, it must be a pacific one — won not on the
field of blood or amid the uproar of furious and dis
cordant politics. It will be a sure but a silent
victory, the fruit of a moral warfare, whose weapons
are not carnal but spiritual; and which shall at
length come to a prosperous termination, not in strife
and anarchy and commotion, but in showers of grace
from on high upon the prayers and labours of the
good." -• . - . • '
7 Another piece of literary work undertaken by Chalmers
during this calm period of his life was a Bridgewater
Treatise, which he was invited by the Bishop of London
to contribute to that series. On the Adaptation of
External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution
of Man was the subject he chose, and it was received
with much favour by the public. His reign as a
preacher was by no means impaired by the fact that
he had no pulpit of his own where his appearances
were punctual and certain, but was only to be heard

GREAT INFLUENCE, 175
occasionally and at special moments. Many invitations
were addressed to him to induce him to resume the
charge of a parish, among others that of the West
Church in Greenock, one of the few prizes of the Scotch
Church. Dr. Chalmers heartily thanks the patron,
Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, for the offer of " the most
lucrative ecclesiastical living in Scotland, whose endow
ments, I believe, are nearly double those of the one
which I now occupy." " You have, in fact," he says,
"conferred upon me a substantial favour by having
placed within my reach a benefice so lucrative. You
have enabled me to say, in language which cannot be
mistaken, in what estimation I hold the professorships
of theology throughout Scotland; and in pleading
whether for the virtuous patronage or for the adequate
endowment of these high offices, your offer of the parish
of Greenock will effectually shield me from any un
generous imputation to which I might otherwise have
been exposed."
Thus he held his place, glad only to have it, proud
that gain was not what he sought, the always ready,
vulgar indictment against clergymen in general— and
exercising a sway which is beyond all the privileges of
wealth or position over the thoughts and impulses of
his country. The great conflict of his life and time,
the most remarkable struggle and event in the recent
history of Scotland, was about to begin, and to sweep
him away in the progress of its development from much
that he held most dear. We linger with regret on the
milder period in which all issues were less tragic, when
the unity was disturbed only by natural divisions such
as exist always in every human society, divergences of
opinion, differences of constitution and thought; but

176 THOMAS CHALMERS.
when no rent had been made in the garment of the
Church, and it was one not only in faith and doctrine,
as it has always remained, but in economy and outward
form. That period, perhaps, like other periods of the
past, takes " A glory from its being far,
And orbs into the perfect star
We saw not when we walked therein " :
but looking back upon it, the philosophic reader will
not be able to refrain from a regret, nor the patriot
from a sigh, nor perhaps the more hot-headed spectator
from an unauthorized anathema of denunciation against
the trifling persons unknown to any other human
record, whose struggle against all the laws of their
Church for promotion and a living brought about a
catastrophe which no persecutions nor oppositions of
power had been able to effect, and which has left a
wound in the heart of Scotland which, so far as can be
foreseen, nothing is likely to heal.

CHAPTER V.
Before we enter upon the great question which
presently was to tear both Scotland and the Church
in two, and in which Dr. Chalmers was so much
instrumental, and took so great a part that it figures
in the estimation of many as the principal point in
his life, we must refer to a matter much more truly
expressing the greatest pre-occupation and desire of
that life, the system of Church Extension, which to
him meant the redemption of Scotland both morally
and physically. The reader, who has seen his exertions
in Glasgow, and been made aware of his impassioned
conviction that the work of the Church, and the con
stitution of the parish, were the only, or at least the
far better way of reclaiming a population which had
exceeded all the old boundaries, will understand with
what a vehemence of desire and warmth of advocacy
he threw himself into the scheme of reorganizing
Scotland, especially in the great towns, and placing
within reach of every district, however poor, the Church,
the parish institutions, the school, the parochial scheme
of charity, in which all his hopes, both as a Christian
and a patriot, were embodied. The one consistent
endeavour in his life all through, from the time when
N

178 THOMAS CHALMERS.
he learned its alphabet in humble Kilmany in his
first experiments, until that in which, close upon the
threshold of the grave, he gave his best attention to
the "territorial Church," built by his exertions and
called by his name in one of the poorest districts of
Edinburgh, had been this. The Non-Intrusion con
troversy, the Disruption, the organization of the Free
Church, which occupy so much room in the history of his
later days, may almost be called accidents in his career
— accidents of the most important kind, yet more or less
forced upon him, unpremeditated and undesired — but
his inspiration, his enthusiasm, his whole heart of work
and longing were for this. He believed in the gospel
as the one means of saving and elevating the masses
which in every country are so apt to fall into both moral
and physical degradation, especially in the crowded
streets of quickly-growing towns, where they herd
together and entrench themselves in ignorance and
penury and want, with at once a sense of neglect and
a sense of resistance, bitterly resenting the one, yet
fiercely setting up the other against efforts made in
their behalf. Chalmers had that preference for the
poor which it is not at all unusual to find among
clergymen who feel the superior ease of access to them,
and the absence of ceremony and precaution, to be a
great relief amid those complications of society which
make so many people in a different sphere irritated
rather than attraoted by exertions for their individual
spiritual well-being. He who was happy in his little
lodging among the Glasgow slums, where he could feel
himself on terms of next-door neighbourship with his
weavers and cotton-spinners, believed in that way,
having himself tried it, of driving out the demons, and

THE OBJECT OF HIS LIFE. 179
bringing in all the charities and beneficent influences
of a higher life. A small parish, a little church, an
active minister, [always about the cluster of streets
which formed his domain, a dozen or so of elders and
of deacons, and the Plate at the church doors — with
these conditions he was ready to face the world, and
to pledge his hearty and generous word to Queen and
Government that there should be, instead of vice,
pauperism, and discontent, purity and peace and honest
labour in every division of the realm. It was a great
thing to undertake, but it was the absolute belief of
this man who knew what he was saying, who was no
theorist, but had personally tried the method which
he had advocated. This was the real and true object
of his life : to have the Scotland of the nineteenth
century mapped out as primitive Scotland had been,
while Glasgow was still but a small place, and crowded
streets were almost non-existent: and to bring to bear
upon each handful of people the ancient laws and
economy of the parish, the system which had made of
Scotland in more primitive times the best educated
and the most independent and self-helping of kingdoms.
It- was a system which had been triumphantly success
ful in these early times. It had been triumphantly
successful under extraordinarily different circumstances,
when fully and honestly tried, in St. John's parish in
Glasgow. He had no doubt whatever of its success
everywhere, when fully and honestly tried. There
would be no finer and nobler work for any man, and
this was the true and lasting inspiration of Chalmers'
life. He had proposed that his plan should be tried
in Glasgow while he was still there, but it had not

180 THOMAS CHALMERS.
met with any general approval. And perhaps his own
immediate surroundings were too much absorbed in
their great exertions for St. John's parish to be prepared
to undertake the greater work. But thirteen years
after, the seed he had sown suddenly came to fruit.
Mr. Collins, one of Chalmers' agency in St. John's, his
devoted friend, a man of the highest character and
reputation, was the head of the new effort. There had
been many obstacles in the way — not only the want
of money, which in 'rich Glasgow, and among the band
of wealthy men who had been taught their duty and
responsibility by Dr. Chalmers, was a less hindrance
than in most places, but difficulties with the law both
of the Church and the land. The ecclesiastical difficulty
was that ministers appointed to these mission churches
were not recognized as parish ministers, had no place
in the Presbytery, and no power to form a Kirk Session
— in short, were only recognized as the incumbents of
chapels-of-ease, the Church having no power to multiply
parishes at her pleasure ; while the difficulty with
Government arose from the law of patronage, which held
that, according to the doctrine of the primitive Irish in
St. Columba's time, every calf belonged to the cow, and
the patronage of the new church must pass to the original
patron of the parish from which it had been separated.
In the Assembly of 1834, however, the Church passed
an Act admitting such ministers, who had hitherto
been only quoad sacra, to the full privileges of parish
ministers, while a Bill in Parliament of the same year
"relieved all newly-created parishes from the claim
to patronage vested previously in the patron of the
original parish." The Church Building Society of
Glasgow immediately proceeded to carry out their long-

CHURCH EXTENSION. 181
thought-of plan. They resolved to build twenty new
churches in that town, but not to begin the work until
£20,000 was subscribed. This was done in a few
months, and the work began.
This practical step roused the Church in general to
action. The year 1834 was the first in which the
Evangelical party, of which Chalmers was the most
prominent leader, attained a majority in the Assembly.
And the work of Church Extension, with all the sanctions
of the highest authority, was put into his hand. He
was appointed, in Scotch phraseology, Convenor of the
Committee, which had been appointed for some time
for this object, but which had hitherto found little
opening for active work. He was no sooner at its
head, however, than work was begun with all the force
of his influence and energy, and something of the
impetuosity and impatience of all delay which were
in his character. It was a twofold effort which he
organized, the one part consisting of an appeal to the
country for money, an appeal addressed to all classes,
from the Glasgow millionaire, who cheerfully gave
forth his thousand pounds for the Doctor's great scheme,
to the poor household which pledged its loyalty by
the penny a week which Chalmers had learned to know
was a subsidy of the utmost importance, not only by
its capabilities of production, but by its power to
interest and bind together the givers. The other branch
of his schemes related to permanent endowment, and
was an appeal to Government for a provision for the
ministers of the new churches about to be built. This,
as the more difficult portion of the work, and that on
which he was ultimately defeated, we must explain in
his own words, taken from the letter of guidance and

182 THOMAS CHALMERS.
direction which he wrote (not being able to accompany
them) to a member of the deputation which went to
London to bring it formally under the notice of the
Government, of which at this moment Lord Melbourne
was the head.
" I hold it of great importance that if a grant should
be obtained, it should be accompanied by such con
ditions as may at once make plain, both to Govern
ment and the public, the main objects of the grant, and
this will best justify bo!.h the measure itself and our
application for it.
" The chief object, then — and let this stand palpably
forth, and be expressly provided for in the constitution
of the grant — is a cheap Christian education for the
common people. Now a simple and unqualified grant
does not secure this object. It may secure an additional
£100 a year to each of our present unendowed
ministers; but it is of the utmost importance its being
distinctly understood that an appetency for this addition
to their income is not in truth the animating principle
either of their or our application. For this £100 a year,
or whatever the allowance shall be, there should be the
stipulation of a quid pro qico. It ought to be given on
the part of the Government in return for such a regu
lation of the seat-rents as shall make the means of
Christian instruction accessible to the great mass of the
community. We want our present unendowed ministers
to obtain £100 a year each : but for that they should
be required to give up their present high seat-rents.
The grants, so far from enriching, would at this rate
make some of them poorer than they are at present.
But this cannot be helped. The character of your

USE OF ENDOWMENTS. 183
application, be it known to all, is not a personal but
a public and patriotic one ; it being for a boon, not to
the ministers of our unendowed churches, but for a
-boon to the plebeian families of their parishes. This
furnishes the principle of the first article or condition
which is specified.
" But there is a second condition nearly as indispens
able as the first one : and that is, that a preference for the
sittings shall be given to those who reside within the
parish of the newly-endowed church — this preference
at the terms stipulated for when the endowment was
made, in favour of the church becoming the permanent
and inalienable right of the parishioners. . . . The third
condition, if it could be obtained, would prove an in
estimable moral blessing to Scotland, and earn for
Government the lasting gratitude of her people. It is
that the grant of, say £100 a year, should be extended
to all the churches of new parishes that may hereafter
be erected. On the one hand, it would be the means
of ultimately making our Church commensurate with
our population ; while, on the other hand, the increase of
these churches would proceed gently and gradually, and
without any immediate or, even after the process is
completed, without any great or sensible pressure. I
suppose the churches to be erected at the expense of
individuals, and the endowments sought for to be pro
vided by Government — a security, therefore, that the
claim will never be preferred until a great previous
sacrifice has been incurred — the best proof of the
existence of the great and real necessity which de
manded it."
These proposals received at first from Government a

184 THOMAS CHALMERS.
favourable reception, and the prospect was very cheering
before the eager workers, in whose eyes, between the
interests and liberality of the people and the apparent
good intentions and amiabilities of the State, their
project seemed half accomplished. But it was not long
before storms arose. Dissent in Scotland has never
been like Dissent anywhere else. It was no divergence
in doctrine, no difference of theological belief that had
carried one band after another out of the Established
Church. The " Relief," one of the first of these bands,
was, to give it its full name, a " Relief from Patronage "
— the " Secession," par excellence, was a secession for the
same reason. A stranger might have gone in those
days from one church to another in Edinburgh or
Glasgow, and would never have discovered by any sign
which was Dissent and which was the Established
Church — as indeed he might still do now, except in so
far as the tendency to what is considered an improved
ritual may perhaps be more prominent in the latter.
The same peculiarity perhaps has secured to Dissenters
in Scotland a very different position aud estimation
from that held by them in England. There is little
difference, if any, in credit and rank between a Dissenting
minister and his brother of the Church. But by that
natural advance in the chosen way, whether to the
right or the left, which happens inevitably to every
community, there had developed among the Dissenters
the new doctrine of the voluntary principle, a doctrine
unknown to their fathers. Driven to it in the first
place by the exigencies of their position, and finding it
in towns very successful, affording to a popular preacher
large means of living and working, they had come by
degrees, and against all the traditions in which they

THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE. 185
had taken their origin, to an adoption of the new
principle — that only voluntary offerings were acceptable
to God and appropriate as a provision for His worship,
which was really the first distinctive and original
doctrine of their own which distinguished them from
the Church — with great enthusiasm. The idea that
there was injustice in appropriating the public funds to
the ' support of one division of the Church more than
another was the political view of the same question,
and this had lately come into great prominence in
Edinburgh in consequence of the conflict on the so-
called Annuity Tax, which was the fund (originally a
commutation of tithes) out of which the stipends of
the Edinburgh ministers had been provided. As soon
as the proposals of Dr. Chalmers for additional endow
ment was laid before the Government, a fierce agitation
broke out on the side of the Dissenters. Their main
plea was, that while additional churches, ministers, and
endowments were thus demanded, a large number of
seats were unoccupied in the existing churches, and
that consequently any addition to church accommo
dation or provision for new workers was uncalled for.
There was a speciousness about the argument which
staggered many minds, and brought a Government
entirely indifferent to the question, and with imperfect
means of judging, to a pause — but that it was an entirely
fallacious one, it requires but little examination to
perceive. It was the same as to say : There is plenty
of room in the churches of Bloomsbury and Belgravia ;
why, then, ask for new places of worship in St. Giles's
or Bethnal Green ? But the outcry was hot, and the
question a new one, puzzling to the unreflective mind.
The very idea was new of carrying in this fashion the

186 THOMAS CHALMERS.
teaching and the ministrations of religion to every
man's door: and the strong Conservative principle of
leaving things alone, and bidding every man go to the
church in which there was room for him,, whether it
suited him or not, mingled with and gave force to the
new Radical principle that it was an injustice to give
the money of the State to one division of religious
teachers rather than another. In face of the sudden
rise of these forces, the Government paused. No
Government is ever willing to spend money where it
can be avoided, nor has there yet been any Govern
ment which could allow itself to judge of the abstract
right and wrong in such a matter. After many delays,
it appointed a Commission to inquire into the subject,
and it really does not appear what in all the convo
lutions of circumstance it could have done more.
Chalmers, however, was highly discontented with
this result. He disapproved of the Commission : of the
members of it, who were neither important men nor such
as could be supposed to have any real knowledge of the
subject; and of the object, which seemed to him to be
that of an inquisitorial examination into the parochial
system of Scotland, bringing each individual minister
to the bar — thus changing the question from an inquiry
into the wants of an increased population to an inquiry
" as to how the Church of Scotland performs its duty,"
an investigation which, to a Church so .jealous of all
State interference, was insulting in the highest degree.
It is evident that political feeling at the same time soon
came to mingle with the real question on both sides.
As it happened, although as it seems involuntarily, the
deputation sent to press the claims of the Church — after
long delay, and after the report of the Commission had

INTRUSION OF POLITICS. 187
made it manifest that the representation of the needs
of Scotland in respect to church accommodation was
genuine — was almost entirely composed of Conservatives,
while the Government was Whig. As a matter of fact,
the Tory party was, and had always proved, the support
of the Church, so that this was natural enough; but
it was not likely to conciliate the party in power.
In addition to these drawbacks, there was the still more
serious one that Chalmers did not even carry his own
party in the Church with him in this effort. Dr.
Guthrie, in his Autobiography, states very clearly that
the movement was premature, that it was hurried on
and pressed upon Government to its own defeat, and
that, great as was the influence of Chalmers, many of
his own chief followers were of this opinion. Guthrie
himself, on his own much lower practical standing-
ground, explains the opposition of the Dissenters from a
homely matter-of-fact point of view, which is curious.
He describes their sudden vehemence in favour of the
Voluntary principle as the fruit of the exasperation and
consternation with which Dr. Chalmers' great scheme
filled them. " If this ' Church Extension,' as it was
called, succeeded, it would cut out the ground below a
large number of the Dissenting Churches in the country ;
since the people, in the popular election of their
ministers, would enjoy all the privileges of Dissent
without having to pay for them by maintaining
ministers and ordinances at their own expense."
" This was driving " (adds Dr. Guthrie) " the Dissent
ing or Voluntary Churches into a corner. The bread of
their ministers and their very existence was in danger,
so they were driven desperate, ready rather than be

188 THOMAS CHALMERS.
pulled down themselves to pull down all establishments.
In forcing the Dissenters into this desperate position, I
thought the Church wrong in points both of principle
and policy. The Dissenters had preserved religion and
made up for her lack of service for many years in
many parts of the country; and I would have had
these services practically acknowledged by our asking
the Government, when we sought the endowments for
the purpose of extending the Church, to endow any or
every party who, though seceders from the Church of
Scotland, adhered to her standards. But this, which at
that early period would have taken off the edge of
Dissenting opposition to the extension of the Church as
contemplated by Dr. Chalmers, and would thus have
been as consistent with policy as with principle, was
not done."
Nothing can bring more clearly into evidence the
true statesmanship of Chalmers' mind and scheme than
the side-light upon it thrown by such a curious exposi
tion of supposed motive and meaning as this. To
imagine the Voluntary principle to be no principle at
all, but a fictitious plea set up to conceal a sordid alarm
and self-interest, which could be silenced by a bribe,
is a poor view indeed of the opponents to whom this
champion imagines himself to be more tolerant and
kindly than was the large-souled and clear-sighted, if
impetuous, leader who pursued his great object without
any thought of the Dissenters, in the full conviction
that their methods were not sufficient for the emergency
any more than the old provisions of the Church, which
a greatly increased population had outgrown. To cut
the ground from under the feet of any workers was not

RELIGIOUS TEACHING NOT DESIRED. 189
in Chalmers' thought. It was the wastes where no man
worked which were in his mind. He felt himself, in
face of the problem of a great need which those who
were destitute did not feel, and had no desire to have
supplied to them. The ignorant and degraded, and
those who are born and bred in the dark purlieus of
great towns, where education was not or Christian
teaching, do not seek, do not wish for the moral training
and spiritual light which alone can raise them from
those depths. This was the argument which was strong
in the mind of Chalmers, and stated over and over again
with all the force of the strongest conviction throughout
his whole career. The people for whom he laboured
were not conscious of what they wanted most. It was
necessary to carry the light to them, to their very doors,
not to expect them to be already so enlightened as to
come and seek it for themselves. Those who have
reached this point do' not remain long in the darkness.
But the darkness which he sought to pierce was not
moved by any desire of electing its own ministers or of
having ministers at all, or teachers, or light or air, or
any improving and elevating thing. The principle of
carrying religious instruction to every man's door, of
bringing its teachers into personal contact with all,
the most unwilling to be taught, of persuading, entreat
ing them to hear, by every charm of human loving-
kindness and brotherliness — this was the inspiration of
Chalmers' life. He thought it could best be done by
that aid of the State to which the National Church had
a right according to all the stipulations of the constitu
tion — the aid of a modest provision which procured little
more than that the man who devoted himself to such
work should not actually starve in the doing of it.

190 THOMAS CHALMERS.
When he found that this was not to be obtained, and
when the storms of the ensuing period had passed over
his head, and he was free again to think of his chief
object and most real, he threw himself upon Christian
charity to carry out that beloved aim. To do it was
his desire, not to quarrel over the modes of doing it : to
do it by such methods as were possible, if not in what
he thought the best and surest way, then in the next
best. No doubt it was a profound disappointment to
Chalmers that his great scheme was not carried out. As
a preacher of the gospel, believing that the only means
of salvation: as a Christian philosopher, believing that to
elevate the character of the people was the only way
really to improve their position : as a philanthropist,
bound to do away with the ills of poverty and confident
in the power of his system to do so — he was disappointed,
and over again disappointed, by the careless reception,
careless rejection of his noble- and well-thought-out
scheme. He was impetuous, no one could deny it, and
impatient of delay and tergiversation. A statesman
ought not perhaps to be so human, he ought to have
patience beyond all assault; but no statesman could
have conceived a finer scheme, nor shown a wider
comprehension, a more absolute grasp of the matter in
hand. The conclusion was; that Government refusing the
aid asked for, Chalmers, encouraged by the large
liberality of some of his old Glasgow friends, took
upon himself a tour through the country to raise the
public interest and gain from private gifts the amount
that was needed for the erection of the churches in
question. The enterprise, undertaken at first while
peace and unity reigned more or less in the Church,

PARTIAL SUCCESS. 191
fell upon troublous days, and was carried out in the
face of a new and vehement conflict, which withdrew
men's minds from the general question and concentrated
.all their energies on an internecine struggle ; and the
Result of his labours was another immediate disappoint
ment in the amount of money provided. Yet, at the
encr, of seven years' of arduous work, from 1834 to
~I§^1. he had the satisfaction of seeing two hundred
and twenty-two churches added to the force of the
Establishment, with so many additional ministers, kirk
sessions, and the full machinery of the parish system — no
inconsiderable achievement. His opinion of the means
by which he and his colleagues attained this remarkable
result is worth quoting. It is from the report of a
speech before the Assembly, in which he asks to be
relieved of his laborious post at the head of the
movement. " While he rejoices in the experimental confirmation
which the history of these few years has afforded him
of the resources and capabilities of the Voluntary system,
to which, as hitherto, unfostered by the paternal care
of Government, the scheme of Church Extension is
indebted for all its progress, it still remains his un
shaken conviction of that system notwithstanding, that
it should only be resorted to as a supplement, and
never, but in times when the powers of infidelity and
intolerance are linked together in hostile combination
against the sacred prerogatives of the Church, should
it once be thought of as a substitute for a national
establishment of Christianity. In days of darkness and
disquietude it may open a temporary resource either
for a virtuous secession or an ejected Church to fall

192 THOMAS CHALMERS.
back upon; but a far more glorious consummation is
when the State puts forth its hand to sustain and not
to subjugate the Church, and the two, bent on moral
conquests alone, walk together as fellow-helpers towards'
the achievement of that great pacific triumph, tije
Christian education of the people." /
Thus while he attained his object to a certain exip-nt.
he did it, not by the means he approved, but by ipeans
with which he was destined thereafter to worJ»r* with
greater success, and to depend upon more entirely than
any religious leader who had gone before him. It is a
curious position in which to stand, and his future efforts
were all in the direction of making that voluntary
principle which he had no faith in, yet was com
pelled to adopt, as unlike a voluntary principle as
possible. This curious contradiction and paradox
throws a transverse light as strange as it is interesting
upon the latter part of this great man's actions and
career. While this work was going on, Dr. Chalmers was
invited to deliver a series of lectures in London upon
Church Establishment, which produced a great effect.
There was much in the commotions of the time which
resembled the present unsettled conditions of thought
and project; and the Church was supposed to be in
danger, as she has so often been supposed to be, without
any corresponding catastrophe. Under these circum
stances, the appearance of an orator so well known and
popular was of special importance, and excited much
attention. Why he should have lectured to what is
called " a picked audience," and in so restrained a space
as that of the Hanover Square Rooms, does not appear,

LECTURES ON CHURCH ESTABLISHMENTS. 193
since "dukes, marquises, earls, baronets, bishops, and
members of parliament," of whom his hearers are said
to have chiefly consisted, did not need to be convinced
of the advantages of national support to religion, nor
of the error of withholding it. A bystander relates
how the speaker when he appeared was received and
welcomed "with clappings and shouts of applause, that
grew more and more intense, till the noise became
almost deafening." "The tide that had been rising
and swelling each succeeding day," it is added in
describing the last of these orations, " now . burst all
bounds. Carried away by the impassioned utterances
of the speaker long ere the close of his finest passages
were reached, the voice of the lecturer was drowned in
applause, the audience rising from their seats, waving
their hats above their heads, and breaking out into
tumultuous approbation." The unusual attitude which
he assumed, seated at a table, according to his custom
as a professor, a little startled his audience at first, yet
occasionally added to the force of his address, since he
himself sometimes sprang unconsciously to his feet,
carried away by his own fervour, while the whole
audience rose with him in a sympathetic climax of
excitement, responding in a " whirlwind of enthusiasm "
such as has rarely been seen in any public assembly.
" Near us were the reporters," says another of Chalmers'
companions. "One seemed to leave the room every
five minutes with what he had written, so that by the
time the lecture was finished it was nearly all in
print." The oration ended about half-past three o'clock, and at
five it was issued to the world in the pages of the Globe,
as if it had been a statement of imperial policy or a
o

194 THOMAS CHALMERS.
declaration of war. Never, either before or after, has
the appearance of a Scotch minister so forced and
riveted the attention of the greater and richer Church
of the South, or so stirred the interest of the public.
He was an ally whose gifts and power were unique,
called to the aid of a community in danger, to whom
his strange tongue, his vehement gestures, and his bold
and distinct difference of doctrine were as nothing in
comparison with his heroic championship. His theme
before that audience of bishops and potentates was not
the imposing aspect of the Church or its high influence
in public life : it was that parish system which he
loved, its efficacy to meet all circumstances, its adapt
ation to all national needs, its pervasion everywhere
with the right of a national institution, and the freedom
of an agency independent of the approbation of the
crowd. When he had come to the end of his subject,
in the last of his addresses, with " nine bishops," as his
biographer proudly describes, among his hearers, the
orator, who had ventured to warn the great Church of
England that she must "come down from all that is
transcendental and mysterious in her pretensions," in
order to become " the great standard and rallying-post
for all that would unite their efforts and sacrifices in that
mighty cause," turned to the case of his own Church,
and proclaimed her distinctive quality of spiritual
independence with fond and proud enthusiasm. " We,"
he cried in the fervour of his eloquence, " own no head
of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever
is done ecclesiastically is done by our ministers as
acting in His name, and in perfect submission to His
authority." His hearers were of that great Church
which owns as its earthly head the Sovereign of the

