1828-1843
It was but natural for Chalmers, in entering on his new duties as professor of divinity in the University of Edinburgh, to rally all his energies for a task so important--to be performed, too, in so commanding a sphere. The course of theology through which he had to conduct his students occupied three sessions, and for each consecutive winter it was necessary for him to produce a fresh set of lectures. Happily the subjects discussed in his first session were already familiar to him--natural theology and the evidences of Christianity. What was necessary for him in this session, was to expand, complete, and combine materials that, in a very limited measure, he had already used at St. Andrews.
A greater contrast can hardly be imagined than the divinity class-room under his predecessor and under himself. The last professor was a striking illustration of what the essential dulness and lifelessness of Moderatism could produce when matured and crowned by old age and infirmity. Two years before the appointment of Chalmers, a deputation of students, including the late Principal Cunningham and Dr. Wilson of Bombay, had waited on the professor, requesting him (but in vain) to provide a substitute, as his voice could not be heard. Naturally the attendance had fallen to a fraction, and utter lifelessness prevailed. With the appointment of Chalmers, an enthusiasm sprang up unprecedented in the history of the university. 'The introductory lecture,' says Dr. Hanna, 'was delivered amid rapturous applause, and, with scarcely any sensible abatement, the excitement of that first meeting was sustained throughout the whole of the succeeding session.' Besides the regular students of the church, a very large body of amateurs attended the course. From these the professor exacted no fee; but at the end of the session, through the Rev. Robert Morehead, an episcopalian clergyman, they asked his acceptance of a sum of money, and, in an elaborate address, expressed the delight and benefit with which they had listened to the course.
In subsequent years, Dr. Chalmers re-wrote his divinity lectures, and after his death these were published in two volumes, entitled, _Institutes of Theology_. Besides delivering his own lectures, it was his practice to comment on his textbooks,--Butler's _Analogy_, Paley's _Evidences_, and Hill's _Lectures in Divinity_, his notes on these now forming a separate volume of his _Posthumous Works_.
Most Calvinistic treatises on systematic theology start from the divine point of view, setting forth the nature of God; and, on the basis of His Sovereignty, explaining his relation to man. Chalmers preferred to start with the actual condition of man, the diseased and disorganised state into which he had fallen, and to rise from that to the provision which God had made for his recovery through Jesus Christ. It is not difficult to see what led him to prefer this order. In his course of moral philosophy, he had come to an abrupt and impassable barrier. Natural ethics gave abundant proof that man's moral nature was disordered, and that he had lost fellowship with God; but it threw no light on the awfully important questions how that nature was to be healed, and how that fellowship was to be restored. The answer to these questions, as Chalmers often insisted, must come from a higher source. It was tantalising to a teacher of moral philosophy to have to leave man in this predicament, and to be restrained from dwelling on the response of revealed theology to his eager questionings. And hence, when revealed theology became his theme, Chalmers was eager to set forth at once the point of junction between the two theologies, to show how the revealed took man up at the point where nature left him; in a word, to bring the remedy of revelation into connection with the disease of nature. If, in general, this order is more acceptable to Arminian than Calvinistic divines, this was not Chalmers's reason for preferring it. We have seen that the sovereignty, the all-sufficiency and universal operation of God, was the first theological truth that took a powerful hold of his mind, even before he became reconciled to evangelical doctrine. That hold it retained ever after. The root of Calvinism, or, we should rather say, of Paulinism and Augustinianism, was planted at the beginning in the very heart of his being.