ILLIAM COLLINS, the well-known publisher, and for many years the zealous fellow-labourer of Dr Chalmers, was born at Eastwood, Renfrewshire, on the 12th of October 1789, His memoir places us beside the infant springs of the Free Church of Scotland.
Of independent, penetrating, and courageous intellect, Mr Collins was ever on the quest for new channels through which to develop his energies, but he was happily guarded from that tendency to theorise, which is the besetting sin of such minds, by the forethought and practical wisdom which he added to all his other qualities. His chief end and aim was the good of others. His philanthropy, early manifested, strengthened with his years, and opened out into a life which unfolded itself in a succession of great labours, wisely conceived and resolutely carried out, for the welfare of his fellow-men. Feeling that all that was really good in himself had its source in the gospel, Mr Collins' efforts for the welfare of others were put forth along the line of that divinely restorative and elevating force which is found in the Cross, and nowhere else.
At the age of twenty-five Mr Collins was ordained an elder in the congregation of the Tron Church, Glasgow, then under the pastoral care of Dr M'Gill. In the course of his reading he happened to peruse the article on the Evidences of Christianity in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The freshness of its intellectual power, and the glow of its moral and evangelical enthusiasm, impressed and delighted him. Accordingly, when Dr M'Gill died, Mr Collins turned his eyes to the author of the article which had so fascinated him, the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, as a suitable successor to Dr M'Gill, and greatly aided in the movement which resulted in the appointment by the Town Council of the young minister of Kilmany to the church and parish of the Tron. From no one did Dr Chalmers receive a heartier welcome on his induction in 1815 than from the youngest member of his session, Mr Collins.
The subject of our memoir now took his place by the side of Dr Chalmers, and continued to co-operate with him in his manifold labours all the time the latter remained in Glasgow. The two men resembled each other in spirit and aim, in genuine piety and large benevolence. It was not the minister alone, nor the elder alone, but minister and elder together, that wrought out that marvellous social and moral change that now began to transform the wide district that was the field of their joint labours. When Dr Chalmers originated the idea of local Sabbath Schools, Mr Collins opened the first school, and thus gave the religious community a proof of the practicability and efficiency of the idea of his great leader.
Dr Chalmers was next transferred to the new parish of St John's. Mr Collins accompanied his minister to his new charge, and still kept his place by his side as his valued adviser and zealous and efficient fellow-labourer. To Dr Chalmers, with his keen political and social insight, it belonged to originate methods of civic and Christian economy, more varied and novel, perhaps, than any age had yet known, and to expound and recommend them by an eloquence of unrivalled brilliance and power. But his elder, quiet and unobtrusive, with keen untiring activity, and soul on fire, came after him, testing the ideas of his chief, and giving them practical realization in the hovels of the poor, in the haunts of the godless, and in the dens of the profligate, thus convincing a some-what incredulous world that the schemes of Dr Chalmers did not belong merely to the region of philosophy and rhetoric, but were thoroughly practical - indeed, the only agencies that ever would recover,the lapsed masses, replacing thriftlessness with frugality, and ignorance and vice with that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. The movement then begun was the first turning in that dangerous tide, whose volume had been growing larger and its waters darker with each succeeding decade, and which, had it been suffered to flow unchecked till our day, would have burst its embankments, in defiance alike of the moral power of the pulpit and the legal authority of the state.
Mr Collins' philanthropy moved within no narrow circle. Every good object evoked the sympathy of his earnest nature, he advocated with characteristic warmth and courage the abolition of African slavery, at a time when that cause was not so popular as it came to be at a later date. This brought him into contact and co-operation with Wilberforce, Macaulay, and other champions of the emancipation of the slave. The fact that he took openly the side of the negro, and that petitions for emancipation lay in his book shop, alienated some of his business customers, many of whom were largely interested in the West India trade.
Mr Collins, moreover, rendered no small service to the cause of religious literature by his reprints, in a more accessible form than heretofore, of many of the writings of the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. To these volumes suitable introductions were prefixed, written by the more eminent clergymen and laymen of the day, of all denominations. This was a wide sowing of the seeds of evangelical truth throughout the land. Besides impregnating the general soil, it planted, doubtless, in many a home and heart the knowledge and the love of genuine piety, where before the gospel had neither been known nor prized. In this scheme, moreover, Mr Collins furnished an example which soon began to be imitated in the numerous societies that by and by arose, and which had as their object the reprinting of the historical literary, and religious works of former days. Since that time, popular knowledge has been advancing with rapid strides.
