Thomas Chalmers

by William Garden Blaikie

This was the origin of the West Port experiment. Writing on 26th July 1844, just fourteen months after the Disruption, to his friend Mr. Lennox of New York, the munificent founder of the Lennox Library and the Lennox Hospital, New York, between whom and Dr. Chalmers there had sprung up a very cordial friendship, he said: 'I have determined to assume a poor district of two thousand people, and superintend it myself, though it be a work greatly too much for my declining strength and means. Yet such do I hold to be the efficiency of the method with the divine blessing, that perhaps, as the concluding act of my public life, I shall make the effort to exemplify what as yet I have only expounded.'

To prepare the way and interest the public in his scheme, he delivered four lectures, in which the methods and advantages of territorial schools and churches were set forth with his usual force. Free Church feeling was running very hieh at the time, and Dr. Chalmers was at great pains to show that his undertaking was dictated solely by a regard to the good of the people. 'Who cares,' he asked, 'about the Free Church, compared with the Christian good of Scotland? Who cares about any church but as an instrument of Christian good? For be assured that the moral and religious well-being of the population is of infinitely higher importance than the advancement of any sect.'

The district selected was of the worst description—a fourth part of the whole population being paupers, and another fourth street beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The population amounted to upwards of 400 families, of whom 300 had no connection with any church. Of 411 children of school age, 290 were growing up without any education. The plan of Dr. Chalmers was to divide the whole territory into twenty districts, containing each about twenty families. To each district a visitor was appointed, whose duty was to visit each family once a week, under directions printed by Dr. Chalmers to show the specific object of the visitation. A school was provided, and the visitors were instructed, in the first instance, to show an active interest in the young, and exhort the parents to send their children to the school. A small fee was exacted, on the principle that what was paid for would be more valued, and that a more regular attendance would be secured.[⁵] The visitors were instructed to meet with Dr. Chalmers every Saturday evening, the first meeting taking place on 27th July 1844. On the 6th November, Dr. Chalmers held his first meeting with the people, telling them all he would do for them, and all that they were expected to do for themselves. On 11th November, when the school was opened, there were 64 scholars; in the course of the year there were 250. On the 22nd December, public worship was commenced by Dr. Chalmers in a tan-loft. The attendance was not encouraging after all the visiting that had been going on—only about a dozen adults, and these mostly old women. In April 1845, the services of the Rev. W. Tasker were secured as missionary-minister, and before the end of the year the nucleus of a fair congregation had been formed. A library, a savings-bank, a washing-house, and a female industrial school were added to the parochial equipments. Dr. Chalmers preached and worshipped often in the loft, met with the visitors, and addressed the people as new features were added to the scheme. 'When he was a hearer merely,' says Mr. Dodds, 'one would see him near the pulpit, in a crowd of deaf old women, who were meanly clothed, but were following the services with unflagging attention and interest. His eye was upon every one of them, to anticipate their wishes and difficulties. He would help one old woman to find out the text; he would take hold of the psalm-book of another, hand to hand, and join her in the song of praise. Any one looking at him could see that he was in a state of supreme enjoyment.' And most earnestly did he pray for a blessing on the work, and that it might be the forerunner of many such undertakings.

'We would give Thee no rest, O God, until Thou hast opened the window of heaven and caused righteousness to flow down that street like a mighty river.' 'Let such a memorial of Christian philanthropy be set up in that place as to be a praise and an example both in the city of our habitation and in other cities of the land.' 'Reveal to me, O God, the right tactics, the right way and method of proceeding in the management of the affairs of the West Port. Oh that I were enabled to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan which are there!' 'O my God, give me the power of ordering matters aright in the West Port.... And more especially, O God, let me understand Thy will in regard to the right place and performances of a female agency.' 'Draw close the affections and affinity between Mr. Tasker and the families of the West Port.... Do Thou guide and encourage him, O Lord.... Oh may he not only be himself saved, but may he be the instrument of salvation to many; and may both he and I be carried in safety, and at length with triumph, to that prosperous termination for which we are jointly labouring!'

We have no space to dwell further on the history of the West Port. The sweep of the experiment was complete. On 19th February 1847 a new church was opened; and on the 25th April, one month before his death, Dr. Chalmers administered the Lord's Supper to the congregation. On that occasion he said to Mr. Tasker, 'I have got now the desire of my heart; God has indeed answered my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in peace and die.' And he wrote to Mr. Lennox, 'I wish to communicate what to me is the most joyful event of my life. I have been intent for thirty years on the completion of a territorial experiment, and I have now to bless God for the consummation of it.'

It may be well to add that under Mr. Tasker and his successors the cause has prospered greatly. After being enlarged twice, the original church still proved too small, and a new and spacious building was erected a little way off. The congregation now numbers upwards of 1300 communicants. Of course it is not wholly territorial; people that have become attached to a church cannot be driven out of it when they leave the neighbourhood; but the old building is still retained as a mission church, and the territorial work continues. In the Free Church in Edinburgh the experiment was repeated many times, new territorial churches in poor and needy districts having been erected at Holyrood, Pleasance, Back of Canongate (Moray), Cowgate, Cowgate Head, and Fountainbridge. In Glasgow there have been many more, and several in the other large towns of Scotland. The Established Church has striven with great success to have its extension churches endowed, thereby carrying into effect the original idea of Chalmers. And yet, in spite of all this, the aim of Chalmers is as far from being realised as ever. With the increasing population, the number of persons, in our large towns especially, who have no connection with any church is larger than in Chalmers's time. And, alas! the wave of scepticism and of secularism that is passing over us intensifies the evil and magnifies the difficulty.

