Letters to Various Correspondents, Nos. 223–228
No. CCXXIIL — To W. KOGER, ESQ. OF GLASGOW.
Charlotte Street, 18th February 1817.
My DEAR SIR, — I was very much touched and gratified by the address which was read to me in your presence, and which you had the kindness to leave in my hands. I consider it as peculiarly valuable on two accounts. First, as an expression of approbation and regard on the part of my hearers; and, secondly, as a memorial of their deliberate sentiments on a subject which has long engaged and interested my own thoughts.
The experience of every month confirms me in the opinion that a minister of religion should be allowed to give all his time and all his strength to such objects as are strictly and substantially religious, and that the violation of this principle not only entails upon him a world of personal vexation and discomfort, but that it also goes to impair the effect both of his pulpit and parochial ministrations.
Were I called upon to specify the one measure by which the people of a parish could contrive to throw the most inviting charm over the situation of their clergyman, I should say, by rendering such an homage to the importance of his employment as to shield it from everything that can at all tend to harass or to disturb it, and permitting him to relieve the fatigue of study by varieties of his own choosing — by such varieties as he him self finds to be most congenial to his own taste, and temper, and sense of duty, and not by such varieties as custom, or accident, or arbitrary regulations may have accumulated upon his office for years, and perhaps for generations before he had entered it.
This charm has been lately held out to me, and that, too, for the purpose of drawing me away from a scene of duty which I count to be one of the most important within the limits of our National Establishment; and I will frankly confess to you that I am not able to compute what might have been the extent of its influence had I not been assured, both by my experience of your past services and by the warmth and sincerity of your present professions, that you were willing to guard the office I now hold from all those intrusions by which its peace or its sanctity might be violated.
I feel myself placed on high vantage-ground in declining all those personal services which have for their object the furtherance of civil and secular accommodation among my parishioners. You have empowered me to state — what I am sure, from the reason and liberality which characterize the functionaries of this city, they will find to be most abundantly satisfying — that the public agency which I withhold in my own person I am willing to provide in a tenfold degree in the persons of others who have kindly undertaken to relieve me of every labour that is not strictly professional.
I thank you most cordially for your kind recommendation and offer in respect of ministerial assistance, and only lament the necessity I am under to accept of it. I trust that it will not tempt me to remit my diligence in the business of my profession, and that its whole effect will be to secure, both for my parishioners and my hearers, the benefit of a more entire ministration.
With sincere prayers for the comfort and usefulness of our future connexion, and an earnest request that you, and the other gentlemen with whom you are associated, may give me a place in their intercessions at the Throne of Grace, I beg leave to subscribe myself, my dear Sir, your most affectionate friend,
THOMAS CHALMEKS.
No. CCXXIV.
Glasgow, Sth January 1818.
MY DEAR SIR, — I received your very kind letter some time ago, and do count it a very great refreshment to obtain from you an occasional communication. Since writing you last, I have had the good fortune to receive your small work on “Benefit Societies,” which I can assure you I read with much interest and satisfaction. These institutions have certainly the advantage over saving banks which you ascribe to them; and if delivered from the accompaniment of dissipation and excess, which I am sorry to observe go along with them in your part of the country, might have an important effect on the habits and comforts of the lower orders. They generally, however, set out on too liberal a system of allowances, which brings them to their termination in a few years. And such is my conviction of the complete means being with the poor themselves, to be altogether independent of relief from others, that I rejoice to observe any demonstration of this in any way that may induce foresight and economy amongst them; so that if, in point of fact, savings banks shall present a greater allurement to economy than any other institution, I should rejoice in their being encouraged and multiplied throughout our land.
You ask me how I liked the review of rny “Discourses” in the “Christian Observer.” I have lived too long in the rough element of severity and invective not to feel that it treats me with great moderation. There is an evident tone of friendship about it which would have reconciled me to much greater freedoms than it has actually used. And I still retain the same feeling of kindness towards its conductors, and the same opinion of its being by far the first of our religious periodicals in respect both of talent and Christian spirit, that I have long entertained.