CHARACTER OF THE SCOTCH CHURCH. 195
realm, and whose power of action is limited on all
hands by law, and tradition under the safeguard of law.
The impetuous Scot was capable as a Christian of many
self-denials, yet could not refrain as he stood up before
them all of one boast and proclamation of the superiority
in spiritual independence of the Church of his fathers.
" It should never be forgotten that in things ecclesi
astical the highest power of our Church is amenable
to no higher power on earth for its decisions. It can
exclude : it can deprive : it can depose at pleasure.
External force might make an obnoxious individual the
holder of a benefice ; but there is no external force in
these realms that could make him a minister of the
Church of Scotland. There is not one thing which the
State can do to our independent and indestructible
Church but strip her of her temporalities. The magis
trate might withdraw his protection, and she cease to
be an Establishment; but in all the high matters of
sacred and spiritual jurisdiction she would be the same
as before. With or without an Establishment she, in
them, is the unfettered mistress of her doings. The
King by himself, or by his representative, may be the
spectator of our proceedings ; but what Lord Chatham
said of the poor man's house is true in all its parts
of the Church to which I have the honour to belong.
' In England every man's house is his castle : not that
it is surrounded with walls and battlements : it may be
a straw-built shed, every wind of heaven may whistle
round it, every element of heaven may enter it — but the
King cannot, the King dare not.' "
Thus, with a fervour of enthusiasm which was received
with an almost wild response of applause, Chalmers

196 THOMAS CHALMERS.
waved aloft the banner of his Church in the presence
of the representatives of that other great national estab
lishment, whose highest councils could not nominate or
place a member of the hierarchy without the royal
conge1 d'ilire. It was generous of his English audience
to allow itself to be thus moved by the stranger's elo
quence; but what could be more strange than to see
the champion of the Church of Scotland on the very
verge of the precipice which was soon to break beneath
his feet, separating him from the Sion he loved, and
turning his boast into a mockery — thus proclaiming as
with the voice of a trumpet the independence which
was so soon to be proved a fiction, and the superiority
of a freedom which even then was threatened by every
hostile power ?
It would not be fair, however, to Dr. Chalmers' fame,
while showing his deep attachment to the principles of
an Established Church, and strong sense of its necessity,
not to show also the feeling with which he regarded the
Nonconformists, with whom he was much brought in
contact in his visits to England. On one occasion, in
the neighbourhood of Bristol, he was asked to open a
church of the Independent or Congregationalist com
munity. When he reached Bristol he found a strong
feeling against the Established Church to prevail in
this community, a feeling with which he was very
unwilling to identify himself in any way. He thought
it his duty accordingly, at the close of his sermon, to
clear his conscience by a declaration of his faith, which
must have been somewhat astonishing in such an atmo
sphere. "I hold the Establishment to be not only a
great Christian good, but one indispensable to the up
holding of a diffused Christianity throughout the land,"

WEAKNESS OF DISSENT. 197
he said, with what fluttering of the dove-cots around
one can imagine. We have already said that Dissent
in Scotland occupies an entirely different position from
Dissent in England, and Chalmers in all probability
was unaware of that additional burst of feeling. He
went on in a tone of judicial calm, stating the case
from grounds much unlike those which English Non
conformists are in the habit of hearing.
"We think it might be demonstrated that, were
the ministrations of your Established Church to be
done away, they would never be replaced by all the
zeal, energy, and talent of private adventurers. In
stead of the frequent parish church — that most
beauteous spectacle to a truly Christian heart, because
to him the richest in moral associations, with its tower
peeping forth from amidst the verdure of the trees in
which it is embosomed — there would be presented to
the eye of the traveller only rare and thinly-scattered
meeting-houses. The cities might indeed continue to
be supplied with regular preaching, but innumerable
villages and hamlets left dependent on a precarious
itinerancy would be speedily reduced to the condition of
a moral waste. . . . But we are far from regarding with
a jealous eye the zeal and exertions of other orthodox
religious bodies. In connexion with our Establishment
we wish ever to see an able, vigorous, and flourishing
dissenterism. The services of Dissenters are needed to
supplement the deficiencies and to correct and com
pensate for the vices of an Establishment, as far as that
Establishment has the misfortune to labour under the
evil of a lax and negligent ministration, a corrupt
and impure patronage. Such wholesome dissent is a
purifier, and, because a purifier, a strengthener of the

198 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Church. I am willing to profess everywhere, and upon
all occasions, my sense of the usefulness of such Dis
senters, and of the worth of their services."
Perhaps a moral relation so elevated and impartial,
so full of the true unity, so unlike the belligerent
attitude of two strongly opposed and mutually hostile
camps, is an ecclesiastical Utopia scarcely to be realized
while men continue as they are. But it was at least
a "noble ideal of that variety yet harmony, that one
great object pursued in many ways, that spiritual unity
beyond and above every divergence of opinion, which
ought to be the inspiration of all Christian teachers and
faithful servants of God and man.

CHAPTER VI.
It is with reluctance that we approach the great
controversy which rent Scotland and the Church in
two, and which is so complicated, so lengthened, and so
full of names and things which have fallen out of
recollection even in Scotland — and out of Scotland are
always difficult to understand — that the task of explain
ing and setting it forth to the general reader is a very
difficult one. The public interest which was largely
called out by the conclusion of that controversy, one of
the most startling and the most picturesque historical
events that have happened in our age, has long ago
dropped, and the monotony of commonplace life and
routine has fallen with the course of half a century
upon the romance and the heroism of the Disruption.
That heroism indeed has become dim even in the success
which made it less of a catastrophe than a triumph
for those most involved; while all manner of after
considerations have tempered the enthusiasm which at
the moment carried the sympathy of all spectators with
the astonishing romance of a renunciation unparalleled
in modern times. The effect produced in England in
1662 by the Act of Uniformity was even more great ; but
it was accomplished piece-meal, and not with the union

200 THOMAS CHALMERS.
and completeness, impressive to the senses as well as the
mind, of the later event. We must now endeavour to
give as brief a summary as possible of the condition of
the Scotch Church from 1840 to the great climax of
the agitation in 1843, the constitutional principles
involved, and the reasons which actuated some half of
its ministers to withdraw solemnly, shaking the dust
from their feet, from what they considered its desecrated
and outraged sanctuary.
The principle which, as we have just said, Chalmers
had proclaimed at the end of his lecture upon Church
Establishment, as the distinction and the pride of
Scotland, the fact that its Church recognized no head
but Christ, that " the King could not, the King dared
not" enter its sacred enclosure with any power or
authority there, was the principle upon which its entire
ecclesiastical system was built. The Lord High
Commissioner, as he is called, the Queen's represent
ative, sits in the highest council of the Church, the
General Assembly, still, as he has done since the
Revolution of 1688, but he is a mere pageant, taking
no part, having no word in the matter — a symbol of
State, representing the fact that the Church has its
special approbation and favour, but no more. The wildest
imagination has never originated so mad an idea as
that this functionary should interfere in the business or
presume to express an opinion even upon the proceed
ings of the " Right Reverend and Right Honourable "
representatives and rulers of the Church, who sit there
in their parliament. In the deepest depths of the
reign of the " Moderates," as well as in the times when
what is now the Free Church was supreme, such an
impossible proceeding would have been regarded with

ECCLESIASTICAL FREEDOM. 201
the same feeling ; such an interference never has been,
and never could for a moment be permitted to be.
This fact will perhaps, better than anything else, explain
the position to the reader unacquainted with the subject.
In England, the secular authority is the final judge in
ecclesiastical matters, and the Anglican hierarchy has
never claimed to rule in its own sphere with the in
dependence claimed by the Presbyterian: but that
independence has always been one of the most precious
possessions of the Church of Scotland, sealed and
secured by jealous stipulations ever since the union
of the two crowns. It is, we believe, the first act
demanded of every British Sovereign, after he or she
has taken the Coronation oaths, to swear to maintain
inviolate the independence and privileges of the Church
of Scotland ; and there has never been, so far as we are
aware, any doubt in respect to these privilege*, so far
as principle is concerned. That of unfettered action
within her own sphere, of power to make her own laws,
to rule her own members, to pull down and to set
up according to the ancient laws and traditions within
her own boundaries, has never ceased to be her ideal
and her claim.
1 There has been one hindrance and one alone upon
this freedom, and that was the institution (or rather the
restoration) of Patronage, which dates from the time of
Queen Anne. The Revolution Settlement, upon which
the privileges of the Church of Scotland, which the
Sovereign swears to preserve, were founded, knows
nothing of this law. It was a piece of additional
legislation added when the waves of national disquiet
had fallen to make up for a little of the lost way which
the Crown and the State had endured in Scotland. We

202 THOMAS CHALMERS.
have already said that this law had been the cause of
every secession from the Church of Scotland, from the
time it was instituted. No breach of doctrine, no
change of ritual had affected the minds of the men who
had broken off from her authority. They had rebelled
against patronage, and against that alone. And the
Church herself, as she became more and more pervaded
by the great awakening and revivals of life, had in her
turn rebelled. During the eighteenth century there
had been great indifference on the subject throughout
Scotland. The reign of the party which is called " the
Moderates " was in full force — if such words can ever
be used of the slumbrous reign of routine which existed
in the Church. It was perhaps good for her outward
aspect ; for the minister who had been the laird's tutor,
and accustomed more or less to such society as was to
be had in his little circle, was more distinctly a member
of the rural aristocracy than the minister called by the
suffrages of the people, and more akin to them than
to the higher class ; but it was not good for her saving
strength as the guardian of an increasing and multiply
ing race. In the old quiet days the patron was largely
moved by influence, by friendship, by connexion, as
it was very natural he should be; and though a wise
and sensible man would no doubt endeavour to select
the best incumbent he could find, and to show a certain
regard for the good of the parish and the credit of the
Church, he was by no means compelled so to do. We
all know that sentimental pleas have always been not
only valid but laudable in the distribution of benefices.
Mr. Quiverful has a perennial claim upon the kindness
of a friend who has a living to bestow, and who can find
fault theoretically with the good feeling which assures

THE EFFECTS OF PATRONAGE. 203
the future of an early friend, a sympathetic teacher per
haps, in this natural and becoming way ? Such prefer
ments have always been common and are unquestioned
to this day in England. If the man does not suit the
parish, does not work it, is not popular in it, so much the
worse for the parish ; and even popular sentiment has
gone no further than this in the Church of England.
But in the Church of Scotland it was not so ; all her
forms conveyed a different idea and supported a different
principle. In the established and never altered method of
appointing a new clergyman to a vacant parish, the two
distinct jurisdictions were always brought clearly before
the world — the one active, the other passive. The patron
indeed took the first step by nominating an individual
either already in full orders, or a licentiate of the
Church, corresponding to the deacons' orders of England.
This was all he had to do. The Presbytery of the
county or district, consisting of all the ministers and
elders within its bounds, then took the matter in hand,
and held a meeting in the parish, according to Scotch
phraseology, " to moderate in a call " ; in other words, to
preside over the invitation of the people supposed to
be given on their own initiative to the presentee. In
by far the greater number of cases this invitation was
given with more or less unanimity, and the settlement
made by full consent of all parties involved. But in
a few cases this was not so ; the presentee was some
times offensive, sometimes so strongly disliked that no
pretence of assent could be procured from the people,
nothing indeed but protests more or less solemn. In
some few detached cases the parish rose in rebellion,
and the hated minister had been known to be put in
by force of arms, by a detachment from the nearest

204 THOMAS CHALMERS.
garrison, curious officers of religion. In such circum
stances it may be believed that the effect upon the
parish was not conducive to religious life or progress.
Those who were piously disposed made their laborious
way to other parish churches, or set up little con
venticles among themselves. The indifferent remained
indifferent, or threw off the bonds of religion altogether.
" A cauld day December blew,
A cauld kirk and in 't but few,
A caulder minister never spak,
They'll a' be warm or I gang back,"
was the picture presented by many rural churches and
the sentiment in many minds, brought up in all the
reverence for the Church and with every tradition in
favour of church-going, and the observance of all pious
decorums, if nothing more.
But when the warm tide of Evangelical life burst
into the Church of Scotland, this grievance, as was
natural, came at once into the foreground as a thing
insupportable. The Evangelical party, the Low Church,
as it has been called in England, has scarcely occu
pied the highest place there, even in its fullest tide of
influence. It is not the ideal of an Episcopal and
hierarchical Church ; it is always more or less a
rebellion, an innovation, a new thing, breaking down
the higher claims of Apostolical succession, making
light of ritual, offending many of the tastes and instincts
of the people. But in Scotland this again has not been
so. The ideal and the tradition of that Church have
all gone with the fervour, the zeal, the uncompro
mising doctrine, the indifference to form, and intense
pre-occupation with spiritual necessities, which are the
features of this party. "A cauld kirk" is the last

• EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE. 205
thing in the' world to please or to attach the people,
who are so much more apt to have opinions of their
own on such subjects than in other nations. The passion
of ritual has never taken root on Scotch soil — never
at least in modern times — but the passion of earnest
religious feeling, the warmth of that burning appeal,
"Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation,"
has been a universal charm, and has penetrated, as
nothing else could, into the heart of the country as the
highest manifestation of religion and its greatest office.
The Evangelical party possessed at the same time the
highest intellect of the Church, and the greatest gifts.
Such an orator as Chalmers, a man entirely after its
own heart, embodying at once the enthusiasm and the
practical character of its genius, patriotic above all
things, forming all his schemes and expending all his
powers for Scotland, was such a leader as few could
resist. The Moderates, who loved a quiet life, and the
cultivation of the milder virtues, fell back under his
influence, and that of the whole young living world of
power and feeling which he drew with him, into the
minority in the Church and in the world. They were
the High and dry, the Church and State men, the " cauld
kirk " unexpanding, unadva'ncing ; while the others were
the Highflyers, at once the new life and the represent
atives of the Covenant and the Reformation. All
Scotch tradition and distinctive principle thus went
with the Evangelical party.
And as has been said, the one great popular and
national grievance came at once into the foreground.
To a people as to a leader so profoundly attached to the
parochial system, and seeing in it not only the strong
hold of the past but the highest possibility of the future,

