Biography
Thomas Chalmers was born on March 17, 1780, in Anstruther, a fishing town on the coast of Fife, in Scotland, the sixth of fourteen children of John Chalmers, a merchant and shipowner, and his wife, Elizabeth. The family was respectable, and the home was a pious one, with the daily worship of the Church of Scotland. Thomas was a lively and energetic boy, who was known for his love of play and for his dislike of school. He was a good scholar, however, and at the age of eleven, he entered the University of St. Andrews. He was a student of mathematics and of natural philosophy, and he took a deep interest in science. He was ordained in 1803 as the minister of Kilmany, in Fife, though he had little interest in his parish duties. He gave more time to mathematics and chemistry than to the pastoral work. He once said that he could spend an hour a week on parish matters, and that the rest was for study.
It was a period of illness that changed him. In 1810, he fell gravely ill and was confined to his bed for months. He used the time to read, and he turned to the Bible and the works of William Wilberforce, A Practical View of Christianity. He was struck by the call to a living faith. He saw that he had been preaching without knowing Christ. In the course of his illness, his brother and his sister died, and he was deeply shaken. He came out of the sickness a changed man. He began to preach the gospel with a new earnestness. He visited the people of Kilmany and spoke to them as one who had found something. Many of them were converted.
In 1815, he was called to the Tron Church in Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland. He soon became the foremost preacher in the country. He drew great crowds. His preaching was marked by passion, with a rich Fife accent, and with an overwhelming force of language. He did not read from a manuscript but used it as a prompt. His series of Astronomical Discourses, preached in 1816 and published in 1817, sold some twenty thousand copies in a few months. In them, he sought to show that the vastness of the universe, as revealed by astronomy, does not make man insignificant in the eyes of God. Instead, he argued, it raises the wonder of the incarnation. It was a book that spoke to the scientific mind.
He was also deeply concerned with the poor. In 1819, he took over the parish of St. John's, in the slums of Glasgow, where he set up an experiment in the care of the poor by the church. He divided the parish into districts, with a deacon in charge of each, who visited each family and looked after its needs. He aimed to show that a church could look after the poor without the help of the state. It was a model of voluntary charity. He also set up schools for the children. He wrote on the subject in The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns. He held to a belief in the power of the local community. He was a man of a generous nature.
In 1823, he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews, and in 1828, he became professor of divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He trained a generation of ministers. Among his students were Robert Murray M'Cheyne and Andrew Bonar. He was the acknowledged leader of the evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. He took a leading role in the controversy over patronage, the right of landowners to appoint ministers to parishes, whether or not the congregations wished it. The evangelicals held that this violated the spiritual independence of the church and the rights of the people. In 1834, the General Assembly passed the Veto Act, which gave congregations a voice. The civil courts overturned it, and the conflict grew sharp.
On May 18, 1843, at the General Assembly in Edinburgh, Chalmers led some four hundred and fifty ministers out of the established church. They gave up their stipends, their manses and their churches. It was a great sacrifice. They met in a hall at Tanfield and formed the Free Church of Scotland. Chalmers was elected as its first moderator. He took the lead in the organization of the new church, and he devised a system for the support of its ministers, the Sustentation Fund. Within a few years, the Free Church had built hundreds of churches and manses and schools. It sent out missionaries to India, Africa and the Jewish world. It also founded New College, in Edinburgh, where he was the principal.
He was a man of great gifts and also of some defects. He could be impractical and at times vague. He was inclined to dream. His social views were conservative. He was somewhat unwilling to change the system. He also suffered from the strain of overwork, and he had several illnesses. He had a warm heart and a deep love for people. He was devoted to his wife, Grace Pratt, and his daughters. He died on May 31, 1847, at the age of sixty-seven, in Edinburgh, in his sleep. Thousands attended his funeral. His life shows the effect of a mathematician who was converted and who led his church to give up its security for the sake of conscience.