Born at Anstruther, Fife, 17th March 1780, educated at St. Andrews, and in 1803 ordained minister of Kilmany. He carried on mathematical and chemistry classes at St. Andrews in 1803–4, and in 1808 published an “Inquiry into National Resources.” Shortly after this he came under profound religious impressions; in 1815 he was translated to the Tron parish in Glasgow, where his magnificent oratory, partly published as “Astronomical Discourses” (1817) and “Commercial Discourses” (1820), took the city by storm. He laboured hard to abate the appalling ignorance and immorality of his parish by “re-modelling and extending the old parochial economy of Scotland.” To the English compulsory assessment for the poor, he preferred the old Scotch method of voluntary church-door contributions, administered by elders; and as minister of St. John’s parish (after 1819), by reviving this method, he in four years reduced the pauper expenditure in the parish from £1400 to £280 per annum. Edward Irving was for two years his assistant. In 1823 he accepted the Moral Philosophy chair in St. Andrews, where he wrote his “Use and Abuse of Literary and Ecclesiastical Endowments” (1827). In 1827 he was transferred to the chair of Theology in Edinburgh, and in 1832 published a work on political economy. In 1833 appeared his Bridgewater treatise, “On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.” As convener of the Church-extension Committee (1834), after seven years of enthusiastic labour, he collected £300,000 for building 220 new churches. Meanwhile, the struggles in regard to patronage became keener, until in 1843 Chalmers, followed by 470 ministers, left the church of his fathers, and founded the Free Church, whose swift and successful organisation was greatly owing to his indefatigable exertions. He spent the close of his life as principal of the Free Church College, and in completing his “Institutes of Theology.” He died suddenly, May 30, 1847. His works, in 34 vols., deal especially with natural theology, apologetics, and social economy.

Personal

  At first sight, no doubt, his face is a coarse one—but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it, that such as have eyes to see, cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large, half-closed eye-lids have a certain drooping, melancholy weight about them, which interested me very much…. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The upper-lip, from the nose downwards, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of leonine firmness of expression to all the lower part of the face. The cheeks are square and strong, in texture like pieces of marble, with the cheek-bones very broad and prominent. The eyes themselves are light in colour, and have a strange, dreamy heaviness, that conveys any idea rather than that of dulness, but which contracts in a wonderful manner, with the dazzling, watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their sockets, and illuminated into all their flame and fervour, in some moment of high entranced enthusiasm.

  He is rather inattentive to his dress and person, and has much of the abstractedness which generally goes to the credit of genius. He wears a deep-crowned hat, drawn so much over his eyes, as to disfigure him. He is above all the little arts, by which some men attempt to build greatness upon personal dignity, or gracefulness of manners…. I have been told, by one of his friends, that having left his house, at a very early hour, one morning, with a bundle under his arm, to take his departure for some neighboring place, in a steamboat, he was arrested by one of the city watch, who did not know him, and who insisted upon conveying him to the watch-house. Dr. C., impatient to be interrupted, told the man who he was. “Na, na,” said the guard of the police, “yure no Dr. Chalmers; he’s not such a man as you; and he’d not be seen strolling at this hour.” To the watch-house therefore he went, where he was immediately recognized, and set at liberty.

  He is like the very genius or demon of theological controversy personified. He has neither airs nor graces at command; he thinks nothing of himself: he has nothing theatrical about him (which cannot be said of his successor and rival); but you see a man in mortal throes and agony with doubts and difficulties, seizing stubborn knotty points with his teeth, tearing them with his hands, and straining his eyeballs till they almost start out of their sockets, in pursuit of a train of visionary reasoning, like a Highland-seer with his second sight. The description of Balfour of Burley in his cave, with his Bible in one hand and his sword in the other, contending with the imaginary enemy of mankind, gasping for breath, and with the cold moisture running down his face, gives a lively idea of Dr. Chalmers’s prophetic fury in the pulpit…. Dr. Chalmers’s manner, the determined way in which he gives himself up to his subject, or lays about him and buffets sceptics and gainsayers, arrests attention in spite of every other circumstance, and fixes it on that, and that alone, which excites such interest and such eagerness in his own breast! Besides, he is a logician, has a theory in support of whatever he chooses to advance, and weaves the tissue of his sophistry so close and intricate, that it is difficult not to be entangled in it, or to escape from it.

