Kitabı oku: «Thomas Chalmers», sayfa 5

Most memorable in the history of Glasgow and in the history of Scottish Christianity were the eight years of labour spent by Dr. Chalmers in that city. Of individual cases of conversion the number was beyond reckoning; beginning with his dear friend, Thomas Smith, and ending with a Camlachie weaver – a reckless infidel till Dr. Chalmers came across him, but won by the simplicity and earnest sympathy which he showed in weekly visits during the months when he was dying of consumption. And the circumstances of his various converts were very different. The thoughtless young officer, who entered his church with the crowd as he would have entered the theatre; the fashionable lady, whose curiosity led her to hear the great popular orator; the busy merchant, with no thought nor desire beyond material things; the aspiring student, bent only on literary distinction – each person, arrested and brought to Christ by the force of his appeals, represented the many classes from among which, as Dr. Hanna tells us, it was the privilege of Chalmers to gather recruits for the Kingdom of Heaven.

But more than that: under Chalmers the tide of public sentiment turned decisively to evangelical religion. Before he came, evangelical preaching had been looked on as a combination of sour fanaticism and weak sentimentalism; under his preaching it attained its true rank and glory as the very essence of the Gospel message. Before his time, as the population of the city grew from year to year, thousands had been quietly allowed to fall away from all Christian observances, and to form a community of paganism, leavening the city with carelessness and corruption. It was his powerful voice that roused attention to the evil and the danger, and organised the machinery best fitted to grapple with it. Previous to his time, even the most earnest of the ministers in their week-day ministrations had seldom gone beyond their own congregations, or thought much of the careless and godless families around them; it was Chalmers that, by the emphasis he laid on the territorial method, brought into operation that system of aggression which affords the only hope of arresting and reclaiming the outcast mass. Before his time infidelity was doing its deadly work among the more intellectual and cultivated classes, and the spirit of indifference was widely spread even where a formal profession of religion continued; it was in a large measure the influence of Chalmers that restored a living faith in Christ and in redemption, and aroused concern in that class of society for the life to come.

Still more remarkably, perhaps, had Dr. Chalmers succeeded in inspiring men and women in Glasgow, young men very emphatically, with the spirit of Christian service. His 'agency,' as he called it, resembled the followers of Saul, 'a band of men whose hearts God had touched.' In after years they formed the very élite of the earnest Christian laymen of the West; and to this day, though all of them have passed away, their fervour and devotedness are still found in some of their children and children's children.

Nor had he failed to secure the esteem and affection of the great community of Glasgow. They honoured him personally, and they were proud of his greatness and fame. They were ready with their purses to support whatever scheme he deemed it necessary to set on foot. A more attached or warm-hearted company could not have been found anywhere than the three hundred and forty friends who, ere he left, sat down together at the largest dinner-party that had ever assembled in the city in honour of a single individual.

Why, then, did he abandon the field where his labours had been so eminently successful?

Simply because these labours had grown to such multiplicity and variety as to demand an expenditure of bodily and mental energy that could not be continued.

His incumbency had lasted during eight years of his prime – from thirty-five to forty-three. Happily he had not been prostrated by any severe illness, and the systematic regularity of his life, with the attention he had given to diet, sleep, and exercise, had kept him from breaking down. But who that thinks of all he was doing, the problems with which he was grappling, the schemes he was working, the constant demands of the pulpit, the incessant labours of the parish, the use he was making of the press, the toil of his correspondence, amounting on an average to fifty letters a week, the perpetual turmoil in which he was living, amid crowds of visitors, and all the other fruits of unrivalled popularity, as well as the demands of an increasing and growing family, and his desire to keep up friendly intercourse with his brothers and sisters – can fail to see that the indefinite continuance of such a mode of life was more than could be thought of? Had it continued much longer, a breakdown was inevitable. Very pathetically he wrote to one of his most intimate friends, Mrs. Coutts, of the constant feeling of exhaustion which at times was like to overbear him altogether. Besides, Chalmers was coming to see that through the press there opened to him a way of spreading his views and extending his usefulness which was as full of promise as it was agreeable to himself. But as a minister of Glasgow he could not do through the press what, with a little more leisure, he could fairly expect to accomplish.

