CHALMERS, THOMAS, a Scotch clergyman, born in Anstruther, Fife, March 17, 1780. At the age of 12 he was sent from the parish school to the Uni versity of St. Andrews, and after study ing there seven years, was licensed as a preacher in July, 1799. During the two following years he studied mathe matics and chemistry in Edinburgh, and then became assistant professor of math ematics at St. Andrews. In 1803 he was presented to the parish of Kilmany, in Fife, where he made a high reputa tion as a preacher, which gradually spread throughout Scotland, and in 1815 he was inducted to the Tron Church of Glasgow. His astronomical discourses delivered there in the following winter produced a sensation not only in the city but throughout the country, 20,000 copies selling in the first year of their pub lication.
It was while pastor of this church that he developed his scheme for the reor ganization of the parochial system with a view to more efficient work among the destitute and outcast classes, his influ ence leading to a considerable extension of the means of popular instruction, both religious and secular. In 1819 he was transferred from the Tron to St. John's, a church built and endowed expressly for him by the Town Council of Glas gow, but his health having been tried by overwork he accepted, in 1823, the chair of moral philosophy at St. Andrews. In 1827 he was elected to the divinity chair in the University of Edinburgh, an ap pointment which he continued to hold till the Disruption from the Scottish Church in 1843. In 1832 he published
his "Political Economy," and shortly afterward his "Bridgewater Treatise on the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man." During this period he was occupied with the subject of Church ex tension on the voluntary principle, but it was in the great non-intrusion move ment in the Scottish Church that his name became most prominent.
Throughout the whole contest to the Disruption in 1843, he acted as the leader of the party that then separated from the Establishment, and may be re garded as the founder of the Free Church of Scotland, of the first assem bly of which he was moderator. Hav ing vacated his professional chair in the Edinburgh University, he was ap pointed principal and primarius pro fessor of divinity in the new college of the Free Church. In addition to his duties in these posts, he continued in Edinburgh his zealous labors for the elevation of the "home-heathen," giving a practical exemplification of his schemes by the establishment of a suc cessful mission in the West Port. He died in Morningside, Edinburgh, May 31, 1847.