His eldest brother, James, who lived in London, was a hard subject to deal with. He seemed to shut himself up from all his family, and to stand in awe lest they should come to visit him. He had resolutely abstained from hearing his brother preach after he became famous. Hardly any case could have more convincingly verified the remark, how unlike brothers may be to each other. James had a kind of mania for balancing his personal accounts to the minutest fraction, and on one occasion worried himself for months in the endeavour to account for a penny, till a year after, when about to cross a toll-bridge, he remembered that he had crossed it a twelvemonth before, and forgot to enter the penny in his accounts. Yet Thomas bore with him patiently, and dealt with him affectionately but faithfully, evidently in the hope that he might change. And before the end he did become more amiable. In announcing his father's death, Thomas pathetically, and with an obvious practical design, remarked that if their beloved parent looked down upon them, 'nothing could afford his spirit a more delightful spectacle than that of his children seeking the Gospel which they had aforetime despised, praying for grace, and not ceasing to pray, till they had obtained.'
His own children were hardly old enough, while in Glasgow, for more than the ordinary fondness of a father. Yet we find him, in his absences from home, and when driven hither and thither by manifold engagements, writing, in imitation of print, those elaborate letters to his little daughter Anne, of which her future husband, Dr. Hanna, has given us a sample in the second volume of the _Life_ (p. 410). One cannot but admire the extreme neatness and clearness of the printing, a memorable contrast to the hieroglyphics he used to dash off on ordinary occasions, which were so illegible that, in his early days, when a letter came from him, his father suggested that it had better be kept till he should himself arrive to read it for them. Once, in the absence of Mrs. Chalmers, when he had been constituted head nurse, an elder and a deacon, on calling in the evening, found him squatting on the floor and playing at marbles with the children. And nothing would serve him but that they should join in the game.
The ever-warm affection of Dr. Chalmers for all the members of his family was the more remarkable that he was so rapidly extending the circle of his friends, receiving so much notice from the most distinguished men and women of the country, and carrying on so voluminous a correspondence with many of them. Among those whose acquaintance he made in his Glasgow period we may note a few. There was James Montgomery, Moravian and poet, whom he saw at Sheffield; whom he greatly perplexed when he told him that when at the Moravian settlement of Fulneck, near Leeds, he had invited the Scotch lads to the inn, and found there were no fewer than 'saxtain or savantain of them'; but whom he charmed no less by the admiration he expressed for the Moravian missions, and by his undertaking--what he more than fulfilled--to raise L500 for them in the course of the year. Another new friend was Mr. Wilberforce, for whose character, talents, and work he had unbounded respect, but who amazed him by the singularity of his movements--'he positively danced and whisked about like a squirrel.' He had an important correspondence with him, beseeching him to support the repeal of the Corn Bill, which he held to be the great danger to the country. There was the Gladstone family at Liverpool, with whom he was greatly taken--William could then have been but a boy of six (A.D. 1817). Legh Richmond visited him at Glasgow, and Chalmers says, 'I had most congenial talk with him, and am greatly humbled by the very superior attainments of other Christians.' When Edward Irving, in hopeless disappointment, was about to leave the country, it was Chalmers that arrested him, having formed such an opinion of his pulpit gifts and noble character that he engaged him as his assistant. We have already noticed some of the friends he met when engaged in his poor-law inquiry; to these we may add Robert Hall, the cleverest man in conversation he ever knew, but surpassed by John Foster in the depth and grandeur of his thoughts. With Mr. Malthus, too, he had much congenial converse. About this time he found a close ally in Mr. Douglas, the proprietor of Cavers, where he had been assistant in his youth, who became so well known as a thoughtful Christian writer, and who placed more than one L500 in his hands to assist him in his schemes for St. John's. Among other things that Mr. Douglas owed to Chalmers's example and influence was the habit of systematic working. Mr. Erskine of Linlathen was another Scottish layman for whom he had remarkable regard, his spirituality of mind being to Dr. Chalmers most impressive and stimulating. Mr. Erskine's work on the _Freeness of the Gospel_, though looked on suspiciously by some very orthodox persons, was to Dr. Chalmers very delightful. Afterwards Mr. Erskine adopted some views with which he could not sympathise. With Lord and Lady Elgin he appears to have been on terms of most intimate friendship. Mr. Colquhoun of Kellermont may be added to the list of distinguished Scottish friends; and, besides these, there were his coadjutors in the St. John's undertaking, the members of his congregation, and nearly all the men of mark and Christian worth in the community of Glasgow.