1838-1843
LOUDOUN--NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY
Just after his return from this tour, Macleod was presented, virtually
at the instance of Chalmers, to the living of Loudoun, in Ayrshire.
On March 5, 1838, he was ordained. From this time onward his private
journal is largely the record of religious introspection. With the
other earnest ministers of that period, he took up the feelings and
the language of the old Puritans. One cannot forget Robertson, on his
appointment to the charge of Ellon, pacing the room for hours in the
silence of the night, ‘and, all unconscious of being overheard, praying
for mercy to pardon his sin and grace to help him in his embassy for
Christ.’ This is good to know, but a little of it goes a long way. When
my brother has entered into his closet and shut the door, I do not wish
to spy upon his spiritual straits, or listen at the keyhole to his
penitential groans. That Macleod, on assuming his first ministerial
charge, deeply felt his responsibility, is clear from his doings as
well as from his diary. The young minister had never doubted the
truth of the religion which, more by example than by precept, had come
down to him from his fathers. And the doctrines of Christianity were
to him not merely true, they were vividly realised in his heart and
imagination. In criticism, at this time, his highest flight was to
name certain antinomies of Calvinism as nuts to crack. On the other
hand, in his frank acceptance of the goodly world, and in his passion
for characters (which was such that he would go scouting for the
ludicrous), he seemed to have more of the humanist than the saintly
temperament. Nothing could have been more alien to him than the plaint
of a latter-day poet--
‘Strange the world about me lies,
Never yet familiar grown,
Still disturbs me with surprise,
Haunts me like a face half-known.’
And he had met in Germany, somewhat to his astonishment, men who
danced on a Sunday, and still showed Christian graces; nay, men who
were reverent and pious, though they could not have subscribed to the
Westminster Confession.
The parish of Loudoun is a broad green wooded valley, through which
runs the Irvine Water, celebrated in song. At one end, on a pleasant
slope, the towers of the castle shine out above the trees; at the
other, several miles distant, lie the villages of Newmilns and Darvel,
where the mass of the population resided. The farmers were a sturdy,
pious race, as befitted the descendants of the Covenanters; but in the
weavers Macleod encountered a new and formidable type of sinner. The
eighteenth century had spoken to their fathers; on matters of religion
their authority was Tom Paine; of politics, Robespierre qualified by
Chartism. Thus the minister, whose business, as he conceived it, was
to pilot souls to heaven, had no sooner taken the helm than he found
himself among rocks and breakers. He was little of a politician, and
no priest, which was fortunate, as a formal defence of the Church or
of Toryism against such antagonists would have been the worst tactics;
but, being a _man_, he got hold of many of the weavers in the end.
“Poor souls!” he could say; “how I do love the working classes!” and
that was a note he never lost. Besides the human, he approached them
on the secular ground. On geology, which was then a fine new weapon to
the adversaries of the Church, he gave a course of lectures which made
a sensation, particularly among the hand-loom atheists, many of whom
became communicants.
The moral condition of Newmilns was terrible in the young pastor’s
eyes, and he would sometimes despair, thinking that all his efforts
were in vain. There was in him some touch of the divine yearning, ‘O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ If he woke in the night-time, he communed with
God. Far from flagging, the ambassador for Christ piled agencies on
means, and, as it were, took the place by storm. The church was crowded
to suffocation; he preached on week-days in various parts of the
parish, instituted Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and meetings for
young men; and, for the sake of the poorest of the poor, held services
to which none were admitted who wore good clothes. In the course of
a year he would visit several thousand families, and as in public he
denounced evil-doers in general, in private he singled them out for
rebuke and exhortation.
In his Loudoun ministry there is just perceptible an official smack,
a note of externality; he has not yet entirely freed himself from the
mechanical theory of salvation. For example, he was much taken up
with the work of winning or, if need were, extorting confessions of
repentance and faith from dying unbelievers. There was one with whom
the zealous young ambassador strove hard, all to induce the invalid
to speak. ‘Before I go have you nothing to say?’ The man lifted up
his skeleton hand and panted out--’No, no, noth--nothing.’ At a later
period Macleod would rather have sympathised with the poet, who wanted
no priest--
‘--to canvass with official breath
The future and its viewless things,
That undiscovered mystery
Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he.’
