Most Calvinistic treatises on systematic theology start from the divine point of view, setting forth the nature of God; and, on the basis of His Sovereignty, explaining his relation to man. Chalmers preferred to start with the actual condition of man, the diseased and disorganised state into which he had fallen, and to rise from that to the provision which God had made for his recovery through Jesus Christ. It is not difficult to see what led him to prefer this order. In his course of moral philosophy, he had come to an abrupt and impassable barrier. Natural ethics gave abundant proof that man’s moral nature was disordered, and that he had lost fellowship with God; but it threw no light on the awfully important questions how that nature was to be healed, and how that fellowship was to be restored. The answer to these questions, as Chalmers often insisted, must come from a higher source. It was tantalising to a teacher of moral philosophy to have to leave man in this predicament, and to be restrained from dwelling on the response of revealed theology to his eager questionings. And hence, when revealed theology became his theme, Chalmers was eager to set forth at once the point of junction between the two theologies, to show how the revealed took man up at the point where nature left him; in a word, to bring the remedy of revelation into connection with the disease of nature. If, in general, this order is more acceptable to Arminian than Calvinistic divines, this was not Chalmers’s reason for preferring it. We have seen that the sovereignty, the all-sufficiency and universal operation of God, was the first theological truth that took a powerful hold of his mind, even before he became reconciled to evangelical doctrine. That hold it retained ever after. The root of Calvinism, or, we should rather say, of Paulinism and Augustinianism, was planted at the beginning in the very heart of his being. But, from the eminently practical character of his mind, it was not his habit to put the higher doctrines of Calvinism in the forefront of his preaching, or even of his theology. Man must be dealt with as a responsible being; his responsibility must ever have its place beside God’s sovereignty. It would be ruinous to handle either of these doctrines in such a manner as to destroy or even impair the force of the other. The combination of the two was one of the great objects of his theological teaching.