206 THOMAS CHALMERS.
the desecration and outrage of a forced settlement, the
introduction into the Church and manse, those strong
holds of influence, of a man detested by the parish and
refused by them, was intolerable. In 1834, when the
Evangelicals first began to get the upper hand, there
was passed by the General Assembly a law giving to
the heads of families in each parish a veto — that is, a
right by their dissent and protest properly expressed, to
stop the proceedings in the case of a distasteful minister,
and return to the patron his presentee, that he might
be replaced by another more acceptable. No idea of
interference with the patron's right was in this step, or
proposal to transfer the power of appointment to another.
It was not even, we believe, ever alleged to have been
used wantonly, or without sufficient reason, and the
patron retained the full right to make a new present
ation. Nothing could seem more simple, more according
to all the principles of the Church, or less a hardship to
any side. It was, however, the cause of a vehement
and long-continued controversy. Those who supported
the veto were called the Non-Intrusion party ; the others,
who upheld the absolute rights of the patron, the In-
trusionists (in all the party names of this period of
strife, the Evangelical party had the best of it, as will
be seen, which is much in a popular movement). This
was the plain, practical matter and claim : that no man
should be forffed upon an unwilling parish as its minister
to whom there was already a well-founded aversion in
the mind of the people. It expanded a little after
wards in the natural course of agitation, when the one
side asserted, and the other, while denying, almost
allowed, that any aversion, however unfounded, was
enough to call forth this veto, and that the objectors,*

NON-INTRUSION. 207
who were not compelled to formulate their objection,
might shut out an excellent clergyman from a living
because he had red hair ! which was the reductio ad
absurdum of the question. The higher doctrinal state
ment involved the whole basis and standing-ground of
the Church. The Veto Act, in this point of view, was
the assertion of the right of the Church to govern itself
by its own laws and officers independent of the State,
and, still more solemn, of the Supreme Headship of
Christ, the only Head acknowledged by the Church of
Scotland, in Whose name and by Whose authority these
laws existed, and these officers exercised their various
faculties. This had been the position of the Church
throughout all its history. It was no new thing.
It must be added that in all this a careful separation
was made between things temporal and things spiritual.
The most pronounced Non-Intrusion champion never
asserted rights on the part of the people to secure the
stipend, manse, or other privileges of the legal presentee
for another, or indeed to take any steps to replace that
presentee with another in contradiction to the legal
rights of the patron. The " temporalities " were care
fully excluded from all part in the question. It was
the right of the patron to retain them, to bestow them
on whom he would. His presentee might enjoy the
stipend, live in the manse, if he so willed ; but he could
have the rank and office of minister of the parish only
by the agency of the Presbytery, the acknowledged
local court of the Church, and that agency could not
act contrary to the will or without the consent of the
people. Thus the position of the Church as supreme
in all sacred things was carefully guarded from inter
ference with rights and property in things not sacred.

208 THOMAS CHALMERS.
That this state of passive opposition between two
such powers could go on long without an actual en
counter was not to be expected. It is an unfortunate
peculiarity of such internecine wars that they are often
brought about, and carried out to the disaster and
almost ruin of the community in the midst of which
they are waged, by some agent of the most insignificant
kind. When a Church and country are thrown out of
gear for such a great figure as a Becket or a Wolsey,
there is something sufficient in the cause, some com
pensation for the loss ; but when the touch which
precipitates change and rends a world asunder is given
by some perfectly obscure hand, and for the advantage
of a trifling individual of no note or importance to any
one but his insignificant self, a certain exasperation
mingles with our regret. The whole fabric of the
Church of Scotland was thus shaken, and infinite dis
aster brought about, by the determination of a certain
Mr. Young, altogether unknown to fame, to get himself
put into possession of the parish of Auchterarder, in
Perthshire, to which in the year 1834 he was presented
by the Earl of Kinnoull. When in the ordinary course
of precedence the Presbytery met at Strathbogie to
preside over the signing of the "call," it was found that
in a parish containing three thousand souls, and out of
the number of three hundred male heads of families
entitled to take part in this formal invitation, two in
dividuals alone presented themselves to do so, while two
hundred and eighty-seven expressed their dissent. The
Presbytery, after conference with the people, adjourned
its meeting for a fortnight to allow time for further
consideration. At the adjourned meeting, however,
the determination of the parish remained unchanged.

FIRST COLLISION. 209
We hear nothing about Mr. Young, who he was or what,
or in what way the people had formed so invincible a
feeling against him ; he appears out of chaos in order
to give the fatal touch to the swiftly revolving wheel
of events, and then disappears again. The Presbytery's
embarrassed situation was happily relieved by an appeal
to the Synod of Perth and Stirling, the next higher
court, which one cannot but feel must have been a
great relief to the first reverend body brought face to
face with this responsibility. From the Synod it was
carried to the General Assembly, the supreme court of
the Church. The Assembly could do no more than re
transmit the matter to the Presbytery, directing it to
proceed in the matter according to the " Interim Act of
last Assembly " — that is, the Veto Act. The Presbytery,
carrying out the instructions of the highest authority
in the Church, proceeded again to the consideration of
the question as between the presentee and the parish.
The veto secured to them by this law having been
exercised by the people, and their opposition to the
presentee remaining as strong as ever, the Presbytery,
according to the law of the Church, rejected Mr.
Young, and invited the patron to choose another and
more acceptable person for the charge. "Against this
rejection the presentee entered an appeal to the Synod,
which he afterwards abandoned ; and it was with
mingled curiosity and alarm that the Church learned
that, in conjunction with the patron, he had raised an
action against the Presbytery before the Supreme Civil
Court, the Court of Session."
"As the action was originally laid, the Court was
asked to review the proceedings of the Presbytery solely

§10 THOMAS CHALMERS,
with the view of determining the destination of the
benefice, and declaring that the just and legal right to
the stipend still lay with the rejected presentee. The
case, however, had not been in Court more than a few
weeks when an ominous change was made upon the
whole character of the action. This change, technically
denominated ' an amendment of the libel,' was affected
by the introduction of new clauses, in which the Court
was asked to find and declare that the rejection of Mr.
Young, expressly on the ground of a veto by the
parishioners, was illegal, being contrary to statute, and
that the Presbytery was still bound under statutory
obligation to take Mr. Young on trial, and if found
qualified, to ordain him as minister of the parish."
Thus the battle was engaged. The Church, it may
be said, had taken the first step by meeting the popular
grievance with a new law, which, though embodying a
principle always held by the Church, was yet not a
part of its acknowledged constitution. It might be
just and right and necessary, but that was not the
question — it was a new thing : and whether the Church
had a right to enact such a law, and thus introduce a
new popular privilege hitherto not formulated by any
enactment, was open to discussion. The Court of Session
gave a decision against that right. It is impossible
for us in the limited space at our disposal to enter
into the long course of litigation and discussion that
followed. The question was finally carried to the
House of Lords, where it was decided not only that the
Church had no power to make a new law on the subject,
but that as a matter of fact she had no right to reject
any man presented by the legal patron, or to test or

THE LEGAL VIEW. 211
judge him in any particular except as to whether he
was qualified in "life, literature, and morals" for the
position of a clergyman. The process followed the
course we have seen in more recent cases in the Church
of England, where practices that have existed for ages
have, on sharp legal examination, been discovered to
have no foundation in actual law, and therefore to be
untenable; while other practices, which can be made.
out to have some hold upon an obscure legal stipulation,
are endowed with sudden force. The question in this
case was much more practically important than the
distinction between having candles unlighted upon the
altar, which was permitted, and having them lighted,
which was not. It went against the universal practice
of the Church — exercised so often that the precedent
itself might have entitled it to rank as law — a practice
supported by both parties in the Church, the leader
of the Moderate party having himself " strenuously
affirmed," as Dr. Hanna says, " that the Church regarded
qualification as including much more than learning,
moral character, and sound doctrine — as extending in
effect to the fitness of the presentees in all respects for
the particular situation to which they are appointed."
The decision of the House of Lords was therefore
entirely unexpected, and took Scotland by surprise. It
was such a decision as extended far beyond the immedi
ate question, and changed altogether the aspect, not
only of that question, but of the Church's position
altogether in a country where she had hitherto and
always held her own independence as complete and
supreme. It is not a question easily comprehensible in England,
where no such idea existed, and, save in a few extra-

212 THOMAS CHALMERS.
ordinary cases, where the right of popular election to a
living has been found to be attended by all the evils of
political elections in the most corrupt times, and to
occasion little less than a public scandal — the action .pf
a congregation in the choice of their spiritual instructor
has never been thought of. Nor, we presume, would it
be very intelligible in the only other country likely to
enter into this subject, in America, where the general
choice is the only principle upon which the selection of
clergymen to individual charges rests. Scotland stood
between the two, holding very strongly by its ideal of
a National Church with its (very modest) endowments
and privileges, yet with equal force to its own power of
regulating the appointments made for its benefit and
use. One subtle and important difference, however,
between the apparent indifference on this subject in
England, and the passion with which it was regarded
in Scotland, is stated by Dr. Chalmers in one of his
great speeches to consist in the fact that, whereas in
England admission into Holy Orders is given without
reference to any local position, in Scotland a minister is
ordained to the special church he is designed to occupy,
so that it might be pleaded that the Church was coerced
even in the very act of ordination by this new decision
of the law — an argument which may be stated for
what it is worth, perhaps not so great after examination
as at the first glance. We are tempted to quote, how
ever, his exposition of the "true theory of the connexion
between Church and State."
" When this alliance was first entered upon, the first
movement was made by the State. The overture came
from them, on what motive, whether of piety or

THE ECCLESIASTICAL VIEW. 213
patriotism or any other cause, it matters not ; if it was
such an overture as could be righteously, in that case
it might be most rejoicingly consented to by the Church,
who might bless God in orisons of the devoutest gratitude,
in that by the aid of the civil magistrate a way had
been opened up for the lessons of the gospel, for the
words and message of eternal life to all the population.
The boon on one side was a maintenance for the Church's
labourers, who might be distributed over the length and
breadth of the land, and act each as the herald of
salvation on his own assigned portion of the territory.
The return on the other side was an immense blessing
to the State, that best security, not for the temporal
and eternal happiness of individuals, only, but for the
moral and political and the economic well-being of every
community — a universal Christian education. Such, then,
is the precise footing on which the Church enters into
that alliance with the State, by which it becomes what
is termed a National Church, or an Established Church,
or a Religious National Establishment. It may have
subsisted for many ages as a Christian Church with all
its tenets and its usages, not as prescribed by human
authority, but as founded either on the Word of God
or on their own independent views of Christian ex
pediency, meaning by this their own views of what is
best for the good of imperishable souls. None of these
things were given up to the State at the time when the
Church entered into an alliance with it ; but one and
all of them remained as intact and inviolable after this
alliance as before it. She did not make over her
liberties to the State at the time when she entered into
fellowship with it in this new character of a National
Establishment, she only made over her services. . . ,

214 . THOMAS CHALMERS.
There are certain obligations incumbent upon her quasi
a Christian Church, and there are certain privileges
which belong to her quasi an Establishment. I hold it
to be quite an axiom, a first and elementary truth, that
we are never in any instance to depart from the obli
gations that lie upon a Christian Church for the sake
either of obtaining or perpetuating the privileges which
belong to us as an Established Church. But though
on the one hand we cannot either rescind or refrain from
enacting what we hold to be vital, ere we make a
voluntary withdrawal of ourselves from the State we
should make every effort to obtain its concurrence, and
that in order to avert the calamity of a disruption
betwixt us ; and this too in the face of every ungenerous
misinterpretation to which our desire of preserving the
connexion between the parties with all its advantages is
liable. But, meanwhile, till we make this out, we have
nothing for it but to administer our own affairs in con
formity with and under the guidance of our own statute-
book." That this view is a very reasonable and true one, in
theory, few people will deny ; nor will those who know
the Church of Scotland hesitate to allow that it has
always been her principle. Whether it is legitimate,
while thus claiming no absolute Divine authority for the
laws of the Church, but admitting the ecclesiastical
system to be more or less founded on "Christian
expediency," that Dr. Chalmers and his party should
have taken the very high ground of asserting the Head
ship of Christ to be involved, and His Divine authority
to be dishonoured by the compliances required of them,
it is perhaps more difficult to see. Yet that this was

ARBITRARY PROCEEDINGS. 215
the view taken up with the highest passion and enthusi
asm by a large part of the population of Scotland, both
clergy and people, there can be no reasonable doubt ;
nor that the acts of the legal party which followed,
against all precedent or tradition, were in every sense
of the word tyrannical and oppressive, a sort of law gone
mad, and running amuck among all the sentiments and
prepossessions most dear to the country thus arbitrarily
brought to bay.
The struggle which followed was twofold, accompanied
often by circumstances of the highest exasperation, and
an arbitrary exercise of authority on both sides, despotic
on the part of the law courts, defiant on that of the
Church, both perhaps having that strain of the absolute
and uncompromising which is a characteristic of Scots
men in every great period of excitement. The calmer
English temper would never, we believe, have come to
such a struggle. That conciliation and caution were
the first necessities in so critical and important a crisis,
ought to have been perceived on both sides ; the law
courts however, it seems to us, in initiating a course of
procedure quite beyond all previous rule and precedent,
were most to blame. But the hurry of events altogether
unforeseen, and that curious heat and fluster of quickly-
rising excitement which seems now and then on the
eve of disaster to seize upon the minds of men, as may
be traced throughout history in almost every great
national^ misadventure, had now set in, carrying with
it the precautions, the hesitations, the dictates of good
sense and common judgment.
Two other presentations of a similar kind to that at
Auchterarder, Lethendy, and Marnoch, took place in
succession with the same results. In both cases the

