I never met any man who had so large a veneration for all that is great and good.It was primarily a veneration of God, and derivatively for all excellence.He had a profound reverence for royalty, for greatness, for rank and station;was essentially a conservatist in politics; and felt very keenly when by his unflinching adherence to principle he seemed to be separating the upper classes from the Church of Scotland.Without being a hero-worshipper, for he worshipped God only, he had a great admiration of intellectual greatness, at least when it was associated with humility.He never wearied to dilate on the greatness of Sir Isaac Newton, and often introduced him some {400} what inappropriately.Jonathan Edwards he admired for his profound metaphysical ability and his consuming piety; and he employed the arguments of that great man on behalf of philosophical necessity to support, what is a different thing the Scripture doctrine of predestination.But the author from whom he derived most, and who again was indebted to him for eloquent expositions of his philosophy, was Bishop Butler.He was vastly impressed with his enlarged views and with his cautious, practical wisdom; and learned from him the habit of connecting nature and revelation.
With such tastes and aims we can conceive that he would look with a favorable predilection towards the occupation of an academic position.So in 1823 he accepted the call to become professor of moral philosophy in the University of St.Andrews.Here he exercised a very great influence in attracting students, in exciting a prodigious enthusiasm among them, and in setting them forth with high purposes to noble works.He gained the position of highest influence when he was appointed in 1827 to the chair of theology in the University of Edinburgh.I am not sure that Scotland has ever had a higher instructor than Chalmers, in respect of all the qualities that go to constitute a successful teacher.He was always well prepared: he was as orderly as a mathematician could be; even his very prayers were often written out.He was a very methodical examiner on his text-books and his lectures, having his very questions ready, but departing from his prepared queries when circumstances required.As a lecturer he did more than delight his audience: he entranced them.They gazed upon him; and at times had difficulty in taking notes, they were so moved and elevated.He did not carry on his students very rapidly or over much ground; but he made them thorough masters of the subject, and imparted an impulse which led them to enter fields of their own.He was particularly interesting and successful when he was expatiating in the border country which lies between theology and philosophy.His course of moral philosophy in St.Andrews, and that on natural theology in Edinburgh, were particularly relished by all students capable of appreciating high truth.He expatiated with great delight on the analogies between natural and revealed religion.His special lectures on the ,Evidences of Christianity" were not so eminently {401} successful, though they were very valuable.In his early and immature work on the " Evidences," he was particularly anxious to make the whole proof inductive, and missed some of those great principles of our moral nature, which, how ever, he afterwards expanded so fully and so effectively in the work as it took its later forms.The student feels that he is deficient in scholarship, and that he gives us metaphysics when he should have presented us with history.In his theology proper, it is evident that he is not specially an exegete.No one would reckon him a high authority in the exposition of a passage of Scripture.But he presents the great truths of the Bible in noble and attractive forms.His creed is essentially Calvinistic; that is, he holds by the same views as Calvin drew out of the Scriptures; but they appear with a more humane and benignant aspect, and with a more thorough conformity to the principles of man's nature.
In his philosophical works he unfolds and enforces a number of very important principles, not, it may be, absolutely original, but still fresh and independent in his statement and illustration of them, and setting aside error on the one side or other.His " Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy " cannot be said to be a full work on ethics, but it enforces great truths in a very impressive and eloquent way.He draws the distinction between mental and moral philosophy: the one has to do with <quid est>, and the other with <quid oportet>.He holds by the distinction between will and desire, maintaining that the former may be moral or immoral, whereas the latter is not.It seems to me that he has scarcely hit on the essential ethical distinction, which is not between will and desire, but between emotion and will; the latter of which may embrace not only volition, but wishes; in short, every thing optative, every thing in which is choice.He treats of the emotions, and shows that there is always a conception (the better expression is phantasm)involved in them.He dwells on the command which the will has over the emotions and of the morality of the emotions.
Nothing is either virtuous or vicious unless the voluntary in some way intermingles with it; but then the will has influence over a vast number of the operations of the mind.