CHALMERS GRAND DESIGN
from "The St. Andrews
Seven"
In November 1823 the most celebrated preacher in Scotland
became Professor of Moral Philosophy at the country's oldest University, St.
Andrews, thirty miles north-east of Edinburgh. Each needed the other. Thomas
Chalmers, aged forty-three, looked for rest from the parish labours in Glasgow
which had brought him fame throughout Britain. St. Andrews, with just over 200
students and threatened with a further decline in student numbers, calculated
the benefits of acquiring a professor of Chalmers stature.
In their
enthusiasm both parties glossed over the real potential for conflict between
them. In a rapidly changing world St. Andrews remained a bastion of
conservative Moderatism' , which emphasised learning and morality rather
than doctrine and spirituality. Chalmers, on the other hand, was the brightest
star in the new galaxy of Evangelical leaders. To expect the Evangelical
Chalmers to live in peaceful co-existence with his Moderate colleagues was
asking too much. His arrival was followed by five years of tension and
controversy. It also heralded the greatest influx of students at St. Andrews in
the nineteenth century. His departure from Glasgow had occasioned dismay and
disappointment, the citizens consoling themselves with a civic banquet in his
honour, but his arrival at St. Andrews was greeted with unprecedented
enthusiasm on all sides. Even the ladies of the town clamoured for admission to
his opening lecture only to be told that their presence would be
unprecedented and unacademic' .
Within a month of his arrival the
local press reported: The popularity of Dr. Chalmers
increases daily. The Moral Philosophy class has trebled its members and the
prelections are attended by a host of more advanced students and others, to
whose accommodation the Reverend Doctor shows every attention. The class met in
Dr. Hunter s class-room (the largest in the college) on Tuesday. The old one
had previously been crowded to excess.
This was not the
first time that Chalmers had been to St. Andrews, nor even the first time he
had been a member of the staff. The town had memories of earlier associations
to lend colour and contrast to his more recent reputation. In 1791, at the
precocious but not unprecedented age of eleven, Chalmers had enrolled in the
Arts course at St. Andrews in the United College of St. Salvator and St.
Leonard. He then completed the divinity course at St. Mary's Divinity School
before leaving St. Andrews and his native Fife (he was born in Anstruther) for
further study in chemistry and philosophy at Edinburgh.
The great
ambition of his early life was a University Chair in Mathematics. This hope
seemed destined to fruition in 1802 when he was appointed assistant to the
Mathematics Professor at St. Andrews, a position which gave him effective
control of the whole course. Chalmers was energetic, talented and opinionated,
and tactless. He criticised his professor in public and found himself summarily
dismissed. His pride more dented than his self- confidence, he was appointed to
the rural parish of Kilmany nine miles west of St. Andrews. To him the chief
attraction of Kilmany was its proximity to the University. From Kilmany he
maintained a running battle with the Senatus of the University, undermining the
enemy through the medium of unofficial lectures in mathematics and chemistry.
Many tales circulated around Fife about this strange young man and his
bizarre chemistry experiments. Not surprisingly questions were also raised
about the neglect of his parish, especially when it was learned that he had
applied for the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. As
vigorous in his own defence as he was careless of the Church's welfare,
Chalmers maintained that after the satisfactory discharge of his parish
duties a minister could enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted
leisure for the prosecution of any science which his taste may engage' .
Reflecting on this claim twenty years later, Chalmers said, What. . . are
the objects of mathematical science? Magnitude and the proportions of
magnitude. But then.. . I had forgotten two magnitudes. I thought
not of the littleness of time. I recklessly thought not of the greatness of
eternity! Instead he had thought only of his academic reputation. For him
personal fulfilment was totally dependent on academic advancement and not at
all on the faithful discharge of his pastoral duties as an ordained minister of
the Gospel. Without a University Chair, he wrote despairingly in 1805, he was
consigned to the status of one of those ill-fated beings whom the
malignant touch of ordination has condemned to a life of ignorance and
obscurity; a being who must bid adieu, it seems, to every flattering
anticipation and drivel out the rest of his days in insignificance.'
Chalmers never lost his passionate need to live a life of significance.
By 1811, however, he had changed his mind completely about the means by which
significance is attained. The process culminating in this dramatic change
involved a number of experiences which fashioned him into the most outstanding
teacher of prospective missionaries and ministers of the gospel in the
nineteenth century.
