This is the third article in a series on Thomas Chalmers. You can read the first one here and the second one here. The contents of these blog articles were originally delivered at the 1996 Historical Studies Conference and you can listen to the original address here.
Again, Chalmers was following a Moderate into the chair, and as in St. Andrews, his arrival was greeted with huge excitement.
His Theology
His lectures in theology were philosophic and began with the condition of man in sin, moving to the remedy that God had provided in Christ. The posthumous publication of these lectures in his Institutes of Theology, left some disappointed it must be said. More modern assessment has tended to denigrate Chalmers as a theologian, and even in cases to suggest that the organisation of his lectures in the Institutes. As Stuart Brown says,
"reveals a mind struggling against doubts about some of the harsher doctrines of scholastic Calvinism and seeking a more personal form of Christianity - while at the same time concerned not to challenge openly the Calvinist orthodoxy of the Westminster Confession which he was bound by his professorial office to uphold. The experience of Erskine of Linlathen and Macleod Campbell had evidently made a profound impact on Chalmers, and his concern for the ecclesiastical organisation and Evangelical mission of the church discouraged him from experimenting in his lectures or in print with new theological ideas."
But there are at least two elements behind Chalmers' theological arrangement that help to explain it and refute the charge that he was a frustrated radical confined in the straitjacket of the church's confessional standards.
Firstly, the fact that his own mind had been drawn to the sovereignty of God long before he had ever come to accept Calvinistic doctrine. That remained strongly with him. And is that not at the root of Calvinism, indeed of Pauline theology, and a central feature of divine revelation itself?
Secondly, it should be remembered that Chalmers could only reach so far in his Moral Philosophy and Natural Theology course. The ethics in such disciplines brought him to the point of man's condition but could throw little light on how man was to be recovered. In his theological lectures Chalmers was anxious to make an immediate connection with where he had left off in his previous course. This was no hesitant Calvinism, nor an incipient Arminianism. It was the work of a thinker in revealed theology rather than a learned theologian like his successor William Cunningham. But it was the work of a man who, in preaching and lecturing, was concerned to set side by side the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. The one was not to be dealt with in any way that impaired the force of the other. His theological teaching sought always to convey the force of each.
Catholic Emancipation
By this time the movement for Catholic emancipation had taken on new momentum, and Chalmers had years earlier made known his support. Now he entered the campaign more fully. He had dealt with the subject at the opening of Edward Irving's new church in London in May 1827, asserting that the Protestant faith should not fear Catholic emancipation. Indeed, Chalmers believed that Protestantism had suffered as a result of excluding Roman Catholics from holding political office.
At a meeting in Edinburgh he gave an impassioned speech supporting emancipation. It was one of the most memorable speeches ever given in the city. In it Chalmers argued that the laws enforcing Protestantism had weakened it, making it to rely upon political support rather than on the truth itself. Moreover, Roman Catholics would be more amenable to the Gospel if emancipation should be established. On this latter point his expectations were groundless as history proves. However, his argument was not founded on that belief, but on the conviction that emancipation was a matter of justice.
Two weeks later, addressing the presbytery of Edinburgh, he again stressed the need for emancipation. He argued that there was no Scriptural reason why the state should not extend constitutional rights to all its citizens irrespective of religious persuasion, providing that did not threaten the state's endowment of the established religion. Chalmers would find that his efforts here would add to the determination of disapproving Dissenters to oppose him in his greater efforts for church extension.
Church Extension and Opposition
His main efforts were again now in fact for church extension. By the Assembly of 1834 the Evangelical Party were in the majority and Chalmers was placed as convener of the Committee on Church Accommodation. A huge effort followed on a national scale - appeals, collections, and the formation of associations. In 1835 he reported that £65,000 had been contributed in the year and 64 new churches were in process of building. Over £200,000 was collected within four years and 200 churches erected.
Chalmers himself was at the head of such singular success. Not only did his organisational skills lead the way but he was able also to fill many of the new pulpits with men who had been his own pupils, and they were men of outstanding qualities in cases like Robert Murray McCheyne, Dundee,
The problem was that of funding these new ministries. Seat rents would have to be kept low enough not to deter the poorest in these parishes, yet that would prove insufficient of itself to keep these ministers. An endowment would be needed, and an approach was made to the government, some of whom had expressed favour with the request. But just then Chalmers was thwarted. Opposition arose from Dissenters who saw in this church extension scheme a move on the part of the Establishment to limit their influence.
