Thomas Chalmers

Thomas Chalmers (March 17, 1780 - May 31, 1847), Scottish divine, was born at Anstruther in Fife.

At the age of eleven he was entered as a student at St Andrews, where he devoted himself almost exclusively to mathematics. In January 1790 he was licensed as a preacher of the Gospel by the St Andrews presbytery. In May 1803, after attending further courses of lectures in Edinburgh, and acting as assistant to the professor of mathematics at St Andrews, he was ordained as minister of Kilmany, about 9 miles from the university town, where he continued to lecture.

His mathematical lectures roused so much enthusiasm that they were discontinued by order of the authorities, who disliked the disturbance of the university routine which they involved. Chalmers then opened mathematical classes on his own account which attracted many students; at the same time he delivered a course of lectures on chemistry, and ministered to his parish at Kilmany. In 1805 he became a candidate for the vacant professorship of mathematics at Edinburgh, but was unsuccessful. In 1808 he published an Inquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources, a contribution to the discussion created by Bonaparte's commercial policy. Domestic bereavements and a severe illness then turned his thoughts in another direction.

At his own request the article on Christianity was assigned to him in Dr Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, and in studying the credentials of Christianity he received a new impression of its contents. His journal and letters show how he was led from a sustained effort to attain the morality of the Gospel to a profound spiritual revolution. After this his ministry was marked by a zeal which made it famous. The separate publication of his article in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, and contributions to the Edinburgh Christian Instructor and the Eclectic Review, enhanced his reputation as an author. In 1815 he became minister of the Tron Church, Glasgow, in spite of determined opposition to him in the town council on the ground of his evangelical teaching. From Glasgow his repute as a preacher spread throughout the United Kingdom. A series of sermons on the relation between the discoveries of astronomy and the Christian revelation was published in January 1817, and within a year nine editions and 20,000 copies were in circulation. When he visited London Wilberforce wrote, "all the world is wild about Dr Chalmers."

In Glasgow Chalmers made one of his greatest contributions to the life of his own time by his experiments in parochial organization. His parish contained about 11,000 persons, and of these about one-third were unconnected with any church. He diagnosed this evil as being due to the absence of personal influence, spiritual oversight, and the want of parochial organizations which had not kept pace in the city, as they had done in rural parishes, with the growing population. He declared that twenty new churches, with parishes, should be erected in Glasgow, and he set to work to revivify, remodel and extend the old parochial economy of Scotland. The town council consented to build one new church, attaching to it a parish of 10,000 persons, mostly weavers, labourers and factory workers, and this church was offered to Dr Chalmers that he might have a fair opportunity of testing his system.

In September 1819 he became minister of the church and parish of St John, where of 2000 families more than 800 had no connection with any Christian church. He first addressed himself to providing schools for the children. Two school-houses with four endowed teachers were established, where 700 children were taught at the moderate fees of 2 and 3 shillings per quarter. Between 40 and 50 local Sabbath schools were opened, where more than 1000 children were taught the elements of secular and religious education. The parish was divided into 25 districts embracing from 60 to 100 families, over each of which an elder and a deacon were placed, the former taking oversight of their spiritual, the latter of their physical needs. Chalmers was the mainspring of the whole system, not merely superintending the visitation, but personally visiting all the families, and holding evening meetings, when he addressed those whom he had visited. This parochial machinery enabled him to make a singularly successful experiment in dealing with the problem of poverty. At this time there were not more than 20 parishes north of the Forth and Clyde where there was a compulsory assessment for the poor, but the English method of assessment was rapidly spreading. Chalmers believed that compulsory assessment ended by swelling the evil it was intended to mitigate, and that relief should be raised and administered by voluntary means. His critics replied that this was impossible in large cities. When he undertook the management of the parish of St John's, the poor of the parish cost the city £1400 per annum, and in four years, by the adoption of his method, the pauper expenditure was reduced to £280 per annum. The investigation of all new applications for relief was committed to the deacon of the district, and every effort was made to enable the poor to help themselves. When once the system was in operation it was found that a deacon, by spending an hour a week among the families committed to his charge, could keep himself acquainted with their character and condition.

