Thomas Chalmers                                                                                                                                       

Part 3: The Disruption, the West Port, and the close

There was much that was bright and inspiring about Chalmers’ early years in Edinburgh. The influence of evangelicalism both in the pulpit and the church courts was increasing all the time. Many of Chalmers’ students were men of great giftedness and godliness who afterwards became outstandingly useful ministers. At last, too, the Church of Scotland was sending out missionaries, Alexander Duff being the first in 1828. There was much to encourage. In 1834, however, a dark cloud came over the Church of Scotland. In that year what is known as The Ten Years Conflict began, a conflict that culminated in the Disruption of 1843 when almost five hundred ministers, with Chalmers at the head of them, severed their links with the Established Church to form the Free Church of Scotland.

The Disruption                                                                                                                                                                             

Chalmers was a firm believer in an established or national church. His great vision was for a nation thoroughly Christianised through the influence of the state-supported Church of Scotland. He believed, says James Dodds, “that there was nothing unscriptural, nothing wrong in any way, but, on the contrary, that it was most salutary, and in accordance with Scripture, that the State, for the religious instruction and moral improvement of its people, should engage the services of the Church…making over to it certain endowments for the support of its clergy, and the efficient performance of its function as the National Church”. In his own words, he viewed it as getting at the government’s hands “a maintenance for our clergy, and engaging in return for the Christian education of the people – a conjunction, we think, fruitful of innumerable blessings both to the Church and to Society, but in which the value given is many hundred times greater than the value received”. Or again, “the establishment and extension of National Churches afford the only adequate machinery for the moral and Christian instruction of a people”.

There was one condition, however, that had imperatively to be fulfilled if the connection between church and state was to be a success: the church’s spiritual independence. In the exercise of its spiritual functions it must be absolutely free. And for generations that had been the case in Scotland. In the course of a famous series of lectures in London in 1838 on the subject of Church Establishments he could say to his English audience, “We have no other communication with the State than that of being maintained by it, after which we are left to regulate the proceedings of our great home mission with all the purity, and the piety, and the independence of any missionary board. We are exposed to nothing from without which can violate the sanctity of the apostolical character, if we ourselves make no surrender of it. In things ecclesiastical we decide all. Some of these things may be done wrong, but still they are our majorities which do it. They are not, they cannot be forced upon us from without. We own no head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ”.

But things were in the process of changing. During the course of the Ten Years Conflict, from 1834 to 1843, the government through its civil courts began to interfere with the workings of the church and to rob it of the spiritual independence it had so long enjoyed. For Chalmers, that was a price too high to pay for the benefits of an Establishment. His language is strong: “I have uniformly stated that the least violation of the spiritual independence of the Church in return for a State endowment was enough to convert a Church Establishment into a moral nuisance”. His view, writes W.G. Blaikie, was “that a church enthralled to the state could never be that beneficent instrument, that powerful 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”.

Sadly, there was to be no redress or retraction. The state refused to allow the church the continuance of her spiritual independence. Encroachment after encroachment was made on the prerogatives of the church’s divine Head. A severance of the relationship became necessary and on the 18th of May 1843 it happened. With the greatest reluctance Chalmers and his like-minded fellow ministers dissolved their connection with the state. But it was a step that God greatly honoured. The Free Church of Scotland flourished, without state help, in a way that few, if any, could have imagined.

The West Port                                                                                                                                                                               

On the 17th of March 1840 Chalmers reached his sixtieth birthday. It had long been a favourite thought with him that the seventh decade of life ought to be turned into a kind of Sabbath, and he had looked forward to it as a period of comparative rest when more time could be given to communion with God. The seven years that remained to him till his death in 1847, however, were, as W.G. Blaikie puts it, “if not the very busiest of his life…years of peculiar tension, anxiety, and disappointment”. We have touched on the principal reason for this. By 1840, the Ten Years Conflict was at its height. Before him was a further three years of conflict. Then would come the massive task of organising a new church, something in which Chalmers had a critical role to play.

Passing over that we come to what Chalmers described as “the most joyful event of my life”. ln a letter to his friend, Mr. Lennox, of New York City, written just weeks before his death in 1847, he says, “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. Our church was opened on the 19th of February…I presided myself, on Sabbath last, over its first sacrament. There were 132 communicants, and 100 of them from the West Port.” In the early 1840s the West Port was one of the worst districts in the city, notorious as the scene of the Burke and Hare murders, and infested with beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. The following gives us a sense for just how bad it was:

“When Mr. Tasker, the minister of the West Port, made his first visits to some of the filthiest closes, it was no uncommon thing for him to find twenty to thirty men, women, and children, huddled together in one putrid dwelling, lying indiscriminately on the floor…Upon one occasion he entered a tenement with from twelve to twenty apartments, where every human being, man and woman, were so drunk they could not hear their own squalid infants crying in vain to them for food…He went once to a funeral, and found the assembled company all so drunk around the corpse, that he had to go and beg some sober neighbours to come and carry the coffin to the grave.”

It was this poor and depraved district that Dr. Chalmers selected for his “territorial experiment”. The term is his and so also the explanation: “The very essence of our scheme lies in the thorough operation of what we have called the territorial principle. We limit our attention to a single district or locality, itself split into sub-districts, having each a Christian agent attached to it; so that not a home or family which might not be frequently and habitually visited by one having the charge of not more, if possible, than twenty households.” Chalmers believed this to be the only effective way of evangelising the degraded and over-crowded districts of major towns and cities, and for years he had been eager to demonstrate what, with God’s blessing, could be achieved. With its 411 families and 2000 inhabitants, its poverty and depravity, the West Port of Edinburgh was an ideal place for the attempt. It was a work, he admitted, “greatly too much for my declining strength”. But he threw himself into it heart and soul – and with wonderful results.

