Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 09.djvu/457

 and in 1845 the new system was introduced [see ]. During his residence in Glasgow, besides his astronomical and commercial discourses and a volume of miscellaneous sermons, Chalmers published an elaborate work on the civic and christian economy of our large towns. In 1816 he received the degree of D.D. by the unanimous vote of the senate of the university of Glasgow.

During two years of his ministry in St. John's he had for his assistant Edward Irving, the bosom friend of Thomas Carlyle. Irving had deemed himself a failure in the Scottish pulpit, and, despairing of success, was on the eve of setting out in a most chivalrous spirit as a missionary to Persia, when Chalmers, after hearing him preach, offered to take him as assistant. The two were very happy together. Through Irving, Chalmers came into contact with Carlyle. They were very unlike, but they appreciated each other. Speaking of their first meeting, Carlyle says: ‘The great man was truly loveable, truly loved; and nothing personally could be more modest—intent on his good industries, not on himself or his fame.’ Nearly thirty years elapsed before they met again, a very few weeks before Chalmers's death. ‘He was a man,’ says Carlyle in the ‘Reminiscences,’ ‘of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination. A very eminent vivacity lay in him. … He had a burst of genuine fun too, I have heard. …’ But ‘he was a man essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. … 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.’

The work in Glasgow was so multifarious and exhausting that, having triumphantly proved by the experiment of St. John's the success of his ideas on the parochial system, he was glad to escape from the crowded city by accepting an appointment in 1823 to the chair of moral philosophy in the university of St. Andrews. He held this chair for five years. In the special department of ethics, the position which charmed him most, and which he was at most pains to establish, was the authority of conscience. He cordially acknowledged the merits of Butler's ‘Sermons on Human Nature.’ Chalmers, however, advanced on Butler by showing how the conclusions of ethics harmonised with the teaching of Scripture. Natural ethics showed man to be a sinner. Revealed theology took him up where ethics left him, and discovered to him a mode of reconciliation. On the fact of human guilt as shown by conscience Chalmers laid much more stress than had been done by most writers on ethics. To a large extent his view commended itself to the religious teachers of Scotland, and influenced their line of preaching. At St. Andrews he did as much as the circumstances allowed to exemplify his principles of parochial activity, and initiated many students into his methods. He encouraged the rising spirit of missions to the heathen, and it was one of his pupils, Alexander Duff, who, on a mission to India being resolved on by the general assembly, became the first India missionary of the church of Scotland.

In 1828 Chalmers was removed to the chair of theology in the university of Edinburgh. He held this office till 1843, when, leaving the established church, he became principal and professor of divinity in the New College (of the Free church), Edinburgh. In the theological chair he was more distinguished for the impulse which he gave to his students than for original contributions to theological science. On the border-land between philosophy and theology, embracing ethics and natural theology, he was thoroughly at home. In theology, while strongly Calvinistic, he differed from many of that school by taking his departure from the needs of man rather than from the purpose of God. His ‘Institutes of Theology’ present in mature form the views he propounded from the theological chair. Accepting the Scriptures as the record of a divine revelation, he held that true theology was simply the result of Bacon's inductive method applied to the book of Revelation, as true science was the result of the same method applied to the book of nature. On this basis his whole theology was reared.

On 19 June 1830 Chalmers became chaplain in ordinary of the Scottish Chapel Royal, a post which he held till his death. In 1832 Chalmers was invited by the trustees of the Duke of Bridgewater, on the recommendation of the Bishop of London (Blomfield), to write one of the eight treatises on natural theology provided for in that nobleman's will. The subject allotted to him was ‘The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man.’ The volume was published in 1833, and after a successful sale (notwithstanding an unfavourable critique in the ‘Quarterly Review’) was recast as a portion of a larger work on ‘Natural Theology.’

It was a few years after his settlement in Edinburgh that Chalmers found himself