Chalmers was surprised and annoyed, but the opposition was stronger than he realised. Hugh Miller, through his editorship of The Witness gave him much support. Like Chalmers he considered the church to be the most important institution in the land, and that the people of Scotland needed to be brought to see what a large interest they had in it.
The Dissenters, or Separatists, had their roots in Scottish secession movements from 1733 onwards. Chalmers and the Evangelicals actually regarded Dissenting congregations as a benefit to the Establishment, but many Dissenters had voiced their opposition to the plans for Catholic emancipation fearing that this was the first step towards the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic church. Some Dissenters made the occasion one for attacking all Establishments thus elevating the Voluntary Principle.
Controversy raged for a whole decade. Chalmers kept a level-headed distance. But he did expound on occasions the policy he passionately believed in. Establishment was defendable, but only as it is an effective instrument of evangelism. The Voluntary Principle (where Church endowment is by voluntary contribution of the people) in his view simply wasn't adequate for the needs of a whole community. Voluntaries planted new churches on the principle of attraction, mainly drawing their own sympathisers. The Established church, when operating in Chalmers' vision of it, demanded provision for all the population. Its duty was to supply a Gospel ministry to everyone.
The Voluntaries, on the other hand, argued that no Established church could be truly "free", being under state authority. Chalmers utterly repudiated this. The church and state had coordinate but independent jurisdictions.
When the appeal was made to parliament for the endowment of the new extension charges the Dissenters responded with a memorial in opposition to it. In it they suggested that the main objective of Chalmers was to annihilate dissent under the guise of a scheme to supply religious education to those lacking it. This was an unworthy charge against him. The parliamentary commission set up to look into the question of endowment reported that both dissenting and established congregations in Glasgow and Edinburgh had spare Accommodation. Chalmers had been effectively blocked.
In the course of the crisis on church extension and its endowment, it became apparent that, in the opinion of the civil courts, the independence of the established church was not what it claimed. The Reform Bill of 1832 was felt by many, including Chalmers, to be against the moral and Christian well-being of the nation. It seemed that the new interest in secular politics was a threat to the establishment of the church, given that a shift in political power had placed influence in the hands not only of Dissenters but also Rationalists with hostility to all religion.
The Patronage Question
While the endowment of church extension was the crucible in which crisis developed, it was the question of patronage that provided the catalyst. To the 1832 General Assembly, of which Chalmers was Moderator, three synods and eight presbyteries presented overtures drawing attention to what they regarded as the evils of patronage. Chalmers believed the church already possessed powers to deal with misuse of patronage. In 1813 he had stated that the church might reject a patron's presentee if they judged him unsuitable. The church courts had the ultimate power to decide whether a presentee was suitable, taking account of all the details of the circumstances. The rights of the patron were not absolute, as indeed the 1712 Act of parliament restoring patronage had recognised, although not stated explicitly. Under Moderatism the call of a congregation had become denuded of its real significance, and the priority for Chalmers was the restoration of its significance and effect.
Chalmers himself preferred not to resort to legislation at first. This was not to be the case, however, and instead it was decided that the church should legislate for a uniformity of practice in congregational settlements.
Chalmers immediately suggested that, in such a case, the church should apply to the government to recognise this step, not because he held any doubts about the church's power to enact such legislation, but rather because he knew that others did, and he thought it better to clear the matter from all doubts and concerns from the outset. In this Chalmers deferred to what he regarded as the better judgement of Lord Moncrieff, although he was to regret afterwards that he had done so.
The legislation finally enacted was what came to be known as the Veto Act, passed by the General Assembly in 1834 under which, "the majority of the male heads of families, resident within the parish, being members of the congregation, and in full communion with the church...ought to be of conclusive effect in setting aside the presentee..."