When the temperance cause found its way to this country from the United States in 1829, Mr Collins hailed it, as "throwing a ray of light," to use his own words, upon a dark problem. He was the earliest member of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Temperance Society, and he laboured in season and out of season to promote its object. He visited, on this errand, many of the towns of Scotland, and even extended his tours to Manchester, Liverpool, and London, in all which places he delivered addresses to large audiences. He visited the metropolis three times, and succeeded, on his third visit, in forming the British and Foreign Temperance Society. At one of its early meetings in Exeter Hall he delivered his famous lecture on the " Harmony of the Gospel and Temperance Societies," - a lecture which contains the germs of the ablest arguments employed in behalf of the movement, even under its later phases. From 1829 to 1834 a large portion of his time and means were devoted to the maintenance of a cause which he regarded as one of the handmaids of the gospel, and which commanded his sympathy and support to his dying day.
Dr Chalmers, some time before, had left Glasgow to fill the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of St Andrews. The departure of the master, however, did not cause the disciple to relax in the prosecution of those labours of Christian benevolence in which the two had been so enthusiastic and so successful fellow-workers. It was now, 1834, that Mr Collins projected the greatest of all his enterprises. This scheme, with which his name came afterwards to be mainly associated, had birth in an incident of a domestic kind. He had an only daughter, who was confined to her chamber by a lingering illness. To beguile the hours and mitigate the sufferings of the invalid, Mr Collins would sit down by her bedside, and relate the sad history of individuals and families whom it had been his lot, as an elder of a very poor district, to visit in the course of the day. As she listened, she could not help contrasting her own happy condition, refreshed by the Divine promises and upheld by the Everlasting arms, with the utter misery of those who were living without God and dying without hope. Can nothing be done, she one day asked her father, as he sat beside her recounting the tale of the day's experiences, can nothing; be done to bring the glorious truths on which I am reposing within the reach of these God-forsaking and God-forsaken ones? The question struck him. "Can nothing be done?" he seemed to hear his daughter say again and again, as he continued to ponder over the matter. Yes, surely, he made answer to himself, something can be done. These men are not far off - they are living in a Christian city - and surely there is wealth enough in Glasgow to bring the cheapest of all commodities, but the greatest of all blessings, to their door. As he pondered, a gracious impulse led him to devise and propound his grand enterprise of aiming to provide twenty additional parish churches for Glasgow. Many pronounced his scheme a "devout imagination;" but the very greatness of the enterprise contributed largely to its success. Christian philanthropy in those days found vent in contributions of one guinea, five guineas, and, on very extraordinary occasions, ten guineas. Here was an appeal to Christian men to unite in achieving a great object of an evangelical kind by contributions of £200 each, payable in five instalments! This was a novelty; but a novelty that first astounded and next attracted men. The originator, they saw, was in earnest. He had given proof of this by subscribing at once his own quota, from, as was known, very slender means. His example stimulated the liberality of those whose incomes were five, ten, twenty fold that of the propounder of the scheme, and the result was that in a few months Mr Collins had obtained, mainly by his own exertions, the sum of £22,000; and only eight years after he had first mooted his proposal before an incredulous public, he had the happiness of consummating his noble enterprise by laying the foundation stone of the twentieth church erected under the auspices of the Glasgow Church Building Society. Of these churches, not fewer than thirteen or fourteen had most appropriately the name of William Collins graven on their foundation stone.
The key-note thus struck, the work was taken up by Dr Chalmers, who resolved on doing for Scotland what Collins had so nobly done for Glasgow. When this illustrious divine put his giant shoulder to the wheel, and went through the length and breadth of the land, arousing the country to the need of additional church accommodation, his former elder, far from restricting his sympathies and efforts to Glasgow, once more took his place by his side, and accompanied his chief in prosecution of this enterprise of Christian philanthropy, along with other distinguished men who were raised up at this crisis of Scottish history to aid in the movement.