Perhaps I ought not to say to you what I honestly think and feel of the evangelical clergy in the Church of England, that they are the great Christian luminaries of our country at this moment; nor in all the other denominations of religion put together have I met with a goodlier number of devoted and spiritual men spending their zeal and earnestness arid talent on the best of causes. There is one peculiarity with which I feel myself most frequently, and I admit most justly charged, and that is a ple onastic exhibition of the same idea. And yet when one thinks of the passage where the power of demonstration is likened to a hammer breaking the rock in pieces, who does not feel that in such a process the hammer is often directed to the samepoint of application? And be assured that there never yet was any cause carried, or any object practically driven, but by a succession of similar and repeated strokes. This is the case in Parliament. It is so also in the pulpit. And though I have no reason to believe that I shall ever contribute much to the establishment of any right position, and the overthrow of any wrong one, yet I have no doubt that an extensive impression will never be made on the public mind by a bare and didactic exhibition of truth, however rigid and faultless the whole conduct of the argument may be; and that with our nature, constituted as it is, there must be reiteration, and variation, and impassioned urgency.
I have not had yet the pleasure of seeing your sermon on the funeral of the Princess Charlotte. Hall is eminently beautiful and impressive, and I really think it among the fore most of his productions. My own I am ashamed to speak of, and indeed it can scarcely be intelligible out of Glasgow, where the question of churches was perhaps about the next in interest to the main and overwhelming interest of that period. I feel some little value, however, for the appendix, for which I am altogether responsible on the footing of voluntary authorship.
I long for a more realizing sense of spiritual things. There is a darkness which no light of argument can disperse. There is a light which never can be reached but by knocking at the door of that sanctuary that we cannot open. May God make to each of us the revelation which He maketh unto babes; and may such be our fellowship with the Father and the Son, as to stamp the recognisable character of Heaven on our fellowship one with another.
Have you ever attended to the doctrine of the disinterested love of God? I fear that Edwards, Witherspoon, and the American divines have a little darkened the freeness of the Gospel offer by their speculations on the subject. They seem to put all the discredit of selfishness on the love of gratitude, and would suspend the act of acceptance by faith, till somehow or other it could be made contemporaneous with the dawn of love to God on account of His own excellencies. This I do think is a forbidding of those whom God has not forbidden, and I cannot but preach the Gospel without reserve to all men in every state of moral disease.
Do let me hear from you soon. May I request you to give my kindest remembrances to Mr. Wilson when you see him. There is no man in the world whom I have a greater love for than Mr. Wilberforce; but I have such an impression of the way in which he is harassed and overdone by extensive calls upon his attendance, that I am fearful to intrude upon him even with compliments. — I am, my dear Sir, yours most affectionately, THOMAS CHALMERS.
No. CCXXV.
Anstruther, llth August 1819.
MY DEAR SIR, — I should have acknowledged your kind communication long ago. I am here on a visit to my mother and for sea-bathing, having reduced myself to a state of con-
2 A siderable languor, as inimical to mental as to bodily exertion. I observed with the utmost gratitude your readiness to assist me in the matter of my publications. I feel my thorough need of such assistance; and have to confess a very uncouth and primeval ignorance of many of the proprieties of our language, aggravated as it is in my case by carelessness and a kind of impatience to arrive at the conclusion of every undertaking.
Since I received yours, I have seen the “Christian Observer” upon my last Work; — very kind, and breathing the partialities of friendship. He speaks of sensibility to the lash of criticism. On this subject I have often admired a couplet in Beattie’s “Minstrel,”
“Him, who ne’er listened to the voice of praise,
The silence of neglect can ne’er appal.”