216 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Presbytery, brought to pause by finding the appointment
almost unanimously opposed by the respective parishes,
were ordered by the Court of Session to proceed to the
ordination of the repulsed presentees ; and in one, that of
Marnoch, they gave way to the unseemly and unjustifiable
command, and carried out the orders of the law courts
in disobedience to and defiance of their own spiritual
authorities. This case had a peculiarity which made
the confusion and chaos into which affairs were drifting
especially remarkable. Marnoch was a Crown living,
and the Government had signified to the representatives
of the Church that it would not press any appointment
made by it, against the will of the parish. The patron,
therefore, was quite willing to reconsider the matter,
and seek another candidate whom the people would
accept. But the presentee, to whom neither the dislike
and disapprobation of the parishioners (fatal circum
stances for the efficiency of an after career), nor the
danger of the Church, nor the risk of increasing that
danger by the most exasperating circumstances, were
evidently of any importance, pressed his legal warrant
in despite even of those who gave it, and demanded his
miserable pound of flesh in defiance of every generous
argument. The blood of the spectator boils to think
that it was for nothing that could be supposed to be
an advantage to the public in any way, even a vindica
tion of a principle, but solely for the aggrandizement of
a few insignificant individuals that the enormous
responsibility of breaking the Church asunder, and
deeply injuring the country, should have thus been
taken. How cheap a thing for Scotland to have bought
up these paltry candidates and endowed them with
income enough to have satisfied their wildest desires,

NEW FEATURES. 217
rather than permit so great a catastrophe to have been
brought about by their means ! If the final result was
one of the most remarkable and picturesque events of
the century, and one, too, of which no patriotic Scots
man, however he may disapprove or even condemn,
can help being proud, the first moving cause was
contemptible beyond measure, and worth nothing but
scorn and wonder on the part of all high-minded men.
The matter, however, was curiously enlarged and
intensified, when an entire Presbytery (eight ministers
in all, there being a minority who took no part in the
proceedings) took a step so revolutionary, laying them
selves open to the highest penalties of the Church,
which, after some delay and many attempts to bring
them to a sense of their dereliction from duty, were
finally imposed upon them. They were solemnly de
posed from their sacred offices by the General Assembly,
which they had disobeyed and defied, in its session of
1841. By this time, however, the old Moderate party
in the Church, "her Majesty's opposition," so to speak,
which had hitherto agreed in maintaining more or less
the Church's independence, and had taken no marked
step to identify itself with any arbitrary and ecclesi
astically illegal proceedings, was touched by the sense
of party necessity and obligation, and by a protest
against this act of the Assembly, placed itself formally
on the other side, thus breaking the force of the stand
made for the privileges of the Church, and making it
apparent that even in the high places of that Church
there were two sides to the question. The deposed
Presbytery of Strathbogie, on the other hand, went
back to their homes unaffected by the sentence passed
upon them, in plain revolt to the sacred authority to

218 THOMAS CHALMERS.
which they had sworn obedience. They were able even'
to obtain an interdict from the Court of Session (also,
it need not be said, disregarded) against any other
clergyman who might be sent to preach or officiate in
their parishes. Chaos had come again, and the in
ternal government of the Church, helpless to prevent
such a systematic rebellion, was brought to a standstill
and thrown into complete disorganization. It was vain
to speak of independence, of privilege, of Church
government of any kind, while such an example of
bold insubordination could not be put down. And to
make matters worse, instead of helping to restore some
appearance of constitutional deference, the Moderate
party now publicly adopted the rebels, and went so far
as to send an address to Government, desiring of the
supreme authority that it would support the law, make
no concession, but coerce the majority of the Church
into submission to its fate.
During this time the most prolonged and endless
negotiations had been going on with the Government
of the day — first that of Lord Melbourne, afterwards
that of which Sir Robert Peel was head — to obtain
some measure by which the conflicting laws of Church
and State might be re-established each in its proper
sphere. The Government had hitherto been, if not
favourable, yet by no means unfavourable, to the ruling
party in the Scotch Church. The power and influence
of Dr. Chalmers as a great power in the country had
been perceived and acknowledged by both parties in
politics, and his advice had been asked and his opinion
taken on various subjects with the deference due to a
great authority. To the framing of the Veto Act the
Government had at least made no objection, if it did

ATTEMPTS AT NEGOTIATION. 219
not yield a tacit approval. It had sanctioned the
principle still more distinctly after the active troubles
began, by more or less pledging itself in the case of
Crown patronage to force no presentee upon an unwilling
parish (an act condemned by the Scotch lawyers as
unconstitutional). It was, therefore, with good hope of
some action on the part of Government which should
make the position more possible, that Chalmers, the
acknowledged leader of the Church, and his colleagues
approached the Ministry. Something must, it was
evident, be done to meet the emergency. The Church
could not go calmly on with a portion of its officers
in full rebellion, and with the possibility of being met
at every step, whether in the granting of holy orders,
whether in the internal discipline of its own organization,
by an interdict forbidding any action. So far had this
already gone that a few guilty and disreputable ministers,
one charged with theft and another with drunkenness,
had already refused the jurisdiction of the Church, and
resorted to the defence of the Court of Session to
protect them against any inquiry into their conduct.
The situation had thus become intolerable, and some
outlet it was necessary to find. There could be,
perhaps, no question more embarrassing for a Govern
ment fully occupied with other imperial concerns, very
ignorant as to ecclesiastical questions, and with little
leisure to devote to any such problems. They were
glad to contribute so much as a conciliatory under
taking to yield to popular feeling so far as regarded
any appointment of their own, an undertaking which
no doubt would have been acquiesced in by a great
number of patrons, nobody in reason desiring to ex
asperate or force into violent measures the authorities

220 THOMAS CHALMERS.
of the Church. But already the current of events had
begun to acquire that velocity which no mild con
ciliatory measure could stop, and no Ministry was
prepared to take a step universally discountenanced
by every Government, and give to the Church a free
hand, as against the stipulations and control of the
State. To recognize that it was unfortunate and un
desirable that a Scotch parish should be driven out of
all comfort and self-command by the imposition upon
it of a minister it hated, was one thing ; but to support
the liberum arbitrium of a Church Court against the
right of the individual to secure a living which had
been promised him, and of the courts of law to give
him possession of his rights, was quite another matter.
First one Minister and then another refused to move.
Then there stepped into the breach Lord Aberdeen, a
statesman of mild and peaceable views, who had the
advantage of understanding the subject, though not as
would appear of being able or willing to express himself
so clearly as to be distinctly understood by the Church
leaders, who at first put unlimited trust in him. We
can enter into this subject in only the briefest way,
at the risk of leaving but an imperfect impression on
the mind of the reader. It is too complicated, too long,
for full treatment in the space at our disposal, nor is it
likely that the reader of to-day could enter into its
complexities with anything like the keen and burning
interest which even in Scotland has now dropped, but
which once attended every detail of the controversy.
It is enough to say that the negotiations were carried
on from 1838, the year in which the Auchterarder case
was settled, until 1843, when the Government rejected
the Church's Claim of Rights, and the step to which

THE PROSPECT OF DISRUPTION. 221
the majority had by this time pledged themselves had
to be taken. This step, at first mentioned in the
discussion as a possibility which nobody seriously con
templated, a withdrawal from the support of the State,
or a withdrawal by the State of that support, is
mentioned for the first time in Chalmers' speech above
quoted as a danger which every effort must be made
to avert; but gradually, as the excitement grew and
the conflict went on, the expression he had used became
more and more a common word in men's mouths and
a prospect in their minds. "The calamity of a dis
ruption betwixt us," Chalmers said in the Assembly of
1839, meaning solely betwixt the Church and State,
not between the two parties in the Church. By 1841,
however, the sense of some great event impending had
proceeded so far that there was a proposal made by
several ministers, headed by Mr. Smith of Greenock,
that a formal demand should be made by the Church
either of complete independence or severance altogether
from the State, a proposition with which Chalmers
declared himself to be " quite in love," though anxious
to wait a little before offering such a trenchant pro
posal to the consideration of either party. One cannot
help feeling that such a demand could scarcely be
thought of by those who believed it likely to be
accepted, and that it was in fact more a threat than a
proposal. Indeed, this feeling seems to underlie much
of the discussion throughout. It would almost seem
as if the Church could not realize or imagine it possible
that the State could in the long run deny her claim,
or risk the extraordinary catastrophe of her withdrawal
from the long partnership. An attitude of this kind is
not unknown in private difficulties, when one person

222 THOMAS CHALMERS'.
proposes with a calmness born of a conviction of its
impossibility, a tragic separation to which he is deeply
persuaded the other will never consent, until suddenly,
in the course of mutual exasperation, that other
turns to bay and does consent, to the confusion,
yet angry or solemn acquiescence of its original pro
poser. It is impossible not to perceive something of
this in the attitude of the majority of the Church.
The impassible State raised many hopes, gave many
disappointments, yet could not, would not let the whole
clergy of Scotland go, and must at the last yield to
something that could be accepted as a standing-ground.
On the other hand, the State, cynical as every Govern
ment is compelled to be, was equally convinced that
the clergy of Scotland would not go, and that when a
man's eyes were fully (and with greater force the eyes
of a number of men) opened to the fact that all his
interests hung in the balance, and that his daily bread
was at stake, no theoretical " cause " would prove strong
enough to make him take the decisive step. On both
sides the conception of the other's purpose and power
was mistaken : neither could comprehend the possibility
of heroic and irredeemable action on the other part.
The compromise attempted by Lord Aberdeen pro
posed to enact that parishioners, discontented with a
presentee, should have the power of presenting distinct
objections against him to the Presbytery, upon the
validity of which they should be permitted to judge,
but that the mere fact that he was disliked or dis
approved, without solid and definite warrant — his want
of "acceptability" in short as a minister — should not
be allowed as a reason for his rejection. The Duke of
Argyle, on the other hand, originated a measure making

PROPOSED COMPROMISE. 223
the Veto Act, in even a form wider than the original,
a part of the British Constitution. The latter of these
proposals was impossible as an Act to be passed by
Parliament ; the former seemed to Chalmers and his
followers to beg the whole question, putting aside that
liberum arbitrium which, was the chief point in their
contention. Throughout the whole discussion, which we have
attempted to describe merely in its historical aspect,
Chalmers was the leading figure. It was he who con
ducted every new advance, who led on from step to
step. His opinion is asked and his advice taken almost
with the vigilant watch upon every change of his
countenance with which obedient ministers approach
an absolute Sovereign. Lord Aberdeen puts this posi
tion very strongly and simply in the letters addressed
by him to Chalmers on the construction of the proposed
Bill. He has endeavoured, he says, to convince the
deputation sent from Edinburgh to confer with him,
and consisting of an eminent clergyman and equally
well-known layman, of his "sincere desire to meet their
views " ; but he adds —
" After all, however, I am well aware that the success
of this measure will mainly depend on the reception
with which it may meet from yourself. I believe that
the peace of the Church is at this moment in your
hands'; for although from the accident of birth and
social position I have had the means of proposing this
measure to the Legislature, it will depend upon you
whether it is to receive life and efficacy."
In still more solemn, tones in an after letter, Lord

224 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Aberdeen writes again " to bring distinctly before you
the state and prospects of the Church of Scotland so
far as the Legislature is concerned, as well as respectfully
to represent to you the awful responsibility under which
you are about to be placed. I have now only to pray
that by an effort of moral courage you may save
the Establishment from the dangers by which it is
threatened." Nor does the tone of the members of
the Church and his fellow-leaders differ much from
this assumption. It is to Chalmers when they return
that their first report is made. It is he who furnishes
detailed instructions for the guidance of the various
embassies sent to London, for the Declaration of Rights
to be presented to Government, and for every successive
act in the struggle. Nor does he disclaim the over
whelming position attributed to him. " I feel the
responsibility of my position," he says, in his reply to
Lord Aberdeen. It will scarcely be necessary to point
out to the reader who has seen, so far as we have been
able to present it, the course of Chalmers' life, how
this position was produced. After his short but splendid
reign in Glasgow, which had made him the foremost
figure in the Church, he had been seated (for fifteen
years before the crisis came) at the very source and
fountain-head of influence as Professor of Divinity in
Edinburgh, the head-quarters of ecclesiastical interests.
Many of the younger ministers of the Church had
thus passed through his hands, and been subjected to
his impetuous and overwhelming influence. He had
himself asserted, as one of his chief reasons for leaving
Glasgow, even when only the comparatively insignificant
Chair of Moral Philosophy in St. Andrews was in
question, that no individual charge in the Church could

HIS GREAT POSITION. 225
be so important as the office of training and educating
the minds of its future clergy; and he had amply
carried out his own prevision in this respect. On the
other hand, he had been instrumental by his great
movement for Church Extension, though only partially
successful and much interrupted by the succeeding
great controversy, in adding many new ministers to
the number of the Church. We may add to this the
charm which his strong sense and practical genius
exercised over men of the world (to use the word in
its best sense), the many devout and strong-headed
men, not clerical-, who are in Scotland scarcely less
concerned in the management and development of the
Church than the ministers. He was the pride both
of the Church and the country, the greatest religious
orator of the day, bringing, as Scotland loves, his fame
to swell the national glory. Government and people
alike recognized his moral predominance. Notwithstand
ing the Presbyterian parity, which is the rule of his
Church, no Archbishop was ever more truly the Primate
of the great province which he swayed.
But perhaps such a position — in the midst, not of a
calm community pursuing its equal way, with so much
routine to balance its enthusiasm that an occasional
fiery impulse is a godsend : but of an agitated and eager
population with a burning question flung into its
midst — is too great a responsibility for any man,
especially for one in whose character impetuosity had
so great a place. He had never been a patient man
in any of the circumstances of his life. He who had
vindicated his own boyish claims to respect in his first
small tutorship, and who had set St. Andrews by the ears
in vehement justification of his injured dignity at the