And then the prospect of an academic chair was very congenial. It had been his earliest dream while the world was all before him, and it had not yet lost its charm. The tenacity of his affections was very remarkable. Towards the close of his life we shall have occasion to note the long-continued vitality of a strong but unavowed attachment which had sprung up in his boyhood, and it is no wonder that to such a nature the early vision of an academic chair continued to retain its brightness and its fascination. Once and again he had set it aside when it seemed to be within his grasp, because his Glasgow experiments and arrangements were not ripe enough for the change. Now, when the Glasgow work was fairly consolidated; when the bustle and pressure of Glasgow life had become almost unbearable; when, through the press, the prospect had opened of impregnating not Glasgow only, but the whole empire with his views; and when his own Alma Mater had sent him a unanimous invitation to fill a chair which formed a connecting-link between philosophy and religion, – it is not wonderful that he made up his mind to the wrench that was to sever him from his Glasgow friends, and resolved to accept a chair in the university with which his earliest memories were connected, and in which he could look forward to a career of peace and comfort to himself, and great usefulness to his church and country.

CHAPTER IV
ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
1823-1828

On the 9th November 1823 Dr. Chalmers preached his farewell sermon at Glasgow, and on Friday the 14th he delivered his introductory lecture at St. Andrews. He had not a single day of rest between the toils of the office he laid down and those of the office he took up. Four of his most esteemed Glasgow friends had accompanied him to St. Andrews in token of gratitude for the past and good-will for the future. At first Dr. Chalmers was alone, and for a time he was the guest of his old friend, Professor Duncan. It was not till the beginning of 1824 that Mrs. Chalmers and his children joined him.

St. Andrews had been familiar to him from his boyhood, and its historical associations had dawned on him gradually, but with a firm hold, as such things usually impress boys. Its traditions went back to a remote antiquity. Fordun's legend of the Greek saint, Regulus, being ordered by the Lord to carry the bones of St. Andrew into the 'north-west corner of the earth,' was too obviously the offspring of superstition to be much regarded; yet it seemed to indicate that the 'East Nook' was one of the earliest seats of Christianity in Scotland. In pre-Reformation times St. Andrews had been the headquarters of the Roman Church, and, under successive archbishops, Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart had been burnt at the stake for their noble testimony to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Before their day, Peter Craw, a Bohemian, and thus of the same stock as the Moravian Church for which Dr. Chalmers always had a very special regard, and other witnesses for the truth had perished in the flames. It was here that John Knox first opened his mouth as a preacher; hither, too, he retired for a time at the close of his life, and preached in the church when danger threatened him in the metropolis. Here, also, Andrew and James Melville, Robert Rollok, Robert Bruce, Robert Blair, Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Halyburton, and many other familiar names in the history of the country, had gathered wisdom as students, or imparted it as professors, or as ministers of the Gospel. The first university in Scotland had been set up at St. Andrews, and men like Buchanan and Melville had made it illustrious by their learning. Nor was it very long since Chalmers himself had found the powers of his intellect awakened as he sat in its mathematical class-room. It must have been with no ordinary feelings that he returned as a professor to his Alma Mater, and girded himself for the duty of influencing its students; not, however, in the spirit or with the aims of his early years, but under the influence of those intense evangelical convictions that, twelve years before, had revolutionised his soul.

During the first session, in preparing his lectures, he was truly from hand to mouth; to be but a few days in advance of the time for their delivery was all that he could achieve. His second session, 1824-25, was regarded as the most brilliant in his academic career. The number of students was more than double what it had ever been in former years, and the enthusiasm was intense. Chalmers was well aware of the fear entertained in some quarters that, amid the blaze of his popular eloquence, he would not be able to attain to an academic level in the more solid qualities of thinking and exposition of thought, appropriate to a university. But in point of fact there was more than enough of solid thought and ingenious speculation in his lectures to do away with any such impression. Eloquent they often were, nor did he scorn the aid of imagination and illustration in handling the topics of his course; but his main object was to exercise the minds of his students, and to set them thinking upon his themes.

