No. 17
TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
A Great Scottish Divine
THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D., D.C.L., whom Lord Rosebery described as “the most illustrious Scotsman since John Knox,” was born in Anstruther, in 1780, drew large crowds in the Tron Church, Glasgow and at St. Andrews, led 470 ministers out of the Scottish Church and founded the Free Church. After preaching Law for eight years he was converted.
In his journal, in May, 1811, he writes: “I am much taken with Walker’s observation that we are commanded to believe on the Son of God! I am now most thoroughly of opinion that on the system of ‘Do this and live!’ no peace can ever be attained. It is ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved!’ (Acts 16:31). When this belief enters the heart, joy and confidence enter along with it!”
Here is his own explanation of the change: “I cannot but record,” he says, “the effect of an actual though undesigned experiment which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the first eight years of that time I could expatiate only on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny, in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and disturbers of human society. But the interesting fact is, that, during the whole of that period, I never once heard of any reformation being wrought amongst my people. All the vehemence with which I urged the virtues and the proprieties of social life had not the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners. It was not until the free offer of forgiveness through the Blood of Christ was urged upon the acceptance of my hearers that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I made the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations.”
And he closes a farewell speech to a congregation with these memorable words: “You have taught me,” he says, “that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality; and out of your humble cottages I have gathered a lesson which, in all its simplicity, I shall carry into a wider theatre.”