The Ten Year Conflict
This was the marker for the beginning of the "Ten Years Conflict", which would culminate in the 1843 Disruption. The Veto was challenged almost at once. Proposed settlements in Lethendy and Auchterarder were vetoed only to be referred to the Court of Session who pronounced against the veto. The Lord President stated,
"That our Saviour is the temporal Head of the Kirk of Scotland, in any temporal, or legislative, or judicial sense, is a position that I can dignify by no other name than absurdity. The parliament is the temporal head of the Church, from whose acts, and from whose acts alone, it exists as the national Church, and from which alone it derives all its powers."
A complete impasse between the church and the civil courts was reached in early 1841. Marnoch, in the presbytery of Strathbogie, had seen the intrusion of John Edwards, on the signature of only one parishioner and against 261 signatures on the Veto against him.
The patron introduced another man, favourable to the people, but Edwards had taken matters to the Court of Session, who ordered the Presbytery to take Edwards on trials for ordination.
The Presbytery, with Moderates in the majority agreed, but the Commission of Assembly forbade proceeding. Seven ministers went ahead, to be suspended by the Commission, but they proceeded anyway to what was, as Dr. Hanna describes,
"an ordination unparalleled in the history of the Church, performed by a presbytery of suspended ministers, on the call of a single communicant, against the desire of the patron, in face of the strenuous opposition of a united congregation, in opposition to the express injunction of the Assembly, and at the sole bidding, and under the sole authority, of the Court of Session."
The church sent some of the ablest ministers, Chalmers included, to preach in Strathbogie. Interdicts were served copiously on ministers intending to preach there, only in most cases to be disregarded.
The effect of these manoeuvrings was to bring to the attention of more and more people throughout the country that every vestige of spiritual authority was being stripped from the church. With Chalmers prominent, negotiations were carried out with the government, but he was disliked by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. His successor, Sir Robert Peel, proved a no more certain source of hope. Lord Aberdeen launched a bitter and unjustified attack on him. The Home Secretary was sure that the situation needed the strong arm of the State, and Lord Hope, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates was chief adviser to the Moderate Party.
Amid such upheaval and pressure, it is enlightening to find evidence of Chalmers' simple, strong and vital faith. He wrote in his Journal, June 21st, 1840,
"Have not yet recovered the shock of Lord Aberdeen's foul attack on me in the House of Lords. May I live henceforth in the perpetual sunshine of God's reconciled countenance. May I experience the sanctifying power of such a habit. Save me, save me, O God, from the untoward imaginations which disquiet and inflame me, warring against my soul, and engrossing my thoughts, to the utter exclusion of the things which make for holiness and peace...Hide me under the covert of thy wings, and let the menaces which overhang the country and the church pass away from them both."
Preparing for Disruption
But by now it was becoming increasingly likely that only a break with the State could preserve the spiritual independence of the church. For church extension endowment Chalmers had knocked at the door of the Whigs and gone from them to the Tories. Both had failed him. But he had experienced the generosity of the people. As the men of parliament failed him again now, Chalmers would need to go to the people again. He had not lost his vision of a church commensurate with the needs of the people, but now it would need to be without the advantages of Establishment. It was in this vein that Chalmers now looked ahead.
The Assembly of 1842 set aside interdicts served against Strathbogie commissioners taking their seats. For the first time in the conflict the Assembly declared, that "patronage is a grievance, has been attended with much injury to the cause of true religion in this Church and Kingdom, is the main cause of the difficulties in which the Church is at present involved and ought to be abolished."
The Assembly also adopted the document which was to become famous as the “Claim, Declaration and Protest anent the Encroachments of the Court of Session.” It was, as expected, dismissed by parliament, an action that provoked Robert Murray McCheyne to say of 7th March 1843 in his usual saintly candour,
"An eventful night this in the British Parliament. Once more King Jesus stands before an earthly tribunal, and they know him not."
At the Convocation of 470 ministers in November 1842 Chalmers played a leading role. He preached a powerful sermon on Psalm 112 verse 4, "Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." It is worth quoting from it at some length. He said,
"The great lesson of this text is the connection which obtains between integrity of purpose and clearness of discernment, insomuch that a duteous conformity to what is right, is generally followed up by a ready and luminous discernment of what is true. It tells us that if we have but grace to do as we ought, we shall be made to see as we ought; or, in other words, that if right morally, we are in the highway of becoming right intellectually.