In 1823, after eight years of work at high pressure, he was glad to accept the chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews, the seventh academic offer made to him during his eight years in Glasgow. In his lectures he excluded mental philosophy and included the whole sphere of moral obligation, dealing with mans duty to God and to his fellow-men in the light of Christian teaching. Many of his lectures are printed in the first and second volumes of his published works. In ethics he made contributions to the science in regard to the place and functions of volition and attention, the separate and underived character of the moral sentiments, and the distinction between the virtues of perfect and imperfect obligation. His lectures kindled the religious spirit among his students, and led some of them to devote themselves to missionary effort. In November 1828 he was transferred to the chair of theology in Edinburgh. He then introduced the practice of following the lecture with a viva voce examination on what had been delivered. He also introduced text-books, and came into stimulating contact with his people; perhaps no one has ever succeeded as he did by the use of these methods in communicating intellectual, moral and religious impulse to so many students.

These academic years were prolific also in a literature of various kinds. In 1826 he published a third volume of the Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, a continuation of work begun at St Johns, Glasgow. In 1832 he published a Political Economy, the chief purpose of which was to enforce the truth that the right economic condition of the masses is dependent on their right moral condition, that character is the parent of comfort, not vice versa. In 1833 appeared a treatise on The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man. In 1834 Dr Chalmers was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in the same year he became corresponding member of the Institute of France; in 1835 Oxford conferred on him the degree of D.C.L. In 1834 he became leader of the evangelical section of the Scottish Church in the General Assembly. He was appointed chairman of a committee for church extension, and in that capacity made a tour through a large part of Scotland, addressing presbyteries and holding public meetings. He also issued numerous appeals, with the result that in 1841, when he resigned his office as convener of the church extension committee, he was able to announce that in seven years upwards of 300,000 had been contributed, and 220 new churches had been built. His efforts to induce the Whig government to assist in this effort were unsuccessful.

In 1841 the movement which ended in the Disruption was rapidly culminating, and Dr Chalmers found himself at the head of the party which stood for the principle that no minister shall be intruded into any parish contrary to the will of the congregation. Cases of conflict between the church and the civil power arose in Auchterarder, Dunkeld and Marnoch; and when the courts made it clear that the church, in their opinion, held its temporalities on condition of rendering such obedience as the courts required, the church appealed to the government for relief. In January 1843 the government put a final and peremptory negative on the churchs claims for spiritual independence. On May 18, 1843 470 clergymen withdrew from, the general assembly and constituted themselves the Free Church of Scotland, with Dr Chalmers as moderator. He had prepared a sustentation fund scheme for the support of the seceding ministers, and this was at once put into successful operation. On May 20, 1847, immediately after his return from the House of Commons, where he had given evidence as to the refusal of sites for Free Churches by Scottish landowners, he was found dead in bed.

Dr Chalmers action throughout the Free Church controversy was so consistent in its application of Christian principle and so free from personal or party animus, that his writings are a valuable source for argument and illustration on the question. of Establishment. I have no veneration, he said to the royal commissioners in St Andrews, before either the voluntary or the non-intrusive controversies had arisen, for the Church of Scotland qua an establishment, but I have the utmost veneration for it qua an instrument of Christian good. He was transparent in character, chivalrous, kindly, firm, eloquent and sagacious; his purity of motive and unselfishness commanded absolute confidence; he had originality and initiative in dealing with new and difficult circumstances, and great aptitude for business details.

During a life of incessant activity Chalmers scarcely ever allowed a day to pass without its modicum of composition; at the most unseasonable times, and in the most unlikely places, he would occupy himself with literary work. His writings occupy more than 30 volumes. He would have stood higher as an author had he written less, or had he indulged less in that practice of reiteration into which he was constantly betrayed by his anxiety to impress his ideas upon others. As a political economist he was the first to unfold the connection that subsists between the degree of the fertility of the soil and the social condition of a community, the rapid manner in which capital is reproduced (see Mill's Political Economy, i. 94), and the general doctrine of a limit to all the modes by which national wealth may accumulate. He was the first also to advance that argument in favour of religious establishments which meets upon its own ground the doctrine of Adam Smith, that religion like other things should be left to the operation of the natural law of supply and demand. In the department of natural theology and the Christian evidences he ably advocated that which had fallen into deserved oblivion. In 1797 appeared his Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare Papers which were exhibited in Norfolk Street, followed by other tracts on the same subject. These contributions to the literature of Shakespeare are full of curious matter, but on the whole display a great waste of erudition, in seeking to show that papers which had been proved forgeries might nevertheless have been genuine.

