Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/387

Rh the Tron church and parish. A blaze of unparalleled popularity at once broke around him as a preacher. A series of discourses which he had preached on the connec tion between the discoveries of astronomy and the Christian revelation were published in January 1817. Never either before or since has the same reception been given to any volume of sermons in our language. Within a year, nine editions and 20,000 copies of the volume were in circula tion. Soon after its appearance he visited London, and occupied for the first time one or two of the pulpits of the metropolis. The crowds were enormous, the applause loud and universal. &quot; All the world,&quot; writes Mr Wilberforce, &quot;wild about Dr Chalmers.&quot; His extraordinary popularity remained undiminished during the eight years that he remained in Glasgow. His preparation for the pulpit, however, formed but a small part of his labours. In visiting his parish, which contained a population of about 11,000 souls, he speedily discovered that nearly a third of them had relinquished all connection with any Christian church, and that their children were growing up in ignorance and vice. The appalling magnitude of the evil, and the certainty of its speedy and frightful growth, at once arrested and engrossed him. To devise and execute the means of checking and subduing it became henceforth one of the ruling passions of his life. Attributing the evil to the absence of those parochial influences, educational and ministerial, which wrought so effectually for good in the smaller rural parishes, but which had not been brought to bear upon the overgrown parishes of our great cities, from all spiritual oversight of which the members of the Establishment had retired in despair, his grand panacea was to revivify, remodel, and extend the old parochial economy of Scotland. Taking his own parish as a specimen, and gauging by it the spiritual necessities of the city, he did not hesitate to publish it as his conviction that not less than twenty new churches and parishes should immediately be erected in Glasgow. All, however, that he could persuade the town- council to attempt was to erect a single additional one, to which a parish containing no fewer than 10,000 souls was at tached. This church, built at his suggestion, was offered to him and accepted, in order that he might have free and unim peded room for carrying out his different parochial plans. In September 1819 he was admitted as minister of the church and parish of St John s. The population of the parish was made up principally of weavers, labourers, fac tory workers, and other operatives. Of its 2000 families, more than 800 had no connection with any Christian church. The number of its uneducated children was count less. In this, as in his former parish, Dr Chalmers s first care and efforts were bestowed upon the young. For their week-day instruction, two commodious school-houses were built, four well-qualified teachers were provided, each with an endowment of 25 per annum ; and at the moderate school-fees of 2s. and 3s. per quarter, 700 children had a first-rate education supplied. For the poorer and more neglected, between forty and fifty local sabbath schools were opened, in which more than 1000 children were taught. The parish was divided into 25 districts, embracing from 60 to 100 families, over each of which an elder and a deacon were placed the former taking the oversight of their spiritual, the latter of their temporal interests. Over the whole of this complicated parochial apparatus Dr Chalmers presided, watching, impelling, controlling every movement. Nor was his work that of mere superintendence. He visited personally all the families, completing his round of them in about two years, and holding evening meetings, in which he addressed those whom he had visited during the week. Many families were thus reclaimed to the habit of church-going, 375 and many individuals deeply and enduringly impressed by the sacred truths of Christianity. The chief reason why Dr Chalmers removed from the Tron parish to that of St John s was that he might have an opportunity of fairly testing the efficacy of the old Scottish method of providing for the poor. At this period there were not more than 20 parishes north of the Forth and Clyde in which there was a compulsory assessment for the poor. The English method of assessment, however, was rapidly spreading over the southern districts of Scotland, and already threatened to cover the whole country. Dr Chalmers dreaded this as a great national catastrophe. Having studied in its principles, as well as in its results, the operation of a compulsory tax for the support of the poor, he was convinced that it operated prejudicially and swelled the evil it meant to mitigate. It was said, however, that though the old Scotch method of voluntary contributions at the church door administered by the kirk-session was applicable to small rural parishes, it was inapplicable to the large and already half-pauperized parishes of our great cities. Dr Chalmers asked the magistrates of Glasgow to commit the entire management of the poor of the parish of St John s into his own hands, and he undertook to refute that allegation. He was allowed to try the experiment. A.t the commencement of his operations, the poor of this parish cost the city 1400 per annum. He committed tha investigation of all new applications for relief to the deacon of the district, who had so small a number of families in charge, that by spending an hour among them every week, he became minutely acquainted with their character and condition. By careful scrutiny of every case in which public relief was asked for, by a summary rejection of the idle, the drunken, and the worthless, by stimulating every effort that the poor could make to help themselves, and when necessary, aiding them in their efforts, a great proportion of these new cases were provided for without drawing upon the church-door collections ; and such was the effect of the whole system of Christian oversight and influence, prudently and vigorously administered, that in four years the pauper expenditure was reduced from 1400 to 280 per annum. At the commencement of his ministry in St John s, Dr Chalmers began a series of quarterly publications on The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Toicns, devoted to the theoretic illustration of the various schemes of Christian usefulness which he was carrying on, presenting himself thus to us as at once their skilful deviser, their vigorous conductor, their eloquent expounder and advocate. But the fatigues of so toilsome a ministry began to exhaust his strength ; and he was already longing to exchange the personal for the literary labours of his profession, when the vacant chair of moral philosophy in the university of St Andrews was offered to him. This offer, the seventh of the same kind that had been made to him during his eight years residence in Glasgow, he accepted, entering on his new duties in November 1823, and devoting the next four years of his life to their fulfilment. Hitherto meta physics and ethics had been taught conjunctly by the professors of moral science in the Scotch colleges, while, in teaching the latter, allusions to the peculiar doctrines of Christianity had generally and often carefully been avoided. Looking upon mental philosophy as belonging properly to another chair, Dr Chalmers confined his prelections to the philosophy of morals, entering at large upon the duties man owes to God as well as those he owes to his fellow-men, endeavouring throughout to demonstrate the insufficiency of natural religion to serve any other purpose than that of a precursor of Christianity. Many of his lectures, as remodelled afterwards and transferred to the theological chair, are to be found now in the first and second volumes