The manse of Loudoun is a little way out of Newmilns, in the direction
of the castle, and overlooking the road; on one side, a pretty garden,
and at the back the glebe, a beautiful brae. In that very house Robert
Burns once spent a night. Coming down in the morning, he was asked
whether he had slept well. ‘I have been praying all night,’ the poet
answered; ‘if you go up to my room you will find my prayers on the
table.’ He had been thinking of the sweet life of the household and all
he might have been. But this tradition did not move Macleod; indeed, at
that time he was unjust to the poet, as what cleric was not? Invited to
take the chair at a Burns Festival in Newmilns, he replied (disloyal
to Wordsworth for once) that he could not, dared not, as a Christian
minister, commemorate such a man.
His life at Loudoun, notwithstanding his professional industry, was
full of brightness and charm. Much of his leisure was passed among his
flowers, or he went into the woods and sat listening to the birds. In
the winter evenings, to his sister Jane, who kept house for him, he
read aloud from the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and, a new writer,
Dickens; and she in turn entertained him with German sonatas and Gaelic
songs. At Loudoun Castle, then inhabited by the Dowager Marchioness of
Hastings, widow of the celebrated Governor-General, he was not only a
welcome guest, but a trusted friend. His conversational gifts might
account for his acceptability at the tables of the great, but he was
never the mere diner-out, still less the nice chaplain. In any company
he would speak, when occasion offered, from the heart to the heart,
and it was at first startling to see the laugh die out of the face
of the big jolly parson, and hear sudden lessons or tales that shook
the inmost soul, and drew the awkward tear. Lady Hastings gave him the
key of a vault in Loudoun Kirk where lay the right hand of her dead
husband, which had been sent from Malta; and, sure enough one morning,
as the Marchioness lay dying, he was summoned to fetch the relic that
it might be buried in her grave.
The ‘coffee-room fellows’ held reunions at Loudoun. Referring to one of
these, Shairp says: ‘We wandered by the side of the Irvine Water, and
under the woods, all about Loudoun Castle, and Norman was, as of old,
the soul of the party. He recurred to his old Glasgow stories, or told
us new ones derived from his brief experience of the Ayrshire people,
in whom, and in their characters, he was already deeply interested. All
day we spent out of doors; and as we lay, in that balmy weather, on
the banks or under the shade of the newly-budding trees, converse more
hearty it would be impossible to conceive.’
Through Shairp (who was now a student of Oxford) he was kept abreast
of the Tractarian movement; not to his peace of mind, for he was
protestant and presbyterian to the core. Once, while staying at Moreby,
he had attended a magnificent confirmation ceremony in York Minster,
but his raptures over the stained windows and ‘the great organ booming
like thunder through the never-ending arches’ suddenly vanished in the
recollection of a sacramental scene which he had witnessed in the
Highlands--’no minster but the wide heaven, no organ but the roar of
the eternal sea, the church with its lonely churchyard and primitive
congregation.’ So far from having any leanings to High Churchism, he
saw no harm in a layman administering the sacrament of the Lord’s
Supper. Another sign is that, Highlander as he was, he had no sympathy
with the Jacobites; he said that Charlie was never his darling, and
spoke of the low cunning and tyrannical spirit of the Stuarts. The
Anglo-Catholic movement he simply abhorred. ‘Well,’ he wrote to Shairp,
‘what think you of Puseyism now? You have read No. 90, of course,--you
have read the article on Transubstantiation,--you have read it! Great
heavens! is this 1841?’ Shairp, who wet his feet in the rising tide,
piped in vain to his friend about the greatness of Newman. Macleod
could not understand a beautiful soul who spent his mornings in
idolatry, a sage of the nineteenth century for whom the only question
was--Anglican Church or Roman?
Into what hole, Bezonian? speak or die.
Protestantism is more than a creed. Men may rail at the Scarlet
Woman, and yet, in the matter of ecclesiastical claims, be little
Beckets. In the non-intrusion controversy, such as it was in the end,
Macleod’s attitude was partly determined by his dislike of sacerdotal
pretensions. Since the law courts had declared the measures of the
General Assembly illegal, the non-intrusionists intrusionists had set
themselves up against the judges, and in the course of their defiance
were justifying, by word and deed, Milton’s saying, that ‘new presbyter
was just old priest writ large.’ The question was not now of patronage,
but of the Headship of Christ, the crown-rights of the Redeemer;
practically the old quarrel between priests and kings.
