Thomas Chalmers was a Scottish divine. He was born in 1780 at AnstrutherEaster, Fife and died in 1847. At the age of twelve he was sent from the parish school to the University of St Andrews, and after studying there seven years, was licensed as a preacher in July, 1799. During the two following years he studied mathematics and chemistry in Edinburgh, and then became assistant to the professor of mathematics at St Andrews. In 1803 he was presented to the parish of Kilmany, in Fife, where he made a high reputation as a preacher. In 1804 he was defeated in an application for the chair of natural philosophy at St Andrews, and again in 1805 for the same chair in Edinburgh University. In 1808 he published an Inquiry into the Extent and Stability of National Resources. In 1813 his article on Christianity appeared in the EdinburghEncyclopaedia, and shortly afterwards his review of Georges Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, in the Christian Instructor.
His fame as a preacher had by this time extended itself throughout Scotland, and in 1815 he was inducted to the TronChurch of Glasgow. His astronomical discourses delivered there in the following winter produced a sensation not only in the city but throughout the country, 20,000 copies selling in the first year of their publication. It was while pastor of this church that he developed his scheme for the reorganization of the parochial system with a view to more efficient work among the destitute and outcast classes, his influence leading to a considerable extension of the means of popular instruction, both religious and secular.
In 1819 he was transferred from the Tron to St John's, a church built and endowed expressly for him by the Town Council of Glasgow, but his health having been tried by overwork he accepted, in 1823, the chair of moral philosophy at St Andrews. In 1827 he was elected to the divinity chair in the University of Edinburgh, an appointment which he continued to hold until the Disruption from the Scottish church in 1843. In 1832 he published his Political Economy, and shortly afterwards his Bridgewater Treatise On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man. During this period he was occupied with the subject of churchextension on the voluntary principle, but it was in the great non-intrusion movement in the Scottish church that his name became most prominent.
Throughout the whole contest to the Disruption in 1843, he acted as the leader of the party that then separated from the Establishment, and may be regarded as the founder of the Free Church of Scotland, of the first assembly of which he was moderator. Having vacated his professorial chair in the Edinburgh University, he was appointed principal and primarius professor of divinity in the new college of the Free Church. In addition to his duties in these posts, he continued in Edinburgh his zealous labours for the elevation of the 'home-heathen', giving a practical exemplification of his schemes by the establishment of a successful mission in West Port. Research Thomas Chalmers
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Research Thomas Chalmers
