Thomas Chalmers

by William Garden Blaikie

Unhappily, a painful controversy arose among the home-churches out of the effort to obtain a national endowment for the new parishes. Nonconformists, for the most part, viewed the application with great dislike, and opposed it tooth and nail. It was bad enough, in their view, that a particular church should be maintained from the public funds, and enjoy peculiar social privileges; but it was not to be borne that it should receive a further grant of public money, of which, of course, nonconformists would have to pay their share. The right way to support ministers, according to the New Testament, was by the voluntary contributions of the people. This, moreover, was a benefit to the people themselves; it led them to take a greater interest in their church, and to attach more value to its ministrations. Thus it happened that every church-extension meeting was more or less an anti-voluntary meeting, the speakers who pled for the scheme vehemently upholding the principle of an establishment. Of the younger men who fought on this ground with Chalmers, none was more strenuous than the late Dr. Guthrie. But Guthrie lived to change his view; and in an autobiographical fragment he tells us, that even when he was denouncing the voluntary system, in his secret heart he honoured, and even envied, the men whose living was derived solely from the freewill offerings of their people.

The great objection of Chalmers to the voluntary system was that it was inadequate. He held it incapable of making provision for the wants of a whole community, and especially incapable of those aggressive efforts that were needed for bringing in the masses who had fallen from the profession of religion. In planting churches, voluntaryism acted on the principle of attraction, aiming mainly at drawing in those who were more or less in sympathy with itself, and disposed to accept its ministrations. The theory of an established church, on the other hand, demanded a provision for the whole of the population, and supplied a ministry whose duty was to look after all the people, and ply them with the offers and the injunctions of Christianity. It was to make the practice and theory of the church in some degree to correspond that he had undertaken and prosecuted his great church-extension movement.

For the nonconformists themselves he always cherished a profound regard, and a grateful sense of the invaluable service they had rendered to the country when the Gospel was seldom preached elsewhere. Of this he had given signal proof when he took sittings in a congregational chapel for his family at St. Andrews. Nothing could have been further from his desire than to drive nonconformists into a corner, or make them feel that they stood in the way of his more comprehensive enterprise. Yet many of them did feel, and could hardly fail to feel, that they were obstacles to the working of a complete territorial scheme. They were like squatters or interlopers in a territory allocated and divided among regular settlers. Unconsciously Dr. Chalmers stimulated a feeling among the Established clergy that they, and they only, were the rightful spiritual guides of the people; a spirit of which he himself was wholly destitute, but which was highly agreeable to human nature, and in many cases rears its arrogant head at the present day.

It was a favourite argument of the voluntaries that an established church could not be a free church; it was subject to the authority of the state, and could not be free, as the nonconformists were, to obey its divine Head in all things. This position Chalmers and his friends resolutely denied. The alliance between church and state was an alliance between two independent powers, each of which was supreme in its own department. In forming a connection with the state, the church did not surrender one particle of its independence; it remained as free as ever to follow the guidance of its divine Head in every point where He had expressed His will. Nay, this freedom was expressly secured by the statutes of the realm. It knew to its cost how eager the rulers of the country had often been to deprive it of its freedom, and at every important crisis of its history, when it renewed or revised its alliance with the state, it had taken care that its freedom should be expressly conceded. It was while the voluntary controversy was at its height that the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical courts became acute, for this very question, the independence and freedom of the church, was the great bone of contention. When the decisions of the Court of Session and the House of Lords were given, it became only too apparent that, in the judgment of the civil courts, the church did not possess the independence it had claimed. This was a dreadful, a shattering blow to Dr. Chalmers, and when it was authoritatively declared, notwithstanding all his intense partiality for an established church, he at once severed his alliance with the state. The main ground on which he acted was, that a church enthralled to the state could never be that beneficent instrument, that powerful moral agent, for which he valued it,—could never be the means of training the people in those holy ways, those high moral and spiritual habits, on which their highest welfare depended.

It was partly in order to advance his church-extension scheme, but more especially to maintain the true theory of a church establishment, and the church's independence in its union with the state, that he delivered in the Hanover Square Rooms, London, in April and May 1838, that series of lectures on the 'Establishment and Extension of National Churches' which raised his fame as an orator to its very highest pitch. 'Nothing,' wrote the late Dr. Begg, who accompanied him, 'could exceed the enthusiasm which prevailed in London. The great city seemed stirred to its very depths.' At the fourth and fifth lectures, an American clergyman who was present wrote that he found the room densely packed long before the hour, and evidently for the most part by the higher classes. 'Dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, baronets, bishops, and members of Parliament were to be seen in every direction. After considerable delay and impatient waiting, the great charmer made his entrance, and was welcomed with clappings and shouts of applause that grew more and more intense till the noise became almost deafening.' 'The concluding lecture,' says Dr. Hanna, 'was graced by the presence of nine prelates of the Church of England. The tide that had been rising and swelling each successive day now burst all bounds. Carried away by the impassioned utterance of the speaker, long ere the close of some of his finest passages was reached, the voice of the lecturer was drowned in the applause, the audience rising from their seats, waving their hats above their heads, and breaking out into tumultuous approbation.'