As to the necessity of checking the power of the patron there was
not from the first any difference between the two sides. Everybody
recognised that the people, having won political freedom, would have a
voice in the appointment of ministers. To patronage, indeed, the Scots
never consented, were never reconciled; they always looked upon it as
a wrong, they could always say, ‘An enemy hath done this.’ Both Knox
and Melville asserted the right of the people to elect their ministers,
and the Kirk, as often as it had the chance, got rid of patronage. The
evil seemed to be cast out for ever at the Revolution, but in 1712 it
was surreptitiously restored. The Act of Queen Anne, which was nothing
but a Jacobite intrigue, handing over the Kirk to the Pretender’s
friends, was introduced behind the nation’s back, and passed in spite
of the strenuous opposition of the General Assembly. For many years
and in various ways the Kirk tried to get it repealed. In a single
decade there were upwards of fifty disputed settlements before the
courts, and about the middle of the century the dissenters numbered
a hundred thousand. To make matters worse, the party which, under
the name of Moderates, systematically championed the patrons, rose to
absolute power in the Kirk. Before a presentee could be settled he had
to receive the call, a document in his favour signed by the heads of
families: this the Moderates treated as a mere form, and minimised it
more and more till they got quit of it altogether--except the name.
Ministers were inducted with the military at their back. At length,
weary of the struggle, the people gave in, and the descendants of the
Covenanters endured intrusion almost dumbly for twenty years, under
the iron rule of Robertson. As Dr. Chalmers said in his grandiose way:
‘The best, the holiest feelings of our Scottish patriarchs, by lordly
oppressors, sitting in state and judgment, were barbarously scorned.’
After the French Revolution the awakening of man’s spirit, extending
from letters and politics to religion, led in Scotland to the rise
of the Evangelical party. They had lofty notions of ecclesiastical
authority, and manifested their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose
holiness was qualified by originality, such as Macleod Campbell, whom
they incontinently deposed. But, for all that, they were the best of
the clergy, because they were in vital earnest with the highest things.
What was their policy on the question of intrusion? In some way it
should prevent the patron from thrusting in a minister against the
will of the congregation. The General Assembly of 1834, the first
in which the Evangelicals outnumbered the Moderates, conferred
upon the majority of heads of families (being communicants) the
right of vetoing, without assigning reasons, the settlement of a
presentee. Now it is conceivable that one might be eager for reform,
and yet disapprove of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stop
intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it would have
led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees on trivial and absurd
pretexts, rejection for rejection’s sake. Popular election entails
complete responsibility, but when men have to take their ministers
from a patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another without
saying why, they will be apt to use their licence to make up for their
slavery. This were hardly worth remarking but for the assumption,
conveyed in many an oration, that the policy was as admirable as the
principle which it embodied. Let the non-intrusionists have all the
praise of meeting, in some sort, the just claim of the people.
The General Assembly, however, had gone beyond its powers. Both the
House of Lords and the Court of Session pronounced the Veto Law to be
_ultra vires_, the judges holding that the presbytery was bound to
take on trials any presentee to whom there was no objection on the
ground of morals, scholarship, or doctrine. Notwithstanding this,
the General Assembly stuck to the veto. So there would be rejected
presentees demanding, in accordance with the law, to be taken on
trials, and presbyteries at their wits’ end, pulled one way by the
General Assembly, and another way by the civil Court. The General
Assembly ordered the presbytery of Strathbogie not to take on trials
a certain presentee who had been vetoed. The presbytery obeyed. But
the Court of Session declared the order of the General Assembly to be
illegal. Thereupon the presbytery, by a majority of seven, admitted
the presentee. For that the seven were deposed. And now came the event
which was the cause of the Disruption. The minority in the General
Assembly, failing to see how it could be rebellion to obey the law of
the land, treated the deposition of these men as null and void. The
question then was, which of the two sides was the Church of Scotland?
Parliament, all the time, was trying to reconcile parties by changes in
the law, but as it always insisted on making the presbytery the final
judge of the fitness of presentees, the non-intrusionists would not
hear of legislation.
