In connection with his public labours, it only remains for us to advert to his work as professor of theology during the last few years of his life. It had long been his desire to reduce his lectures to a form that would convey the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian revelation. When he began his _Horae Biblicae Quotidianae_ and _Sabbaticae_, he began at the same time to condense and reconstruct his lectures; the two works advanced _pari passu_; the devout study of the Scriptures went hand in hand with the endeavour, in the spirit of the Baconian philosophy, to present the substance of their contents. Hence arose his _Institutes of Theology_--a work which has received far too little attention since German theology began to supersede our own, but which may one day, in some future age, be valued as it should.
But the great merit of Chalmers as a professor lay in the enthusiasm with which he inspired his students. It would have been hard indeed for any conscientious youth to be under him and not feel his soul quickened, at least occasionally, to a sublime ardour, and fired with a new ambition. So wonderful was his influence, that at the Disruption nine-tenths of those who passed through his classes stood by his side. The present writer, though he spent but one session under him before the Disruption, can bear testimony, not only to the intellectual and spiritual impulse he gave, but to the subtle sympathy which drew his students to share his church views, though he never alluded to them in the class, and to the enthusiasm with which they listened to him in the General Assembly. He well knew that in the Free Church the mass of the ministers would be but poorly paid, and that there was all the greater reason why they should be well equipped by superior scholarship, and especially by superior piety, for their office. And in this he was highly successful. After three sessions in the Free Church College, he could testify that the students of his last session stood the highest of any he had known, not only in general proficiency and scholarship, but also in their sense of divine things, and devotedness in heart and spirit to the great objects of the Christian ministry. In his later years, it was his practice to invite his students to private interviews for spiritual conversation and prayer.
On 4th June 1846, he laid the foundation-stone of the Free Church College. It had been considered a great stroke of policy that the most commanding site in the city had been secured for the building. The writer of this sketch, who was present on the occasion, remembers his grand appearance after the ceremony, when his noble head appeared above a confused pile of stones and timbers; and, producing a scrap of paper covered with shorthand hieroglyphics, he apologised, with a broad smile, for taking to 'the paper,' seeing it was but a scrap, whereas if he were to speak extempore, his remarks might become an 'interminable rigmarole.' Not a little of the short speech was addressed to the workmen engaged in the building. That dear object of his life, to raise the working population to a higher level of life in the best sense of the word, came back on him in all its strength. Within the walls to be erected, there would be, he said, no false theories of equality taught or countenanced; but there was one equality between man and man that would be strenuously enforced,--the essential equality of human souls; it would be taught that, in the high count and reckoning of eternity, the soul of the poorest of nature's children, the raggedest boy that ran along the pavement, was of like estimation in the eye of Heaven with the greatest and noblest of the land. The young men in that college would ever be taught that, though their education might fit them for the company of princes and peers, it would be their peculiar glory to be visitants of the poor man's humble cottage, and to pray by the poor man's dying bed. 'Heaven grant that the platform of humble life may be raised immeasurably higher than at present, and through the whole extent of it--that the mighty host who swarm upon its surface, brought under the elevating power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and so rescued from grovelling ignorance and loathsome dissipation, may rise to a full equality with ourselves in all that is characteristic of humanity, and take their place, along with us, side by side, on the footing of kindred and companionable men.' He then made a graceful allusion to the young queen, who had mercifully escaped one of those horrible attempts on her life that occurred in the earlier part of her reign; prayed that she might long continue to adorn her exalted position, and concluded by calling for three cheers on her behalf. Thus the college of the Free Church was founded on a cordial recognition of both ends of the social scale: with benevolent wishes for the working multitude on the one hand, and a cordial and loyal tribute to the Sovereign on the other.