In connection with his public labours, it only remains for us to advert to his work as professor of theology during the last few years of his life. It had long been his desire to reduce his lectures to a form that would convey the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian revelation. When he began his Horæ Biblicæ Quotidianæ and Sabbaticæ, he began at the same time to condense and reconstruct his lectures; the two works advanced pari passu; the devout study of the Scriptures went hand in hand with the endeavour, in the spirit of the Baconian philosophy, to present the substance of their contents. Hence arose his Institutes of Theology—a work which has received far too little attention since German theology began to supersede our own, but which may one day, in some future age, be valued as it should.

But the great merit of Chalmers as a professor lay in the enthusiasm with which he inspired his students. It would have been hard indeed for any conscientious youth to be under him and not feel his soul quickened, at least occasionally, to a sublime ardour, and fired with a new ambition. So wonderful was his influence, that at the Disruption nine-tenths of those who passed through his classes stood by his side. The present writer, though he spent but one session under him before the Disruption, can bear testimony, not only to the intellectual and spiritual impulse he gave, but to the subtle sympathy which drew his students to share his church views, though he never alluded to them in the class, and to the enthusiasm with which they listened to him in the General Assembly. He well knew that in the Free Church the mass of the ministers would be but poorly paid, and that there was all the greater reason why they should be well equipped by superior scholarship, and especially by superior piety, for their office. And in this he was highly successful. After three sessions in the Free Church College, he could testify that the students of his last session stood the highest of any he had known, not only in general proficiency and scholarship, but also in their sense of divine things, and devotedness in heart and spirit to the great objects of the Christian ministry. In his later years, it was his practice to invite his students to private interviews for spiritual conversation and prayer.

On 4th June 1846, he laid the foundation-stone of the Free Church College. It had been considered a great stroke of policy that the most commanding site in the city had been secured for the building. The writer of this sketch, who was present on the occasion, remembers his grand appearance after the ceremony, when his noble head appeared above a confused pile of stones and timbers; and, producing a scrap of paper covered with shorthand hieroglyphics, he apologised, with a broad smile, for taking to 'the paper,' seeing it was but a scrap, whereas if he were to speak extempore, his remarks might become an 'interminable rigmarole.' Not a little of the short speech was addressed to the workmen engaged in the building. That dear object of his life, to raise the working population to a higher level of life in the best sense of the word, came back on him in all its strength. Within the walls to be erected, there would be, he said, no false theories of equality taught or countenanced; but there was one equality between man and man that would be strenuously enforced,—the essential equality of human souls; it would be taught that, in the high count and reckoning of eternity, the soul of the poorest of nature's children, the raggedest boy that ran along the pavement, was of like estimation in the eye of Heaven with the greatest and noblest of the land. The young men in that college would ever be taught that, though their education might fit them for the company of princes and peers, it would be their peculiar glory to be visitants of the poor man's humble cottage, and to pray by the poor man's dying bed. 'Heaven grant that the platform of humble life may be raised immeasurably higher than at present, and through the whole extent of it—that the mighty host who swarm upon its surface, brought under the elevating power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and so rescued from grovelling ignorance and loathsome dissipation, may rise to a full equality with ourselves in all that is characteristic of humanity, and take their place, along with us, side by side, on the footing of kindred and companionable men.' He then made a graceful allusion to the young queen, who had mercifully escaped one of those horrible attempts on her life that occurred in the earlier part of her reign; prayed that she might long continue to adorn her exalted position, and concluded by calling for three cheers on her behalf. Thus the college of the Free Church was founded on a cordial recognition of both ends of the social scale: with benevolent wishes for the working multitude on the one hand, and a cordial and loyal tribute to the Sovereign on the other.

The last of the public services rendered by Dr. Chalmers to the Free Church consisted of a paper on the education question, and of his evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons on the refusal of sites. It was about the time when the question of national education was coming full into the arena of discussion; and, at the request of Mr. Fox Maule, afterwards Earl of Dalhousie, Chalmers, who had given much attention to the subject, recorded his views in a short paper. The difficulty was about the introduction of religion. Dr. Chalmers's view was substantially that which was subsequently acted upon: he advised that there should be no legislative enactment on the subject of religion, but that the regulation of this should be left to the governing bodies of the several schools. Not that religion was unimportant, but the very reverse; but because the Christian church was so divided that it could be far better seen to by the local managers. To this he added a conscience clause; the result being substantially the system which prevails in Scotland at the present day. He took occasion to add, 'We despair of any good being done in the way of Christianising our population but through the medium of a government themselves Christian, and endowing the true religion, which I hold to be their imperative duty, not because it is the religion of the many, but because it is true.'