At the very outset, he disabused his class of the idea that moral philosophy was the same as mental philosophy. Moral philosophy was the science of ethics, the science of duty, and, in his view, it ought to embrace duty in all its relations, and to make use of all the light that could be brought to bear on that high theme. In particular – and here was the peculiar feature of his course – he desired to make the fullest use of what had been communicated on this subject by supernatural revelation. He justified this method of proceeding by an illustration. If natural philosophy were divided into two courses, and if one of them should relate to terrestrial objects and such parts of astronomy as might be prosecuted without the telescope, it would be strange indeed were the professor to make no allusion to that instrument, and to ignore, or even repudiate, all the light which it threw on the general scheme of things. So also, in investigating the science of ethics, it would be an extraordinary thing if no use were made of the Christian Revelation, supposing that its authenticity could be established as a revelation from heaven. Natural theology would form an important branch of his subject; but, in its very nature, natural theology was an incomplete and inadequate science. Following the light of nature, it proved the insufficiency of that light; it created the thirst and the longing for more light than it could itself supply. This further light revelation brought in. He held moral philosophy to be the study that ought immediately to precede that of theology; without theology it was incomplete. It would be no part of his course to set forth at full length the evidences for the Christian Revelation, but he would give a general view of them; he would show at least that there was a primâ facie presumption in favour of the divine origin of Christianity; and, therefore, that it was consistent with the principles of the Baconian philosophy to make use of its light in dealing with the great questions of moral obligation.

In fact, Chalmers in this matter took ground precisely opposite to that more recently taken by one of his countrymen – the munificent founder of the Gifford Lectures. According to Gifford, it becomes us to investigate the whole subject of natural theology and moral obligation without the slightest reference to any alleged supernatural revelation. This he held to be the sound, impartial, unprejudiced course of true philosophy, and the best way of attaining to simple, absolute truth. In the view of others, this is like the act of a man blindfolding himself before entering on a difficult investigation; or of a man walking in sparks of his own kindling, while, if he chose, he might be at work under the bright influence of electric light.

One might have thought that, after finishing his first course at St. Andrews, Chalmers would have held himself entitled to a long rest. But as soon as the session was ended, he set himself, during the fortnight that intervened, to prepare for the General Assembly. The question of pluralities, the question of pauperism, and the question of the amount of time to be spent by students in theological study were to be before the house, and Chalmers was interested in all. On one of these occasions he came into collision with Dr. Inglis, the leader of the Assembly; but, even on a point of order, Chalmers was equal to him, and in a division, he carried his motion. At the close of the Assembly, on the invitation of Mr. Leonard Horner, he took part in a meeting in Edinburgh on behalf of a then infant institution – the School of Arts. The motion which he made on that occasion was seconded by Sir Walter Scott. This was the only occasion on which these two eminent men appeared on the same platform and were associated in the same work.

The Assembly is past, but the time of rest has not yet come. Dr. Chalmers hurries back to Glasgow. Now that he has got breathing-time, his heart returns to the great experiment which he had begun there, and an unrestrainable eagerness takes possession of him to help it on. The next six weeks are spent in incessant labour in the old field. In looking back on this period he remarked in his peculiar phraseology, 'I think that I never spent a season of more crowded occupancy.' On his way to Glasgow he took Perth, where he preached a missionary sermon on a week-day, the collection amounting to £81, 8s. In Glasgow he preached steadily in the chapel of ease, and he had the great satisfaction, though of course it was but a temporary one, of adding four hundred to the sittings let, no doubt to accommodate the many persons who were bent on hearing him during the few weeks of his stay. During these six weeks he preached ten times in the chapel, writing all the lectures, and apparently the sermons too – seven of his texts being from the Epistle to the Romans, part of the exposition afterwards published. Apart from spiritual impulse and spiritual fruit, his six weeks in Glasgow benefited the chapel to the tune of £200. In the midst of his incessant public work he contrived to write to his wife a full journal of all his proceedings, and he gave her most explicit instructions to give the children a feast of strawberries on the arrival of each letter, and to let them know that they were from him. With all his greatness and eloquence, it is amusing to find him showing that nervousness in the prospect of a speech at a public dinner which but few men have been able to overcome. 'It kept me anxious all day.' One is reminded of Sir Robert Peel, who could hardly eat anything at public dinners when a speech was forthcoming, but sat in misery, crumbling his bread. 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.'

