1843-1847
Gifted and mighty men though many of the leaders of the Disruption were, Chalmers towered high above them all. With the multitude his illustrious name gave a dazzling éclat to the movement; with the thoughtful the fact that a man of his sagacity, patriotism, and caution, and strong proclivity to an established church, should have thrown himself heart and soul into the non-intrusion cause, created the conviction that it must be supported by very weighty considerations. What but the strongest sense of fatal injury to the church could have induced him, after electrifying London with pleadings for a national establishment of religion, to forsake his own, and become practically a voluntary? No man felt his responsibility for the Disruption more deeply than Chalmers; and no man laboured more assiduously in behalf of the Free. Church, in the creation of which he had had such a share. To the General Assembly of 1843 he gave in the Reports of the Sustentation and Building Committees, both of which were very encouraging. The months of August and September were spent in a tour to the east and north of Scotland, on behalf of the Sustentation Fund. In October he attended an extra meeting of the General Assembly at Glasgow, opening it with a sermon from Nehemiah xi. 16. In November he had to enter on his duties as Principal and Professor of Divinity in the Free Church Theological Institution, now known as the 'New College.'
It was natural for him to be very much cheered by the numberless letters and visits of congratulation that came to the Free Church from every quarter. When even those who had as voluntaries been his most inveterate opponents in his church endowment effort, came with their warm and most brotherly salutations, a new hope of union sprang up that rekindled hope for the highest welfare of Scotland.
Speaking to the General Assembly held at Glasgow in the autumn of 1843, he said:—
'I confess to you that I was much interested by the arrival, by one post after another, of those addresses and resolutions from various churches, of whose very existence I was not aware till I received their letters. And I think that every man, whose heart is in the right place, will be delighted with such movements. They are movements quite in my own favourite direction, because one and all of them are movements of convergency; or, in other words, movements which point in the first instance to union, and, as soon as possible and prudent, I trust their landing-place will be incorporation. There is among them one very pleasant address, signed by—I have not had time to count the names,—but I believe some of the youngsters of my family tried a more wholesale method of arriving at a probable estimate of the amount of support thus given to the Free Church; instead of numbering, they measured it, and found it about seventeen yards long.... I have felt exceedingly delighted with these communications. I must say that I consider it as infinitely more characteristic of the religion which we profess—the religion of peace and charity—that instead of each denomination sitting aloft and apart upon its own hill, and frowning upon each other from their respective orbits, they should hold kindly and mutual converse, and see each other eye to eye, while they will discern, to their mutual astonishment, if not how thoroughly, at least how substantially, they are at one. I just conclude with observing that now is the time to rally about the common standard all that is pure and vital in Protestantism; for now it is that we shall have to make head against a new form and revival of Antichrist, whether in the form of Popery—naked Popery, or Popery in disguise, even that Antichrist which threatens to shake a most withering mildew over the whole of Christendom.'
The same views were expressed with equal emphasis at a general meeting, held about the same time, in commemora tion of the two hundredth anniversary of the Westminster Assembly. And when the Evangelical Alliance was projected, he wrote a pamphlet in its favour, expressing a strong desire that it should be called the Protestant Alliance, and that it should have for its double object the protection and promotion of the cause of Protestantism; and, in his own familiar and favourite line, the work of a great Home Mission.
Among the eminent strangers who visited Scotland about this time none excited a livelier interest in Dr. Chalmers's mind than Dr. Merle D'Aubigné, who came in 1845, when in the full flush of his fame as the popular historian of the Reformation.
