The Present and Future
of the Church of Scotland
by Arthur P. Stanley, Dean of
Westminster.
p.152
From the revivals of our more modern days, out of the smoke
and sulphur of the volcano of the Disruption, two names of the departed emerge
of which the main claims consist in those qualities - not which divided them
from their brethren, but which brought them together.
Thomas Chalmers.
- Every Scottish churchman, I had almost said every Scots man, claims, whether
before or after 1843, the honoured name of Chalmers. To attempt to portray his
noble character would be in me as impertinent as for you it would be needless.
Yet there are a few words which I would fain utter - the more so, as they are
in part suggested by my own humble recollections of that wise and good man-
Eleven days before his death, in the city of Oxford, for the first and last
time I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Chalmers. I was too young and too
English at that time to be much occupied with the divisions which parted the
Free from the Established Church; and there was assuredly nothing in his
appearance or conversation which recalled them. But I was not too young to
appreciate, nor am I yet too old to forget, the force, the liveliness, the
charity with which he spoke of everything on which he touched. Three points
specially have remained fixed in my memory which assuredly betokened a son not
of the Covenant, but of the Church universal.
He was full of the
contrast of the two biographies which he had just fihished; one was that of
John Foster, the other of Thomas Arnold. Two
men, he said, so good, yet with a view of life so entirely
different; the one so severe and desponding, the other so joyous
and hopeful. lie had completed the perusal of another book, of which it
seemed equally strange that he should have through all his long life deferred
reading it till that time, and that having so delayed he should then have had
the wonderful energy to begin and master it. It was Gibbons Decline
and Fall; and the old mans face, Evangelical, devout Scotsman as he
was, kindled into enthusiasm as he spoke of the majesty, the labour, the giant
grasp displayed by that greatest and most sceptical of English historians.
Another spring of enthusiasm was opened when he looked round on the buildings
of the old prelatic, mediaeval Oxford. You have the best machinery in the
world, and you know not how to use it. Such were the words which
are still written, as taken down from his mouth, on the photograph of the
University Church in the High Street, which was given to him by his host at
that time, which was restored to that host by Chalmerss family after his
death, and by him given to me when I left Oxford, in recollection of that
visit. You have the best machinery in the world, and you know not
how to use it.
How true, how discriminating, and how amply
justified by the prodigious efforts which, as I trust, since that time Oxford
has made to use that good machinery. How unlike to the passion for destruction
for destructions sake which has taken possession of many who use his
venerable name in vain! How like to the active, organizing mind, which saw in
establishments and institutions of all kinds not lumber to be cast away, but
machinery to be cherished and used. In front of that academic church of Oxford
we parted, just as he touched on the question of the interpretation of the
Apocalypse. But this, he said, is too long to discuss here
and now; you must come and finish our conversation when we meet at
Edinburgh.
That meeting never came. He returned home; and the
next tidings I had of him was that he was departed out of this world of strife.
As I read his biography that brief conversation rises again before me, and
seems the echo of those wider and more generous views which at times were
overlaid by the controversies into which he was drawn. Such is his own account
of his longing recollection of the earlier days when he lived in the great
ideas which are the foundation of all religion. Oh, that He possessed me
with a sense of His holiness and His love, he exclaims, after an
interval of twenty-six years, as He at one time possessed me with a sense
of His goodness and His power and His pervading agency. 'I remember', he
continues, when a student of divinity, and long before I could relish
evangelical sentiment, I spent nearly a twelvemonth in a sort of mental
elysium, and the one idea which ministered to my soul all its rapture was the
magnificence of the Godhead and the universal subordination of all things to
the one great purpose for which He evolved and was supporting creation. I
should like to be so inspired over again, but with such a view of the Deity as
coalesced and was in harmony with the doctrine of the New Testament.
Such a view he doubtless gained; nor was it, if we may humbly say so, in
any way incompatible (if Science and Religion both be true) with that which was
the source of his earliest, and, so it would seem, his latest religious
fervour.
Even late in life he was accused by suspicious zealots of
being an enemy to Systematic Divinity; and his reply was certainly not
calculated to allay the alarm. Long did he cling to the freer and nobler views
of Theology. My Christianity, he said most wisely and truly,
approaches nearer to Calvinism than to any of the isms in Church history;
but broadly as Calvin announces truth, he does not bring it
forward in that free and spontaneous manner which I find in the New
Testament. The passage from English poetry which he quoted more
frequently than any other was that pregnant passage from the Moravian Gambold,
which contains within itself the germs of all the broader and higher views of
faith. The man That could surround the sum of things, and spy The heart of God
and secrets of His empire Would speak but love. With love the bright result
Would change the hue of intermediate things, And make one thing of all
theology. And even in the very ferment of the Sustentation Fund he could
exclaim, Who cares about the Free Church compared with the Christian good
of the people of Scotland?'
Who cares about any Church, but as an
instrument of Christian good? For be assured that the moral and religious
well-being of the population is of infinitely higher importance than the
advancement of any sect.'
John Duncan.The other departed light
of the great movement of 1843, whom I would recall for a moment, is one whom I
never met, but whom the descriptions of his friends and disciples place before
us in so vivid a light, that one almost seems to have seen him - in his
multifarious learning, in his simpleminded eccentric detachment from all the
cares of this world, almost a Scottish Neander - I mean Dr. John Duncan. In
that charming volume, which gives the most casual, but also the most intimate
convictions of his mind, it is remarkable that, to the peculiar doctrines which
divide the Free Church from the Established, there is hardly an allusion; that
even its peculiar Calvinistic theology and Presbyterian platform occupies a
very secondary place. I am first a Christian, next a Catholic, then a
Calvinist."
(placed here in the interests of continuity!)
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