1892.]
The author does not mention Saint-Germain, and may never have heard of
him. If his account of Major Fraser is not mere romance, in that
warrior we have the undying friend of Louis XV. and Madame de
Pompadour. He had drunk at Medmenham with Jack Wilkes; as Riccio he
had sung duets with the fairest of unhappy queens; he had extracted
from Blanche de Béchamel the secret of Goby de Mouchy. As Pinto, he
told much of his secret history to Mr. Thackeray, who says: 'I am
rather sorry to lose him after three little bits of _Roundabout
Papers_.'
Did Saint-Germain really die in a palace of Prince Charles of Hesse
about 1780-85? Did he, on the other hand, escape from the French
prison where Grosley thought he saw him, during the French Revolution?
Was he known to Lord Lytton about 1860? Was he then Major Fraser? Is
he the mysterious Muscovite adviser of the Dalai Lama? Who knows? He
is a will-o'-the-wisp of the memoir-writers of the eighteenth century.
Whenever you think you have a chance of finding him in good authentic
State papers, he gives you the slip; and if his existence were not
vouched for by Horace Walpole, I should incline to deem of him as
Betsy Prig thought of Mrs. Harris.
NOTE.--Since the publication of these essays I have learned,
through the courtesy of a Polish nobleman, that there was
nothing mysterious in the origin and adventures of the Major
Fraser mentioned in pp. 274-276. He was of the Saltoun
family, and played a part in the civil wars of Spain during
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Major Fraser
was known, in Paris, to the father of my Polish
correspondent.
XIII
_THE MYSTERY OF THE KIRKS_
No historical problem has proved more perplexing to Englishmen than
the nature of the differences between the various Kirks in Scotland.
The Southron found that, whether he worshipped in a church of the
Established Kirk ('The Auld Kirk'), of the Free Church, or of the
United Presbyterian Church (the U.P.'s), it was all the same thing.
The nature of the service was exactly similar, though sometimes the
congregation stood at prayers, and sat when it sang; sometimes stood
when it sang and knelt at prayer. Not one of the Kirks used a
prescribed liturgy. I have been in a Free Kirk which had no pulpit;
the pastor stood on a kind of raised platform, like a lecturer in a
lecture-room, but that practice is unessential. The Kirks, if I
mistake not, have different collections of hymns, which, till recent
years, were contemned as 'things of human invention,' and therefore
'idolatrous.' But hymns are now in use, as also are organs, or
harmoniums, or other musical instruments. Thus the faces of the Kirks
are similar and sisterly:
Facies non omnibus una
Nec diversa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum.
What, then, the Southron used to ask, _is_ the difference between the
Free Church, the Established Church, and the United Presbyterian
Church? If the Southron put the question to a Scottish friend, the
odds were that the Scottish friend could not answer. He might be a
member of the Scottish 'Episcopal' community, and as ignorant as any
Anglican. Or he might not have made these profound studies in Scottish
history, which throw glimmerings of light on this obscure subject.
Indeed, the whole aspect of the mystery has shifted, of late, like the
colours in a kaleidoscope. The more conspicuous hues are no longer
'Auld Kirk,' 'Free Kirk,' and 'U.P.'s,' but 'Auld Kirk,' 'Free Kirk,'
and 'United Free Kirk.' The United Free Kirk was composed in 1900 of
the old 'United Presbyterians' (as old as 1847), with the overwhelming
majority of the old Free Kirk, while the Free Kirk, of the present
moment, consists of a tiny minority of the old Free Kirk, which
declined to join the recent union. By a judgment (one may well call it
a 'judgment') of the House of Lords (August 1, 1904), the Free Kirk,
commonly called 'The Wee Frees,' now possesses the wealth that was the
old Free Kirk's before, in 1900, it united with the United
Presbyterians, and became the United Free Church. It is to be hoped
that common sense will discover some 'outgait,' or issue, from this
distressing imbroglio. In the words which Mr. R.L. Stevenson, then a
sage of twenty-four, penned in 1874, we may say 'Those who are at all
open to a feeling of national disgrace look forward eagerly to such a
possibility; they have been witnesses already too long to the strife
that has divided this small corner of Christendom.' The eternal
schisms of the Kirk, said R.L.S., exhibit 'something pitiful for the
pitiful man, but bitterly humorous for others.'
