Thomas Chalmers

by William Garden Blaikie

Preaching for the Hibernian Society, he had a beautiful passage on Irish character, which affected Mr. Canning to tears. 'The tartan,' he said, 'beats us all.' Mr. Wilberforce had brought Canning, along with Huskisson and Lord Binning to the chapel, where they found Lord Elgin, Lord Harrowby, and many others. In another chapel, on the same day, the crowd that had gathered in the street was so vast that even the preacher himself had great difficulty in getting admission. We know what a compliment it is, laudari a laudatis. It was about this time that he formed the acquaintance of the greatest pulpit orator of England, Robert Hall, who wrote thus to him, 'It would be difficult not to congratulate you on the unrivalled and unbounded popularity which attended you in the metropolis.... The attention which your sermons have excited is probably unequalled in modern literature.'

One might fill a whole volume with notices of his popularity, and of the remarkable triumphs of his eloquence. To many, the wonder was increased when they learned the circumstances in which his sermons were sometimes composed. On one occasion, while enjoying his holiday, word was brought to him of the sudden death of the Princess Charlotte, and of his being looked for in Glasgow to preach on the day of her funeral. This letter reached him on a Sunday, while he was preaching at Kilmany; posting on Monday from Kirkcaldy to Queensferry, he got a seat on the mail to Edinburgh; he arrived in Glasgow, after a night journey, between five and six on Tuesday morning, and next forenoon preached one of his most brilliant discourses. Wherever the coach stopped to change horses, he rushed into the inn, wrote a few sentences, then rushed out to continue his journey. And the sermon was not a mere appeal to feelings. A large part of it consisted of an elaborate plea for a larger provision for the spiritual necessities of great cities,—being the germ of that plan of church extension and parochial cultivation which was to form the great business of his life.

Twice every Sunday he usually filled his pulpit in the Tron Church; and when latterly, in St. John's, he had the Rev. Edward Irving as his assistant, the two supplied two pulpits—the parish church and a chapel of ease—while other engagements were often undertaken in various parts of the country. But the work of the pulpit could hardly be reckoned as the chief of Dr. Chalmers's labours. His regard for the old parochial economy of the Kirk of Scotland was a supreme feeling; he looked on every minister as having charge of the people of the parish, and held that it was his duty to watch over their spiritual condition. It was his sense of the infinite importance of this, if Christianity was to retain any hold on the people of our cities, that had made him such an enemy of pluralities, and that roused his intense opposition to the settlement of Dr. Duncan Macfarlane as minister of the High Church of Glasgow, while he retained the office of Principal of the University. He knew for certain that the result would be the almost total neglect of a parish of upwards of ten thousand souls.

The population of the Tron parish was between eleven and twelve thousand. Dr. Chalmers never devoted himself to the regular visitation of the extra-parochial families that formed, to a large extent, his ordinary congregation; where there was sickness or death, he would visit them, but not in ordinary circumstances. His concern was with the people of the parish. His first object was to ascertain their general condition, and for this purpose he determined on a house-to-house visitation. It was a Herculean task. He could but spend a few minutes in each house, give a kindly greeting, put a few questions, perhaps utter an earnest word of Christian counsel, and then invite the inmates to the place where an evening service would be held for the benefit of all. And on the whole it was a depressing task; for he found that a great proportion of the people had no seats in any place of worship, and were in deep ignorance on the high matters of faith and eternity. He had his plans of reformation in readiness, but these involved the enlistment and training of a large body of helpers. As a first step in this direction, on, 20th December 1816, he ordained a few younger men to the office of the eldership, calling on them very earnestly to eschew the example set by many elders around them, who attended only to things temporal, and to devote themselves, by household visitation and other means, to the superintendence of the spiritual interests of their districts. So earnestly was he devoted to the welfare of his parish, that sometimes, when his family were in the country, he would live in a humble room, at a rent of six shillings a week, in order to be near his work; at other times he would dine in the little vestry-room attached to his church.

Next, to meet the alarming ignorance of spiritual truth, he instituted a Sabbath Evening School Society, and got a few members of his congregation to work it. At the end of two years, upwards of two thousand children were under instruction by this means. 'Our meetings,' says one of the members, 'were very delightful. I never saw any set of men who were so animated by one spirit, and whose zeal was so steadily sustained. The Doctor was the life of the whole. He was ever most ready to receive a hint or suggestion from the youngest or most inexperienced member; and if any useful hint came from such a one, he was careful to give him the full merit of it, generally by his name. Although we had no set forms of teaching, we consulted over all the modes, that we might find the best.'