It was not till near the end of the struggle that the minister of
Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The thunder of the captains
and the shouting had been long in his ears without stirring him to
action. He was all in his vocation, the cure of souls,--the mystery
of existence ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and
death, or remembered his days upon the hills. ‘I wished,’ he said,
‘to keep out of this _row_, and to do my Master’s work and will in
my dear, dear parish.’ Some clerics are listless in religion; but
when a question of church politics is raised, alert as a horse at
the sound of the trumpet. Macleod hated controversy, and said it
was the worst way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he
might have sung, ‘How happy could I be with _neither_!’ In him the
opposing types were blended; he had all the humanism which marked the
one,--the love of letters, the relish of things, the superiority to
clerical prejudice,--with all the zeal of the other for the cause of
the gospel. But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred ‘the
cold gentlemanly Moderate’ to ‘the loud-speaking high professor.’ And
the non-intrusionists were claiming to be the only true Christian
ministers in the land, nay more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared
that they were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting
instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes of the Moderate
clergy, and preached, telling the people that now, for the first time,
the gospel was in their ears. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ they said, ‘will
have left the Church when we go.’ In a pamphlet written by Macleod,
‘A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk,’ which had a large sale,
_Saunders_ observes: ‘I ken mony that are foremost eneuch in this
steer that in my opinion hae little o’ the meekness and gentleness o’
Christ.’ He must have been thinking of the minister who said that ‘the
devil was preparing a cradle in hell for the opposition.’ Everything
in the popular cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ‘earthly, sensual,
devilish’; _vox populi, vox Dei_, and no mistake. The struggle against
the civil courts was ‘one of the most illustrious conflicts for the
spirituality and liberty of the Church of Christ of which any record
can be found either in modern or in ancient times.’ What Macleod could
least endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper. They
insisted on remaining in an Established Church, while flying in the
face of the law by which it was established. The Headship of Christ was
bound up with the resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an
order of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh.
As for patronage, Macleod was probably willing that it should be
abolished altogether, but he could not support the veto in defiance of
the declared law of the Church. ‘I’m desperate keen for gude reform,’
says _Saunders_ again, ‘and would like the folk to hae mair poo’er,
but I would like to get it in a legal way.’ Macleod believed that the
Establishment was necessary for the religious welfare of the country,
and saw nothing that was worth the risk of its existence. Not till it
became evident that the non-intrusionists were bent on destroying the
Church did he join in the conflict. ‘It will be our bounden duty,’ one
of the leaders had said, ‘to use every effort that if we be driven
out, they shall be driven out too; it is our bounden duty to bear this
testimony that the Church ought to be established on the principles
which we are contending for, or that there should be no establishment
in the land at all.’ When things like that were being said, Macleod,
in alarm, plunged into the whole literature of the controversy. The
position he reached was this, that when there was a dispute as to the
privileges granted by the State to the Church, it was for the civil
court to interpret the terms of the contract. He became one of the
Forty, a set of Independents, whose chief distinction is that they
promoted parliamentary legislation for the reform of patronage. While
opposed to the revolutionary policy, they were not Moderates, for they
countenanced some of the acts of the majority. They were as little for
Erastus as for Hildebrand.
A non-intrusionist deputation came to Newmilns. Macleod allowed them
to harangue in the church, but he took care to be present, and when
they invited the auditors to sign certain resolutions, springing up, he
asked the people to wait till they heard from their minister the other
side of the question. ‘The evening came, and the church was crammed
with all sects and parties. I do believe I never had a greater pressure
on my soul than I had before this meeting. I did not so much possess
the subject as the subject possessed me. Between anxiety to do right
and a feeling of degradation that I should be looked upon by even one
Christian brother as inimical to the Church of Scotland, not to speak
of the Church of Christ, I was so overcome that during the singing of
the psalm--
“Therefore I wish that peace may still
Within Thy walls remain”--
I wept like a very child. I spoke, however, for three and a half
hours, and not a soul moved!... The result has been most gratifying. Of
ten elders not one has left me. The people are nearly unanimous, or at
all events so attached to me personally that they are about to present
to me a gold watch and an address from all parties.’
About the same time (February 1843) circumstances compelled him to
take action in the presbytery. Along with the Veto Law the Chapel Act
had been passed, giving seats in the church courts to the ministers
of non-territorial charges. The House of Lords had just declared
that also to be illegal, when the Presbytery of Irvine met to elect
commissioners to the General Assembly. The minister of Loudoun happened
to be Moderator. Should he allow the chapel ministers to vote? There
was more in his mind than the law; ‘it was the avowed intention,’ he
says, ‘of the High Church party to get the majority in the Assembly
by means of the _Quoad Sacras_ ... and then, as the Assembly of the
National Church, to dissolve the connection between Church and State,
excommunicating those who might remain.’ Refusing the illegal votes, he
set up a separate presbytery; and here was the first actual split in
the Church.