  A lady who lives very near me, is an invalid, and staid in town for the attendance of physicians, summoned me last evening to meet her confessor, Dr. Chalmers, a person whose genius and whose piety I respect highly, though there are certain points on which I much differ from him. There is a perfect artlessness and originality about his conversation that is very pleasing; he is modest too, and quite unspoilt. He and the great Well-known are the only persons I see whose manners are perfectly simple.

  He is of low stature, and square built, with a full, but by no means corpulent person. His head is very large, though not disproportionably so. Features, regular and commanding; a high, uncommonly broad, retreating forehead; even and strongly marked brows; eyes, though dimmed by study, yet mildly intellectual; a straight, though prominent nose; a well defined and proportioned mouth.

  He could reason broadly and powerfully; he could explain and illustrate with exhaustless profusion; he could persuade by all the earnestness of entreaty, all the pathos of affection, and all the terrors of threatening; he could apply, with great skill and knowledge of men’s ways, the truth he would inculcate; and he could pour, in a torrent of the most impassioned fervor, the whole molten mass of thought, feeling, description, and appeal, upon the hearts and consciences of his hearers. Thus singularly endowed, and thus wisely using his endowments, he arrived at a place of the highest eminence in the highest walk of popular oratory.

  He is of middle height, thick set and brawny, but not corpulent. His face is rather broad, with high cheek-bones, pale, and, as it were, careworn, but well-formed and expressive. His eyes are of a leaden color, rather dull when in a state of repose, but flashing with a half-smothered fire when fairly roused. His nose is broad and lion-like, his mouth, one of the most expressive parts of his countenance, firm, a little compressed and stern, indicating courage and energy, while his forehead is ample and high,… covered with straggling grey hair.

  By those of his school-fellows, few now in number, who survive, Dr. Chalmers is remembered as one of the idlest, strongest, merriest, and most generous-hearted boys in Anstruther school. Little time or attention would have been required from him to prepare his daily lessons, so as to meet the ordinary demands of the school-room; for when he did set himself to learn, not one of all his school-fellows could do it at once so quickly and so well. When the time came, however, for saying them, the lessons were often found scarcely half-learned—sometimes not learned at all…. Joyous, vigorous, and humorous, he took his part in all the games of the play-ground—ever ready to lead or to follow, when school-boy expeditions were planned and executed; and wherever for fun or for frolic any little group of the merry-hearted was gathered, his full, rich laugh might be heard rising amid their shouts of glee.

  Another of our occasional guests, during the winter of 1806, was a young student from the University of St. Andrews, namely Thomas Chalmers, who, I believe, had not then assumed the title of reverend, nor ever dreamed of being dubbed Doctor of Divinity. In truth, I think no one could then have rationally predicted or guessed in what particular path of life a spirit so energetic and yet so versatile would at last determine to move…. Retaining the broadest Scotch accent, he spoke with rapidity and fervour on subjects numberless and completely incongruous. Considering his force and calibre, he might indeed have seemed born to grapple with all pursuits and all sciences…. He entered with equal zest into all studies, theological, poetical, political, metaphysical, and mathematical. Apparently there were no obstacles too great for him. Difficulties could not weigh him down, because he was au dessus de tout cela; he could look down upon the difficulties, and he trampled on them; yet no one could say that this was the effect of arrogance. On the contrary, the consideration of his subject, or object, whatsoever it might be, was paramount; it absorbed his attention; he was not disturbed by the morbid sensibility and idiosyncrasies of genius, and the consideration of self disappeared utterly.

