The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-12-05 00:00:00

JOHN GLADSTONE, ESQ., & DR. CHALMERS

The public, north of the Tweed, have recently been fa-
voured with copies of a correspondence between Mr.
Gladstone and the venerable leader of the non-intrusion
party, Dr. Chalmers, which, as it tends to exhibit, in
somewhat striking colors, the present attitude of the Rev.
Doctor with respect to the Church of which he was once
a most illustrious member and champion, and the friends
by whom he was once looked up to with almost unlimited
confidence, we propose to give here, in substance at least,
to our readers.
The facts of the case upon which the gentlemen in ques-
tion came into collision we shall give as briefly as we can,
from the more detailed statement of them contained in
Mr. Gladstone's letters to the rev. gentleman and to the
editor of the Montrose Review. Impressed with a sense
of the want of church accommodation prevailing in Leith
(his native town), Mr. Gladstone proposed supplying that
want by the erection there of a new church, at his own
expense; and knowing Dr. Chalmers personally, he applied
to him for advice,as to the best mode to carry out his views,
premising to him that the only condition on which he
should proceed would be that the patronage should he se-
cured to himself and his heirs, subject, as in similar cases,
to the legitimately authorized laws and regulations of the
Church of Scotland. The inducing reason of this stipula-
tion, on the part of Mr. Gladstone, was to prevent bicker-
ings and dissension among the congregation upon the sub-
ject of the election of a minister, two instances having then
recently occurred in Leith, where, the patronage beirg in
the hands of the people, division bad arisen, which, in
both cases, terminated in appeals to the Court of Session.
Dr. Chalmers expressed his approbation of the " inten-
tions, conditifons, and motives" of Mr. Gladstone; ex-
pressed his confidence of their being agreed to by the Ge-
neral Assembly, and offered his support " without condi-
tion or qualification," on two distinct occasions. On the
faith of these assurances and promised support, confirmed
at many interviews, Mr. Gladstone purchased land at
Leith, on which he built the church proposed by him.
Here, then, was the position of Mr. Gladstone and
Dr. Chalmers respectively up to the year 1842. Dr.
Chalmers had, in the first instance, given his assurance
of support to the principle, upon which Mr. Gladstone
proposed the erection of his new church in Leith. Re-
lying upon that assurance, the latter gentleman had
erected and endowed, at an expense of about £lO,OOO,
the Church of St. Thomas, a manse, and two school
houses. The application to the General Assembly, for a
confirmation of his rights of patronage, was supported
by Dr. Chalmers, on the 27th of May, 1839, in a speech
which contained the remarkable expression that " the
question of patronage he treated as did Gulliver the
question of big ends and little ends. He did not care
what end of the egg was uppermost; what he wanted was
to get at the egg." Subsequently to the confirmation of
his right of patronage, Mr. Gladstone, at the expense of
another £lO,OOO, added to the Church of St. Thomas,
and endowed, "an asylum for receiving and supporting a
limited number of females suffering from complaints con-
sidered to be incurable; " and the spiritual interests of
these females, together with the schools, being entrusted
mainly to the superintendence of the minister of St.
Thomas, rendered their founder still more anxious for
the preservation of his privilege of exercising the right of
presentation, s:hich, in two instances, he has already done
to the full satisfaction of the new parish, which had thus
been formed by him.
Thus situated. thd lapse of Dr. Chalmers—his adviser,
and author of the guarantee upon the faith of which he had
benevolently expended no less than £20,000,—t0 the non-
patronage party, which regards an established church as
"a nuisance to be swept away," excited, naturally, some
amazement and misgiving in the mind of Mr. Gladstone.
The Doctor, lie began to see, had "got his egg "—the
£2o,ooo—treating, "as did Gulliver the question of big
ends and little ends,"—the promised perpetuity of Mr.
Gladstone's patronage—withiperfect contempt ! He was
now clamouring, with Candlish and the rest of the
voluntaries, for the abolition of that very patronage which
he had assisted in giving to the founder of St. Thomas ;
and under these circumstances, on the 6th of June, 1842,
Mr. Gladstone addressed to the rev. agitator a letter,
recalling to his mind all the circumstances which we have
detailed above, and putting the following home questions
" I beg to enquire how and in what manner you pro-
pose to indemnify me for the right and interest you are
thus most actively using all your powers and influence
to deprive me of? What have I done to merit such treat-
ment at your hands? And how do you propose to repair
the wrong you would, in my humble opinion, most in-
consistently and unjustly inflict upon me?"
To this letter, written throughout in the best spirit,
the rev. doctor did not find convenience to reply; and on
the 22d of the same month Mr. Gladstone again addressed
him, intimating that, in the event of his again remaining
unanswered, he should publish his own letter ; but that
if he did receive a reply he should be determined, by its
nature, as to the course he should pursue. "At last,
(says Mr. Gladstone,) I received his answer, long and
laboured, but highly ingenious ; what some straight-
forward people may probably call jesuitical, when com-
pared with his previous conduct; but the substance of it
was to tell me he had changed his opinions, and that he
had a right to do so. I therefore considered my case,as far as
it depended on him, as hopeless, and gave up the idea of
carrying it farther, but waited for the chapter of events."
No publication therefore ensued. Mr. Gladstone was
satisfied that, so far as Dr. Chalmers was concerned, he
had been duped ; and considered the question at an end.
But not so the doctor. Stung by some letter which ap-
peared lately in the columns of the Montrose Standard.
which be attributed to Mr. Gladstone, Dr. Chalmers,
after an interval of a year and a half, has himself pub-
aNtiirtthttarr."ZeintiMsltterNstlY'lliftrecllP, tetil?gil*" Yet. Wit
tical" letter, in which the circumstances between them,
and especially the writer's position past and present, are
thus sought to be explained and justified.
" When you did me the honour," writes Dr. Chal-
mers, "of asking my advice on the subject of a new
church and parish for Leith, I had but one object at
heart—and that was the religious good of the population
there. I conceived this also to be alone your object, and
felt most grateful for the large and liberal provision you
offered in furtherance of this sacred interest.
" I confess that your right as a patron, viewed in the
light of a secular or patrimonial interest, did not once
enter into my thoughts. I felt that I had no other duty
in giving the advice that you desired of me, than to state
what appeared to me the likeliest and most practicable
scheme for setting up an efficient parochial economy for
the destitute families of that locality which you had fixed
upon. Had I conceived that, over and above the ac-
complishment of this object, I was helping to provide
you with a title to complain of our General Assembly—
when in the exercise of her high vacation, she judges
what is best for the good of our people, in any new cir-
cumstances which might arise—l never would have been
a party to any such negociation. I should have declined
all converse with you upon the subject, had I contem-
plated the possibility of its being turned into an argument
for the abridgement either of my own liberty, or the li-
berty of that Church of which I am a member, to pro-
nounce our own honest and conscientious convictions
of what we hold to be fittest and most effectual for the
moral and religious benefit of the people of Scotland."
It is painful, truly painful to contemplate the moral
obliquity displayed in this, the only portion of the letter
in which the question at issue is touched upon, the re-
mainder being upon the general question of Non-intru-
sionism versus the Church. The first passage can be
viewed (with all respect to the clerical character) as little
better than an evasion of the facts urged by Mr. Glad-
stone in the letter to which this is a reply. The doctor
says that, in his furtherance of the plans of Mr. Glad-
stone, he had at heart only the religious good of the po-
pulation at Leith, and that he conceived this also was
the sole object of Mr. Gladstone. But the latter, as Dr.
Chalmers well knew, had his own views as to the mode
in which the good proposed was to be effected. The pos-
session of the patronage of St. Thomas was the condition
on which Mr. Gladstone advanced his money. Such
possession was guaranteed, so far as it could be, by the
doctor, and was pleaded for and voted for by him in the
General Assembly. Was the doctor, at that time, play-
ing a double part—" getting his egg," by what deceitful
arts he cared not ? Mr. Gladstone himself seems to sus-
pect as much