The humour of the present situation is only too manifest. Two
generations ago about half of the ministers of the Kirk of Scotland
left their manses and pleasant glebes for the sake of certain ideas.
Of these ideas they abandoned some, or left them in suspense, a few
years since, and, as a result, they have lost, if only for the moment,
their manses, stipends, colleges, and pleasant glebes.
Why should all these things be so? The answer can only be found in the
history--and a history both sad and bitterly humorous it is--of the
Reformation in Scotland. When John Knox died, on November 24, 1572, a
decent burgess of Edinburgh wrote in his Diary, 'John Knox, minister,
deceased, who had, as was alleged, the most part of the blame of all
the sorrows of Scotland, since the slaughter of the late Cardinal,'
Beaton, murdered at St. Andrews in 1546. 'The sorrows of Scotland' had
endured when Knox died for but twenty-six years. Since his death, 332
years have gone by, and the present sorrows of the United Free Kirk
are the direct, though distant, result of some of the ideas of John
Knox.
The whole trouble springs from his peculiar notions, and the notions
of his followers, about the relations between Church and State. In
1843, half the ministers of the Established Kirk in Scotland, or more,
left the Kirk, and went into the wilderness for what they believed to
be the ideal of Knox. In 1904 they have again a prospect of a similar
exodus, because they are no longer rigid adherents of the very same
ideal! A tiny minority of some twenty-seven ministers clings to what
it considers to be the Knoxian ideal, and is rewarded by all the
wealth bestowed on the Free Kirk by pious benefactors during sixty
years.
The quarrel, for 344 years (1560-1904), has been, we know, about the
relations of Church and State. The disruption of 1843, the departure
of the Free Kirk out of the Established Kirk, arose thus, according to
Lord Macnaghten, who gave one of the two opinions in favour of the
United Free Kirk's claim to the possessions held by the Free Kirk
before its union, in 1900, with the United Presbyterians. Before 1843,
there were, says the sympathetic judge, two parties in the Established
Church--the 'Moderates' and the 'Evangelicals' (also called 'The Wild
Men', 'the Highland Host' or the 'High Flyers'). The Evangelicals
became the majority and 'they carried matters with a high hand. They
passed Acts in the Assembly ... altogether beyond the competence of a
Church established by law.... The State refused to admit their claims.
The strong arm of the law restrained their extravagancies. Still they
maintained that their proceedings were justified, and required by the
doctrine of the Headship of Christ ... to which they attached peculiar
and extraordinary significance.'
Now the State, in 1838-1843, could not and would not permit these
'extravagancies' in a State-paid Church. The Evangelical party
therefore seceded, maintaining, as one of their leaders said, that 'we
are still the Church of Scotland, the only Church that deserves the
name, the only Church that can be known and recognised by the
maintaining of those principles to which the Church of our fathers was
true when she was on the mountain and on the field, when she was under
persecution, when she was an outcast from the world.'
Thus the Free Kirk was _the_ Kirk, and the Established Kirk was
heretical, was what Knox would have called 'ane rottin Laodicean.' Now
the fact is that the Church of Scotland had been, since August 1560, a
Kirk established by law (or by what was said to be a legal
Parliament), yet had never, perhaps, for an hour attained its own full
ideal relation to the State; had never been granted its entire claims,
but only so much or so little of these as the political situation
compelled the State to concede, or enabled it to withdraw. There had
always been members of the Kirk who claimed all that the Free Kirk
claimed in 1843; but they never got quite as much as they asked; they
often got much less than they wanted; and the full sum of their
desires could be granted by no State to a State-paid Church. Entire
independence could be obtained only by cutting the Church adrift from
the State. The Free Kirk, then, did cut themselves adrift, but they
kept on maintaining that they were _the_ Church of Scotland, and that
the State _ought_ in duty to establish and maintain _them_, while
granting them absolute independence.
The position was stated thus, in 1851, by an Act and Declaration of
the Free Kirk's Assembly: 'She holds still, _and through God's grace
ever will hold_, that it is the duty of civil rulers to recognise the
truth of God according to His word, and to promote and support the
Kingdom of Christ without assuming any jurisdiction in it, or any
power over it....'