An event that somewhat disturbed the line of Dr. Chalmers's argument for the freedom of the church had taken place just before he left Edinburgh. On the 8th March 1838, the Court of Session, in giving judgment on the famous Auchterarder case, found the veto law of the church to be illegal and ultra vires, and began to take steps for the reversal of all that the church had done in connection with it. The judgment had not become final, for it was subject to appeal to the House of Lords, and in his lectures Dr. Chalmers made no reference to it. But when, in 1839, the House of Lords affirmed the decision of the lower court, and when Lords Brougham and Cottenham, in expressing their views, scouted alike the principle of the veto and of the independence of the church (although Lord Brougham had at one time strongly commended the veto), Dr. Chalmers made a full statement of his views in the General Assembly. Before that time he had been disposed to think that if the judgment of the Court of Session should be affirmed by the Lords, the best course for the church would be to give up the veto, reserving power to judge of each case by itself, and act accordingly.

In such a case as that of Auchterarder, for example, where the presentee had been vetoed by 287 out of 300 male heads of families and called only by two, the presbytery might have decided that in these circumstances the call was really no call, and therefore the presentee could not be taken on trial. But, according to the views expressed by the judges, this course would have been as illegal as the veto itself. Dr. Chalmers therefore moved that, while the Assembly would make no claim to the temporalities of Auchterarder, they would still maintain the principle that no minister be intruded on an opposing congregation, and that a committee be appointed to confer with the Government, in order to prevent any further collision between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. A magnificent speech of three hours was delivered in support of this motion, which, after a long discussion, was carried by a majority of forty-nine. It has been remarked, that never was the eloquence of Chalmers more Demosthenic than in his orations for the freedom of the church. And this intense regard for her freedom was no new notion of his: so far back as 1814, in a speech in the Assembly on the plurality question, he had maintained that 'the church had power to reject a presentee for any reason, or for no reason at all.' To Chalmers, the enforced intrusion of unacceptable presentees was not the only, perhaps not even the chief, interference with the liberty of the church. When it was decided that the church had no power to erect new parishes or to give their ministers the usual status of her clergymen; and, likewise, that she had no power to readmit into her pale any of those who in former years had left it,—cases in which no shadow of temporal interest was involved—it seemed to him that such restrictions on her liberty were not only intolerable, but that they tended completely to shatter her efficiency.

Of the four years of long and weary negotiation that followed the passing of this resolution, we have no space to write at any length. Alongside of negotiations with Government there ran a stream of decisions both by the civil and church courts which greatly complicated the situation. New cases of intrusion occurred, pre-eminent among which was the case of Marnoch, where the presentee was vetoed by 261 out of 300 male heads of families, and had the name of but a single parishioner attached to his call. For insisting on his settlement, the seven members of presbytery who took this course were first suspended and then deposed.

As to negotiations with Government, a considerable share of the interviews and correspondence fell to Dr. Chalmers. With Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, he did not hit it off. On a former occasion, as Chalmers himself told Dr. Gordon, when his lordship heard of a deputation from the Scottish church, he expressed a hope 'that that d—d fellow Chalmers was not among them.' Unable to make anything of the Whigs, Chalmers and his friends now turned to the Tories, who at one time seemed friendly, but with them, too, negotiations finally broke off. In these negotiations there was a painful episode between Dr. Chalmers and Lord Aberdeen. A bill introduced by his lordship did not come up to what Chalmers understood him to have promised, and he was unable to support it. Lord Aberdeen complained bitterly, and in the House of Lords accused the Non-intrusion Committee of giving an unscrupulous report of their conversations with him, and he believed they had behaved in the same way to the Government. For Dr. Chalmers he had a special gibe. 'A reverend gentleman, a great leader in the General Assembly, having brought the church into a state of jeopardy and peril, had left it to find its way out of the difficulty as well as it could.' Evidently these were the words of a man who had lost his temper, and forgot what was due in courtesy, to say nothing of charity, to absent men. Unfortunately his son and biographer, Sir Arthur Gordon, has made the matter worse by a vulgar charge against Dr. Chalmers, that he was overborne by the violent men in the non-intrusion committee, and, being afraid of losing his leadership, succumbed to them, and had not the moral courage to avow his change of opinion. Dr. Chalmers was not in the habit of succumbing to any one, for no one stood more independently on his own judgment; and, as to trimming and shuffling, his whole life showed him to be incapable of such conduct. The event proved who was in the right; Lord Aberdeen afterwards carried his bill, which proved a miserable failure. As Dr. Donald Fraser has remarked, it had to be given up as a nuisance. And then, under a Conservative Government, came the abolition of patronage![³]

Chalmers had now had experience of both the great political parties, and with equally disappointing results. His grand project of a church commensurate with the necessities of the country (so far as these were not provided for by the nonconformists) was nearly as far off as ever. But his experience in raising money for church extension gave him hope in another direction. When he knocked at the door of the Whigs on behalf of church extension he was refused. When he knocked at the door of the Tories, he found that they might have endowed the church, but they would have enslaved her. They viewed the church 'as an engine of state, not as an instrument of usefulness.' He was now about to knock at the door of the people; and he cherished no little expectation that through them he would yet succeed in his scheme of making Scotland a spiritual garden.