  Thomas Chalmers was a Great Man. All the characteristics of genuine greatness marked him as he stood among others. It was not that he surpassed all men around him in pure intelligence, or in any single element of moral excellence; but, taken altogether, mind and heart, and visible bearing—you gave him involuntarily, and he naturally took, the foremost position in almost any assemblage of notable persons with whom he had to do. The unassumingness of a child did not avail to screen him from that homage of which he was the object. The admitted merits and talents of others, on the right hand or the left, did not render that homage ambiguous—did not abate it. There might often be men near him who surpassed him in talent, but they did not dislodge him, in the view of others, from his place. All was harmony in Chalmers’s conformation. His figure and attitude very nearly accorded with the Ideal of such a man, after Michael Angelo; and if it showed a rusticity to which that great artist would have applied his chisel, there was beneath the rugged surface a refinement, an intellectuality, to which only the hand of Raphaelle could have given expression.

  Dr. Chalmers was a ruler among men: this we know historically; this every man who came within his range felt at once. He was like Agamemnon, a native ἅυαξ ἀνδρῶν, and with all his homeliness of feature and deportment, and his perfect simplicity of expression there was about him “that divinity that doth hedge a king.” You felt a power, in him, and going from him, drawing you to him in spite of yourself. He was in this respect a solar man, he drew after him his own firmament of planets. They, like all free agents, had their centrifugal forces acting ever towards an independent, solitary course, but the centripetal also was there, and they moved with and around their imperial sun,—gracefully or not, willingly or not, as the case might be, but there was no breaking loose: they again, in their own spheres of power, might have their attendant moons, but all were bound to the great massive luminary in the midst…. Dr. Chalmers would have made a sorry Balaam; he was made of different stuff, and for other purposes. Your “respectable” men are ever doing their best to keep their status, to maintain their position. He never troubled himself about his status; indeed, we would say status was not the word for him. He had a sedes on which he sat, and from which he spoke: he had an imperium, to and fro which he roamed as he listed: but a status was as little in his way as in that of a Mauritanian lion.

  He was of middle stature, square built, with light florid complexion and hair partly gray, about sixty years of age. His appearance was prepossessing, and I expected to be much pleased. My chagrin was therefore great when he read the hymn and I found it impossible to understand him. His voice was almost inaudible from hoarseness, his articulation indistinct from loss of teeth, and a broad Fifeshire accent made his language seem like a foreign tongue. The singing of that hymn was delightful. Of the prayer I understood a little, and it was unlike any that I ever before heard. By the time he came to the sermon the power of his voice increased, and I was able to understand most of it.

  He was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honestly, and kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination. A very eminent vivacity lay in him, which could rise to complete impetuosity (glowing conviction, passionate eloquence, fiery play of heart and head),—all in a kind of rustic type, one might say, though wonderfully true and tender. He had a burst of genuine fun too, I have heard; of the same honest, but most plebeian, broadly natural character…. He was a man essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere, all his life; such an intellect, professing to be educated, and yet so ill-read, so ignorant in all that lay beyond the horizon in place or in time, I have almost nowhere met with. A man capable of much soaking indolence, lazy brooding, and do-nothingism, as the first stage of his life well indicated; a man thought to be timid, almost to the verge of cowardice: yet capable of impetuous activity and blazing audacity, as his latter years showed.

  It has been questioned whether, like so many men of genius, who have been masters of the most delicious harmony in their writings,… he was really destitute of what is usually termed an ear for music. From all that I can learn, he had only an ear for good marked tunes…. He was present at an evening party, where a very accomplished lady was discoursing most eloquent music from the fashionable opera of the day. When she was at the overture and the recitative he looked perplexed, as if listening to a medley of madness; but when she struck upon some lively and expressive airs, he turned round with a look of great relief to the gentleman who was next to him, “Do you know, sir, I love these lucid intervals!”

  It was interesting to observe the never-failing attention of his class. From the commencement to the close of his lecture they maintained a breathless silence; during his more impassioned flights of oratory they eagerly bent forward, and sometimes those that were in the back rows stood up. On one remarkable occasion, when he was powerfully demonstrating the impossibility of order arising out of chaos without the agency of an intelligent Creator, I observed that by degrees, not merely the front rows, but nearly the whole class had risen. I am not sure that I was not myself among those who instinctively gave this evidence of excitement.