A source of greater trouble and annoyance arose after his Glasgow visit in connection with a promise to deliver a missionary sermon at Stockton, near Manchester. After his arrival, he found that an advertisement had been issued from which it appeared that the sermon would come in as a sort of interlude in a vast musical entertainment, in which an orchestra of at least a hundred persons, supported by drums, trumpets, bassoon, organ, serpents, violins without number, violoncellos, bass viols, flutes, and hautboys would take part. Chalmers was most indignant. He felt it an affront to himself, to be stuck up like a mountebank, as if he had come to help in the entertainment of a pleasure-seeking audience. But not less did he feel it a prostitution of his office, as if the Ambassador of Heaven, dealing with men on their state before God and their need of reconciliation, were to be mixed up with such a clatter. He was on the verge of refusing to preach at all. But remembering his promise, he compromised the matter by refusing to appear except at the time when his sermon was delivered. 'I stopped in the minister's room till it was all over. Went to the pulpit, prayed, preached, retired during the time of the collection, and again prayed. Before I left my own private room, they fell too again, with most tremendous fury, and the likest thing to it which I recollect is a great military band on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.' In spite of all, the collection exceeded £400. In telling the story, as he often did to his friends, he said that they hardly let him alone even while he was preaching; 'the fellows were tuning their trombones in my very ear.'

November 1825 found him again at his work in St. Andrews, with a better prepared course, and a very numerous class. Notwithstanding the labours of the recess, no symptom of exhaustion appeared; on the contrary, he seemed to thirst for further labour, and whereas the subject of political economy had been considered to fall to the professor of moral philosophy, he intimated that in the following session he would make political economy the subject of a separate course. A numerous class was enrolled, but instead of teaching the subject by lectures, he treated it by means of a text-book. The text-book was Dr. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, on portions of which the students were examined, the professor occasionally adding explanations or little dissertations of his own, or referring to more modern books which gave the latest aspects of the subject.

It should be added that Dr. Chalmers always opened his class with prayer. This was an innovation in a class of philosophy. The prayers were short and pithy, often bearing on the subject of the preceding lecture, and the language was often felicitous, and even sublime. Of the like quality were the prayers he offered when he became a professor of divinity. Many of these will be found in the Institutes of Theology.

But at St. Andrews he was very far from confining himself to academic labours. He could not look round him without feeling that, small though the town was, it was not less in need than crowded Glasgow of efforts to dispel its spiritual darkness, and awaken young and old to the things of eternity. The place had fallen from its high estate; it was no longer like the St. Andrews of those days when, fragrant with martyr memories, it formed one of the chief centres of evangelical influence in Scotland. The first form of pastoral activity to which Dr. Chalmers betook himself was that of a Sabbath-school teacher. As soon as he had leisure after the first session, he marked out for himself a district of the town in the neighbourhood of his house, visited the families, and invited the children to attend a class of his own on the Sunday evenings. For that class he made as careful, though not as elaborate, preparations as for his students in the university. By and by it increased to rather burdensome size.