The State, in fact, if we may speak carnally, ought to pay the piper,
but must not presume to call the tune.
Now we touch the skirt of the mystery, what was the difference between
the Free Kirk and the United Presbyterians, who, since 1900, have been
blended with that body? The difference was that the Free Kirk held it
to be the duty of the State to establish _her_, and leave her perfect
independence; while the United Presbyterians maintained the absolutely
opposite opinion--namely, that the State cannot, and must not,
establish any Church, or pay any Church out of the national resources.
When the two Kirks united, in 1900, then, the Free Kirk either
abandoned the doctrine of which, in 1851, she said that 'she holds it
still, and through God's grace ever will hold it,' or she regarded it
as a mere pious opinion, which did not prevent her from coalescing
with a Kirk of contradictory ideas. The tiny minority--the Wee Frees,
the Free Kirk of to-day--would not accept this compromise, 'hence
these tears,' to leave differences in purely metaphysical theology out
of view.
Now the root of all the trouble, all the schisms and sufferings of
more than three centuries, lies, as we have said, in some of the ideas
of John Knox, and one asks, of what Kirk would John Knox be, if he
were alive in the present state of affairs? I venture to think that
the venerable Reformer would be found in the ranks of the Established
Kirk, 'the Auld Kirk.' He would not have gone out into the wilderness
in 1843, and he would most certainly have opposed the ideas of the
United Presbyterians. This theory may surprise at a first glance, but
it has been reached after many hours of earnest consideration.
Knox's ideas, as far as he ever reasoned them out, reposed on this
impregnable rock, namely that Calvinism, as held by himself, was an
absolutely certain thing in every detail. If the State or 'the civil
magistrate,' as he put the case, entirely agreed with Knox, then Knox
was delighted that the State should regulate religion. The magistrate
was to put down Catholicism, and other aberrations from the truth as
it was in John Knox, with every available engine of the law, corporal
punishment, prison, exile, and death. If the State was ready and
willing to do all this, then the State was to be implicitly obeyed in
matters of religion, and the power in its hands was God-given--in
fact, the State was the secular aspect of the Church. Looking at the
State in this ideal aspect, Knox writes about the obedience due to the
magistrate in matters religious, after the manner of what, in this
country, would be called the fiercest 'Erastianism.' The State 'rules
the roast' in all matters of religion and may do what Laud and Charles
I. perished in attempting, may alter forms of worship--always provided
that the State absolutely agrees with the Kirk.
Thus, under Edward VI., Knox would have desired the secular power in
England, the civil magistrate, to forbid people to kneel at the
celebration of the Sacrament. _That_ was entirely within the
competence of the State, simply and solely because Knox desired that
people should _not_ kneel. But when, long after Knox's death, the
civil magistrate insisted, in Scotland, that people should kneel, the
upholders of Knox's ideas denied that the magistrate (James VI.) had
any right to issue such an order, and they refused to obey while
remaining within the Established Church. They did not 'disrupt,' like
the Free Church; they simply acted as they pleased, and denounced
their obedient brethren as no 'lawful ministers.' The end of it all
was that they stirred up the Civil War, in which the first shot was
fired by the legendary Jenny Geddes, throwing her stool at the reader
in St. Giles's. Thus we see that the State was to be obeyed in matters
of religion, when the State did the bidding of the Kirk, and not
otherwise. When first employed as a 'licensed preacher,' and agent of
the State in England, Knox accepted just as much of the State's
liturgy as he pleased; the liturgy ordered the people to kneel, Knox
and his Berwick congregation disobeyed. With equal freedom, he and the
other royal chaplains, at Easter, preaching before the King, denounced
his ministers, Northumberland and the rest. Knox spoke of them in his
sermon as Judas, Shebna, and some other scriptural malignants. Later
he said that he repented having put things so mildly; he ought to have
called the ministers by their names, not veiled things in a hint. Now
we cannot easily conceive a chaplain of her late Majesty, in a sermon
preached before her, denouncing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, say
Mr. Gladstone, as 'Judas.' Yet Knox, a licensed preacher of a State
Church, indulged his 'spiritual independence' to that extent, and took
shame to himself that he had not gone further.