The outstanding peculiarity of these schools was that they were territorial. They were, in the first instance, at least, for the children of the parish, and for these alone. The children were gathered through the visitation of the Doctor's agents, the result being that, in this way, an immensely larger number got the benefit of Sabbath-school instruction than when a general system of schools prevailed, to which any one might go or not go as he was inclined.

At a later period, he entered on a more costly educational undertaking. In his Sunday schools, he found many children that could read in a way, but with such hesitation and difficulty as showed that reading was no pleasure to them, and that it was sure not to be practised as an ordinary habit. Glasgow was then very deficient in day schools. When he went to St. John's, he determined to remedy this defect, in so far as that parish was concerned. Setting the example himself by a £100 contribution, he soon obtained the necessary funds. 'Within two years from the commencement of his ministry, four efficient teachers, each endowed to the extent of £25 per annum, were educating 419 scholars; and, when he left Glasgow in 1823, other school buildings were in process of erection, capable of accommodating 374 additional pupils; so that the fruit of four years' labour was the leaving behind him the means and facilities for giving, at a very moderate rate, a superior education to no less than 693 children, out of a population of ten thousand souls.'

The management of the poor was, as we have seen, a subject which, even before he came to Glasgow, had begun to occupy his very earnest thoughts, and on which he had formed decided views. To some prevalent notions on the subject, especially in England, he entertained very strong objections, for he held that their tendency was to increase pauperism, so that the more money that was spent, the greater did the evil become. There were two beneficial influences in particular that a system of compulsory poor-rates was fitted to impair—the spirit of independence, and the readiness of friends and relatives to assist the poor. When it came to be understood that the poor had a legal claim to be supported from the rates, they would cease to make any exertion to be thrifty and independent, and their friends and relatives would cease to charge themselves with their maintenance. Dr. Chalmers was persuaded that, so long as these two beneficial influences remained in active operation, the poor might be maintained at a far less cost than would be possible under a scheme of compulsory rates. His plan was to fall back on the New Testament method—to have a body of deacons specially charged with the care of the poor; to assign to each deacon a certain limited proportion of the parish, instruct him to make very full inquiries into the case of every one applying for help, endeavour in every case where destitution was caused by want of work, to find work for the applicant; or where there were friends or relatives able to help, to draw on their resources before application should be made to the public fund. So long as he was minister of the Tron parish, there were insurmountable difficulties to carrying this plan into execution. But the creation of the new parish of St. John's altered the case. Dr. Chalmers was determined not to accept the appointment to that parish unless he should be allowed full liberty to carry out his plans for the maintenance of the poor. After a considerable amount of fighting, he at length got all the liberty he asked. The turmoil and worries to which he was exposed in contending with old opinions, old practices and prejudices of all sorts, were like to prostrate him. But as soon as this battle was over, another remained to be fought. He must prove, by practical demonstration, not only that his scheme was workable, but that in its effects it would be a great improvement on the other. He must undertake the management of all the poor in a parish of ten thousand souls—the poorest parish in the city. With this great undertaking he now proceeded to grapple.

What he undertook was, to relinquish all claim to the fund raised by assessment, and provide for the poor of St. John's parish through the church-door collections alone. It was arranged that the then actual inmates of the town's poorhouse, connected with the parish, would be maintained as before, but that no new cases would be sent there; all the new outdoor cases, and all the other cases of pauperism, were to be defrayed from the congregational fund. Hitherto the cost of the poor in the parish had been at the rate of £1400 per annum, whereas the collections amounted to only £480. Thus, though not at first, yet ultimately, St. John's Church would be responsible for an amount of pauperism that had hitherto cost £1400.

The unwearied visitation of the deacons produced highly beneficial results. Sometimes very appalling cases of distress were found to be wholly fabulous. A poor woman applied to a deacon to bury a grown-up daughter who had died that day. He refused until he had made a personal visit. This he did, but no such person could be found. Next day the woman renewed her application: a young man was sent by the deacon to verify the woman's statement; but she disappeared in the crowd. When the matter was stated to another deacon, he wondered whether the woman's husband, whom he had helped to bury six months before, were still alive. The two went in quest of the family, and found the buried husband and the dead daughter performing all the functions of life.