Thomas Chalmers                                                                                                                                                                            

Part 1: The early years

When Thomas Chalmers gave his inaugural lecture as Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh in November 1828 people came in such numbers that a strong police presence was required to keep things in order. Imagine! Nor did the interest diminish. “His class-room continued to be crowded all through the session”, writes one of his biographers, Norman L. Walker. It was all so very different from how things had been. Theology lectures in the past, says Walker, had been “often clear, sometimes learned, and students had come forth from the Hall with a more or less competent knowledge of theological systems. But there had never been any approach to ‘an explosion’, and youthful enthusiasms had been rather dulled than fanned into a flame. Now there was a professor in possession to whom Christianity was not a mere framework of dry bones, but a living force. His own soul was on fire; and whatever he felt himself he made his audience feel. And as a consequence, there immediately began a process which in time told visibly upon the face of Scotland – the inspiring of a race of men who carried the life with them into the pulpits which they filled, and became the means of bringing about a great revival of religion”.

So, who was Thomas Chalmers? The aim of this sketch is to introduce you to the man, to his work, and to his remarkable and widespread influence. It is written in the hope that you will be eager to find out more. 

Beginnings     

Thomas Chalmers was born on the 17th of March 1780 in Anstruther, a fishing village on the Fifeshire coast of Scotland. He was part of a large family of eight brothers and five sisters, with parents who were fine Christians. His father is described as “a man of fervent but unostentatious piety”, whilst of his mother, after her death, Chalmers could write of “the deep and immovable trust of her spirit upon her Saviour” which “shed a singular and beautiful light on the evening of her days”.

To enter a university at the age of eleven, as Chalmers did, seems an extraordinary thing to us. But St. Andrews University in those days, as one writer puts it, was “little more…than a school for big boys from the neighbourhood”. During the first two sessions Chalmers showed far more interest in golf, football, and handball than in academic studies. But a change came when he began to study mathematics at the age of fourteen. His intellect awoke and mathematics became the absorbing interest of his mind. He now applied himself more diligently to his other studies and became an outstanding student.

At the age of fifteen, and again it seems an extraordinary thing to us, Chalmers was enrolled as a divinity student and began to prepare for gospel ministry. The key event of this period was the reading of Jonathan Edwards’ The Freedom of the Will. It made a profound impression. “I remember”, he says, “when a student of divinity, and long ere I could relish evangelical sentiment, I spent nearly a twelve-month in a sort of mental elysium, and the one idea which ministered to my soul all its rapture was the magnificence of the Godhead, and the universal subordination of all things to the one great purpose for which He evolved and was supporting creation”.

Chalmers’ admission that he had no relish in those days for what he calls “evangelical sentiment” is a sobering one. But neither among students for the Church of Scotland ministry, as he was, nor among Church of Scotland ministers, was it at all uncommon. The closing years of the eighteenth century were dark years for Scotland’s national church. The warmth and light of evangelical life and ministry were largely to be found outside her communion among the various branches of the Secession Church. In God’s grace, however, a remarkable change for the better was soon to begin – a change in which Chalmers himself would both participate and play a major role.

Chalmers was licensed to preach on the 31st of July 1799, at the age of eighteen. It was not generally the case that a divinity student would be licensed by a presbytery until he was twenty-one, but in the case of Chalmers the rule was waived. An old statute of the church was invoked which allowed exceptions to what was then then the minimum age of twenty-five if the candidate in question showed “rare and singular qualities”. In the judgment of the men who pleaded his case, Chalmers’ did. “A lad o’ pregnant pairts”, they said.

He preached his first sermon on the 25th of August 1799 in the Lancashire town of Wigan. According to one of his brothers, who was present on the occasion, “it is the opinion of those who pretend to be judges that he will shine in the pulpit”. Chalmers himself, however, had little interest in preaching. “His mathematical studies”, comments his brother, “appear to occupy more of his time than his religious’”. 

From 1799 till his ordination in May 1803 Chalmers did a variety of things. During the academic year 1799-1800, for example, he studied mathematics and natural philosophy at Edinburgh University. The following year was taken up with the study of chemistry, moral philosophy, and political economy. He also spent some enjoyable months as an assistant minister in the Scottish borders town of Hawick. What came next lay much closer to his heart, however – a mathematical assistantship at St. Andrews University over the academic year 1802-1803. Chalmers poured his very considerable energies into it and was immensely popular with his students.

Minister of Kilmany  

Only a few days lay between the close of his teaching session at St. Andrews and his ordination to the Christian ministry, and his father hoped that he would come home to Anstruther and devote the time to the preparation of his heart. But no. For such a thing his son felt no need whatsoever. He was already prepared for ministerial work and felt that there was nothing to be gained from a few days given to meditation and prayer. They were spent elsewhere.

Chalmers was ordained to the small country parish of Kilmany in Fife on the 12th of May 1803. He was twenty-two years old. The surroundings delighted him and he warmed to the people. Kilmany’s chief attraction, however, was its proximity to St. Andrews where he hoped to continue teaching mathematics. This would help toward the realisation of what was then his chief ambition, to become a professor of mathematics.

