When Thomas Chalmers began the West Port Experiment in 1844, he delivered a series of four public lectures on the principles of the territorial or parochial method of evangelism. In it, he told his hearers how he had decided many years ago to disassociate all his parish labors from matters of public charity. To have combined them would compromise the great errand on which he labored. “I fairly cut my connexion with them all [the public charities]; I let the people understand that I dealt only in one article, and that, if they valued the advantages of Christian instruction, they were welcome to any approximation which I could make to them” (Memoirs 2:684). In short, Chalmers would distribute not the “bread that perishes,” but that which bread “endures to everlasting life.”
The Church must not get sidetracked from her calling. Christ gave the Church “one article” to distribute to the nations. She is given the keys, not to an earthly storehouse of perishables, but to the very kingdom of heaven.
Here is a sermon Thomas Chalmers preached to a benevolent society that sets forth his principles for Christian benevolence. He advocates at once a very practical, thorough-going humanitarianism, steering a course between the pitfalls of merely throwing cash at poverty on the one hand and a this-worldly focus on outward needs (anticipating the Social Gospel?). He was a stalwart evangelical, both ‘practical and pious.’
Again, remember that Chalmers’ sermons are nowhere near as generally accessible as other 19th century preachers such as Spurgeon and Ryle. If you haven’t read or listened to a Chalmers sermon, you may want to read my short intro under the ‘Audio’ tab. But while going through Chalmers can be hard work, it is work well spent!
Below is a tremendous sermon Thomas Chalmers preached on the scourge of cholera in Britain in the year 1832. In it, we see God as the First Cause hearing and answering prayer either lower or higher up on the chain of secondary causes. Masterful. And also instructive as the world watches the vicious spread of Ebola. Listen to the sermon here. And access more titles I’ve recorded by Thomas Chalmers.
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ON THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER AND THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.
“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming ? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (2 Peter 3:3-4).
The infidelity spoken of in our text, had for its basis the stability of Nature, or rested on the imagination that her economy was perpetual and everlasting-and every day of Nature’s continuance added to the strength and inveteracy of this delusion. In proportion to the length of her past endurance, was there a firm confidence felt in her future perpetuity. The longer that Nature lasted, or the older she grew, her final dissolution was held to be all the more improbable-till nothing seemed so unlikely to the atheistical men of that period, as the intervention of a God with a system of visible things, which looked so unchanging and so indestructible. It was like the contest of experience and faith, in which the former grew every day stronger and stronger, and the latter weaker and weaker, till at length it waswholly extinguished ; and men in the spirit of defiance or ridicule, braved the announcement of a Judge who should appear at the end of the world, and mocked at the promise of His coming.
But there is another direction which infidelity often takes, beside the one specified in our text. It not only perverts to its own argument, what experience tells of the stability of Nature ; and so concludes that we have nothing to fear from the mandate of a God laying sudden arrest and termination on its processes. It also perverts what experience tells of the uniformity of Nature; and so concludes that we have nothing either to hope or to fear from the intervention of a God during the continuance or the currency of these processes. Beside making Nature independent of God for its duration, which they hold to be everlasting, they would also make Nature to be independent of God for its course, which they hold to be unalterable. They tell us of the rigid and undeviating constancy from which Nature is never known to fluctuate; and that in her immutable laws in the march and regularity of her orderly progressions, they can discover no trace whatever of any interposition by the finger of a Deity. It is not only that all things continue to be as they were from the beginning of creation-causes and effects following each other in wonted and invariable succession, and the same circumstances ever issuing in the same consequents as before. With such a system of things, there is no room in their creed or in their imagination for the actings of a God. To their eye Nature proceeds by the sure footsteps of a mute and unconscious materialism; nor can they recognise in its evolutions those characters of the spontaneous or the wilful, which bespeak a living God to have had any concern with it. He may have formed the mundane system at the first: He may have devised for matter its properties and its laws: but these properties, they tell us, never change; these laws never are relaxed or receded from. And so we may as well bid the storm itself cease from its violence, as supplicate the unseen Being whom we fancy to be sitting aloft and to direct the storm. This they hold to be a superstitious imagination, which all their experience of Nature and of Nature’s immutability forbids them to entertain. By the one infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of judgment. By the other infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of providence. By the first, they tell us that a God has nought to do with the consummation of Nature ; or rather, that Nature has no consummation. By the second, they tell us that a God has nought to do with the history of Nature. The first infidelity would expunge from our creed the doctrine of a coming judgment. The second would expunge from it the doctrine of a present and a special providence, and the doctrine of the efficacy of prayer.
“It is our fault, that we look upon God’s ways and works by halves and pieces; and so, we see often nothing but the black side, and the dark part of the moon. We mistake all, when we look upon men’s works by parts; a house in the building, lying in an hundred pieces; here timber, here a rafter, there a spar, there a stone; in another place, half a window, in another place, the side of a door: there is no beauty, no face of a house here. Have patience a little, and see them all by art compacted together in order, and you will see a fair building. When a painter draweth the half of a man; the one side of his head, one eye, the left arm, shoulder, and leg, and hath not drawn the other side, nor filled up with colours all the members, parts, limbs, in its full proportion, it is not like a man. So do we look on God’s works by halves or parts . . . yet do we not see, that in this dispensation, the other half of God’s work makes it a fair piece.”
-Samuel Rutherford, The Trial and Triumph of Faith (1645)
the territorial or parochial method of evangelism. In it, he told his hearers how he had decided many years ago to disassociate all his parish labors from matters of public charity. To have combined them would compromise the great errand on which he labored. “I fairly cut my connexion with them all [the public charities]; I let the people understand that I dealt only in one article, and that, if they valued the advantages of Christian instruction, they were welcome to any approximation which I could make to them” (Memoirs 2:684). In short, Chalmers would distribute not the “bread that perishes,” but that which bread “endures to everlasting life.”
West Port Experiment 