  It would be hard to name an orator of equal fame who had so few of the usual external helps and ornaments of eloquence; and hence the first feeling of almost every hearer whom his fame had attracted, was a shock of disappointment. As he rose to speak, and the hearer contrasted with his ideal of an orator, or with his preconceived notions, the middle-sized, and somewhat strange and uncouth figure before him, with its broad but not lofty forehead, its prominent cheek bones, and its drooping, lack-lustre eyes; as he observed the abrupt and awkward manner, apparently indicating embarrassment or irreverence, or both, and listened to the harsh croaking tones, the broad Fifeshire tongue, while the speaker bent over his manuscript, and following it with his finger, read every word like a schoolboy,—it seemed incredible that this could be the man who had stormed the hearts of his countrymen for more than thirty years, and whose published discourses had rivalled in their sale the productions of the great Wizard of the North…. Gradually the great preacher would unveil himself; the ungainly attitude, the constraint and awkwardness, the vacant look, and feebleness of voice and manner, would be cast aside, or if in some degree retained, would be overlooked by the hearer in the deepening interest of the theme; the voice, though still harsh and unmusical, would ring out and thrill like a clarion; the eye, which was so dull and half-closed, would be lighted up with intelligence; the breast would heave, and the body sway to and fro, with the tumult of the thought; voice and face would seem bursting with the fury of excitement, while his person was bathed with perspiration; the words, before so slow, would leap forth with the rapidity and force of a mountain torrent; argument would follow argument, illustration would follow illustration, and appeal would follow appeal, in quick succession, till at last all hearts were subdued, and carried captive by the flood of an overwhelming and resistless eloquence.

  Not very familiar with the Scotch brogue which Chalmers spoke, of the rudest Glasgow kind, and finding it not only difficult to understand but painful to listen to, I was little disposed, at first, to give much heed to his sermon. His appearance and manner in the pulpit, moreover, were by no means attractive. His face and features were coarse and large; his lank gray hair fell carelessly about a narrow forehead, and he kept his head bent, and his blinking eyes close to his manuscript; while his only action was an up and down or sawing movement with his right arm, from the elbow. In spite of all these personal disadvantages, which, at the beginning, were very repulsive to me, I was soon so interested in his fervid utterances, and absorbed by the quick alternations of emotion with which my feelings responded to his earnest appeals, that I unresistingly yielded to the torrent of his eloquence. The man, in the meantime, seemed transfigured, and my tearful eyes saw, as it were through a sacred halo, the prophet or apostle.

  He was one of nature’s nobles, and most of the qualities which stamped him with that character were obvious—almost glaring—to all who came across his path. I do not mean merely his rich and glowing eloquence, but his warrior grandeur, his unbounded philanthropy, his strength of purpose, his mental integrity, his absorbed and absorbing earnestness. They might not be so well aware of his singular simplicity and detachment from the world, of which I remember to have been deeply struck on a particular occasion. He sometimes gave me the honor of a walk with him, and one day he said he wished to make an appointment of this kind with me, when during our walk he would explain to me fully his situation with respect to the emoluments of his professorship—the chair of Divinity. If I remember right that chair, when he was appointed to it, was believed to have a large endowment, but a point of law was, I think, subsequently raised which, if affirmed, would have swept away nearly the whole. After forty-five years I may state this inaccurately, but what I remember clearly is that the question was a very grave one, and I think it materially affected his prospects, and even the status of himself and his family. The day came and the walk began, and lasted, I suppose a couple of hours or more. At our starting he opened one of his favorite and engrossing subjects, probably that of evangelizing the country by the means of manageable districts, each with its church and minister. Having begun, he forgot all about his endowment and his status. The conversation held fast by the original theme till we were within a few yards of my father’s door. He seemed then to recollect himself, and said: “If you will allow me I will send my man of business to call upon you, and he will acquaint you with all particulars of the question which has been raised.” Such was the impotence of lucre to lay hold on his great, stately and heavenly mind.

