position which he deemed to be the only one consonant with Christianity, accounts for that almost bigoted devotion to an established church, which Dr. Chalmers displayed for many years of his life. Looking upon the parish churches and their officers as the proper guardians of the poor, he could not but regard with impatience any voluntary system or dissenting churches, as so many disorganizers, who complicated his plans for the poor and weakened the only churches upon whom he supposed any reliance could be placed for performing the great office of relieving suffering humanity. It is pleasant to discover what thus accounts so favourably for what appeared to be the greatest defect in Dr. Chalmers's character. His zeal for the poor made him, for a time, an uncompromising opponent of Christian freedom. The severe lesson he received before his death, in the disruption of the Scotch Establishment, and the noble sacrifice of sentiment he made by uniting in the secession, showed how far he was above preserving consistency at the expense of truth. He suffered in this more mental agony, probably, than any other individual who left the Establishment. How his opinions were modified, in regard to the poor, we are not informed, but we feel confident, that if the occasion had offered to produce another work on the subject, it would have been what is yet a desideratum in Christian literature. Dr. Chalmers's error, in the first place, was assuming the parish churches to be the proper guardians of the poor, instead of taking the higher ground that every Christian is a guardian of the poor, and insisting upon the great law which requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves. His system of action should have been developed from that law, and not from the duty of parish churches. He could then, without difficulty, have reached and brought in the agency of congregations under all systems of religion, both established and voluntary. When the duties of individual Christians towards the suffering are all discharged, there will not be much left for parish churches or separate congregations to perform. But though Dr. Chalmers committed this error, and though he failed in his "Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns," to produce the work which was needed, and though political economists, so called, have not assigned a high rank to that production, it contains more truth, more profound Christian philosophy, more pure Christian sympathy for the poor than any one to which the controversy has given rise. The following extracts from Chalmers's "Christian and Civic Eco nomy" will help to illustrate the subject of the foregoing pages, and afford a specimen of the manner and tone of his work: "There are many towns in our empire, where the Establishment has not provided room in churches for one-tenth of the inhabitants." . . . . "It is clear, in these circumstances, that the vast majority must be left to wander without the pale of Christian ministrations, and Christian ordinances, altogetherwhere they have settled down into a mass of heathenism, which, to the eye of common experience, looks completely irrecoverable. There is a very general feeling of helplessness and despair upon this subject, as if the profligacy and ungodliness of cities were elements in every way as unconquerable as is physical necessity itself." . . . . "All serving to confirm the general hopelessness that there is upon the subject, and to afford a plausible warrant for the contempt wherewith schemes of philanthropy are so apt to be regarded by the more secular and sober-minded of our citizens, who feel satisfied with things as they are, nor want their quiescence to be at all disturbed by any suggestion or demonstration, whatever, of things as they should be." "It has transformed the whole character of charity, by turning a matter of love into a matter of litigation: and so, has seared and shut many a heart, out of which the spontaneous emanations of good-will would have gone plentifully forth among the abodes of the destitute. We know not how a more freezing arrest can be laid on the current of benevolence, than when it is met in the tone of a rightful, and perhaps, indignant demand for that, wherewith it was ready, on its own proper impulse, to pour refreshment and relief over the whole field of ascertained wretchedness. There is a mighty difference of effect between an imperative and an imploring application. The one calls out the jealousy of our nature, and puts us upon the attitude of surly and determined resistance. The other calls out the compassion of our nature, and inclines us to the free and willing movements of generosity. It is in the former attitude, that, under a system of overgrown pauperism, we now, generally speaking, behold the wealthy in reference to the working classes of England. They stand to each other in a grim array of hostilitythe one thankless and dissatisfied, and stoutly challenging as its due, what the other reluctantly yields, and that as sparingly as possible. Had such been a right state of things, then pity would have been more a superfluous feeling in our constitution; as its functions would have been nearly superseded by the operation of law and justice. And the truth is, that this sweetener of the ills of life has been greatly stifled by legislation; while the amount of actual and unrelieved wretchedness among the peasantry of England too plainly demonstrates, that the economy of pauperism has failed to provide an adequate substitute in its room. Were this economy simply broken up, and the fountain of human sympathy again left free to be operated upon by its wonted excitements, and to send out its wonted streams throughout those manifold subordinations by which the various classes of society are bound and amalgamated together-we doubt not that from this alone a more abundant, or, at least, a far more efficient and better spread tide of charity would be diffused throughout the habitations of indigence." .... "And we fear not, on the other hand, the dislike of the theologian to our announcement, that the pauperism itself is a moral nuisance, which must be swept away from these realms, ere we can rationally hope for a very powerful or prevalent spirit of Christianity in the land. That which letteth must be taken out of the way. It is, indeed, a heavy incumbrance on the work of a clergyman, whose office it is to substitute among his people the graces of a new character, for the hardness, and selfishness, and the depraved tendencies of nature, that, in addition to the primary and essential evils of the human constitution, he has to struggle, in his holy warfare, against a system so replete as pauperism is, with all that can minister to the worst, or that can wither up the best affections of our species." . . . . "We hold pauperism to be a still more deadly antagonist to the morality of our nation." "Like the Malaire in Italy, it has now attained a progress and a virulency, which begin to be contemplated with the awe of some great approaching desolation; and a sense of