A Government Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter. Elaborate statistics of the spiritual destitution of Glasgow were given in by Mr Collins to that Commission. These were not without important results. Copies were sent to all the dignitaries of the Church of England, and the result of their circulation among the English bishops and clergy, was the formation of church building societies in at least two of the dioceses of the sister kingdom. The metropolis of England did not deem it beneath it to follow in the wake of Presbyterian Glasgow, nor its metropolitan pastor to copy the example of the humble elder of the Tron.
But it concerns us more to trace the effect of this church extension movement upon the future fortunes of the Scottish Church. In the first place, it established a much higher scale of Christian liberality than had been in use aforetime. This, in the providence of God, was a preparation for a time of greater necessities and still more urgent claims, then near at hand, though as yet altogether unforeseen. In the second place, the number of churches and zealous and faithful pastors were, within a few years, greatly multiplied. While in 1833 there were only twenty-four churches in Glasgow in connection with the Church of Scotland, in ten years the number had increased to forty-four, and within the same decade over the whole country not less than one hundred and eighty-seven new churches had been erected.
But these were the least important of the results flowing from the Church extension movement in which Mr Collins had taken the initiative. Its fully ripened fruits were not gathered till the Disruption, which, as every one knows, was followed by years of church building on a scale never before witnessed. It is true that the material fabrics erected by the efforts of Chalmers and Collins were in almost every case lost to the Free Church. But let us reflect how little was lost, when the stones and timber were adjudged to belong to those who remained in the Establishment, and how much was gained, when the numerous and zealous congregations which had been nursed in these fabrics, with the faithful pastors who ministered to them, cast in their lot in almost every instance with the disestablished Church of Scotland. Let us reflect also how important an item these ministers and members formed in the noble army that gathered round the standard uplifted on the 18th of May 1843 for the crown rights of Christ, and the liberties of the Christian people.
In all these labours we see Mr Collins working for an issue he did not foresee, at least till it was close at hand. The experiments he had made were afterwards to be repeated on a much larger scale, and the success that attended them in the first instance emboldened himself and others when similar operations had to be undertaken in every city and parish of Scotland. Without the enlarged scale of contribution established by Mr Collins, it would have been all but impossible to have reared the five hundred new churches imperatively demanded by the Disruption; and without the living congregations, which his Church extension scheme had called into being, how very much smaller would have been that host of ministers, elders, and adherents that, marching out of the Establishment in 1843, constituted themselves into the Free Protesting Church of Scotland.
His interest in all that appertained to the highest good of his native land continued unabated after the Disruption. In the labours of the subsequent busy years to provide churches, manses, and schools for the congregations of the Free Church, he took part, according to the measure of his strength. He laid the foundation stone of the new and elegant Church erected for the congregation of Free St John's, then under the pastoral care of Dr Thomas Brown. He also laid the foundation stone of the Free Tron, of which Dr Robert Buchanan was minister; and now he connected himself once more with the session of that congregation. He had left it twenty-one years before; he now returned and acted as an elder in it till called to the General Assembly and Church of the firstborn on high.
In 1848, failing health compelled him to seek the more genial air of Rothesay. Even there the noble passion of his soul could not help displaying itself. Despite his bodily weakness, he took an active part in the establishing of a missionary station in the most destitute part of that town. The accomplished biographer of Dr Chalmers, writing of Mr Collins as one of Chalmers' chosen and beloved friends, speaks of him as one who, after a life of honourable service in the cause of Christ - as few busy men among us have ever lived - in that retirement into which feeble health has forced him, still cherishes with unabated zeal those interests which in bygone years he loved so much to promote. The writer of this short memoir had the privilege of spending part of a day with him in his retreat only a little while before his decease, and he never can forget the sweet serenity of spirit which breathed forth in every word and look; the glow into which his conversation kindled when it turned on the progress of Christ's kingdom throughout the earth, and the deep repose and joy of his heart resting, as it evidently did, on his Saviour. On Sabbath, the 2d of January 1853, as the church bells were summoning the worshippers to the sanctuary, Mr Collins ceasing to breathe, entered into rest.
J. A. W.
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