YEAR 1794
THIS year had opened into all the leafiness of midsummer before anything
memorable happened in the parish, further than that the sad division of
my people into government-men and jacobins was perfected. This calamity,
for I never could consider such heartburning among neighbours as any
thing less than a very heavy calamity, was assuredly occasioned by faults
on both sides; but it must be confessed that the gentry did nothing to
win the commonality from the errors of their way. A little more
condescension on their part would not have made things worse, and might
have made them better; but pride interposed, and caused them to think
that any show of affability from them would be construed by the democrats
into a terror of their power; while the democrats were no less to blame;
for hearing how their compeers were thriving in France, and demolishing
every obstacle to their ascendency, they were crouse and really insolent,
evidencing none of that temperance in prosperity that proves the
possessors worthy of their good fortune.
As for me, my duty in these circumstances was plain and simple. The
Christian religion was attempted to be brought into disrepute; the rising
generation were taught to gibe at its holiest ordinances; and the kirk
was more frequented as a place to while away the time on a rainy Sunday,
than for any insight of the admonitions and revelations in the sacred
book. Knowing this, I perceived that it would be of no effect to handle
much the mysteries of the faith; but as there was at the time a bruit and
a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the
other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself
the charity, brotherly love, and welldoing inculcated by our holy
religion, I set myself to task upon these heads, and thought it no
robbery to use a little of the stratagem employed against Christ’s
kingdom, to promote the interests thereof in the hearts and
understandings of those whose ears would have been sealed against me, had
I attempted to expound higher things. Accordingly, on one day it was my
practice to show what the nature of Christian charity was, comparing it
to the light and warmth of the sun, that shines impartially on the just
and the unjust—showing that man, without the sense of it as a duty, was
as the beasts that perish, and that every feeling of his nature was
intimately selfish, but then when actuated by this divine impulse, he
rose out of himself, and became as a god, zealous to abate the sufferings
of all things that live; and, on the next day, I demonstrated that the
new benevolence which had come so much into vogue, was but another
version of this Christian virtue. In like manner, I dealt with brotherly
love, bringing it home to the business and bosoms of my hearers, that the
Christianity of it was neither enlarged nor bettered by being baptized
with the Greek name of philanthropy. With welldoing, however, I went
more roundly to work, I told my people that I thought they had more sense
than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians; for that it
would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserved, seeing
that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals
and manners to which the newfangled doctrine of utility pretended.
These discourses, which I continued for sometime, had no great effect on
the men; but being prepared in a familiar household manner, they took the
fancies of the young women, which was to me an assurance that the seed I
had planted would in time shoot forth; for I reasoned with myself, that
if the gudeman of the immediate generation should continue free-thinkers,
their wives will take care that those of the next shall not lack that
spunk of grace; so I was cheered under that obscurity which fell upon
Christianity at this time, with a vista beyond, in which I saw, as it
were, the children unborn, walking on the bright green, and in the
unclouded splendour of the faith.
But what with the decay of trade, and the temptation of the king’s
bounty, and, over all, the witlessness that was in the spirit of man at
this time, the number that enlisted in the course for the year from the
parish was prodigious. In one week no less than three weavers and two
cotton-spinners went over to Ayr, and took the bounty of the Royal
Artillery. But I could not help remarking to myself, that the people
were grown so used to changes and extraordinary adventures, that the
single enlistment of Thomas Wilson, at the beginning of the American war,
occasioned a far greater grief and work among us, than all the swarms
that went off week after week in the months of November and December of
this year.