  It was a smart saying of Robert Hall, that the mind of Chalmers seemed to “move on hinges, not on wheels. There is incessant motion, but no progress.” Hall was more discursive in thought, and in style far more finished. But Chalmers knew what he was about, and secured the effect at which he aimed. He concentrated his force on one important truth at a time, turned it round and round in every light, and would not leave it till he had made full demonstration of it to those who heard him, and pressed it home upon them with all his energy. Till this was accomplished he would not, and could not, pass on to other matters. In this sense it may be admitted that he moved—he was born to move—on hinges, and not on wheels. And it must also be admitted that this, while it may arrest and convince an audience, may not suit so well the quiet examination of students…. Let Thomas Chalmers be remembered. Those who knew him need no such exhortation, those who were his students or his helpers cry with an air of triumph, “We were with Chalmers!” as soldiers who had been in the Peninsular or at Waterloo used to say, “We were with Wellington!”

  The end of the life was in exquisite keeping with his saintly and genial character. After a happy Sunday evening spent in the sweet intercourse of his family and of a brother minister, he retired with a beaming countenance and a general “good-night,” promising to conduct worship himself the following morning. But long ere it dawned he had entered into his eternal rest. The countenance was so calm and sweet, and the grand head and form were so full of dignity and repose, that it was only the marble chillness and the dread silence which informed the surprised household that it was death, not sleep, they were gazing on. A sorrow such as occurs only when a nation mourns marked the last honours which affection could pay to his remains. More than 100,000 citizens witnessed the burial, and they were but the representatives of multitudes, in all churches and in all lands, who felt that in Thomas Chalmers they had lost a leader and a friend. He rests in the Cemetery of the Grange, beneath the shadow of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags.

  The large, benignant simplicity of the man is what first and most deeply impresses one. Not the simplicity of the recluse, a selfish compound of quiescence and indifference; for his nature was broadly social, and his life was spent in ceaseless and widely varied labors for the well-being of others. Chalmers was a peaceful man, but his peace was the assured peace of conscious power, and beneath all his serenity there beat a fiery heart, capable of noble wrath and heroic action.

  Of Chalmers’ oratorical powers, it would be a waste of time to speak. His was a voice that filled the world, the English-speaking world at any rate, from end to end in its day, although if, as they say, he was one of those apt to confound Augustine of Hippo with our first Canterbury Archbishop, rhetoric rather than theological learning must have been his strong point.

  The greatest of Scottish preachers…. Other preachers seek to make different impressions in different portions of their sermons, Chalmers was content to make no more than one by the whole sermon, but when he had made that, it was indelible. No man who ever heard him could help seeing what he would be at, or could ever forget the importance which he gave it. His iterations and reiterations and re-reiterations were but like the whirlings of the sling from which at length the stone was sent whizzing to its mark; or like the gyrations of the eagle as it circles round and round in order only the more unerringly to swoop down upon its prey. His style was not meant for the eye, and so one soon tires of reading him; but for the ear it was most effective; and wherever, to this day, you meet with one who was privileged to listen to him from the pulpit, you will be sure to find him repeating to you the essence of the sermon which the great orator had distilled into a phrase that could not be misunderstood, and that would not allow itself to be forgotten.

  He was not the model of a mild and benevolent pastor and apostle, nor was the ideal of a dispassionate legislator—occupied above all the tides of sentiment, with a profound study of the best and highest principles upon which men were to be ruled and guided for their own best advantage—his. He was of an imperious nature, born to command, not unready to fight, impatient of interruption and misconception, accustomed to carry through his purpose, whatever it was, with a high hand, to mould everything around him to his will; a natural despot, though a most genial and friendly one. There was not air enough for him to breathe (one would have said) in any limited sphere.

  His broad Scotch accent was so marked as to make it difficult to catch some of his utterances; but as he advanced with his subject his manner of delivery—which was the opposite of Irving’s, being heavy and dull—then became eloquent in diction and earnest in manner.

  The great merit of Chalmers as a professor lay in the enthusiasm with which he inspired his students. It would have been hard indeed for any conscientious youth to be under him and not feel his soul quickened, at least occasionally, to a sublime ardour, and fired with new ambition. So wonderful was his influence, that at the Disruption nine-tenths of those who passed through his classes stood by his side. The present writer, though he spent but one session under him before the Disruption, can bear testimony, not only to the intellectual and spiritual impulse he gave, but to the subtle sympathy which drew his students to share his church views, though he never alluded to them in the class, and to the enthusiasm with which they listened to him in the General Assembly.