It were untrue to general nature, as well as to my own individual experience, did I profess to have fulfilled the first of the above lines, and therefore have no title to the privilege expressed in the second. But it is good to know the way of arriving at that privilege, even to love the praise of God and not the praise of men. Nor do I know a more memorable remark of Foster’s, than that — of all the propensities of unrenewed nature, the appetite for praise needs to be kept under the severest castigation.
By the way, have you seen his “Missionary Sermon?” What a marvellous composition! — how rich in sentiment, and how replete with matter so weighty and dense, that in my hands it would have been expanded into a large octavo volume ere I could have felt it to be in a right condition for being addressed to the general mind of the country. I underrate, I believe, the capacity of my readers; and in my anxiety to convey a lucid impression, I nourish a diseased tendency to useless and excessive illustration.
UEV. Mil. CUNNINGHAM. 283
I saw one of your excellent ones of the Church of England lately, Mr. Stuart of Percy Chapel. I have now seen many of the most distinguished of both our Establishments, and without flattery, there is one mighty point of superiority that you have over us. You know that a man may look with an observant eye upon a particular affection, and yet not possess the affection itself. To have a just perception of the laws and the phenomena of anger, it is not necessary to have an irritable constitution; and it is not the most passionate who are worst fitted to acquire the metaphysics of human passion. Now, this is just as true of our good as of our bad feelings. It is just as true of the spiritual as of the sensual part of our nature; and I do think that while the orthodox of our Church come forth with their didactic expositions of Christianity, and intellectually assign the right place to faith, and love, and holiness, the evangelical of yours shew forth all these graces in real and living exemplification. We theorize about the virtues cf the new creature: you actually breathe these virtues. I have seen many good epistles written with pen and ink, and all about Christ too, by our clergy; but I have not seen so many living epistles among them. We talk about religion; you talk religion. And as far as I have remarked, while the matter has come as abundantly to us in word and even in argument, (Ao’yco, either verbo or ratione), it has come far more abundantly to you in power.
When in the same room with Mr. Stuart, I felt as in a pure and holy atmosphere, and learned how greatly more efficacious, in the way of especial influence upon others, is the devotion which emanates from an actually renewed heart, than the demonstration which emanates from an able and enlightened understanding.
I have seen the tracts of some of your seceders. I would call them able and impressive expositions of one half of the truth. Why are they more fearful of touching on the personal graces of the believer than the apostles were before them? Why will they only look to the sun through the open window of a chamber, when the first teachers looked also to the light, and heat, and visibility which were introduced through the open window into the chamber itself? Still it is most true and worthy of all acceptation, that without the sun and without the open window, all would be void, and dark, and cheerless in the apartment. Still it is true that the gospel attitude is that of looking unto Jesus, and beholding with open face the glory of the Lord. But why do Antinomians obliterate the succeeding clause, about being changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord? — With best wishes and many prayers both for your personal and ministerial com fort, believe me, my dear sir, yours most truly, No. CCXXVI.
Glasgow, 25th March 1823.
MY DEAR SIR, — I should have replied to your kind letter of the 26th of December long ago, but I was then in sad agitation about my purposed movement to St. Andrews, and am still in a state of great engrossment with duties and preparations of various sorts. I have, however, now the comfortable prospect of at length being unwarped out of a situation, the fatigues and details of which I at length found to be utterly incompatible with the attention which I conceive due to such distinct and general objects as have been offered to me.
In regard to a topic for a missionary sermon, I at one time thought highly of the civilizing influence of Christianity, as an argument fitted to propitiate those who were indifferent to the cause on its higher and more appropriate merits. My experience, however, has led me to distrust the efficacy of all those attempts which are made for the purpose of conciliating- to a Christian enterprise those who are not Christians; and, after all, I am more disposed to confide the whole hopes of success to the strict and sacred operation of evangelical motives on men of evangelical minds, though I cannot deny, at the same time, that the earth may be, and often has been, made to help the woman.