The beginning of the great change may be traced
back to 1806 in which year his brother George died following an illness during
which he found comfort in the writings of some contemporary Evangelicals whom
Thomas despised. Then in August 1808 his sister Barbara died, and Thomas, who
had been commissioned to write the entry on Trigonometry' for the
Edinburgh Encyclopaedia asked if he might also write the entry on
Christianity' , since he now desired to examine its evidences more
closely. The death of his favourite uncle, Thomas Ballardie, in June 1809,
followed by a serious illness of his own, left Thomas fearful that he would be
the next victim. In preparing for what he supposed must be his early death, he
concluded that his academic ambitions were insignificant by comparison with the
ministerial duties he had neglected hitherto.
His new evaluation of the
labours distinctive of the minister of the Gospel was reinforced by his reading
Pascal' s Thoughts on Religion. Of incomparable mathematical genius, Blaise
Pascal could nevertheless, as Chalmers observed, stop short in the
brilliant career of discovery, . . . resign all the splendours of literary
reputation, . . . renounce without a sigh all the distinctions which are
conferred upon genius, and resolve to devote every talent and every hour to the
defence and illustration of the Gospel . In later years Chalmers was to present
to his own students the great challenge of Pascal's example.
The first
stage, then, in the process culminating in Chalmers' conversion began, as with
many others, in anxiety about his prospects after death. This was followed
quickly by his discovery of the strength of the evidences for the Christian
faith and the liberating truth that a sense of personal significance need not
depend on academic achievement.
The second stage, which lasted through
1810, saw Chalmers struggling to achieve the high standard of personal devotion
and dedication to duty which he imposed on himself out of the conviction that
salvation consisted of self-preservation through the re-ordering of priorities
and the establishment of habits of discipline. In this stage of his conversion
process, Chalmers can be compared with John Wesley in his Holy Club days at
Oxford and with the early Martin Luther attempting to storm heaven by
asceticism. Chalmers Journal of the period reveals that, as with Wesley and
Luther, there was little peace or joy in the struggle as he oscillated between
the presumption that he deserved to be saved and despair because his failings
suggested that he was far from right with God. He later realised that both the
presumption and the despair have one root cause: looking to oneself instead of
Christ.
The third and final stage in Chalmers conversion is best
described in his own words, written nine years afterwards in a letter to his
brother:
Feb. 14, 182.o My Dear Alexander,
I stated to you that the effect of a very long confinement, about ten years
ago, upon myself, was to inspire me with a set of very strenuous resolutions,
under which I wrote a Journal, and made many a laborious effort to elevate my
practice to the standard of the Divine requirements. During this course,
however, I got little satisfaction, and felt no repose. I remember that
somewhere about the year 1811 I had Wilberforce's View put into my hands, and
as I got on in reading it felt myself on the eve of a great revolution in all
my opinions about Christianity. I am now most thoroughly of opinion, and it is
an opinion founded on experience, that on the system of 'Do this and live', no
peace, and even no true, and worthy obedience, can ever be attained. It
is,'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' When this
belief enters the heart, joy and confidence enter along with it. The
righteousness which we try to work out for ourselves eludes our impotent grasp,
and never can a soul arrive at true or permanent rest in the pursuit of this
object. The righteousness which, by faith, we put on, secures our acceptance
with God, and secures our interest in His promises and gives us a part in those
sanctifying influences by which we are enabled to do with aid from on high what
we never can do without it. We look to God in a new light we see Him as
a reconciled Father; that love to Him which terror scares away reenters the
heart, and, with a new principle and a new power, we become new creatures in
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now the tales circulating about
Chalmers were of a different order. An example may be taken from the pen of Dr.
Robert Balfour who visited Kilmany in 1814:
I
never saw nor heard him till I came here, but report made him great and good. I
went, therefore, to his parish church with very high expectations indeed. They
were not disappointed: his talents are of the first order, and now
distinguished grace adorns them. He has long been known as a celebrated
philosopher and scorner of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; now, from
conviction and with a warm heart, he preaches the faith which once he
destroyed. I have had serious conversation with hip, and am astonished at a man
of such superior powers so modest and humble. He is indeed converted, and like
a little child.
Actually, Chalmers disliked such categorical
descriptions of his conversion. The minister's role is to proclaim the
whole counsel of God' without partiality , he said, whereas the desire to be
thought orthodox often arises from the temptation of human praise' .
Though he quickly assumed leadership of the Evangelical party in the Church of
Scotland, Chalmers proved problematical to his fellow Evangelicals because,
while sharing their beliefs, he retained his own inimitable vocabulary.