Meanwhile, another class of young persons engaged his attention, and the Sabbath school was handed over to others. It had been suggested to him that great good would result from a students' class, from gathering together, on Tuesday evenings, such students as desired to receive from him religious instruction of the same kind as they had been accustomed to receive in their fathers' houses before they came to college. The first winter of this meeting, five students came for the purpose. Chalmers instructed them and dealt with them, gave them books for Sabbath reading, examining them as to their contents, and at the same time taking a book of his own, Scripture References, as a kind of doctrinal text-book of his expositions and examinations. Next year, the number was about a dozen. In the third year, the number became so great that his dining-room was crowded with students. One of them remarked afterwards that they learned more of Christian ethics at these meetings than from all his class-room lectures on moral philosophy.

In some instances, the fruit of these meetings was very remarkable. According to the testimony of Dr. Duff, who was one of Chalmers's young men, the students of St. Andrews, previous to his coming, were a godless lot. To make a profession of piety was to incur universal derision. Nor were the divinity students much better; some of them, indeed, were more notorious than other students for impiety, immorality, and riotous revellings. Dr. Chalmers was the instrument of a great revival. In 1823-24, some of the students formed themselves into a missionary society, which held meetings next session in the room of a remarkable man, John Urquhart, one of those saintly youths whose early death puts an end to the boundless promise of their student careers. Dr. Chalmers had already become president of a missionary society, embracing different denominations. At the monthly meetings of this society, which became so large that they had soon to be held in the Town Hall, he gave addresses on missionary topics, not only communicating information, but also pressing the motives and encouragements to missionary effort, answering objections, and gathering from the reports on the state of the heathen confirmations of Scripture, and evidences of the divine origin of Christianity. A university missionary society had now become possible, and its career began in 1825-26 under more favourable conditions than could have been looked for. The blessing of God rested on it, for it furnished some of the first and noblest missionaries that the Church of Scotland sent into the foreign field. The first was the Rev. Robert Nesbit, who spent many laborious and effective years at Bombay. Before Dr. Chalmers left St. Andrews, another of his students, Mr. Adams, had begun his missionary career. In 1829, Chalmers presided at the ordination of Alexander Duff, now one of the brightest names in the record of missions. The Rev. A. Mackay and the Rev. David Ewart followed, and John Urquhart was preparing to go when illness and death arrested his career. A more beautiful or promising springtime of missionary activity could hardly be imagined. And the same course that had thus been begun at St. Andrews was also being followed in Edinburgh. On 27th December 1825, the Edinburgh University Missionary Association was founded, chiefly through the influence of John Wilson, afterwards so well known as Dr. Wilson of Bombay. Chalmers has sometimes been called a man of one idea, and in some minds the notion got hold that all his interest was in home missions, and that he looked with comparative indifference on foreign. It would be more correct to say that he was a man of all manner of ideas, but that he worked out only one idea at a time. In that large heart there was room not only for the welfare of Scotland, but of the whole world too. His identification of himself with the missionary cause, at a time when many derided it, was an act of high moral courage. So was another act, his taking sittings for his family in the dissenting chapels, that they might be nourished with evangelical food, not then to be obtained in the Established Church. Occasionally he would attend these chapels himself, both on Sundays and week-days; not disdaining the devotional services of a pious mechanic at the prayer-meeting, and deriving far more help therefrom than from the dreary ministrations either of the town church or that of the college.

In one respect Dr. Chalmers's course did not run smoothly at St. Andrews. He got into loggerheads with his colleagues on the subject of college finance. In dealing with the funds of the college, it had been the practice of the Senatus to lay aside a certain amount for general expenses, and to divide the balance as a supplemental salary among the different professors. Chalmers was not clear that this was a legitimate course, and for some years he refused to receive his share of the supplemental fund, which accordingly accumulated until it amounted to some £700. Reflecting as this refusal did, or was supposed to do, on the honesty of his colleagues, it gave him more pain than any other public duty he was ever called to perform. After he had left St. Andrews, the university commissioners having looked into the matter, recorded it as their judgment that there was no good reason why he should not accept of the sum standing at his credit; and as Dr. Chalmers had desired only that the matter should be settled by competent authority, he accepted the money. But nothing could exceed his surprise and indignation when he found, in the published report of the commissioners in 1831, a statement that 'the principal and professors appear to have made these appropriations without any authority.' In a letter addressed to the commissioners, and published in 1832, after quoting their judgment in his own case, he said he could not divine what they really thought of these appropriations – whether they were honest or fraudulent. 'If you think them wrong, how is it that to me you have called the evil good? If right, how is it that to your Sovereign you have called the good evil?'