226 THOMAS CHALMERS.
very beginning of his career — he who fulminated against
the Glasgow dinner-parties, and found the crowds who
attended his path intolerable, was not less impetuous
in full maturity than in his fiery youth. If any
derogation from his personal independence set him
aflame, it may be imagined with how much stronger
force the attack upon the independence of the Church,
the ideal which he had so fondly cherished and so
proudly proclaimed, would move him. Sagacious as
he was, practical as he was, the art of compromise was
unfamiliar and uncongenial to him. We may think
now, looking back, that with such a measure as that of
Lord Aberdeen, the Church in the exercise of prudence
and patience, with use of all the means within its
power to stave off unpopular presentations in the mean
time, and in the future the hope of that entire abolition
of patronage which has since been attained, might
very well have made shift to live and hold her ground
attending better things. The Church of England has
been often content with a compromise much less in
her favour. But the Scot, so canny in the conventional
idea, so cautious in the common opinion, is by nature
absolute and unaccommodating in all matters of mind
and sentiment. He is more logical than his brother
on the other side of the- Tweed, less apt to find a
via media, or to wish to find it, and more apt to act
en masse with that momentum and accumulation of
velocity which attends a great general impulse. The
" unanimous hero nation," as Carlyle calls it, is apt
to go too far, with too great a swing of united move
ment. In politics the same effect has been recently
produced under our eyes. In religion the current is
still stronger. A leader with power such as that of

INCREASED DEMANDS. 227
Chalmers should have the faculty of holding back, of
putting on the drag ; but Chalmers was himself the
most striking example of the national characteristic.
When he delivered a great speech, it was not only his
audience whom he worked up to fever heat, but himself.
The foam flew from his mouth and the sparks from
his eyes, which in repose were almost dull, wrapped
in veils of abstraction and musing. At first some of
his fraternal critics in his own party considered him
too conservative, inventing the veto by way of saving
patronage : but long ere the matter had reached its
climax Chalmers had* thrown aside the veto. "I am
sickened to despair," he cried, with his accustomed
vehemence, though in the stillness of a letter, " that
we must foist in Non-Intrusion upon every occasion."
He flung all these smaller details to the winds. " Any
thing short of an unfettered spiritual power in the Church
would be fatal to its national establishment," he
replies to Lord Aberdeen. . " The integrity of our
jurisdiction," not the details by which that is carried
out, becomes his war-cry. " The cause of our spiritual
independence, or which is tantamount to this, the sacred
cause of the Headship of Christ." Thus his demand,
the necessity which possessed him, swelled and rose.
It is easy to say and to understand that to force upon
an unwilling community as its religious instructor a
man whom it disapproves and dislikes, is a reasonable
grievance, and very prejudicial to the cause, not only
of religion, but of -the good conduct and orderly life
which are of so much importance to the State — but
"the sacred cause of the Headship of Christ," as
manifested in the unfettered power of Presbyteries and
Assemblies, was a very different matter, and it is

228 THOMAS CHALMERS.
scarcely wonderful that the Government paused as
tonished before this plea. It is the claim of Rome,
one continually struggled against by all kings and
parliaments, subsisting only by the force of the strongest
and most prevailing of ancient institutions, and tempered
by every limitation which the ingenuity of statesmen
have been able to impose upon a power which asserts
itself to. hold the keys of eternal life and death. The
Church of Scotland made no such assertion, claimed
even no Divine authority for its special organization,
admitted Christian expediency as one of the foundations
for its distinctive peculiarities — yet made the same
claim as Rome.'
It would be perhaps too much to say that Chalmers
in the position which circumstances and his own genius
had procured him, as leader of the Church, lost his
head, to use a common expression; yet it is very
apparent that the whirl and impetus of a rising excite
ment swelled in him; making his demand not less but
more comprehensive and absolute, and bringing the
alternative — at first produced as a threat, then gradually
settling into an ultimatum, to frighten the other side
into compliance, again rising to the height of a necessity
and pledge of honour — more and more into view. In
the beginning of the year 1843 this alternative had
become the nearest and most pressing of all things, a
shadow that filled the whole landscape, and was in
every man's thoughts — That Government should either
grant the Church full independence, or sever altogether
her connexion with the State. But this was an im
possible way of putting it ; for the last thing the State
was likely to do — except grant that independence —
was of its own accord to sever the bond between

THE HEROIC WAY. 229
itself and the Church. The formula required to be
put in another way — That the Church should either
win complete independence, or give up the livings
and privileges of the Establishment. In that form it
became comprehensible and practical. If not free with
bread to eat and a roof to shelter her, than free without
either bread or roof, as she had been before, as she had
chosen many times to be. The heroic way has always
a charm, especially to simple minds and those more
conversant with the high motives of religion than with
the complications of the world : and the Scotch imagin
ation has always thrilled to the idea of the Church in
the wilderness, the worship on the hillside, which is
one of its most cherished traditions. The blood of the
Covenanters is in all our veins. There is an attraction
even in the very idea of sacrifice — a sacrifice great
enough to make the ears of all men tingle all over
the world, to penetrate the very universe with a high
beat and throb of emotion. It might be said, and was
said, that for Chalmers and his colleagues — men of the
highest influence and reputation, sure anywhere of a
high place, and of undiminished popular support — it
was an easy matter to give up their existing position
and means ; and no doubt there was a certain truth in
the statement. The real battle was fought out in
obscure country manses, where devout men of small
gifts, the humble parish priests to whom no glow of
eloquence or charm of influence had been given, able
only to look after their little flocks and preach their
modest sermons, saw before them a step into the
darkness, a destitution of all things, something more
doubtful still than the cave in the desert and the
raven's cake of bread : for the prophet had no astonished

230 THOMAS CHALMERS.
group of little children hanging on his skirts, no wistful
woman treading by his side the way through the
wilderness. What discussions, what consultations must
have arisen in the chill spring evenings in those country
manses between the minister and his wife, the man
and woman upon whom the anguish of this burden
lay 1 He whom it did not become to relinquish his
birthright, to sully his personal honour, to betray as
he thought his Lord, by any going back ; and she, as
careful of all these high principles as he, but with a
closer sense of all the details of renunciation, and with
the thought of the children tugging at both their hearts.
If the Government accepted the Claim of Rights, well:
but if not — then — Upon what troubled and anxious
scenes the early sunshine of May, beginning to linger
out in the sweetness of the long northern evening,
must have looked down.
On the other side there were jibes and jests and
provocations. The spectators were uneasy, expectant,
full of gathering excitement too. Who would go out ?
would any one go out ? Would there be forty of them ?
would there be a dozen ? The men in the clubs in
Princes Street and the young Briefless in the Parlia
ment House made bets upon the event. Would it end
in a great fiasco, and Homeric roar of laughter over the
collapse of so many heroics ? Edinburgh at least could
think of nothing else. The opposite party in the Church,
uneasy and alarmed, tried to comfort itself with pre
dictions, with calculations. Chalmers, of course, would
go — unless indeed, in the boundless skill of his mathe
matical genius, he found out still at the last moment
some exquisite reason to smooth the necessity away.
It was worth while to live at such a moment, to feel

WHAT WILL THEY DO? 231
the prick and thrill of that great question, the human
problem of what a man will do in a pressing emergency,
exposed to every curious looker-on, and to be solved
before their eyes — the most entertaining, the most
absorbing interest of humanity. That Government
would reject the Claim of Rights everybody was as
sured — short of a miracle ; but then there is in every
soul the profound certainty that a miracle is always
possible, whatever science may say. This question
was settled just before the meeting of the General
Assembly. The Government did reject the Claim of
Rights, and the question became more exciting, more
earnest than ever — What will they do ?
The Assembly met on the 18th of May, 1843, in the
midst of this atmosphere surcharged with the highest
excitement. By four o'clock in the morning eager
spectators had begun to fill the church in which its
deliberations were held, and the streets were crowded
with a surging mass of people. In the long hall of
Holyrood, where the preposterous portraits of imaginary
kings are still allowed to hang, the Lord High Com
missioner was holding his usual levie, when a little
accident took place ; a noise, and the portrait of King
' William III. fell from the wall opposite to the spot
where her Majesty's representative stood. " There
goes the Revolution Settlement," cried a voice tingling
over the crowd, which even there was full of the per
vading excitement. The accident was indeed signifi
cant enough to be remarked. In St. Andrews Church
all was expectation as the music of the approaching
procession, escorting the Lord High Commissioner, was
heard. That functionary came in, in his little state,
and the church filled with the black-coated mass of the

232 THOMAS CHALMERS;
clergy, while the multitude outside thronged to the
very steps impatient for the event. One can feel the
rustle yet hush of that crowd when, after a few minutes
of breathless expectation, occupied within by necessary
formalities, a rustle of movement was heard, and the
well-known white head and pale, impressive heavy
countenance of Chalmers became suddenly visible, with
the Moderator in his robes by his side, issuing from the
door : and behind him an endless line, figure after
figure, appearing like an army. The crowd held its
breath, then breaking into tumultuous cheers, opened a
narrow line in which three men could walk abreast, in
the ever-lengthening line: and soon that dark and
silent procession, a quarter of a mile long, wound on
between these living walls, recognized, shouted over,
cheered with the wild outcries of unrestrainable emotion
along the whole course of the way. More than four
hundred ministers walked in that line, leaving their
all in this world — their incomes, their positions, their
homes — behind them for ever.
" Ah, Freedom is a noble thing !
Freedom makes man to have liking.
Freedom all solace to man gives,
He lives at ease who freely lives.
Grief, sickness, poortith, want, are all
Summed up within the name of thrall."
This sentiment has always been dear to the mind of
Scotland. It overwhelmed the country with one great
sympathetic thrill, which carried every other interest
away. To Lord Jeffrey, sitting quiet in his library, a
sudden visitor broke in with the cry, " More than four
hundred of them are out ! " The little judge and
critic, no clerical, but with a heart open to every noble

THE 'RESIDUARIES.' 233
and generous emotion, sprang to his feet with an
answering shout, "I am proud of my country; there
is not another country upon earth where such a deed
could have been done."
Nobody has ever cared to inquire what went on in
the deserted place from which that crowd (nearly a
thousand altogether, for there were more than an equal
number of elders in the procession) went forth, nor
what was the sick sensation at the heart of the other
men who stood looking on aghast to see the Church
rent in two. There must have been many good and
honest men on that other side, as is proved by the
course of history, to whom the fact now accomplished,
which so long they had hoped and believed to be im
possible, must have conveyed the keenest pang. But
they are left out in all the narratives. With the Scotch
faculty of stamping a name upon a foe which is often
highly felicitous and effective, the remaining portion of
the Church were distinguished at once as " Residuaries,"
and thus consigned to a popular liinbo of ridicule and
jibe. The men who "went out" were the heroes of
universal sympathy and fame.
We are glad, this event once over, of which we can
not but feel both the cause and the result to be full of
matter for painful consideration, to find our Chalmers
again in his most characteristic development. It is
not to be supposed that such a born legislator and
administrator suffered this great convulsion to happen
without having made preparation for it — preparation
in which he was in his element, the right man in the
right place. He who in almost his first utterance in
the new place of meeting warned the country that he
bad in no' degree changed his mind on the subject of

234 THOMAS CHALMERS.
a National Church, and that though he had now to
count upon voluntary help for the sustenance of the
Church, he was in no way converted to the voluntary
principle, had not waited till now to organize that
voluntary help into a fund bearing all the character
of a great endowment. The Sustentation Fund of the
Free Church — the only thing which could have enabled
this great band of ministers, 470 in all, to keep their
order and organization and maintain the whole frame
work of an ecclesiastical establishment without a bank
or purse, after having thus suddenly deprived them
selves of all their means of subsistence, their homes
and places of worship — :was Chalmers' last great work.
The plan had been forming in his mind for some time
before, taking the place of that great effort for Church
Extension which he had entered into with so much
enthusiasm, but had not been able to carry to the end
he hoped. The plans which he had formed for that
remained a ready machinery for the new and more
pressing need. Before the new Free Church Assembly
immediately formed in Canonmills' Hall, the place to
which he led his four hundred when they left St.
Andrews Church — had been in existence for many days,
he was able to inform the excited and triumphant band
— triumphant in their loss, with a conviction of having
conquered and overcome, such as no material victory
could have given — that already this new and great
inheritance was provided for them. Six hundred and
eighty-seven associations had been formed, extending
over the whole country. The first-fruits of their con
tributions already amounted to £17,000, and he had,
supposing no advance to be made on this beginning,
the promise of a 'yearly revenue of £74,000. . Nothing

