Thomas Chalmers

by William Garden Blaikie

But, from the eminently practical character of his mind, it was not his habit to put the higher doctrines of Calvinism in the forefront of his preaching, or even of his theology. Man must be dealt with as a responsible being; his responsibility must ever have its place beside God's sovereignty. It would be ruinous to handle either of these doctrines in such a manner as to destroy or even impair the force of the other. The combination of the two was one of the great objects of his theological teaching.

Chalmers's style of theological discussion was very unlike the common. It was not fashioned on the anvil of the schoolmen. There was a remarkable combination in it of the philosophical and the popular. His mind was deeply philosophical, delighting in first principles, and eager to concatenate truth, to establish comprehensive laws, to reconcile apparently conflicting doctrines, and to bring what seemed unreasonable into harmony with reason. But his style was so diffuse and flowing that he appeared to want the exactness and correctness of a philosophic mind. Moreover, he could not confine himself to the strictly intellectual aspects of theology; he could not but include its moral and practical aspects. In bringing out the practical bearings of doctrines, he was liable to become somewhat declamatory.

Another peculiarity was his fondness of illustration, the product, as it seemed, of the poetical rather than the philosophic faculty. The result was that, as a philosophic theologian, Chalmers hardly got justice. And since his day philosophic theology has passed into a quite different groove. He was just beginning to know something of German philosophy when he died. He was greatly interested in it, and had he survived, he would in all likelihood have given much of his attention to it. But he could only have known it at second hand, and any discussion of it in these circumstances must have been of but secondary weight. And now that the German standpoint has become so common, the theology of Dr. Chalmers, as well as that of his successor, Principal Cunningham, has fallen into the background. But it would not be easy to say how much is missed by even philosophical students when they give the go-by to his writings.

The academical and other honours conferred on him had more respect to his position as a preacher and a philanthropist than a professor of theology. In 1830 he was appointed one of her Majesty's chaplains for Scotland, the letter from Sir Robert Peel in which the announcement was made to him saying emphatically that the honour was conferred in consideration of his high character and eminent acquirements and services. At the Disruption, when he ceased to be a minister of the Established Church, he resigned this appointment. It was but the other day that it transpired that her Majesty wished him to continue to hold it. But such was his conscientiousness that, though the salary was placed at his credit by the Queen's Remembrancer till his death in 1847, no part of the salary was ever drawn either by him or his family. In 1834 he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Institute of France, and in the following year he received the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. Such honours as these last were without a parallel in the case of any Presbyterian minister. About the same time he was elected a Fellow, and thereafter a vice-president, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Among other honours, he was asked by the Bridgewater Trustees to write one of their eight treatises on natural theology, the subject assigned to him being 'The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.' This essay was afterwards merged in his work on Natural Theology. In his visits to Oxford and Cambridge he received almost unbounded attention from the most distinguished men in both universities, and in his intercourse with them he had much enjoyment. At Cambridge he could not restrain his delight at being entertained in the college of Newton—a name which held an extraordinary place in his regard. In recognition of his appointment as a corresponding member of the French Institute, he visited France in 1838, and read a paper to the Institute on the 'Distinction, both in Principle and Effect, between a Legal Charity for the Relief of Indigence and a Legal Charity for the Relief of Disease.'

The right treatment of pauperism continued to exercise his mind and to draw forth his testimony on every available occasion. In 1829 he was summoned to London to give evidence before a Parliamentary Committee on the Irish Poor-Law. His view was ever the same. A compulsory rate created a spirit of dependence, and thereby tended to the increase of pauperism and the degradation rather than the elevation of the people. It was often said that comfort tended to the improvement of character. His belief was the very opposite; it was character that tended to the increase of comfort. His success in Glasgow led him to believe that the same system would succeed in Ireland. He had sought to stimulate friendship and kindliness among all classes, so as to induce them to help one another in times of need; nothing had had a greater effect in diminishing pauperism. This was far too valuable and efficient a weapon to be carelessly thrown away.