The second passage quoted is sheer trifli.ig and subter-
fuge. "Had I conceived," said the doctor, " that I was
helping to provide you with a title to complain rf our
General Assembly, &c." The question, we beg to assure
the doctor, is not at all one in which the General Assem-
bly is concerned. It is his own character for fair dealing
that is concerned. The public want to know (for it is
now the public's affair) how Dr. Chalmers reconciles
with his sacred character, or his character as a man, a
deliberate breach of a pledge deliberately given. It is
Dr. Chalmers who was seeking to injure the property of
Mr. Gladstone, and not the Assembly at all.
We must here leave the controversy. It will be in-
structive to the public ; but upon the reputation of Dr.
Chalmers it is, we fear, little calculated to confer addi-
tional lustre.

ENLIGHTENED, LIBERAL, ANTI• CORN-LAW ROCH-
DALE.—RochdaIe, or Rochdale', immortalised by Tim
Bobbin—immortal still more as the birthplace of John
Bright—has at length reached the prmter-pluperfection
of immortality ! Within the past ten days its millowners
and others have contributed nearly £3,000 to the funds
of the Anti-Corn-Law League ; and great has therefore
been the glorification of Rochdale—the Athens of the
manufacturing districts—the centre and quintessence of
Lancashire civilisation ! But one speck—one blot—upon
the brilliancy of its fame has unfortunately been allowed
within the same period to be fastened. In the absence of
" the schoolmaster "—at some Anti-Corn-Law meeting,
we presume—the enlightened (!) mobocracy of Rochdale
has been amusing itself by a freak of very questionable
character. A handbill is just now before us, which an-
nounces the performance of the peculiar species of Olym-
pic games practised in this locality—viz., climbing a
greased pole, catching soaped pigs, jumping in sacks, and
other athletic sports, Aye, and Old English sports too !
exclaims the reader. Admitted ; but these are not all.
In addition, we find announced a contest between pro-
fessors of the art of eating hot porridge I—and another,
more mare still, between adepts in the science of " LICK-
ING TREACLE "!! The very idea that any portion—the
rudest even—of the population of philosophic, enlight-
ened, Anti-Corn-Law Rochdale, should descend to por-
ridge-eating and treacle-licking for money—perhaps to
be contributed to swell the League fund—is so outrage-
ous, that we trust we shall be informed how it can occur,
in a locality whose population can spend £3,000 at once
in Anti-Corn-Law agitation, that even half-a-dozen peo-
ple could be found so disgusting in their tastes, as to
enjoy the sight of human beings degrading themselves to
the level of the brute creation. Do the liberal millowners
and manufacturers of Rochdale spend anything in the duty
of educating and civilising the poor slaves, who toil to
enable them to squander money so profusely ? Perhaps
some correspondent will give us some little insight into
this subject.