A SANGUINE UTOPIAN. 235
could better show the state of exultation and success,
the sense of a great and unlimited future before them,
than this speech.
"I doubt not," said Chalmers (addressing, not the
vast assembly of people, but the band of the " fathers
and brethren" who held the central place around him),
" I doubt not there are a good many here who heard
me predict such a result as that which I have this day
laid before you ; and I trust you will forgive me for
saying, though I am not a professor of physiognomy,
that when I chanced to lift my eyes from the paper
to the countenances of those who were before me, I
observed in them a good-natured leer of incredulity,
mixed up no doubt with a benignant complacency,
which they cast on the - statements and high-coloured
representations of a very sanguine Utopian. At the
hazard of being regarded as a Utopian this second time,
and at this new stage of our advance, I will make as
confident an avowal now as I did then, that if we only
make a proper use of the summer that is before us in
stirring up — I do not say the people of Scotland, but
that portion of them who are the friends of our pro
testing Church — if we do what we might and what we
ought, we will not only be able to repair the whole
Disruption, but will get landed in the great and glorious
work of Church Extension. For you will recollect that
though the application of the first portion of the funds
goes towards, I will not say the support of the ejected
ministers, but the upholding of the continuance of their
services, yet, after that is secured, and after the maxi
mum has been attained, the over and above sums will
go, not to the augmentation of ministerial income, but

236 THOMAS CHALMERS.
to the augmentation of ministerial services — not to the
increase of the salaries of the ministers, but to the
increase of their numbers ; and we shall not stop short,
I trust, in our glorious enterprise till, in the language
you have already heard, 'the light of the gospel be
carried to every cottage door within the limits of the
Scottish territory.' "
The principle of the great fund, called, as has been
said, with the usual felicity of nomenclature which
distinguished this agitation and conflict, the Susten-
tation Fund, was entirely that of an endowment. That
a minister should be dependent upon the gifts of his
special congregation, or in any respect their hired
servant, was obnoxious to every feeling of the race
and profession with which Chalmers had to. deal, as well
as with his own. In actual practice that system, we
presume, works well enough without bearing too hardly
upon the shoulders or the souls of Nonconformists
dependent upon the voluntary principle ; and yet in
the smaller Dissenting congregations, among the un
educated and vulgar, it does, we are told, often bear
hardly enough. The ministers of Scotland had no
experience of any such thing ; their means were often
small, but their position and modest dignity were
secure ; and to the greater part of them no humiliation
of poverty would have been so great as that which
should have compelled them to gather painfully their
own individual living from those who had hitherto been
in the position of their pupils and charges, the flock
which they were commissioned to feed. The fund
instituted by Chalmers gave at once from a Central
Board an allowance to each minister, " an equal dividend

THE SUSTENTATION FUND. 237
or stipend, not to exceed an amount to be fixed by
way of maximum," and thus secured their independence.
To each or any, his congregation might offer a sup
plementary fund, according to their sense of what was
fit ; but his daily bread came from an abstract source,
the best substitute for a formal endowment which could
have been invented — nay, an endowment in the best
sense of the word. The maximum was not great. It
was not, to begin with, much over £100 a year, though
it rose afterwards to £150; but neither are Scotch
endowments great, and so much as it was, it was at
least independent, sure, and free from any caprice of
popularity — an unspeakable advantage. The extra
ordinary success of the scheme was as great as its form
was admirable. We quote from a little biography of
Chalmers, written by Mr. James Dodds, a brief summary
of this financial triumph, which was his latest work.
"The number of ministers that came out in 1843
was about 500 : in 1868 the Free Church ministry
was 950.
" Within the same period — twenty-five years — there
have been erected 900 churches, 650 manses, 600
schools, three colleges, a noble assembly hall, and an
extensive and valuable library has been instituted.
" The central and local building funds have together
raised £1,605,000.
" The value. of property and other assets belonging to
the body is £2,000,000.
" The yearly revenue for all purposes, which in 1863
was £343,000, in 1868 was £421,000.
"The Sustentation Fund in particular, which in 1844
was £146,000, in 1868 was £265,600."

-238 THOMAS CHALMERS.
These numbers are amazing: they farm a budget
surpassing that of some States. " I doubt," says Dr.
Robert Buchanan, one of its chief administrators, " if
there is any other revenue in the kingdom, civil or
ecclesiastical, which comes in with such reliable regu
larity as our Free Church Sustentation Fund." It has
undergone changes, we believe, since Chalmers' day.
But Chalmers' plan has never failed to insure the high
advantage he conceived. It has established and en
dowed his Church. It is a precedent if any such painful
necessity should occur again. Whatever may be said
of his action before the event, whether we may blame
his impetuosity, his rashness, his absolutism, his failure
in patience and duty to that very ideal of a Church
which he held so high, here his praise and fame are
supreme. If he were in any way guilty of that great
breach which has rent Scotland in two, he did at last
take the burden manfully upon his shoulders, and do
for those who trusted in him his very best.
And after  ? This is a dreary question to ask after
almost every great crisis in life. The enthusiasm, the
zeal, the warmth of feeling roused by the unexampled
event of the Disruption were beyond description.
Perhaps everybody concerned was too conscious that it
was an unexampled event; but this consciousness in
itself of having done something greater than had ever
been known before, of having borne the most con
spicuous public testimony since the Reformation of trust
and faith — even in the weakness of human character, of
having left dismay and death behind — no doubt had a
share in keeping up the courage of the ministers who
had made that' sacrifice, during at least the first
troublous portion of their after career. But when the

THE RESULT 239
steady roll of events had gone on for a period of years,
what was there found for the elevation of the country
and the cure of all its evils in this step which cost so
much ? Little, very little, was fulfilled of that of which
they had dreamed. Aftsr many a jibe and jest at the
'' Residuaries," whom they had left astonied and cast
down like men who dream, on their triumphant exit, it
became apparent that they had not emptied or ruined
the old framework of the Kirk, which would have been
the only entire justification of the step they had taken.
Had they carried all with them, and left only a vacant
sanctuary behind, the sight of a unanimous Church
severing itself from the bonds of State control would
have been satisfactory to every ideal, and made no
schism. But this was what they did not do. The old
National Church, after a pause indeed ofconsternationand
weakness, slowly rose again from her ashes, proving her
truth after all by a new form of that everlasting pledge
that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church.
These were no gates of hell : they were far more danger
ous, they were the severed forces of true religion and
devotion ; but no more than the bands of evil did they
prevail. And the issue has been no glorious revolution,
but only the planting of another great Church by the
side of the old, not for the conversion of the home-
heathen or the spreading 'of Christian life among those
alien to it, but, at least in the first place, for rivalship
and contention, a struggle over the few sheep in the
wilderness, an internecine warfare. That also by this
time has quieted down, and the two Churches now exist
side by side — the National Establishment strong as
ever, the Free Church too, a majestic structure in its
kind, full of power and influence. They hold the same

240 THOMAS CHALMERS.
doctrines, they use the same books, they sign the same
creeds. The patronage which was the root of all dis
sensions has been swept away. No hateful summons of
the State sounds at the one door more than at the
other ; the only distinction between has been ex
tinguished. Why, then, do they stand still apart ? It
is a question difficult to answer. Because they have
drifted into channels more apart than at the first,
the National Church veering one way, the Free
another, in impulse and heart, some people say. But
every Church, like every human institution, has always
had two sides, two tendencies, and neither has yet
departed from the great standards round which both
cling. "Though we quit the Establishment," said
Chalmers, amid all the excitement of the Disruption,
" we go out on the Establishment principle ; we quit a
vitiated Establishment, but would rejoice in returning
to a pure one." His Church has never, so far as we
know, contradicted his declaration. Why, then, do these
two Churches stand apart ?
It is a question full of solemn and most important
meaning. We can only propound it as spectators of
a great imperfection : we cannot answer nor even
suggest a reply. The year now begun is the fiftieth
year since these things were. What a thing would it
be for Scotland, an act still more heroic because more
liable to misconstruction, and less capable of the
stimulus of high excitement and popular feeling, could
the jubilee of the Free Church be celebrated by a
reunion, and the deadly rent be healed !

CHAPTER VII.
There is no more sad or solemn thing in nature
than to see how often the acknowledged hand of
heaven, not only the award which is recognized as that
of fate, will " keep the word of promise to the ear, and
break it to the hope." Nothing can more clearly and
over again testify to this than the end of the life of
Chalmers. He was .permitted to see churches rising
over all the country, as he had dreamed and prayed
to see : but they were not the churches of his dream,
not the new homes to which a deserted and untaught
people were to be seduced and drawn by every wile
of Christian kindness and help. The churches were
built, but they were built in competition with the
existing churches to draw away from one to another the
respectable bands of the Scotch bourgeoisie, the God
fearing peasant population, church-goers from their
youth. If he recognized this at all in the quiet of
his own thoughts, there is no word to say ; certainly
he did not appear to think of it in the public utterances
of his enthusiasm, when his" vehement spirit and im
petuous nature flung themselves forth to meet the
emergency which was great enough to occupy every
faculty. Even at the moment he satisfied his visionary E

7

242 THOMAS CHALMERS.
soul by a sweep forward into the time when, all im
mediate wants supplied, the new Church should rush
forth, carrying all before her, into " the glorious field of
Church Extension." That far glance into a future
teeming with possibilities he permitted himself, and it
would seem to have satisfied him. And fortunately he
did not live long enough to realize the boundaries set
hard and fast, as in the oldest of establishments, which
formed themselves at once round the new organization
of which he was the soul and chief.
He lived only four years after the great event which
had filled with its controversies, its economics, and its
triumphs the latter part of his life. When he had set
the Sustentation Fund in full working order, he would
seem to have withdrawn more or less from the agi
tations of business into the formation of the New
College, of which he was at once appointed Principal.
Not that his familar countenance was withdrawn from
the high places of the Church, but a softened and
subdued mood became apparent in all he said and
did, a sort of gently stealing conviction that his work
was over, and no more conflict or championship to be
required of him. He had spoken before in his Diary
of the seventh decade of life as of the Sabbath of man's
days, the time of natural quietness and rest. This had
begun for him in anything but rest; but when the
immediate strain of the great crisis and catastrophe
was over, as soon as circumstances permitted he seems
to have sought the quietness which he had identified
with this period of life. And never was life more full
of honours, of popular recognition, of the homage of
a world which had long been taught that it could make
no mistake in any acknowledgment of the greatness of

HIS LAST SCHEME. 243
Chalmers. So far as this was concerned, he had indeed
nothing left to attain.
One new effort, however, remained for him to make.
Besides the work of his classes, immediately recon
stituted in a new Free Church College after his sever
ance from the old, the one piece of work into which
he threw himself with much of his old vehemence was
the mission in the West Port, a very poor and degraded
portion of Edinburgh, which he took in hand im
mediately after the Disruption, by way of resuming
practically the work which he had begun in Glasgow,
which he had meant to pursue on a large scale in his
scheme of Church Extension, and to which we are glad
to return as the dominant idea, in the midst of all
interruptions and delays, of his entire public life. " I
have determined," he wrote to a correspondent, " 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." He began the experi
ment with a delight and satisfaction which renewed
many plans and visions of old. He found another
name for the scheme, as he had already found so many
striking and popular names. It was henceforth the
Territorial Scheme, the local effort to be made from
door to door, from street to street, to draw the careless
people, who knew little of the gospel and nothing of
the pious customs of religious life, to the church and
school and helpful charities planted in their midst. He
could not now, alas ! as in the old masterful Glasgow

244 THOMAS CHALMERS.
way, take the poor and their provision upon his
shoulders and beat down poor-houses and poor-laws
and pauperism altogether out of the charmed parish,
substituting brotherly help and Christian laws instead,
with all the stern but kind restraints of constant super
vision; but to Christianize after all was the great
point, better even than to depauperize, and to his
fervent mind the one always more or less included the
other. It was the plan that had pleased his earliest
thought. Intrusion and non-intrusion, veto and interdict,
were hindrances in themselves hateful, though he had
flung his whole soul into them when the struggle stood
in the way of everything and had to be settled before
anything else could be done. "Who cares about the
Free Church," he cried indignantly, as soon as his hands
were free, " compared with the Christian good of the
people of Scotland ? " It was not his now to organize
that great and united assault upon the powers of dark
ness in their innermost dens, of which he had dreamed ;
but at least he could prove its possibility, as he had
proved the possibility of that other devout imagination
in Glasgow, and leave to all who came after him that
best of lessons — that what men had done, men might
again do. The district of which he took possession lay
in absolute misery and depravity, cared for by no man.
Its physical and moral condition were alike deplorable ;
one-fourth of the population were paupers on the poor-
roll, and one-fourth were beggars, thieves, or unfortunate
women. Drunkenness was almost universal, scarcely a
third of the .children were under any sort of instruction,
and barring a few Roman Catholics, over whom the
priests had still some hold, and a few stray intruders from
better regions dwelling among these children of Heth

The West port. 245
against their will, the mass of the people were entirely
beyond the reach of any religious influence. It was to
this mass of human corruption that the great orator
and legislator, sick of the commotion and the struggle,
jgladly turned his way. Once more his wonderful
powers of organization were called into effect. He got
up once more his "agency," humble citizens, chiefly of
the poorer classes themselves. He divided the ground
into "proportions," and began the work with all the
enthusiasm of early days. Impatient and impetuous
everywhere else, here he was patience itself, cheering
his fellow-workers in every discouragement, bidding
them never to despair.
This work was begun in 1843 : four years after,
in 1847, a church had been built, in which three
hundred sittings were at once let to the surrounding
families : and one hundred communicants from this once
depraved and hopeless district assembled at the. first
Communion Service held a little later : the school was
full, the parents paying the little school-fees cheerfully,
and the whole face of the district changed. "I have
got now the desire of my heart," Chalmers says, after
that first communion. "The church is finished, the
schools are flourishing, our ecclesiastical machinery is
about complete, and all in good working order. God
has indeed heard my prayer, and I would now lay down
my head in peace and die." " I wish to communicate
what to me is the most joyful event of my life," he
wrote to one of his confidential correspondents. "I
have been intent for thirty years on a territorial
experiment, and I have now to bless God for the
consummation of it." Five years after, when he had
been long gone to his reward, the minister of the West

