1780-1847

Thomas Chalmers was born at East Anstruther, in Fifeshire, March 17, 1780. He received his education at St. Andrews and was licensed to preach when but nineteen years old, and, four years later, ordained a minister. During the first years of his ministry his attention was chiefly absorbed by the study of mathematics and natural philosophy. He formed classes in those subjects in St. Andrews and became very popular as a teacher and lecturer. An " Inquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources," which he published in 1808, showed that he had some understanding of the principles of political economy and a capacity to deal with its problems.

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At about this time Chalmers experienced a great change in his inner life and became keenly susceptible to religious impressions and religious truths. While engaged in preparing an article on Christianity for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, after an extensive study and prolonged meditation, he was convinced that Christianity was a fact and the Bible "the veritable word of God." Under the quickening influence of this new inspiration he grew more devoted to his pastoral duties, more earnest in his life, and more eloquent in his discourses. When he was appointed minister to the Tron church in Glasgow, in July, 1815, the fervor and eloquence of his preaching soon made him very popular. His "Astronomical Discourses," which he published in 1817, gave convincing proof of his great intellectual powers and his lofty imagination. We can speak but briefly here of the great and good work Chalmers accomplished during his ministry in Glasgow, especially after he was transferred to St. John's Parish in 1819. His views on political economy were put into practice in his parish with such marked results that when he was entrusted with the management of its poor he reduced the pauper expenditure to less than one-third of the usual charges in four years. He founded some fifty Sabbath-schools, and in many other ways ameliorated the lot of the poor in his parish. Chalmers accepted an appointment to the chair of moral philosophy in St. Andrews in 1823, and after five years of faithful labor he was called to fill the chair of theology at Edinburgh. Chalmers's most remarkable work during this period, a book which gained for him many literary honors and the degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford, was his treatise "On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." The later years of Chalmers's life became somewhat disturbed by the dissensions springing up within the Church itself. When the secular courts were appealed to, the crisis came, and Chalmers, with four hundred and seventy clergymen, left the Church rather than sacrifice principles he held indispensable to its welfare. The rest of his life was given in the cause of the Free Church, of which he was thus the virtual founder. He died suddenly at Morningside, Edinburgh, May 31, 1847.

As an orator Chalmers's fame is undisputed. As a man he seems to have been universally esteemed, admired, and loved. One biographer has truly said of him: "There have been some loftier and more purely original minds in Scotland than Chalmers, but there has never been a truer one, nor a heart whose Christian faith and piety were more intense, sincere, and humane." His sermon entitled " God's Sympathy for Man," is a discourse typical of Chalmers, showing his eternal, unshaken confidence in Him who marks the sparrow's flight, and who will guard and protect his children on the awful day when the heavens shall be rolled away like a scroll.

I

GOD'S SYMPATHY FOR MAN

HAVE already attempted at full length to establish the position that the infidel argument of astronomers goes to expunge a natural perfection from the character of God, even that wondrous property of His, by which He, at the same instant of time, can bend a close and a careful attention on a countless diversity of objects, and diffuse the intimacy of His power and of His presence, from the greatest to the minutest and most insignificant of them all. I also adverted shortly to this other circumstance, that it went to impair a moral attribute of the Deity. It goes to impair the benevolence of His nature. It is saying much for the benevolence of God to say that a single world, or a single system, is not enough for it -that it must have the spread of a mightier region, on which it may pour forth a tide of exuberancy throughout all its provinces-that as far as our vision can carry us, it has strewed immensity with the floating receptacles of life, and has stretched over each of them the garniture of such a sky as mantles our own habitation-and that even from distances which are far beyond the reach of human eye, the songs of gratitude and praise may now be arising to the one God, who sits surrounded by the regards of His one great and universal family. Now it is saying much for the benevolence of God, to say that it sends forth these wide and distant emanations over the surface of a territory so ample, that the world we inhabit, lying imbedded as it does amidst so much surrounding greatness, shrinks into a point that to the universal eye might appear to be almost imperceptible. But does it not add to the power and to the perfection of this universal eye, that at the very moment it is taking a comprehensive survey of the vast, it can fasten a steady and undistracted attention on each minute and separate portion of it; that at the very moment it is looking at all worlds, it can look most pointedly and most