During his five years' incumbency in St. Andrews, he issued two volumes from the press. The first was the third and concluding volume of The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. Among the topics embraced in this volume were the Poor-Laws and the Combination-Laws. The particular aspect of the Poor-Laws with which he dealt, and which he most thoroughly condemned, was the application of the poor-rates, as in England, to supplement the wages of ill-paid labourers. Though kindly meant, this arrangement, he held, was an invasion of the relation between master and men so ruinous, and involved a bounty to the masters so unjust, that no toleration ought to be found for it. This was also the general opinion; and the practice was discontinued by law. According to Dr. Chalmers's biographer, his exposure of the practice formed a powerful contribution towards its removal.

In regard to the Combination-Laws, which imposed severe and stringent penalties on any united movements of workmen for increasing their wages, a bill for repealing them had been introduced and carried by Mr. Huskisson, whose efforts to free industry from the fetters of Protection were hailed by Dr. Chalmers with great delight. Unfortunately, the carrying of this measure into law was accompanied by certain deplorable excesses on the part of some classes of workmen, who did not understand how to use their new-found liberty. Dr. Chalmers strongly upheld the righteousness of the repeal of the old laws, mainly on the ground that we ought not to manufacture crime out of acts (such as workmen's combinations) which the natural conscience does not condemn. But with equal firmness he denounced any interference with the freedom of labour, especially when men on strike coerced and persecuted those that might be willing to work. The experience of seventy years has not materially changed the position. 'Strike, if you please,' is the voice of reason and justice to workmen; 'but leave those who do not concur with you at perfect freedom to do as they please.'

The other publication of this period was a book on Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments. It was devoted chiefly to the case of the Scottish universities. Among the reforms which he advocated, a foremost place was given to the raising of the standard of scholarship for those joining the university. Though apparently disregarded at the time, it was seen, whenever serious attention began to be given to the state of our universities, that this was indeed the most important change to begin with. What Dr. Chalmers proposed was, that an entrance examination should be instituted, and that a gymnasium, or, as we now call it, a secondary school, should be attached to each of the universities, for instruction that would qualify for the entrance examination. Modern opinion has so far transcended the modest proposal of Chalmers, that instead of a preparatory school in each university seat, the demand is now for adequate secondary schools scattered over all the land.

It was a very congenial thing for Chalmers to advocate in this way the elevation and ample equipment of our universities. His old love of science and general culture had never died in him, although he had learned to give them a secondary place, and to feel profoundly that the first duty and the chief interest of man concerned his relation to the great God, without whom nothing could be great, nothing strong. But the spirit of Chalmers was stirred within him as often as he thought of the great leaders of science, and their splendid achievements in astronomy and in other departments. The very name of Newton sent a thrill through every fibre of his being, and roused the desire to follow in his steps, as well as to see every youth around him inspired by his spirit, and by all that was noble in his example. Speaking of the universities of England, which were more successful than the Scottish in cultivating particular branches, but gave less complete attention to learning as a whole, he said, 'We cannot conclude this passing notice of the universities of England without the mention of how much they are ennobled by those great master spirits – those men of might and high achievement – the Newtons, and the Miltons, and the Drydens, and the Barrows, and the Addisons, and the Butlers, and the Clarkes, and the Stillingfleets, and the Ushers, and the Foxes, and the Pitts and Johnsons, who within their attic retreats received that first awakening which afterwards expanded into the aspirations and triumphs of loftiest genius. This is the true heraldry of colleges. Their family honour is built on the prowess of sons, not the greatness of ancestors.'