It could not have been said of Dr. Chalmers that they made him the keeper of the vineyards, but his own vineyard he had not kept. How like the Apostle he was in being jealous over himself with a godly jealousy will appear from such extracts from his journal as this: 'I live as if in exile from God, in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. Erred in levity with Mr. Duncan in our reading-room; more kind and hospitable to Mr. Dwight than formerly on a similar occasion; marvelling little of God when moving through His delicious air upon our ride, and in the midst of His unnumbered beauties. Oh that I could associate with everything the first great Cause of all things! Absolutely nothing of the serious or sacred in me when sitting among eighteen immortals in the evening. What an exclusion of religion from the world's companies! Give me wisdom and principle, O God. Oh! let me redeem the time, and give myself to the work of an entire and spiritual Christianity!'
Sometimes we find an entry in his journal: 'Fasted somewhat this day,'—so eager was he to leave no means of spiritual quickening unused. But still we find severe judgment against himself. 'Old things are not wholly passed away: the love of literature for itself, and the love of literary distinction, have not passed away. Let me love literature as one of those creatures of God which is not to be refused, but received with thanksgiving. Let me desire literary distinction, but let my desire for it be altogether that I may add to my Christian usefulness, and promote the glory of God; then, even without these, I would be a new creature. The impression of my defects is not such as to overwhelm me, but stimulate me.'
During his St. Andrews incumbency, Dr. Chalmers had been offered various offices, notably that of professor of moral philosophy in the University of London. To none of these offers did he accede; but when, on 31st October 1827, the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh unanimously elected him to fill the chair of theology in the university there, he gladly accepted the office, the more especially that it had been arranged that he was not to enter on his new duties till November 1828. It was a trial to him to part with the calm and quiet he had enjoyed at St. Andrews, and again plunge into a vast and bustling community like that from which he had escaped five years before, and which had left little more than 'the dazzling recollection of a feverish and troubled dream.' But theology was a higher department than moral philosophy, and Edinburgh was a centre of wider influence than St. Andrews. His course was clear; nevertheless, in his closing lectures, he assured his students that nothing in what was before him was fitted to displace them from his recollections; but, on the contrary, from his individual acquaintance with them all, he would ever regard his connection with them as a more tender relationship than he could hope to enjoy with the students of Edinburgh.
CHAPTER V
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY
1828-1843
It was but natural for Chalmers, in entering on his new duties as professor of divinity in the University of Edinburgh, to rally all his energies for a task so important—to be performed, too, in so commanding a sphere. The course of theology through which he had to conduct his students occupied three sessions, and for each consecutive winter it was necessary for him to produce a fresh set of lectures. Happily the subjects discussed in his first session were already familiar to him—natural theology and the evidences of Christianity. What was necessary for him in this session, was to expand, complete, and combine materials that, in a very limited measure, he had already used at St. Andrews.
A greater contrast can hardly be imagined than the divinity class-room under his predecessor and under himself. The last professor was a striking illustration of what the essential dulness and lifelessness of Moderatism could produce when matured and crowned by old age and infirmity. Two years before the appointment of Chalmers, a deputation of students, including the late Principal Cunningham and Dr. Wilson of Bombay, had waited on the professor, requesting him (but in vain) to provide a substitute, as his voice could not be heard. Naturally the attendance had fallen to a fraction, and utter lifelessness prevailed. With the appointment of Chalmers, an enthusiasm sprang up unprecedented in the history of the university. 'The introductory lecture,' says Dr. Hanna, 'was delivered amid rapturous applause, and, with scarcely any sensible abatement, the excitement of that first meeting was sustained throughout the whole of the succeeding session.' Besides the regular students of the church, a very large body of amateurs attended the course. From these the professor exacted no fee; but at the end of the session, through the Rev. Robert Morehead, an episcopalian clergyman, they asked his acceptance of a sum of money, and, in an elaborate address, expressed the delight and benefit with which they had listened to the course.
In subsequent years, Dr. Chalmers re-wrote his divinity lectures, and after his death these were published in two volumes, entitled, Institutes of Theology. Besides delivering his own lectures, it was his practice to comment on his textbooks,—Butler's Analogy, Paley's Evidences, and Hill's Lectures in Divinity, his notes on these now forming a separate volume of his Posthumous Works.
Most Calvinistic treatises on systematic theology start from the divine point of view, setting forth the nature of God; and, on the basis of His Sovereignty, explaining his relation to man. Chalmers preferred to start with the actual condition of man, the diseased and disorganised state into which he had fallen, and to rise from that to the provision which God had made for his recovery through Jesus Christ. It is not difficult to see what led him to prefer this order. In his course of moral philosophy, he had come to an abrupt and impassable barrier. Natural ethics gave abundant proof that man's moral nature was disordered, and that he had lost fellowship with God; but it threw no light on the awfully important questions how that nature was to be healed, and how that fellowship was to be restored. The answer to these questions, as Chalmers often insisted, must come from a higher source. It was tantalising to a teacher of moral philosophy to have to leave man in this predicament, and to be restrained from dwelling on the response of revealed theology to his eager questionings. And hence, when revealed theology became his theme, Chalmers was eager to set forth at once the point of junction between the two theologies, to show how the revealed took man up at the point where nature left him; in a word, to bring the remedy of revelation into connection with the disease of nature. If, in general, this order is more acceptable to Arminian than Calvinistic divines, this was not Chalmers's reason for preferring it. We have seen that the sovereignty, the all-sufficiency and universal operation of God, was the first theological truth that took a powerful hold of his mind, even before he became reconciled to evangelical doctrine. That hold it retained ever after. The root of Calvinism, or, we should rather say, of Paulinism and Augustinianism, was planted at the beginning in the very heart of his being.