Of all the members of the General Assembly who witnessed or took part
in the procession from St. Andrew’s Church on May 18, 1843, there were
none more sorrowful than the minister of Loudoun. But ere the day was
over a little indignation came to his relief. ‘How my soul rises
against those men who have left us to rectify their blundering, and
then laugh at our inability to do so!’ Principal Tulloch has said that
the act of secession would always be deemed heroic in the history of
Scotland; but Norman Macleod, who, unlike the other, was an eye-witness
and in the thick of events, wrote in his journal immediately after the
Disruption: ‘The great movements, the grand results, will certainly
be known, and everything has been done in the way most calculated to
tell on posterity (for how many have been acting before its eyes!):
but who in the next century will know or understand the ten thousand
secret influences, the vanity and pride of some, the love of applause,
the fear and terror, of others, and, above all, the seceding mania,
the revolutionary mesmerism, which I have witnessed within these few
days.’ For himself he felt how much easier it would have been to go
than it was to stay. ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘did I have such a fortnight of
care and anxiety. Never did men engage in a task with more oppression
of spirit than we did, as we tried to preserve the Church for the
benefit of our children’s children. The Assembly was called upon to
perform a work full of difficulty, and to do such unpopular things
as restoring the Strathbogie ministers, rescinding the Veto, etc. We
were hissed by the mob in the galleries, looked coldly on by many
Christians, ridiculed as enemies to the true Church, as lovers of
ourselves, seeking the fleece; and yet what was nearest my own heart
and that of my friends was the wish to preserve the Establishment
for the well-being of Britain. While the “persecuted martyrs of the
Covenant” met amid the huzzas and applauses of the multitude, with
thousands of pounds daily pouring in upon them, and nothing to do
but what was in the highest degree popular; nothing but self-denial,
and a desire to sacrifice name and fame, and all but honour, to my
country, could have kept me in the Assembly. There was one feature of
the Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the _fever_ of
secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to the Free Church.’ In
the course of one of his speeches in the rump Assembly he exclaimed:
‘We shall endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled,
and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which we shall,
I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the beautiful spectacle which
was presented to us on Sabbath evening, in the dense crowd assembled
here to ask the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me to
distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing out, _Nec tamen
consumebatur_. We shall try to bring our ship safe to harbour, and
if we haul down the one flag, “Retract: no, never,” we shall hoist
another, “Despair: no, never.” And if I live to come to this Assembly
an old man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate our
present position, in endeavouring through good report and bad report to
preserve this great national institution as a blessing to them and to
their children’s children.’
The Free Church was always in his eyes ‘just an outburst of
presbyterian Puseyism,’ and undoubtedly its rise was marked by a
clerical reign of terror. Mr. Skelton testifies: ‘The air of Edinburgh
is generally bitter with Calvinism, and in 1843 it was particularly
inclement. The Free Kirk, having just made a heroic sacrifice, were
naturally rather out of temper. Cakes and ale, consequently, were
quite at a discount. The re-enactment of the old sumptuary laws of
the Puritans began to be talked of again. The national beverage was
interdicted. Young professors could not be permitted to indulge in
promiscuous dancing. The presbytery thundered hoarsely against the
profanation of the Sabbath as practised on Leith Pier, or round
Arthur’s Seat. The slightest sign of independent vitality, intellectual
or religious, was sourly repressed by a party in which the secular
intolerance of the democracy was curiously combined with the spiritual
pretensions of the hierarchy.’ ‘A gloomy fanaticism,’ writes the
father of Norman Macleod, ‘followed the breaking up of the Established
Church, and perhaps in no part of the country did this bitterness exist
more strongly than in the Western Islands. In Skye, especially, it
led to dividing families, and separating man from man, and altogether
engendered strife which I fear it will take years to calm down.’
Although too young, even if he had been fit, to be in the front of the
battle, the minister of Loudoun was notable among the remnant; and
with his repute, besides, as a pastor, it was no wonder that he was
besieged with offers of livings. He refused the first charge of Cupar,
Fife; the Tolbooth and St. John’s, Edinburgh; Campsie, Maybole, St.
Ninian’s. He accepted Dalkeith. Then he learned how much his people
at Loudoun were attached to him. Many whom he had thought rocks sent
forth tears. At the church gate, after his farewell sermon, there was a
mournful crowd; and as he walked home he was waylaid by watchers, who
seized his hand, and invoked upon him the blessing of God.