In his sermons there is little advance. Robert Hall, the great Baptist preacher, compared them to the motion of a rocking-horse, which moves but does not go on. But the one idea with which he starts is set in every possible light, illustrated with great brilliance and emphasized with resistless force. An American hearer noted in Chalmers "a straightforwardness of delivery, as if his sole object was to communicate a conviction with which his own mind was charged."
The movement in his sermons comes from its intellectual importunity, from the entire surrender of the preacher to his theme, from his vivid imagination, and his abandonment to the feelings of the moment. The power of Chalmers' preaching lies in this, that all the weight is in one direction and is intended to carry one point. The movement never for an instant ceases to revolve around one thought. This is clearly seen in his most famous sermon, "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection."
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After five years at St. Andrews he became professor of divinity at Edinburgh University. In 1832 he became moderator of the General Assembly and began to play an influential part in church polity. He was the leader of the Disruption of 1843, when 474 ministers left their churches and manses for conscience' sake. His capacity for leadership, his experience of administration, and his evangelical zeal enabled him to lay the foundations of the Free Church of Scotland.
Chalmers died in his sleep on Sunday evening after a happy day spent with his children and grandchildren at the age of sixty-seven. Lord Roseberry said of him: "Here was a man bustling, striving, organizing, speaking and preaching, with the dust and fire of the world on his clothes, but carrying his shrine with him everywhere."
His preaching was saturated by his personality. One who heard him preach three months before his death said: "As he preached, the huskiness of his voice and hesitation of manner vanished and the barbarous pronunciation was forgotten and there with blazing eye and face, he stood before you, like one possessed by a divine spirit, rolling out in great sentences the glorious truths which he had set himself to expound. You were thrilled and carried away as you have never been before and you felt that this man is the great power of God."
There was nothing light or flimsy about Chalmers. He was a man of profound insight: solid, robust, courageous, his mind combining the exactness of a man of science with the breadth of a stateman, and, above all, a man of God.
David Read preached the sermon at the bicentenary commemoration of Chalmers in 1980 and ended with these words: "Pray that a new generation of church leaders, clothed with the mantle of Chalmers, will arise to declare and live the Gospel with a new courage and a new power."