  His grasp of mathematical truths and of applied science was rather vigorous and effective than profound or exact, but he brought to both an ardent imagination, which gave to these pursuits a vividness of interest that absorbed his enthusiastic energy. To his eyes they were coloured with brilliancy and an attractiveness which they assume only for a few. It was to these pursuits that his attention was chiefly devoted, and in them that he hoped to find the best outlet for his ambition. He had early found employment in connection with the teaching of mathematics at St. Andrews University, and he was firmly resolved that his clerical calling should not interfere with his work in this field. But his popularity as a teacher—a popularity due to his marvellous powers of exposition and to the rich vein of imagination which clothed his conception of scientific truths—was resented by the duller but more authorised representatives of the Faculty, and he found himself thrust aside with little ceremony by men to whom his genius was something of a reproach.

General

  The grand old Christian Giant—the John Knox of the nineteenth century.

  When we come to think of English literature at large, and to think of it as influenced or favoured by no special or national feelings, it is quite certain that the “Works” will undergo a severe sifting. Portions—large portions, of the mass, we cannot doubt, must subside, and, at no distant date, will cease to be often asked for, or popularly read. The works of the very best writers (if voluminous) have undergone the same discerptive process. Nor has any human reputation hitherto been of such plenary force as might suffice for immortalizing every paragraph or treatise that a man has written and printed. Assuredly Chalmers will not stand his ground as an exception to this almost universal doom—a doom which has consigned to oblivion a half—a three-fourths—or a nine-tenths of the products of even the brightest minds; especially if they have been, in their day, teeming and industrious minds, and if such writers have mixed themselves at large with the social and political movements of their times.

  The “Astronomical Discourses” of Dr. Chalmers ran to nine editions within a year; and, according to Dr. Hanna, never previously, nor ever since, has any volume of sermons met with such immediate and general acceptance. The “Tales of My Landlord” had a month’s start in the date of publication, and even with such a competitor it ran an almost equal race. Not a few curious observers are said to have been struck with the novel competition, and watched with lively interest the almost neck to neck course, for a whole year, of Scotland’s great preacher and her great novelist.

  As an author, he is distinguished more for his exposition of the views of others than for the excogitation of anything profoundly original. It may with confidence be pronounced that he had a greater genius for style than any other Scotchman of this century except Carlyle. We cannot read a page of Chalmers without feeling ourselves in the hand of a master of luminous and varied exposition. Himself possessing the clearest grasp of his subject, he fully comprehended and kept steadily in view the difficulties of the reader: he sought to unfold his matter in the most luminous sequence, and to make sure that one point was thoroughly expounded before he proceeded to the next.

  In his philosophical works he unfolds and enforces a number of very important principles, not, it may be, absolutely original, but still fresh and independent in his statement and illustration of them, and setting aside error on the one side or other. His “Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy” cannot be said to be a full work on ethics, but it enforces great truths in a very impressive and eloquent way…. His views on natural theology appeared first in the “Bridgewater Treatise,” on “The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.” The feeling of admiration excited was mingled with disappointment. The bulk was too great for the matter, and the work had the appearance of a hasty recooking of his old thoughts which were grand in themselves, but were not formed into a duly proportioned whole. His arguments and his illustrations have a much better form given them in his subsequently published work,—“Natural Theology.”

  The name of Chalmers is in all the churches honored as one of Christian genius consecrated to the highest services which any man can render to his church and his country. His characteristic work, however, was not in the field of Christian thought. He broke out no new lines in this field. He initiated no new movement. Both he and Andrew Thomson were powerful leaders on the old lines—the latter with inferior, although stanch intellectual weapons.

  It was this time that he delivered his famous “Astronomical Discourses,” which, whatever may be said either of the objection which he sought to meet, or of the argument by which he met it, must be pronounced unrivalled for the grandeur and amplitude of their sweep through the depths of space, and for what John Foster called “the brilliant glow of a blazing eloquence” with which they displayed the sublime poetry of the heavens.