Yet there was no denying the radical practical changes which resulted
from his new understanding of the Gospel. He now preached, not the ineffective
moralising sermons of his Moderate days, but the utter alienation of the heart
in all its desires and affections from God,. . . the free offer of forgiveness
through the blood of Christ, and the Holy Spirit given through the channel of
Christ s mediatorship to all who asked Him . Because the Scriptures had now
become the living Word of God, he set himself to relearn Greek and Hebrew which
he had neglected during his student days at St. Andrews. His considerable
organising abilities were now devoted to the support of missionary and Bible
societies, while insisting that the traditional parish system of the Church of
Scotland is the best means of fulfilling the missionary obligations inherent in
the Gospel. He set aside the study of mathematics since it could not help him
to defend or illustrate the Gospel, whereas he retained his academic interest
in economics because he believed it could subserve that end. His views on the
areas of academic activity relevant to the defence of the Gospel were not
understood by all, but were to influence generations of students.
Chalmers
remained at Kilmany until 1815 forging his own synthesis of the best of
Evangelical traditions and scholarly habits of thought retained from his
Moderate days. Accompanying the new-found concern for prayer, Bible study,
personal religion, and the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, which were the
distinguishing characteristics of Evangelicals, was a determination, then rare
among Evangelicals, to relate this faith to the social and intellectual
problems of his day.
In Glasgow, where he served as a minister from
1815 to 1823, his mid-week lectures on business ethics and on science and
religion drew such crowds that shops closed as they could not compete with the
magnetic orator. He travelled to Edinburgh in 1816 and London in 1817 and took
both by storm. Returning to Glasgow, he explored ways in which Christian life
could be made possible in a society tottering on the brink of revolution and
fragmenting in the face of post-war unemployment and rapid social change. In
1819 he set up the St. John's Experiment in which, with the help of a highly
organised and enthusiastic laity, he implemented his ideas on systematic
visitation, the use of Sunday schools, and poor relief.
This blend of
the spiritual and the practical was the key to Chalmers appeal. He struggled to
release people from what he saw as an endemic fear of doing in the Christian
life. Such inactivity may have been attributed to a distorted view of
predestination, or plain apathy. So Chalmers often spoke of the power of pains
and prayer and severely criticised those who emphasised either at the expense
of the other.
Chalmers, as we have already observed, also had a rare
appreciation of the relevance to theology of other disciplines. Chalmers saw
moral philosophy - provided it concentrated on ethics from which it had been
sidetracked by Hume's scepticism - as a handmaid to ministerial training; and
political economy (which he also taught at St. Andrews) was in his view a
framework for understanding the way society worked, which Christians concerned
to apply their faith to the whole of life could not ignore. By accepting a
Chair in Moral Philosophy in 1823 and embarking on lectures in political
economy, Chalmers, as a key figure in Scottish Evangelicalism, was
demonstrating a commitment to holding together facets of the Christian mission
which have a tendency to fly apart. Rather than distinguishing between the
spiritual and the material , Chalmers sought to apply Christian
insights to a number of social issues: economics and poor relief, the needs of
the working classes, the ethics of the business community, famine relief, and
the compatibility of the Christian faith with applied science and technological
change. Through the Gospel, then, society is renovated as well as man. This
comprehensive vision of the Christian good of Scotland , to cite his much
quoted phrase, formed the social conscience of a generation of St. Andrews
students. Chalmers' refusal to restrict religion to limited areas of human
endeavour arose from a deep conviction, derived froth his study of the writings
of the great American Evangelical theologian of revival, Jonathan Edwards, that
truth was a great whole, of which philosophy, science, and revealed religion
were inseparable parts. His students quickly caught the vision of their new
professor's grand design .
By the 1820s St. Andrews, by-passed by the
industrial development then revolutionising Scottish society, was a backwater.
Its cathedral, one of the largest in Britain, had been a ruin for more than two
centuries; its harbour, once the centre of an opulent textile trade, lay
deserted; and in its streets, perpetually swept by east winds, the grass grew
undisturbed by traffic. The ancient university, founded in 1412 by Bishop Henry
Wardlaw, was in a dilapidated condition. The ancient college buildings, which
were so much off the perpendicular that they had to be bound with cross beams,
reminded Chalmers of an old cotton mill.