Chalmers also took part in the Junius controversy, and in The Author of Junius Ascertained, from a Concatenation of Circumstances amounting to Moral Demonstration, Lond. 1817, 8vo, sought to fix the authorship of the celebrated letters on Hugh Boyd. In 1824 he published The Poetical Remains of some of the Scottish Kings, now first collected; and in the same year he edited and presented as a contribution to the Bannatyne Club Robene and Makyne and the Testament of Cresseid, by Robert Henryson. His political writings are equally numerous. Among them may be mentioned:

• Collection of Treaties between Great Britain and other Powers, Lond. 1790, 2 vols. 8vo
• Vindication of the Privileges of the People in respect to the Constitutional Right of Free Discussion, etc., Lond. 1796, 8vo, published anonymously
• A Chronological Account of Commerce and Coinage in Great Britain from the Restoration till 1800, Lond. 1810, 8vo
• Opinions of Eminent Lawyers on various points of English Jurisprudence, chiefly concerning the Colonies, Fisheries, and Commerce of Great Britain, Lond. 1814, 2 vols. 8vo
• Comparative Views of the State of Great Britain before and since the War, Lond. 1817, 8vo.

But Chalmers's greatest work is his Caledonia; which, however, he did not live to complete. The first volume appeared in 1807, and is introductory to the others. It is divided into four books, treating successively of the Roman, the Pictish, the Scottish and the Scoto-Saxon periods, from 80 to 1306 AD. In these we are presented, in a condensed form, with an account of the people, the language and the civil and ecclesiastical history, as well as the agricultural and commercial state of Scotland during the first thirteen centuries of our era. Unfortunately the chapters on the Roman period are entirely marred by the authors having accepted as genuine Bertram's forgery De Situ Britanniae; but otherwise his opinions on controverted topics are worthy of much respect, being founded on a labourious investigation of all the original authorities that were accessible to him.

The second volume, published in 1810, gives an account of the seven south-eastern counties of Scotland--Roxburgh, Berwick, Haddington, Edinburgh, Linlithgow, Peebles and Selkirk--each of them being treated of as regards name, situation and extent, natural objects, antiquities, establishment as shires, civil history, agriculture, manufactures and trade, and ecclesiastical history. In 1824, after an interval of fourteen years, the third volume appeared, giving, under the same headings, a description of the seven south-western counties--Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Wigtown, Ayr, Lanark, Renfrew and Dumbarton. In the preface to this volume the author states that the materials for the history of the central and northern counties were collected, and that he expected the work would be completed in two years, but this expectation was not destined to be realized. He had also been engaged on a history of Scottish poetry and a history of printing in Scotland. Each of them he thought likely to extend to two large quarto volumes, and on both he expended an unusual amount of enthusiasm and energy. He had also prepared for the press an elabourate history of the life and reign of David I. In his later researches he was assisted by his nephew James, son of Alexander Chalmers, writer in Elgin.

George Chalmers died in London on the 31st of May 1825. His valuable and extensive library he bequeathed to his nephew, at whose death in 1841 it was sold and dispersed. Chalmers was a member of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies of London, an honorary member of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland, and a member of other learned societies. In private life he was undoubtedly an amiable man, although the dogmatic tone that disfigures portions of his writings procured him many opponents. Among his avowed antagonists in literary warfare the most distinguished were Malone and Steevens, the Shakespeare editor; Mathias, the author of the Pursuits of Literature; Dr Jamieson, the Scottish lexicographer; Pinkerton, the historian; Dr Irving, the biographer of the Scottish poets; and Dr. Currie of Liverpool. But with all his failings in judgment Chalmers was a valuable writer. He uniformly had recourse to original sources of information; and he is entitled to great praise for his patriotic and self-sacrificing endeavours to illustrate the history, literature and antiquities of his native country.de:Thomas Chalmers