The great lesson of our text is, that if we purpose aright we shall be made to see aright, and that the integrity of our will shall be followed up by light in the understanding. God will establish the just. Commit then thy works to the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths. It is he who, by the light of his Holy Spirit, makes good the connection between singleness of purpose and wisdom of conduct, and thus I understand the text, that he maketh wise the simple and giveth understanding to the simple."
From his experience of financing church extension, he also put forward a plan for financing a secession should it need to take place, and by this time few doubted that it would.
The Decisive Moments
In the Assembly of 1843 the Non-Intrusionists were in the minority for the first time in 10 years. The Moderator Dr. Welsh, instead of constituting the Assembly, announced that he and others could not regard it as a free Assembly. He then read a protest setting out the reasons, handed it to the clerk, and then left, followed by Chalmers and over 190 ministers and elders, joined by many more at the Tanfield Hall where the first Assembly of the Church of Scotland Free was constituted. Chalmers was enthusiastically elected Moderator.
It is impossible to conclude that Chalmers himself had been persuaded by anything less than extraordinarily weighty considerations in severing his connection with the State, a connection that he had held to be so indispensable to the good of the church and its mission.
Chalmers and his allies were convinced that not only had the State's interference been an assault upon the prerogatives of Christ's Headship of his church, but also a stranglehold upon the church's enterprise and activity, a fatal blow to its spiritual life and power. Had even a little latitude been left to the church to give effect to the voice of the people, Chalmers would likely have retained the church-state connection. He did not take the strong view that other Disruption men took of the divine right of the question, but the absoluteness of the State's claims left him in no doubt that severance was needed and right in the circumstances.
Nor was it the case that Chalmers, after the Disruption had taken place, could no longer retain and pursue his vision of the church as God's instrument for the good of the nation. He believed that more good could be done by a disendowed church than by an established church controlled by the State. It was still this conviction that spurred him on in the remainder of his life to the building up and strengthening of the Free Church.
6. New College 1843-1847
Chalmers entered on his service in the Free Church's theological institution, known as the "New College", in November 1843, as Principal and Professor of Divinity. A vast amount of work was necessary in raising up the Free Church, in the provision of manses and schools, and in financing its ministers. All this needed to be virtually a replica of the Establishment they had left, relying on the generosity of the people. Chalmers committed himself mainly to his College lectures and to the Sustentation Fund.
The Sustentation Fund
By the end of the first year the Sustentation Fund efforts had raised £68,700, enough to pay 600 ministers £100 each. But Chalmers was disappointed. For one thing he wanted to pay each minister another third of that figure.
Then, secondly, he knew that many more ministers were required for new congregations.
Thirdly, the Fund was not, as it stood, going to be sufficient to finance major mission enterprises to the spiritually destitute which Chalmers still dearly longed to see. That was his major disappointment with the Fund.
Chalmers tried to alter the "equal dividend" element that ensured each congregation received an equal benefit from the Fund. But some congregations were selfishly withholding funds while drawing their equal dividend. The brotherly spirit had been over calculated. Chalmers failed in his appeal. He remonstrated vehemently, sometimes with more than reasonable force. But it's easy to see why, when he saw that the Fund was not going to be the means of carrying out his urge of regenerating Scotland's spiritual wastelands.
Yet Chalmers was not finished. Perplexed, but not in despair. He had one more project in mind that would again apply his convictions and would show by God's blessing that they were vindicated. This was the West Port project.
The West Port
Building on his experiences in Glasgow, Chalmers chose this area of Edinburgh for his final evangelistic and social venture. An area of 2000 people, the West Port was one of the poorest and most crime-ridden of districts. Chalmers mapped it out into 20 districts, assigning one to a specific worker who was to visit the twenty families or so there every week.
Chalmers' Journal shows that on this he spent as much energy in prayer as on any other work he had ever engaged in.
"O pour forth the spirit of generosity on my coadjutors and their friends in the work of cultivating the West Port of Edinburgh...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 able to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan that are there...Be my help and my adviser, O God, and tell me by thy word and Spirit what I ought to do."
Progress was not at first encouraging. Yet Chalmers encouraged his helpers with advice like the following,
“We are not worthy of having entered on the experiment if not capable of persevering with it under the discouragement it may be of many alternations, and for a time, if God so please to exercise our faith and patience, of reverse."