St. Andrews was rich only in
the romance of historical association. In the sixteenth century Cardinal Beaton
had been hanged from his castle window, John Knox had preached, and the French
had captured the town. But while the very stones breathed history they did not
cry out, and St. Andrews was easily forgotten by Edinburgh and even more so by
Westminster after 1707 when Scotland and England were united by the Act of
Union. The university suffered from financial mismanagement and neglect. Funds
intended for building maintenance were used to augment the salaries of
professors. Nepotism was rife in staff appointments, and although there had
been and still were some fine teachers, the main criterion for appointment was
political reliability rather than academic excellence.
By refusing to
take part in corruptions long hallowed by usage, Chalmers quickly got off-side
with his fellow professors. They had been willing to risk Chalmers presence
among them for the sake of the new students he was expected to attract, but
they were not prepared to have him rock the boat financially, politically or,
indeed, theologically. By the 1820s Moderatism was ossified at St. Andrews in
its most defensive and anachronistic form. It was not surprising that the
students had voted against Moderatism with their feet. The professor of logic
invariably arrived late for class and left early as he had written few lectures
and had to spin them out. The professor of church history excelled only in
slowness of utterance: in the University chapel he commenced a sermon on the
text Enoch walked with God :
Walking, my brethren,
is that mode of progression by which
a man by alternately advancing first
one foot and then the other,
gradually proceeds along the road.
Chalmers
supplied the missing ingredient - life: enthusiasm and conviction - and the
students returned. The university year or session ran from November through to
April the following year. After the manner of newly appointed lecturers,
Chalmers, in 1823/4, prepared his material barely one class ahead of his
students. His lectures were fresh and intoxicating, and as we have seen, his
classroom in the quadrangle of ruins was overcrowded. A much larger room had to
be found, and the following year he taught the largest moral philosophy class
at St. Andrews in the nineteenth century. The lecture room seated 150, but so
many crowded in to hear the Doctor' that even in the middle of winter,
the fire normally essential for warmth had to be extinguished, and the windows
thrown open. Students came from England and Wales as well as from the other
Scottish universities in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Some older students
who had completed the course re-enrolled to do it again under Chalmers.
Chalmers commenced each class period with a brief prayer followed by a
succinct outline of the lecture to follow. In his delivery Chalmers made few
concessions to his change from pulpit to lecture room. Some students were so
spellbound by the presentation and the vision of comprehensive, systematic,
unified truth which Chalmers embodied as well as expounded that they never got
past taking down the first sentences. He imparted not just ideas, but a vision
- the grand design - taught not just by lecturing, but by inviting
participation. Students were interrogated, set prize essays and required to
take part in seminars in which they did the major work of presenting each
topic. Chalmers students were not only inspired; they learnt to think for
themselves.
The resultant atmosphere was highly conducive to hero-worship.
Many of his students were young teenagers, and it is not surprising that
someone of Chalmers strength of personality should have made an enormous
imprint on young lives. Of the many who came under his influence we will follow
the progress of six in particular. Nesbit, Duff, Mackay and Ewart attended
Chalmers class in his first (1823/24) session, and Urquhart and Adam attended
the following year. John Urquhart was the most brilliant of the six, so that it
mattered less that he was one of those generally too transfixed to take notes.
Robert Nesbit, more introspective in personality, made a determined effort to
write down Chalmers every word. Alexander Duff was destined to come closest to
his mentor in fame, thought and personality, although he imbibed more of
Chalmers elaborate phraseology than his sense of humour. John Adam had left his
theological studies in Glasgow to sit under Chalmers and, judging by the
following reaction, he was not disappointed:
Dr. Chalmers lectures and even examinations and repetitions are
really quite a treat; he has the art of clothing every thing in such vivid
colours, his comprehensive mind takes such a grasp of its subject, and his fine
imagination and nervous language present such a luminous display of it, as to
fix the attention and fill his hearers with delight, whilst he carries them
along wiht him in his new and original elucidations. The most careless are at
length fixed in a listening posture, and every countenance bears the mark of
the profoundest attention, till his brilliant imagery sometimes irresistibly
calls forth the testimony of universal admiration, by 'ruffing', though
forbidden.
It would be wrong to underestimate the equally
formative influence of their earlier experiences and home backgrounds, and the
extraordinary effect of their interaction one with another. It was St. Andrews
that provided the nest and Chalmers who drew them - and we must begin with an
account of their early lives......
Home |
Biography | Literature | Letters |
Interests | Links |
Quotes | Photo-Wallet