But to all his schemes for remedying pauperism there came a death-blow in 1844. In 1840, Dr. Pultney Alison of Edinburgh, a medical practitioner of great eminence and not less benevolence, published a pamphlet in which he drew a painful picture of the miserable condition of the poor, especially in many parts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and strongly urged the necessity of an ampler provision for them, secured by law, though one result of this would be the increase of the cost of Scottish pauperism from £150,000 to £800,000 per annum. Chalmers did what he could to counterwork Dr. Alison. When the British Association met in Glasgow in 1840, he contributed a paper on the subject, and the public interest was so great that the meeting where it was discussed had to be adjourned to a church. He delivered several lectures to his students, which were afterwards collected and published in a volume. But the absorbing interest which had arisen in the Church question that was now under vehement discussion, and other causes, chilled the interest of the public in pauperism; and in 1844 a measure was enacted by Parliament, in opposition to the views of Chalmers. To him it seemed that even though an immediate improvement in the condition of the poor might be thus obtained, it must be at the sacrifice of many of the virtues that went to elevate them.

In the political world two great questions were agitating the community about the time when Chalmers came to Edinburgh—Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill.

Chalmers was a strenuous advocate of Catholic Emancipation. It did not seem to him just, as a general principle, to exclude any body of the people from a share in the government of their country on account of their religious opinions. Not only so, but he had a strong conviction that the effect of such exclusion was to create a prejudice against the religion of their opponents and prevent them from giving an impartial consideration to the arguments in its favour. In urging his views at a public meeting in Edinburgh, he rose to a height of eloquence that carried his audience by storm. As long as the Roman Catholics were excluded from political privileges they would not listen to any arguments against their faith. But let this injustice be removed, let them be admitted to the same platform as the rest of the community, and he looked for a change. And what might they not expect if the Bible were to become a familiar book to their Catholic brethren, and they were to receive its lessons with open and candid minds? The very thought seemed to open a most interesting and hopeful vista, well adapted to be expanded and enforced by his gorgeous eloquence. But even had he known that expectations of this sort were groundless, he would still have advocated emancipation simply as a matter of justice.

On the question of the Reform Bill he did not take the popular side. His opposition to it comes on us as a surprise. We should have expected that a man whose motto was 'Honour all men,' who had already befriended Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Corporation Test Acts, and who was afterwards an advocate of the repeal of the Corn-Laws, would have approved of the very moderate degree of political privilege implied in the ten-pound suffrage. In a speech in the Presbytery of Edinburgh, Dr. Chalmers once said: 'I have already professed myself, and will profess myself again, an out and out and, I maintain it, the only consistent Radical. The dearest object of my earthly existence is the elevation of the common people, humanised by Christianity and raised by the strength of their moral habits to a higher platform of human nature, and by which they may attain and enjoy the rank and consideration due to enlightened and companionable men.' But, though he offered no active opposition to the measure, he did not approve of it. In this he seems to have been actuated by various motives. In the first place, he did not think that this was the true way to elevate the people. He had always maintained that it was mainly by a moral and Christian education, by the cultivation of right principles and habits, that their true welfare was to be secured, and he dreaded anything that might lead them to value material or political benefits more than this. Further, he had a dread that any loosening of the old foundations of society might encourage a spirit of anarchy and recklessness which would ultimately bring the country to ruin. He knew that such a spirit slumbered, and more than slumbered, in many breasts, and he was opposed to any measure that would give it the slightest encouragement. He did not reckon on any abatement of discontent from the extension of the suffrage, and did not believe that the political appetite would be satisfied with anything short of a social revolution. So great were his fears, that on one occasion he expressed his apprehension that if the government then in office were to be removed, anarchy would immediately take possession. Nothing would have surprised or alarmed him more than to be told that by and by a Conservative Government would bring down the suffrage to a much lower point than the then Reform Bill proposed. But still more would he have wondered had he learned that fifty years after his death, and under all these radical changes, so far from the country being abandoned to anarchy, the law-abiding habit of the people would be as strong as ever, and the foundations of society as firm.

When the great question of the Corn-Laws came up at a later period, Chalmers was in favour of the repeal; not chiefly for any important economical results that he expected from that step, but because it would, as he used to say, 'sweeten the breath of society.' He would have been surprised at the remarkable commercial results which the abolition of the Corn-Laws, and the institution of the system of Free Trade have produced on the resources of the country.