246 THOMAS CHALMERS.
Port (Chalmers' Church, so called) had to report that
the new congregation thus picked out of the waters of
misery, was maintaining all its expenses by its own
offerings, the income of the district for religious pur
poses amounting to nearly £250 a year, besides
contributions amounting to £70 for other objects;
that the church was filled to overflowing, and "it is
not known that there is a single child of a family
resident within the West Port who is not at school."
This was the meaning and object of Thomas Chalmers'
life. He was not permitted — what great visionary ever
is ? — to fulfil it grandly, his own way. Moses does not
lead his bands over Jordan into the Land of Promise.
Had the prophet been given that triumph, who can say
what disappointments would have overwhelmed his
great soul in the accomplishment of its hope ? But he
had his glimpse from the mountain heights of that fair
land, and of that vague future which is always glorious
to human eyes as long as it is unattained. And
Chalmers, too, had his glimpse from Pisgah — his little
savage West Port purified and taught and cleansed
and made sacred to God ; better, who could doubt, for
him, than had he beheld his fresh and novel scheme
settled down into the commonplace, battled over by
combative philanthropists, lost in the rise and flow
of other thoughts and other ambitions. But it is
difficult to refrain from the thought — If he had been
faithful to his first inspiration and resisted that charm
of academic quiet which drew him away from Glasgow,
but did not suit him after] all when he tried it — if
he had been so happy as to secure support for his
grand scheme of Church Extension, when it filled all
his veins with the divine delirium of eager zeal and

PERPLEXITIES AND INDIGNATIONS. 247
enterprise — then there might have been no division,
no breach, but a United Church, aggressive as he would
have had it, assailing all the Powers of Darkness, beating
out by cheerful force of multitudinous armies, Sin and
Ignorance and Poverty and Discontent, the demons of
his highest hatred ! A devout imagination ! yet surely
one that some day will come true, all other means
failing, by this one means, which the Happy Warrior,
the Christian philosopher, thus proved and tried —
leaving a warrant and an example for other men to
tread in his steps.
But the ifs and thens are in a higher power— or
rather, if we were to express our inmost thought, are
never forced by that Divine Arbiter who has the issues
of death in His hand : but who compels no man, and no
body of men, to do well against their own will and
meaning and desire.
It is almost amusing, if we dare apply such a word
to a good man's prayers, to find in the record of his
private devotions a prayer to understand the will
of God " in regard to the right place and performances
of a female agency," betraying thus a perplexity which
must have been one time and another strongly
developed in the minds of many clergymen; and on
the other hand, to find him bursting forth in indignation
as to the reluctance of some of the ministers to en
courage his beloved "territorial" work, lest it should
carry off some members from their own churches.
"For the sake of the paltry few that would drop from
this or that man's congregation," he cries, " am I to let
the masses live in dirt and die in darkness ? " He was
impatient as of old with this and every petty thought,
but never impatient of the hesitations or stupidities

248 THOMAS CHALMERS.
of the poor, always willing to wait, to foster every
beginning, to break no bruised reed.
It is not much short of fifty years since Chalmers
died, and his generation has departed too, carrying
with them the personal impress of his aspect and
character which was so strong upon all with whom he
came in contact : and the materials for forming any new
and independent views are wanting : yet we trust some
impression of the inner man, with his weaknesses
as well as his greatness, with the formality of the
old middle-class Scotsman, and the vehemence of ardent
genius, curiously supplementing, inspiring, and clothing
each other, with his accent and flavour of intense nation
ality, and his big and generous soul, have been at least
indicated in this summary of his great and busy life.
It was not in his nature, nor was it happily the
custom of his time and nation, to unfold his domestic
life to the public, or open all the secret places of his being
to the inquisition of men. His private journals, his
prayers and meditations, were indeed published after
his death : but there is in these private musings, sacred
as they are, so much that is abstract, so little that
is individual, that, as in all the similar records of
that period and manners, very little is to be gleaned
either of the character of the thinker or indeed of
his personal way of contemplating the Divine subjects,
of which they are full. We do not pretend to know
whether the records of spiritual experience in our own
day will be found more individual or more interesting
when the next generation has them to know us by.
But there will probably be not so many of them,
nor will the pious soul seek to find pasture so con- '
sistently as was done fifty years ago among these often-

Spiritual experience. 249
arid wastes. The letters of spiritual communion — which
for a whole lifetime continue to call upon the reader
to take the very first step in the Christian life as if
no advance upon that were possible, and which after
thirty or forty years of full acceptance of the mystery of
faith still exhort both writer and reader to " Believe in
the Lord Jesus Christ," as if they had not been devoutly
doing so, as if that had not been the secret of their lives
all the time — are, it seems to us, singularly unprofitable
writings, notwithstanding that they have been so largely
received by the devout as the language of religion.
We have no profane meaning in saying so. It seems to
us that a man who had lived by that faith, and in the
light of constant communion with the Father of Spirits,
should have a thousand things to tell us of that sacred
intimacy, so real and all-pervading. But perhaps the
very sacredness of the intercourse which makes the soul
shy of its own deepest feelings, leads a man to take
refuge in a mode of expression, constantly repeated and
accepted by so many as the only language for such
experiences, which is indeed conventional beyond
description, and as little life-giving as any commonplace
utterance could be. On his last day on earth, Chalmers,
musing in his garden, softly walking like Isaac among
the flowers in evening quiet, was heard murmuring to
himself, " Father, my Heavenly Father." There is more
to ourselves in this murmur than in the many pages
of abstract piety which in the form of journals and
letters fill so great a part of the volumes which contain
the record of Ms life..
His domestic habits and tenor of existence are
kept also in much unintentional abstractness. He
had an excellent wife, congenial to him in every way, a

250 THOMAS CHALMERS.
woman who kept his path smooth and entered into his
plans and thoughts : and that is all we know of
her — everything, it is true, that is necessary, but
yet nothing at all. His family consisted entirely
of daughters, for whom he had a preference (as is said)
over sons — but neither do we know anything of them.
A glimpse of a grandchild, bearing in his life the part
that " Hugh Little John" took in that of Scott, affords
us a more pleasant prospect of that always beautiful
communion, the intercourse between an old man and a
child. And yet Chalmers scarcely lived to be, according
to that extension which in theory at least we now
make of life, an old man at all. He died at sixty-seven,
not even reaching that ancient limit of existence which
we now see so many overpass while retaining all their
vigour : yet he had recognized himself for many years
before as au old man, though there are no signs that his
eyes were dim or his natural force abated. Towards the
end of his life, however, we find a few details, specially in
his last visit to his native home at Anstruther, which
may be worth quoting. He wandered about there in his
old haunts, recalling everything, reminding some of his
old school-fellows, friends of fifty years or more, humble
villagers that had never left their native boundaries,
of ancient incidents of the far-away past. "You
were the first man that ever gave me a notion of
the form of the earth," he said to one. "I thought
it was round like a shilling till you told me it was
round like a marble." Another, who like himself was
marked with small-pox, he congratulated on their
mutual advantage over " folks with finer faces." " Theirs
have been aye getting the waur, but ours have been
aye getting the better of the wear." But the prettiest

A BOYISH LOVE STORY. 251
incident of all is one of a sentimental kind, also not
unlike an incident in Sir Walter's life. Tom Chalmers,
in his schooldays, a big, uncouth boy, had been much
smitten in his boyish chaotic soul by the daily appari
tion of a little maiden riding in on her pony from her
father's house in the country to homely Anster for
lessons. Whether the bashful schoolboy ever reached so
far as to speak to this vision of youth and loveliness we
are not told. We presume that she was a Miss Ramsay
of Barnsmuir, and therefore above the level of John
Chalmers* son, but her road would- lie past his house
daily. The yotmg lady grew up and married, and there is
no sign that they ever met. But when he was an old
and a great man, sixty-five, and one of the most notable
personages in the country, he had a meeting with
a younger sister of this little lady of his dreams. She
herself was by this time dead ; but he asked to hear
everything about her, both her life and dying. ' At last
he inquired whether there was any portrait of her in
the house. The lady took him to a room in which a
little profile, one of those black silhouettes so common
in those days, hung upon the wall, when the following
exceedingly quaint incident, full of clumsy but touching
tenderness, took place —
" He placed himself before it, gazed on it with intense
earnestness, took down the picture, took out his
card, and by two wafers fixed it firmly on the back of
the portrait, exactly opposite to the face. Having re
placed the likeness, he stood before it and burst into a
flood of tears, accompanied by the warmest expressions
of attachment. After leaving the house he sauntered in
silence round the garden, buried in old recollections,

252 Thomas chalmers.
heaving a sigh occasionally and muttering to himself,
' More than forty years ago.' "
What was the queer meaning in the old man's
mind, of that card placed behind the little dark shadow
of his little love's face, who can tell ? A kind of
visionary appropriation of her and her youthful image
amid the wilderness before and after of the unknown 1
His son-in-law supplies, as if unwillingly, some little
touches of his personal appearance and habits towards
the end. After his early studies in the morning, which
he kept up, spending some hours every day in writing,
" he 'came forth beaming and buoyant with a step
springing as that of childhood, and a spirit overflowing
with benignity. If his grandson or any of the younger
members of the family were alone in the breakfast-
room, a broad and hearty ' Hurro ! Hurro ! ' ringing
through the hall announced bis coming, and carried to
them his morning greeting." He never gave up the
native Scots, which had always hung upon his tongue
in accent and expression in the midst of his most
brilliant successes. Here is a statement, virtually the
same as that which has been so much commented on as
spoken by Carlyle, a congenial spirit.' "Eh, man" (it
was his Tommy who was addressed), " if a' the gowks in
the world were brought together, they would fill a great
inuckle house." The bitterness goes out of the senti
ment as thus expressed, if there was any bitterness in it.
His remark on Carlyle, by the way, is worth preserving
in its sagacious simplicity. They had met in London,
and recognized each other at once, as like draws to like.
" It is a most interesting phenomenon to me, Carlyle's
state of mind. The lad" (this was in 1845) "looking

HIS OPINIONS OF CHARACTER. 253
with a most graphic and intelligent eye on the
peculiarities of Calvinism, having a sort of regard for
them too, and yet  " His opinion of other great
persons further back in the world's history is highly char
acteristic too. "I like Isaac," he said, "there was a
great mildness about him; it is very picturesque, his
going forth to meditate in the evening. Jacob's early life
is most distasteful to me ; he was the sneck-drawer
and Esau was the snool about the pottage. But how
impressive his interview with Pharaoh and his closing
scene ! There was great chivalry no doubt in David's
pouring out the water before the Lord, the chivalry of
the middle ages in the antique Jewish way of it. I
cannot say I altogether sympathize with it. I would
e'en hae ta'en a willy waucht of the water. I like
everything that marks the identity of human nature. I
am sure that judgment of Solomon's would make a
great stir among the women : tongues would not be
idle in Jerusalem."
Chalmers returned from a course of visits in England
on a Friday in May, 1847. The Assembly was sitting,
and he was to read a report, not then finished, on the
Monday, before that body. He was tired next day and
did not get up, but saw and talked to his friends,
holding with one of them a remarkable conversation,
which from the lips of a Calvinist, a Predestinarian,
and Necessitarian — dreadful names in our days, and
supposed to mean dreadful things — may be a revelation
to some readers. Chalmers breathed neither fire nor
flame on these subjects. He would not have any
limitation of the Atonement. He thought that when
Scripture said that Christ died for the world, it was
most likely that it meant that and nothing else. He

254 THOMAS CHALMERS.
"did not like the explanation," that what it meant
was Gentiles as well as Jews. " There is one text that
puts that explanation entirely aside," he said ; " God
commandeth all men everywhere to repent." " In the
offer of the gospel we must put no limitation what
ever," and he ended one of the last of his religious
utterances on earth with these striking words —
"Human beings," continued Dr. Chalmers, "have
the most strange way of keeping their accounts ; they
have one way of keeping their accounts with the world,
and another way of keeping their accounts with
heaven. In relation to the world you will find men
often open, generous, and unsuspicious ; but then they
keep their accounts with heaven in the most suspicious
and niggardly manner — in a manner with which I can
have no sympathy, continually striving against and
fighting with the goodness and sincerity of God, and
will not take God at His word."
The next day he was unusually well and full of
brightness. " I am fond," he said, " of the Sabbath. Hail,
sacred Sabbath morn ! " and, as has been said, he was
heard murmuring " Father ! " to himself as he took his
meditative walk about the garden before the evening
fell. He had gone to church in the afternoon, and
ailed nothing, body or mind. Immediately after evening
prayers he withdrew, bidding his family remember that
they must be early to-morrow, and waved his hand
saying, " A general good-night." Next morning a note
came early for him, but no answer was received when
his servant knocked at his door. He was thought to
be asleep, and was left in quiet till another com-

HIS END. 255
munication arrived of a more urgent character. Then
some one went into the room, spoke without receiving
any reply, and finally opened the shutters to admit
the light. " He sat there half-erect, his head reclining
quietly on the pillow — the expression of his coun
tenance that of fixed and majestic repose. He had been
dead for hours."
Thus peacefully, nobly, and quietly this great servant.
of God, with all his impetuosities calmed into rest,
was released from the life burden. A more beautiful
ending no man could desire. The chariots of Israel
had already been waiting when he spoke with his
Heavenly Father in the garden ; and for him there had
been no further need for trial or for pain.

THE END.

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Richard Clay h Sons, Limited,
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