The first step was the opening of a school. Almost three-quarters of West Port children were growing up without any education at all. So successful, however, were the district visitors in persuading parents to take advantage of the provision (even though it wasn’t free), that when the school opened on 11th November 1844 there were 64 day students and 57 evening students. In the course of the first year the numbers grew to 250. Most of them were from the West Port.  The school was located in an old tanning-loft. In the same place, on Sunday morning the 22nd of December 1844, public worship was held for the first time. It was a far from attractive location: “The interior was bare and dilapidated; the walls coarse and unplastered, pierced here and there with little, dingy, unsightly windows; the roof low and scantily slated, scarcely affording decent shelter; the floor decayed, uneven, and shaking at every tread.” 

William Hanna was present at the evening service. “When we looked round”, he writes, “and saw that the whole fruit of the advices, and requests, and entreaties which for many previous weeks had been brought to bear upon all the families by the visitors, was the presence of about a dozen adults, and those mostly old women, we confess to strong misgivings as to the result.” In April 1845, however, Chalmers secured the help of William Tasker, later the West Port minister, and attendance grew under his ministry.

Dr. Chalmers himself, as health permitted, met with the district visitors once a week for discussion, encouragement, counsel, and prayer. He also habitually attended the Sunday services, sometimes as a preacher, often as a hearer. An eyewitness records that “when he was a hearer only, one would see him near the pulpit, in a crowd of deaf old women, who were meanly clothed, but who followed 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. Anyone looking at him could see that he was in a state of supreme enjoyment; he could not be happier out of heaven.”

The West Port was deeply upon his heart. In prayers that only came to light after his death we hear requests like this: “Moving fearlessly onward, may I at length obtain such possession of the West Port, as that the gospel of Jesus Christ shall have the moral ascendancy over a goodly number of its families”. “O that I were enabled to pull down the strongholds of sin and of Satan which are there”. “Do thou plentifully endow him [Mr. Tasker] with the graces and gifts of the Apostle Paul. May he have many souls for his hire”. “O may he not only be himself saved, but may he be the instrument of salvation to many.”

On Friday 19th February 1847, the West Port Church was formally opened by Dr. Chalmers. On the following Monday he wrote to William Tasker, “I have got now the desire of my heart – the church is finished, the schools are flourishing, our ecclesiastical machinery is about complete, and all in good working order. God has indeed heard my prayer, and I could now lay down my head in peace and die.” When only a few weeks later that is exactly what happened it was feared that the work would founder. It did not. Three hundred seats had been let when the church opened and attendance continued to grow steadily. By 1879 the membership was in excess of eleven hundred. By 1896 the number of communicants was upwards of thirteen hundred. Also, and almost from the beginning, through the educating of the children, through the efforts of the visitors, and through the public preaching of God’s word, the district itself began to visibly change for the better. It was all a magnificent monument not just to Chalmers’ labours and prayers, but to his faith. He loved the maxim of John Eliot, missionary to Native Americans, that “prayer and pains can do anything”. He used to quote it often. And be believed it.

“With more than kingly honours…”                                                                                                                                              

 The end came suddenly and peacefully. On the Sunday evening of 30th May 1847, Chalmers retired to bed seemingly well. The next morning there was no sound from his room. When his housekeeper at last went in and threw open the window shutters and drew aside the curtains of his bed, there he was, says Hanna, “half erect, his head reclining gently on the pillow; the expression of his countenance that of fixed and majestic repose. She took his hand – touched his brow; he had been dead for hours; very shortly after his parting salute to his family he had entered the eternal world”.

His funeral took place on the 4th of June. On the following day, in the columns of the popular evangelical newspaper the Witness, there was a moving account of it from the pen of its editor Hugh Miller: “Dust to dust; the grave now holds all that was mortal of Thomas Chalmers. Never before did we witness such a funeral; nay, never before, in at least the memory of man, did Scotland witness such a funeral. Greatness of the mere extrinsic type can always command a showy pageant; but mere extrinsic greatness never yet succeeded in purchasing the tears of a people; and the spectacle of yesterday – in which the trappings of grief, worn not as idle signs, but as the representatives of a real sorrow, were borne by well-nigh half the population of the metropolis, and blackened the public ways for furlong after furlong, and mile after mile – was such as Scotland has rarely witnessed, and which mere rank or wealth, when at the highest and fullest, were never yet able to buy. It was a solemn tribute, spontaneously paid to departed goodness and greatness by the public mind…There was a moral sublimity in the spectacle. It spoke more emphatically than by words, of the dignity of intrinsic excellence, and of the height to which a true man may attain. It was the dust of a Presbyterian minister which the coffin contained; and yet they were burying him amid the tears of a nation, and with more than kingly honours”.

I close this sketch with what Walker calls “the great lesson of Chalmers’ life”. It “is the same”, he says, “as that which is suggested by the story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. God needed a man to roll back the tide of irreligion, and to make his Church in Scotland better serve its ends; and the man was found among that very class of ministers who were most unfriendly to the supernatural in religion. Hence his call was a great act of grace. What he would have done had not God found him, we can only guess. What he did accomplish, in consequence of his being found of God, is matter of history. That divine touch, which altered the direction of his life, made him a lasting blessing to his country; and as we glance back upon his career, and see what grace enabled him to do, we are led anew to think what a bright new century there would be for Scotland if the Spirit were to exercise His sovereign power and divert some of the energy now given to the world into the channel of the gospel”.