1860-1866
TRAVELS--BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS
No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or
further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least
once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer
of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at
certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg.
Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to
find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full
of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted.
There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed
to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital,
and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite,
and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags
that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection!
The islands of the Neva pleased him; but the best scene of all was
where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the
skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before
Adam was born,’ and this in _Good Words_, where there was to be nothing
to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police
villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite
exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system.
At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a
number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services,
and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna
speak.’
His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change
from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the
record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the
bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm
brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could
not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing
might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except
for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that
like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets
which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’
In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher
of _Good Words_, Alexander Strahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon
after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which
in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta,
he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and,
what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day,
it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the
traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock,
which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when
on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy,
the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new
world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in
coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement
of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken
for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed;
he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further;
so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he
looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail
to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much
he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in
Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise,
he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse
under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has no trace of
the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot)
a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it
was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first
with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful
to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded
clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of
the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted
up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory
teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with
delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for
the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their
surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the
top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye
and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty
chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath,
the few minarets near it,--there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words
were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to
enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first
time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took
off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered
through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in
hand. The party saw Jordan and the Dead Sea, from Bethlehem proceeded
through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.
In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was
startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and
bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which
the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till
midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the
most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.
By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed.
As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing
in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and
the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment
was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession
of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again!
For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle
of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister
of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the
first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had
convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the
real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in
a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the
devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,--the elder Story of
Roseneath. The rising generation of parish ministers could not fail to
catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example
of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their
instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs
of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of
a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit,
if not in doctrine, liberal,--a man singularly forgotten. He took up
the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master
had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions.
In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with
which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so
much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign
field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the
India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted
as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of
interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere
but in the Highlands the word went,--’There’s life in the Auld Kirk
yet.’
Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more
historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the
inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth
century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the
rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were to Macaulay
‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other
rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children
of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to
every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege.
Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks;
but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business,
there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note
was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then
an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister
of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the
renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken
but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down
with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a
passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind
he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an
understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in
the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure,
he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a
stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the
Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he
could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor
would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic
he would give, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified
outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob
(which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone
far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from
the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not
pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the
obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there
is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no
faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not
pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have
preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few
big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the
literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the
Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was
a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff.
For all that, Robert Lee was admirable--always just to the intellect,
a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart.
He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who
set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that
there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He
objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected
to the Confession of Faith because, by the advance of thought and
knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated;
he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His
design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government.
Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced
into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and
stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true,
wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them;
and the moral estate summed up in the word _Scotch_, a significant
word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these
worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations
raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was
indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a
new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came
to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave
in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch
was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day
Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old
Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught
on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared
with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of
the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist. I don’t
pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work
that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried
on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church--that
enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in
Jesus, and to the work of conversion--_I mean Satan himself_.’ Owing
to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and
it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is
perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor
of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim,
kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how
Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would
not pray _extempore_, is like a bad novel--no dignity in the action,
no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he
won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even
in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may
almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is,
belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation
there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of
Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite
priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible
mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said
explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion than to imagine that
the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has
anything to do with Episcopacy.’
Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was
an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements;
but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a
general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet
the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is
on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty
we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with
kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by
any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly
seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very
little freedom,’ he sighs.
Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to
provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843.
Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were
nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the
other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such
as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that
we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General
Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal
interests, are accustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery
of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of
trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the
Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit
the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting
before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in
duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his
action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for
nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue,
the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians
had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to
talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian
kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland
ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon
had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham,
and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord
cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on
Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men--men who rose
at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at
night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name
of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’
We must not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse
themselves in any way,--all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were
told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the
love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some
would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out
by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly
when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite
innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral
law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment,
whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we
to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both
the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The
Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of
Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong
change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world
that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would
crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard
even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a
rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at
night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not
contained in the law of life which was in Christ.
The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of his argument, is
powerful in its way, but it fails to show that the Lord’s day is a
scriptural institution; the question as to what is lawful or unlawful
being left to ‘the common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of
Christians.’
There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. Macleod awoke
one morning and found himself infamous. Anathemas were hurled from
almost every pulpit. Every newspaper and many magazines took up the
question. Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. There were
innumerable squibs,--the cleverest in prose _The Trial of Dr. Norman
Macleod for the Murder of Moses’ Law_, by David Macrae, in verse the
lines by Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has brought to light,
beginning--
Have you heard of valiant Norman,
Norman of the ample vest--
How he fought the Ten Commandments
In the Synod of the West?
Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed
him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’
he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had
a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his
black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With
the common folk it was probably the word _Decalogue_ that did all the
mischief. What it was they did not exactly know, but it was an awful
thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for
daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told
one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer--his old
friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow--he wrote--
MY DEAR ERSKINE,--Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of
your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am
mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all
a _sell_ together! We are sold to Donkeys, and for _them_ we write, and
so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat!
Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no
Decalogue, or that I am a devil--like yourself.
Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but
Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic)
called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language,
the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’
This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests
on _no authority of Scripture at all_, but the said observance, when
it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community
in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered
four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect.
With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if
you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the
week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered
probable that the valiant Norman would be deposed, but, after all,
the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told
them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in
the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never
mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so
it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly
stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith.
The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the
relation of the creed to the Church.
This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. In the General
Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that the Confession was ‘the truth
of the living God,’ but Tulloch had said, ‘With the spirit of the
seventeenth century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.’
A few months later he published an address on _The Study of the
Confession of Faith_, which is a remarkable piece, every word weighed,
and every word in its place. He begins by brushing aside, as utterly
worthless, all such knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the
letter, asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession
‘must be studied both philosophically and historically.’ The manifesto
of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities which that party had
gathered in the course of a struggle for ascendancy, insomuch that a
historical student, well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell,
by the internal evidence alone, the decade in which the document was
put together, and the men who had the chief hand in the work. Further,
many of the ideas used in the Confession to explain the mysteries
of Christianity were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The
Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain theological
school, which was peculiarly under the influences and the prejudices of
the period. To claim infallibility for such an instrument is the worst
kind of Popery--’that Popery which degrades the Christian reason while
it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.’
Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse--
‘Brother, up to the breach
For Christ’s freedom and truth;
Let us act as we teach,
With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth.
Heed not their cannon-balls,
Ask not who stands or falls;
Grasp the sword
Of the Lord,
And Forward!’