Astronomical Discourses (Illustrated): Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy

Astronomical Discourses (Illustrated): Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy

In 1815, just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Thomas Chalmers proposed a unique outreach to the cosmopolitan bankers, lawyers, and merchants of Glasgow. He would undertake a series of “businessmen’s lunchtime lectures” on astronomy. Declaring, “It is a most Christian exercise to extract a sentiment of piety from the works and appearances of nature. Therefore, there is a great and an imposing splendor in the science of Astronomy.” His aim was to meet objections against the truth of the Gospel “in the treatises of infidelity” and “in the conversations of the worldly” with “a determined examinations of the glories of Creation—in the full knowledge that the Heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handiwork (Psalm 19:1).” Every other month for the the next two years, Chalmers employed every apologetic method in the ample arsenal of Christian truth to developing a vibrant “Natural Theology.” Collected together into a slim volume, The Astronomical Discourses became the bestselling book in the English language over the course of the next several years, outselling Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. To this day, the lectures provide a cogent model for Biblical apologetics in an increasingly skeptical cultural environment. According to historian Iain Murray, “When Thomas Chalmers was born in 1780, it was about the deadest time in the history of the Church of Scotland since the Reformation. When he died in 1847, it was about the alivest. The difference was almost entirely attributable to the Spirit’s work through him.” He was a pastor, reformer, apologist, professor, author, publisher, and founder of schools, missions, and Bible societies that would reshape the history of Scotland and much of the modern world.