What would you think of the universality of the law written in the heart as an invitation to missionary undertakings? There is no controverting the existence of a moral sense among the rudest barbarians — the accusings and the excusings of it within them — insomuch that the idea of sin is at once understood among them without a formal or circumlocutory definition. Thus in all countries you have a ground upon which you can at once enter — a John the Baptist in every heart, who has already in some measure prepared the way of the Lord, precursors even in the strangest territories who are there before you, and whose office it is to make your message welcome, or at least intelligible; as much, in fact, of moral intimation, already given unto all, as will secure, and in a judicial way, their acquittal or their condemnation when we go forth preachingunto all — enough to guide them to the understanding and reception of the Gospel if they follow the light that is already in them, and enough to attach to them the most fearful of penalties if they reject or turn from it. I am aware that within the short compass of a letter I cannot qualify enough so as to free the argument of all exceptions; but you will perceive in the general how an impressive reasoning on the side of the missionary cause might be built on the universal moral light which, however obscurely, is spread over the world — a light at all events that enters into the character and conduct, and so leaves an accusing or restless conscience in every heart; thus preparing the way for the tidings of a Saviour, and making
Him precious to some, while to others He is the savour of death unto death. I should be much comforted by a letter from you. I am still hopeful of being ready, on English Pauperism, by the month of May or June. — Believe me to be, my dear Sir, yours most affectionately, No. CCXXVII.
Edinburyh, llth March 1832.
MY DEAR SIR, — I have asked Mr. Whittaker to send you a “Letter to the Royal Commissioners for the Visitation of Colleges in Scotland,” lately printed by me; and my precise reason for so doing is, that you might be enabled to estimate the justice of your friend Lord A.’s complaint against me, because of an offensive communication which I had presumed to make to him and his fellow Commissioners.
I am in all my principles and feelings a thorough Conservative — none more so. But they are our Tory corruptionists who have brought us into our present helpless situation. There was no rudeness in the manner of my communication that could be alleged as at all offensive. But the substance of it was disagreeable to his Lordship, who dislikes honesty and truth when associated with independence.
If the Commissioners shall respond to my statements, am I at liberty to notice in any future argument how unpalatable my memorial was to Lord A.?
I have written Mr. Collins to send Whittaker copies of my “Eight Years’ Experience in Glasgow,” if the pamphlet be yet in print. I should really like you to see it. — I am, my dear Sir, yours most truly, THOMAS CHALMERS.
I shall be most thankful for any abstract which you may publish of my views on Pauperism. — T. C.
REV. Dll. WRIGHT. 287
No. CCXXVIII. — To Ri:v. DR. WRIGHT OF STIRLING.
Glasgow, Uth February 1823.
MY DEAR SIR, — I write under the impulse of lively gratitude to yourself for what you wrote of me to Mr. Muir, who was :ind enough to read it to me. I hold it to be a most excellent recommendation that I should write the number of sermons ch you suggest, and I sincerely trust that it will not be lost upon me. It is my desire to join in the sentiment of the Psalmist on this subject, “If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, and let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not prefer thee above my chiefest joy.” It is satisfactory to myself that I have ever held a professorship as a higher station, even speaking Christianly, than a church. I never quitted this sentiment even when I had not the most distant hope of a chair; and now that I have had the offer of one, and accepted of it, I have just acted on the principle which I at all times felt and have at all times avowed. But it is still a matter of great thankfulness to me when I can get any of my brethren among the senior clergy to view the thing even with tolerance, though not with positive approbation. I am much comforted by the testimonies of Dr. Davidson and Mr. Gordon of Edinburgh. I request a place in your prayers. Should I be spared, I look forward now with great confidence to the occasional enjoyment of your society. Here I was overborne and had no time for general intercourse or general objects. The unbounded leisure and command of summer give me a scope for all sorts of excursion, whether of mind or body. — With kindest compliments to Mrs. Wright, and earnest request that you would send me a letter, I entreat you to believe me, my dear Sir, yours very affectionately,