His attitude toward the work of the ministry in those days is nowhere better seen than in a pamphlet he wrote in 1805. It was his first publication. The mathematics’ chair in Edinburgh University had become vacant and one of the candidates, a Rev. Dr. Macknight, hoped to both secure the chair and retain his Edinburgh parish. It led to a complaint. Such a conjunction of offices was wrong, it was said. No one could successfully fill them both at one and the same time. Chalmers was indignant. This “cruel and illiberal insinuation” against the “the whole order of churchmen” needed to be refuted. Hence the pamphlet. There is a passage in it that is quoted in all the biographies: “The author of this pamphlet can assert from what to him is the highest of all authority, the authority of his own experience, that after the satisfactory discharge of his parish duties, a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which his taste may dispose him to engage”.

There is a moving sequel to this from Chalmers’ later years when he was a leader of the church’s evangelical party. In the course of a discussion at one of the General Assemblies he argued vehemently against the very combination of offices, minister and professor, that in his early days he had so boldly defended. One of his opponents had his old pamphlet to hand and quoted from it amidst much laughter. It drew from Chalmers the following moving response. Thanking the man for the opportunity thus afforded of making a public renunciation, he said, “I now confess myself to have been guilty of a heinous crime, and I now stand a repentant culprit before the bar of this venerable Assembly…I was at that time, sir, more devoted to mathematics than to the literature of my profession; and feeling grieved and indignant at what I conceived an undue reflection on the abilities and education of the clergy, I came forward with that pamphlet to rescue them from what I deemed an unmerited reproach, by maintaining that a devoted and exclusive attention to the study of mathematics was not dissonant to the proper habits of a clergyman. Alas, sir! so I thought in my ignorance and pride. I have now no reserve in saying that the sentiment was wrong, and that, in the utterance of it, I penned what was most outrageously wrong. Strangely blinded that I was! What, sir, is the object of mathematical science? Magnitude and the proportions of magnitude. But then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes: I thought not of the littleness of time; I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity”.

Conversion     

 We come now to Chalmers’ conversion. The distaste for “evangelical sentiment” which he admitted to be his during his student days continued for the first six years of his ministry. “The death of Christ”, writes one of his biographers, “had, in some manner inexplicable, removed all the obstacles that lay in the way of man’s salvation; and man had nothing now to do but obey the commandments of God and, by a life of virtue, prepare himself for the perfection and unalloyed felicity of heaven. He must do his best, and the death of Christ would make up for his deficiencies. Such was about the sum of his present theology”.  “Christ”, by Chalmers’ own confession, “through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver, whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as stripped Him of all the importance of His character and His offices”.

The change came at last. When Chalmers was twenty-nine a severe illness confined him to his room for four months and for six months kept him out of the pulpit. Recovery took almost a year. He thought that he was going to die and it made him think more seriously about his relationship with God than he had ever done in his life. The result, in the words of his principal biographer, William Hanna, was “the effort after a pure and heavenly morality”. “Every thought of his heart, every word of his lip, every action of his life he would henceforth strive to regulate under a high presiding sense of his responsibility to God; his whole life he would turn into a preparation for eternity. With all the ardour of a nature which never could do anything by halves, with all the fervour of an enthusiasm which had at length found an object worthy of its whole energies at their highest pitch of effort, he gave himself to the great work of setting himself right with God”. A year of fruitless toil was to follow before, in Hanna’s words, “the true ground of a sinner’s acceptance with God” was reached, and “the true principles of all acceptable obedient” were implanted in his heart.

It was through the reading of William Wilberforce’s Practical View of Christianity that the light eventually came. There is such a lovely irony about this. Chalmers loathed evangelical literature and on occasion even denounced it from the pulpit: “Many books are favourites with you which, I am sorry to say, are no favourites of mine. When you are reading Newton’s Sermons, and Baxter’s Saints Rest, and Doddridge’s Rise and Progress, where do Matthew, Mark, Luke and John go to?” Yet, it was through one of those very books that he so disliked that he was brought to an understanding of justification by faith alone and the experience of peace with God.

One of the first and most noticeable effects of his conversion was his regular and earnest study of the Bible. There was a frequent visitor to the manse by the name of John Bonthron. One day, prior to Chalmers’ illness, he said, “I find you aye busy, sir, with one thing or another; but come when I may, I never find you at your studies for the Sabbath”. “Oh, an hour or two on the Saturday evening is quite enough for that”, was his minister’s reply. How different things were now! John often found him at his Bible and one day remarked on it: “I never come in now, sir, but I find you aye at your Bible”. “All too little, John, all too little”, was the reply.

A great change took place in his preaching of course. He had always been earnest but now his earnestness was channelled into the pursuit of his people’s conversion. And God blessed his ministry to that end. In his remarkable Address to the Inhabitants of Kilmany, written and published just after leaving them for Glasgow in 1815, he reflects back over the twelve years of his ministry and its two sharply contrasting periods. Before his conversion his emphasis had been on “the meanness of dishonesty, on the villainy of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society.” But it was all in vain. “I never once heard of any such reformations having been effected…I am not sensible that all the vehemence with which I urged the proprieties of social life had the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners”

Chalmers did at last witness a change in his parishioners’ lives. But only after God changed his own life and, with it, his message. “[I]t was not till reconciliation to God became the distinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertion; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method  of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance…that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations.” His conclusion? “You have…taught me that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry in all its simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of its subduing efficacy upon the vices of a more crowded population.”