A missionary minister, William Tasker, was secured for the work and by the end of 1845 a congregation had been formed. The meetings increased and a building for 520 was built in early 1847, the greatest number of the attenders being from the local area. In April that year Chalmers administered the Lord's Supper to the congregation. He confessed to 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."
It was exactly a month before his death. How it would have filled him with ecstatic joy to see revival spread across the country in 1860-61, in which new charges like the West Port were also embraced. Tasker wrote in 1861,
“At this moment I have nearly 60 candidates for communion, two thirds of whom date their serious impressions within the last three months. At present we have at least 60 persons who hold district prayer meetings in almost every close of the West Port."
The West Port proved to be a blueprint for other congregations to work from, most notably Chalmers' old charge in the Tron, Glasgow. Yet the goal of Chalmers was never fully realised by himself or after him. Population increased in the cities so rapidly that the church's resources failed to keep up with it. In addition, the famines of 1845 and 46 in the Highlands and in Ireland left thousands facing starvation and showed the inadequacies of both Church and State.
Chalmers was aghast at the laissez-faire attitude of the Whig government and the lack of response from private philanthropy, many preferring to conclude that the people in these areas had brought the famine on themselves and it would be better to let nature take its course and eradicate the population than support it artificially. Chalmers appealed to the government, wrote articles and called for reform.
In reality Chalmers was appealing against his own convictions that State handouts, without corresponding efforts of work on the part of the recipients, were not the answer to poverty. But this was a crisis of unusual proportions, and even had it not been, the failure in response to an ideal is not the same as the ideal itself being a failure.
The Final Days
Early in May 1847 Chalmers was in London, appearing before a Committee of the House of Commons, in relation to the complaints by the Free Church against those who had refused it sites for places of worship, including such powerful landowners as the Duke of Sutherland.
On 28th May he arrived back in Edinburgh, weary and needing rest. Friends and family were anxious, but he parried them. On Sunday 30th May he attended church services but was too tired to conduct family worship that evening, promising to do so in the morning. His housekeeper found him next morning in bed, propped up half sitting. He had died very soon after he had left them the previous evening.
His friend and colleague Thomas Guthrie, deeply affected, said,
"Men of his calibre are like mighty forest trees. We do not know their size till they are down."
Conclusion
Chalmers remains one of Scotland's greatest sons. He was the kind of rare individual who gives direction to a nation, and whose interest is not either in people's souls or in their temporal welfare, but in both.
While he influenced many in the middle and upper classes his heart was also set upon the lot of the poor, the uneducated, the ungodly. Church extension and endowment, educational reform, overseas missionary work, opposition to the Erastianism of the Court of Session, leadership of the body that resulted from the Disruption, were alike tasks for which he was eminently gifted.
His life story also gives the lie to the suggestion that it was the turn in theology from the late nineteenth century onwards that gave impetus to concern, denouncement of, and action about, social deprivations. To think of Liberal theology applying itself to the problems of Chalmers' time, with greater success than Chalmers had, is to forget that its near relative, Victorian Moderatism, had no moral energy at all to transform spiritual and physical slum conditions.
Chalmers himself described Moderate preaching as,
"like a winter's day, short, and clear, and cold; the brevity is good, the clarity is better, but the coldness is fatal. Moonlight preaching ripens no harvests."
Chalmers knew from his own experience, and amply demonstrated in his projects, that only the theology in which Christ's sufficiency and man's utter helplessness in the dilemma of sin, in which Holy Spirit regeneration, active faith in Christ, and a living hope are to the fore, can ever deliver the moral force needed to do good to a nation.
But perhaps his greatest feature was that in the midst of having a horizon so broad as to include philosophy, physical science, social science, political economy, education, and theology, he retained the piety of a simple Christian.
The most suitable epitaph is in his own words,
"I want to grow in the faith in all its simplicity and self-abasement. I want self to be crucified, and the Saviour to be all in all with me...there is a wonderful charm in the righteousness of Christ becoming our by faith; it throws another moral atmosphere over the soul, and renews at the very time that it pacifies. I desire Christ to be all in all to me...O my God may the fear of thee supplant every other fear, and the love of thee subordinate every other love."
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