  Looking at the influence of Chalmers on the religious thought and life of Scotland generally, we may say that he let in daylight and fresh air on the evangelical enclosure of the church. He hardly ever opened his lips without uttering something fresh and racy. The evangelical message assumed a new importance at his hands. It came from him sustained by intellect, embellished by imagination, and enforced by eloquence, while new relations, hitherto overlooked, were brought into view—to the science, the culture, the thinking of the age. As Chalmers advanced in life a rare sagacity became conspicuous; with broad, statesmanlike view he was seen to have apprehended the evils of modern society—to have detected the remedy, and girded himself, in all his strength, to apply it. While thus broadening out and acquiring fresh influence, he was at the same time growing in humility and devoutness.

  My third biography is that of Dr. Chalmers, fruitful of beneficent example in more directions than could be easily specified, but to me of peculiar service in relation to poverty in Glasgow, with its attendant evils and vices. In his modes of averting pauperism, of relieving want in person and in kind, of bringing preventive measures to bear on the potential nurseries of crime, and of enlisting the stronger in the aid and comfort of the feebler members of the community, I found many valuable suggestions for the local charities which came under my direction or influence while I was a parish minister; and in the fewer trusts of that kind which I still retain, and in my present limited intercourse with the poor and suffering, I see his insight and foresight continually verified.

  The long and painful struggle for emancipation from theological dogma can hardly be treated in such a paper as this without liability to misunderstanding. Strange as it may seem, the starting-point of the change with me was the reading of the works of Dr. Thomas Chalmers, whose writings were great favorites with me in the early years of my life as a minister. Some of his books I read on horseback, riding from one preaching place to another. I recall particularly the “Astronomical Discourses,” the “Bridgewater Treatise,” and certain portions of the “Institutes of Theology.” Dr. Chalmers believed himself to be a sound Calvinist, but there were certain things, rather in his method than in his conclusions, that changed my way of thinking on these things.

  As literature his works have hardly maintained the reputation which they once had, and even those who revere him, unless they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge that there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric itself is not of the finest.

  Most of his compositions were cast in a rhetorical mould, and betray at times all the faults peculiar to that form of writing. Pomposity, verbiage, bombast, and rodomontade are there to be discovered in abundance. Often, again, he employs a phraseology and a mode of expression which are unintelligible, when they are not repellent, to our generation. The “scowling infidel” and the “pigmy philosopher” play by much too prominent a part in his apologetic writings, while the favourite and well-worn image of the storm-tossed sailor-boy and his weeping mother seems no longer capable of exciting the desired emotion…. A straining for effect—a lack of the sense of proportion—are but too manifest in his most admired pieces…. He is by no means more satisfactory in handling the principles of ethics than in casuistry; and his contributions to moral philosophy deservedly exercised very little influence on the thought of his own generation, and exercised none on the thought of this. But, when ample allowance has been made for such palpable and serious defects, there remains no inconsiderable mass of truly admirable writing. It is not merely that we find vigour, impetuosity, and earnestness, though these qualities are present in a very high degree. But we find, when he is at his best, a copious, dignified, and aptly employed, if not exactly elegant, vocabulary, a rare felicity of illustration and metaphor, a swelling rotundity of diction, and a complete mastery of a certain species of rhythm and balance…. Of his literary, as of his speculative, influence at the present day it is impossible to discover any important traces; but those who are ambitious enough to aspire to a lofty type of the ecclesiastical, or, indeed, of any, sort of eloquence, will find in Chalmers an eminently noble and inspiring, though, at the same time a highly dangerous, model.

  Chalmers was an orator of undoubted genius, an administrator of great talent, an accomplished scientist, and a second-rate thinker…. His intellect had a natural grandeur, apprehended things in their largest relations, and ranged congenially among the heights and depths of the universe; it was equally remarkable for mastery of detail, and for clear concrete vision…. He popularized the sublimities of science with singular power; the profounder bearing of philosophy and of history upon theology lay beyond his purview.