helplessness mingles with the terror which is inspired by the forebodings of a mighty disaster, that has been gathering along the lapse of time, into a more distinct shape and more appalling magnitude. It is indeed, a frightful spectacle; and the heart of the Christian, as well as of the civil philanthropist, ought to be solemnized by it. He, of all men, should not look on with indifference, while the vapour of this teeming exhalation so thickens and spreads itself throughout the whole moral atmosphere of our land: And, when he witnesses the fell malignity of its operation, both on the graver and more aniiable virtues of our nature,-when he sees how diligence in the callings, and economy in the habits of individuals, are alike extinguished by it, and both the tendernesses of relationship and the wider charities of life, are chilled and overborne-we should expect of this friend to the higher interests of our species, that he, among all his fellows, would be most intent on the destruction of a system that so nips the best promises of spiritual cultivation, and, under the balefulness of whose shadow, are now withering into rapid decay, and sure annihilation, the very fairest of the fruits of righteousness." If companionship in crime or in adversity make strange bedfellows, so companionship in error affords not less curious specimens of incongruous fellowship. Parties, having taken their sides with little or no reference to Christianity, lug it in to serve the purposes of the discussion, to turn a period or to point a sneer, according to the disposition of the writer. It was not the object of even Chalmers to solve the question by means of Christian truth, but to establish his position that compulsory provisions for the poor were of evil tendency, and that the proper charge of the poor belonged to the parish officials of an established church. This view did not afford him a fair opportunity to explain the nature of Christian charity; it was not his topic,-he did not attempt a full exposition, and Christianity only plays a subordinate part in the system of Dr. Chalmers. Wayland, in his work on "Population," refers to revelation throughout, as offering the only true solution, but, though his book is in many respects well written, his exhibition of the bearing of Christianity on this subject is very feeble, and shows how slightly he felt its power, and how little he knew its scope. It is worth observing, in these various authors, their various modes of referring to the truths of Holy Writ as furnishing a curious and instructive exhibition of the human mind and human nature. But no one can fully understand the relations of Christianity to this subject, as fixed by the various writers, who has not fully mastered the spirit and details of the leading author, Malthus, whose "Essay on Population" has, ever since it appeared, ruled the faith of a large number of disciples. It would be difficult to point out a publication as thoroughly infidel in its spirit and tendencies. When taken up, out of the controversy about population, and regarded from the side of Christianity, the book cannot be read without an accumulating sense of contempt, horror, and indignation. Yet this is the standard book in English literature on this subject; its positions are regarded as impregnable by a very large body of the educated people of Great Britain; and its contents are the received doctrine of all the political economists, strictly so called, of Europe and America. Yet Dr. Chalmers is found battling by the side of Malthus, both agreeing in the opposition to a compulsory legal provision for the poor; and we find him writing to his friend Morton "Mr. Malthus's theory upon this subject would have carried me without examples. But it seldom happens that a speculation so apparently paradoxical, is so well supported by the most triumphant exemplifications."* It is scarcely to be wondered that, when such a man can receive such theories and speculations so kindly, the world around him should do so likewise. But, whatever the number of Malthus's innocent disciples, there were not wanting many who detected the cloven foot. On the Continent, especially, many, who did not belong to the stricter school of political economists, denounced the work as atrocious and unchristian. It required an infidel to detect an infidel, according to the spirit of the old proverb: and thus was effected a complete exposure of the fallacies, *Life of Chalmers, vol. ii. 386. the inhumanity, and the infidelity of a work professedly friendly to Christianity, the production of one of its ministers. It was Wm. Godwin, who, writing "Of Population," gave the first effectual check to the spread of Malthusian doctrines. Without any reference to the argument and the facts of Godwin, in which unusual ability is evinced, as opposed to those of Malthus, we cannot but advert to the effectiveness of the excoriation which he applied to Malthus and his opinions: not content with this, he crushes him indignantly as a venomous reptile. The morbid exposure is frightful; such a literary smashing was rarely or never seen, and never more richly merited. If a butchery like this, were unbecoming a Christian, it is the only pretence upon which the shame of leaving its execution to an infidel can be justified. Of course, such a punishment will neither bear transfer nor abridg.. ment, but we must not let the occasion pass without giving a specimen of Mr. Godwin. The portentous evil which Mr. Malthus held up to frighten the world was, the fact asserted by him, that population tended to increase in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence in an arithmetical ratio : Thus, Food, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Population, 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256. "This, then, is the precise outline of Mr. Malthus's system. The evils against which he would guard are hunger and famine; the remedies for these evils are vice and misery."* Unimpeded increase would, "in less than two thousand years, people the whole visible universe, at the rate of four men to every yard square." It must, of course, have required a vast deal of vice and misery to counteract such a ratio of increase as that imports. Mr. Malthus, to remove some of the harshness of his conclusions in the earlier editions of his work, introduces another check to population, which he calls "moral restraint," but he constantly insinuates a caution against any reliance upon it. He finds that "in past ages it has operated with very inconsiderable force," and he is not visionary enough to entertain "any opinion respecting the future improvement of society, in which he is not borne out by the experience of the past." His main dependence, therefore, against the enormous calamity of an over-peopled world, is vice and misery. Mr. Malthus "sits remote, like a malignant providence dispensing from his magazine all the various iniquities and miseries of life, which, sooner or later," in *Godwin on Population, chap. i. book vi. 516. † Malthus, vol. ii. p. 344, note. |