intelligently to each of them; that at the very moment it sweeps the field of immensity, it can settle all the earnestness of its regards upon every distinct handbreadth of that field; that at the very moment at which it embraces the totality of existence, it can send a most thorough and penetrating inspection into each of its details, and into every one of its endless diversities? You cannot fail to perceive how much this adds to the power of the all-seeing eye. Tell me, then, if it do not add as much perfection to the benevolence of God, that while it is expatiating over the vast field of created things, there is not one portion of the field overlooked by it; that while it scatters blessings over the whole of an infinite range, it causes them to descend in a shower of plenty on every separate habitation; that while His arm is underneath and round about all worlds, He enters within the precincts of every one of them, and gives a care and a tenderness to each individual of their teeming population. Oh! does not the God, who is said to be love, shed over this attribute of His its finest illustration, when, while He sits in the highest heaven, and pours out His fulness on the whole subordinate domain of nature and of providence, He bows a pitying regard on the very humblest of His children, and sends His reviving spirit into every heart, and cheers by His presence every home, and provides for the wants of every family, and watches every sickbed, and listens to the complaints of every sufferer; and while, by His wondrous mind the weight of universal government is borne, oh! is it not more wondrous and more excellent still that He feels for every sorrow, and has an ear open to every prayer?

"It does not yet appear what we shall be," says the apostle John, "but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." It is the present lot of the angels, that they behold the face of our Father in heaven, and it would seem as if the effect of this was to form and to perpetuate in them the moral likeness of Himself, and that they reflect back upon Him His own image, and that thus a diffused resemblance to the Godhead is kept up amongst all those adoring worshippers who live in the near and rejoicing contemplation of the Godhead. Mark, then, how that peculiar and endearing feature in the goodness of the Deity,

which we have just now adverted to-mark how beauteously it is reflected downwards upon us in the revealed attitude of angels. From the high eminences of heaven are they bending a wakeful regard over the men of this sinful world; and the repentance of every one of them spreads a joy and a high gratulation throughout all its dwelling-places. Put this trait of the angelic character into contrast with the dark and lowering spirit of an infidel. He is told of the multitude of other worlds, and he feels a kindling magnificence in the conception, and he is seduced by an elevation which he cannot carry, and from this airy summit does he look down on the insignificance of the world we occupy, and pronounces it to be unworthy of those visits and of those attentions which we read of in the New Testament. He is unable to wing his upward way along the scale, either of moral or of natural perfection; and when the wonderful extent of the field is made known to him, over which the wealth of the Divinity is lavished-there he stops, and wilders, and altogether misses this essential perception, that the power and perfection of the Divinity are not more displayed by the mere magnitude of the field than they are by that minute and exquisite filling up, which leaves not its smallest portions neglected; but which imprints the fulness of the Godhead upon every one of them; and proves, by every flower of the pathless desert, as well as by every orb of immensity, how this unsearchable Being can care for all, and provide for all, and, throned in mystery too high for us, can, throughout every instant of time, keep His attentive eye on every separate thing that He has formed, and by an act of His thoughtful and presiding intelligence, can constantly embrace all.

But God, compassed about as He is with light inaccessible, and full of glory, lies so hidden from the ken and conception of all our faculties, that the spirit of man sinks exhausted by its attempts to comprehend Him. Could the image of the Supreme be placed direct before the eye of the mind, that flood of splendor, which is ever issuing from Him on all who have the privilege of beholding, would not only dazzle, but overpower us. And therefore it is that I bid you look to the reflection of that image, and thus to take a view of its mitigated glories, and to gather the lineaments of the Godhead in the

face of those righteous angels, who have never thrown away from them the resemblance in which they were created; and, unable as you are to support the grace and the majesty of that countenance, before which the sons and the prophets of other days fell, and became as dead men, let us, before we bring this argument to a close, borrow one lesson of Him who sitteth on the throne, from the aspect and the revealed doings of those who are surrounding it.

The infidel, then, as he widens the field of his contemplations, would suffer its every separate object to die away into forgetfulness: these angels, expatiating as they do over the range of a loftier universality, are represented as all awake to the history of each of its distinct and subordinate provinces. The infidel, with his mind afloat among suns and among systems, can find no place in his already occupied regards for that humble planet which lodges and accommodates our species: the angels, standing on a loftier summit, and with a mightier prospect of creation before them, are yet represented as looking down on this single world, and attentively marking the every feeling and the every demand of all its families. The infidel, by sinking us down to an unnoticeable minuteness, would lose sight of our dwelling-place altogether, and spread a darkening shroud of oblivion over all the concerns and all the interests of men; but the angels will not so abandon us; and undazzled by the whole surpassing grandeur of that scenery which is around them, are they revealed as directing all the fulness of their regard to this our habitation, and casting a longing and a benignant eye on ourselves and on our children. The infidel will tell us of those worlds which roll afar, and the number of which outstrips the arithmetic of the human understanding-and then, with the hardness of an unfeeling calculation, will he consign the one we occupy, with all its guilty generations, to despair. But He who counts the number of the stars is set forth to us as looking at every inhabitant among the millions of our species, and by the word of the gospel beckoning to him with the hand of invitation, and, on the very first step of his return, as moving towards him with all the eagerness of the prodigal's father, to receive him back again into that presence from which he had wandered. And as to this world, in favor of which the scowling