At the Disruption there was a vast amount of work to be done, for it would have required more than seven hundred churches to accommodate all the congregations that adhered to the Free Church. There were, besides, many cases of peculiar difficulty, caused chiefly by the refusal of proprietors to grant sites for churches and manses on their properties, a refusal which on vast estates like those of the Duke of Sutherland or the Duke of Buccleuch would have amounted to an absolute extinction of the church. Dr. Chalmers, however, under the influence of his strong desire for a sabbatic decennium, kept clear of the ordinary work of the church, excepting the Sustentation Fund and his college lectures. As for the college itself, it was mainly in the hands of Dr. Welsh, until his lamented death in 1845, when Dr. Chalmers felt constrained to become convener of the College Committee. Among other services, Dr. Welsh took in hand to provide for a college building, which it was proposed to erect from the contributions of twenty subscribers of £1000 each. This was a serious undertaking at a time when the wealthier friends of the church had been straining all their energies for the Building, Sustentation, and Mission Funds. But the whole sum was speedily contributed in the way proposed, and though in the end the price of the site and the cost of the building amounted to more than double the sum named at the beginning, the whole was ultimately provided. Such liberality for college purposes was due in a great degree to the profound regard in which Dr. Chalmers was held, and in a somewhat less degree to his colleague Dr. Welsh.
It must be owned that Dr. Chalmers was not satisfied with the success of the Sustentation Fund. It had been adopted not only unanimously but enthusiastically by the whole church, and considering all that had to be done for other purposes, it was marvellous that in the first year it amounted to £68,700, enough to furnish fully £100 to six hundred ministers. That, however, was but two-thirds of the amount which Chalmers had named as the minimum payment to each minister from this fund. And, besides, there were many additional ministers to be provided for, needed by the new adhering congregations; and moreover,—and this was never absent from his thoughts—there was to be considered the vast home-mission work needed in order to realise his lifelong desire to overtake the whole spiritual destitution of the country. It was the inadequacy of the Sustentation Fund to realise this further object that was the chief cause of his disappointment. Moreover, he found in the machinery of his scheme a serious leak, which bade fair to ruin it. Every congregation was to receive an equal dividend for its minister from this fund, whatever might be the amount of its own contributions. In order that this provision might work satisfactorily, it was necessary that congregations should make an equal effort for the fund. But it was soon found that many congregations were steeped in selfishness, and, while drawing their equal dividend, their contributions were but a fraction of what they should have been. Chalmers had calculated on a brotherly spirit and a brotherly conscience, which he now found were often wanting. He became alarmed for the future, and proposed a modification of the original arrangement, to the effect that no congregation should receive from the fund more than its own contribution and a half more. But it was too late. The fund had been constituted on the footing of an equal dividend, and there was a strong opposition to the change. Chalmers remonstrated by word of mouth and by pamphlets on the 'Economics of the Free Church.' All that the Assembly would allow was that the new plan should be tried with new congregations. But as the new congregations were generally comparatively poor, the result was something like starvation to their ministers; and, after a short trial, the plan was given up. But no one could deny the serious nature of the evil that Chalmers had pointed out, and for many a long year there were perplexed discussions as to the remedy. Even now, though the leak has been abundantly dealt with, it has not been quite overcome. In his remonstrances, Chalmers showed more vehemence than was perhaps reasonable, considering that it was the defect of his own original scheme that caused the difficulty. But his vehemence was due to the conviction that came home so strongly to him, that the Sustentation Fund could not become the instrument of carrying out his dearly-cherished project,—of recovering the whole waste-places of Scotland, and making them parts of the vineyard of the Lord. The thought saddened him, and it led him to speak more disparagingly of what the Free Church had accomplished, and what the Sustentation Fund had accomplished, than was altogether deserved.
After experiencing three disappointments—from the Whigs, and the Tories, and the Free Church, it might have been supposed that, all eager as he was for rest and quiet, he would now let the matter alone. But no. There remained one other step. By an experimentum crucis, by a demonstration of what, under the divine blessing, could be done by his scheme in as unfavourable a district as could be found, he might yet vindicate it in the eyes of all men; he might leave behind him a monument which would be a perpetual rebuke of the languor and listlessness of the church; a perpetual encouragement to similar undertakings, and a perpetual testimony to the maxim of John Eliot, the apostle of the North American Indians, which he used often to quote, that 'prayer and pains can do everything.'