Obviously, if this is 'Erastianism,' it is of an unusual kind. The
idea of Knox is that in a Catholic State the ruler is not to be obeyed
in religious matters by the true believers; sometimes Knox wrote that
the Catholic ruler ought to be met by 'passive resistance;' sometimes
that he ought to be shot at sight. He stated these diverse doctrines
in the course of eighteen months. In a Protestant country, the
Catholics must obey the Protestant ruler, or take their chances of
prison, exile, fire and death. The Protestant ruler, in a Protestant
State, is to be obeyed, in spiritual matters, by Protestants, just as
far as the Kirk may happen to approve of his proceedings, or even
further, in practice, if there is no chance of successful resistance.
We may take it that Knox, if he had been alive and retained his old
ideas in 1843, would not have gone out of the Established Church with
the Free Church, because, in his time, he actually did submit to many
State regulations of which he did not approve. For example, he
certainly did not approve of bishops, and had no bishops in the Kirk
as established on his model in 1560. But, twelve years later, bishops
were reintroduced by the State, in the person of the Regent Morton, a
ruffian, and Knox did not retire to 'the mountain and the fields,' but
made the most practical efforts to get the best terms possible for the
Kirk. He was old and outworn, and he remained in the Established Kirk,
and advised no man to leave it. It was his theory, again, as it was
that of the Free Kirk, that there should be no 'patronage,' no
presentation of ministers to cures by the patron. The congregations
were to choose and 'call' any properly qualified person, at their own
pleasure, as they do now in all the Kirks, including (since 1874) the
Established Church. But the State, in Knox's lifetime, overrode this
privilege of the Church. The most infamous villain of the period,
Archibald Douglas, was presented to the Kirk of Glasgow, and, indeed,
the nobles made many such presentations of unscrupulous and ignorant
cadets to important livings. Morton gave a bishopric to one of the
murderers of Riccio! Yet Knox did not advise a secession; he merely
advised that non-residence, or a scandalous life, or erroneous
doctrine, on the part of the person presented, should make his
presentation 'null and of no force or effect, and this to have place
also in the nomination of the bishops.' Thus Knox was, on occasion,
something of an opportunist. If alive in 1843, he would probably have
remained in the Establishment, and worked for that abolition of
'patronage' which was secured, from within, in 1874. If this
conjecture is right the Free Kirk was more Knoxian than John Knox, and
departed from his standard. He was capable of sacrificing a good deal
of 'spiritual independence' rather than break with the State. Many
times, long after he was dead, the National Church, under stress of
circumstances, accepted compromises.
Knox knew the difference between the ideal and the practical. It was
the ideal that all non-convertible Catholics 'should die the death.'
But the ideal was never made real; the State was not prepared to
oblige the Kirk in this matter. It was the ideal that any of 'the
brethren,' conscious of a vocation, and seeing a good opportunity,
should treat an impenitent Catholic ruler as Jehu treated Jezebel. But
if any brother had consulted Knox as to the propriety of assassinating
Queen Mary, in 1561-67, he would have found out his mistake, and
probably have descended the Reformer's stairs much more rapidly than
he mounted them.
Yet Knox, though he could submit to compromise, really had a
remarkably mystical idea of what the Kirk was, and of the attributes
of her clergy. The editor of _The Free Church Union Case_, Mr. Taylor
Innes (himself author of a biography of the Reformer), writes, in his
preface to _The Judgment of the House of Lords_: 'The Church of
Scotland, as a Protestant Church, had its origin in the year 1560, for
its first Confession dates from August, and its first Assembly from
December in that year.' In fact, the Confession was accepted and
passed as law, by a very dubiously legal Convention of the Estates, in
August 1560. But Knox certainly conceived that the Protestant Church
_in_, if not _of_, Scotland existed a year before that date, and
before that date it possessed 'the power of the Keys' and even, it
would perhaps seem, 'the power of the Sword.' To his mind, as soon as
a local set of men of his own opinions met, and chose a pastor and
preacher, who also administered the Sacraments, the Protestant Church
was 'a Church in being.' The Catholic Church, then by law established,
was, Knox held, no Church at all; her priests were not 'lawful
ministers,' her Pope was the man of Sin _ex officio_, and the Church
was 'the Kirk of the malignants'--'a lady of pleasure in Babylon
bred.'
