In 1824, Thomas Chalmers, recently appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrew's University, was aghast to discover a misprint in an article in the Edinburgh Review. It arose in the midst of his calculations for pauperism in England, his experimental treatment of which as minister of the industrial parish of St John's, Glasgow, was the basis for his somewhat contentious international reputation. For a mathematician, chemistry lecturer and now moral philosopher, this ‘glaring inaccuracy’ opened him up to ‘discredit and derision…[in] many periodicals’, just when he was building an academic reputation that would enable his social ideas to gain greater traction. The issues, as Chalmers knew, were deeper than the dropping of a ‘zero’, so that 100 became 10: sloppiness and inaccuracy in Christian thought was a primary critique of the rationalist enemies of public Christianity. Chalmers himself was not happy with systematised theologies which adopted only ‘the form and aspect of a regular science’. Showing the adaptive power of evangelical thought, he looked to moral philosophy to unify faith and science. This was the synthesis which had enabled evangelicalism to face the encroachment and professionalisation of new and multiplying disciplines of thought, and which would power it to unprecedented cultural dominance in the English-speaking world over the period between 1840 and 1870. Chalmers’ saw the struggle to maintain a synthetic worldview – ‘a place of enlargement’ beyond ‘mere theology’, where science and faith were one – as leading ‘on to the higher manifestations of Christianity’.