On the other hand, the real Church--it might be of but 200 men--was
confronting the Kirk of the malignants, and alone was genuine. The
State did not make and could not unmake 'the Trew Church,' but was
bound to establish, foster, _and obey it_.
It was this last proviso which caused 130 years of bloodshed and
'persecution' and general unrest in Scotland, from 1559 to 1690. Why
was the Kirk so often out 'in the heather,' and hunted like a
partridge on the field and the mountain? The answer is that when the
wilder spirits of the Kirk were not being persecuted they were
persecuting the State and bullying the individual subject. All this
arose from Knox's idea of the Church. To constitute a Church no more
was needed than a local set of Calvinistic Protestants and 'a lawful
minister.' To constitute a lawful minister, at first (later far more
was required), no more was needed than a 'call' to a preacher from a
local set of Calvinistic Protestants. But, when once the 'call' was
given and accepted, that 'lawful minister' was, by the theory, as
superior to the laws of the State as the celebrated emperor was
superior to grammar. A few 'lawful ministers' of this kind possessed
'the power of the Keys;' they could hand anybody over to Satan by
excommunicating the man, and (apparently) they could present 'the
power of the Sword' to any town council, which could then decree
capital punishment against any Catholic priest who celebrated Mass,
as, by the law of the State, he was in duty bound to do. Such were the
moderate and reasonable claims of Knox's Kirk in May 1559, even before
it was accepted by the Convention of Estates in August 1560. It was
because, not the Church, but the wilder spirits among the ministers,
persevered in these claims, that the State, when it got the chance,
drove them into moors and mosses and hanged not a few of them.
I have never found these facts fully stated by any historian or by any
biographer of Knox, except by the Reformer himself, partly in his
_History_, partly in his letters to a lady of his acquaintance. The
mystery of the Kirks turns on the Knoxian conception of the 'lawful
minister,' and his claim to absolutism.
To give examples, Knox himself, about 1540-43, was 'a priest of the
altar,' 'one of Baal's shaven sort.' On that score he later claimed
nothing. After the murder of Cardinal Beaton, the murderers and their
associates, forming a congregation in the Castle of St. Andrews, gave
Knox a call to be their preacher. He was now 'a lawful minister.' In
May 1559 he, with about four or five equally lawful ministers, two of
them converted friars, one of them a baker, and one, Harlow, a tailor,
were in company with their Protestant backers, who destroyed the
monasteries in Perth, and the altars and ornaments of the church
there. They at once claimed 'the power of the Keys,' and threatened to
excommunicate such of their allies as did not join them in arms. They,
'the brethren,' also denounced capital punishment against any priest
who celebrated Mass at Perth. Now the lawful ministers could not think
of hanging the priests themselves. They must therefore have somehow
bestowed 'the power of the Sword' on the baillies and town council of
Perth, I presume, for the Regent, Mary of Guise, when she entered the
town, dismissed these men from office, which was regarded as an
unlawful and perfidious act on her part. Again, in the summer of 1560,
the baillies of Edinburgh--while Catholicism was still by law
established--denounced the death penalty against recalcitrant
Catholics. The Kirk also allotted lawful ministers to several of the
large towns, and thus established herself before she was established
by the Estates in August 1560. Thus nothing could be more free, and
more absolute, than the Kirk in her early bloom. On the other hand, as
we saw, even in Knox's lifetime, the State, having the upper hand
under the Regent Morton, a strong man, introduced prelacy of a
modified kind and patronage; did not restore to the Kirk her
'patrimony,'--the lands of the old Church; and only hanged one priest,
not improbably for a certain reason of a private character.
There was thus, from the first, a battle between the Protestant Church
and State. At various times one preacher is said to have declared that
he was the solitary 'lawful minister' in Scotland; and one of these
men, Mr. Cargill, excommunicated Charles II.; while another, Mr.
Renwick, denounced a war of assassination against the Government. Both
gentlemen were hanged.
These were extreme assertions of 'spiritual independence,' and the
Kirk, or at least the majority of the preachers, protested against
such conduct, which might be the logical development of the doctrine
of the 'lawful minister,' but was, in practice, highly inconvenient.
The Kirk, as a whole, was loyal.