THE SCOTTISH CHURCH, 1560-1843--'THE WITNESS'
'The fate of a nation was riding that night.'
_Paul Revere's Ride_, LONGFELLOW.
When Andrew Melville said to King James VI., 'Sir, as divers times
before have I told you, so now again must I tell you, there are two
kings and two kingdoms in Scotland; there is King James, the head of
the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church,
whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a
king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member,' he expressed what, from
its foundation as an Establishment in 1560 till now, has been in every
one of its constituent parts the belief and practice of the indomitable
Kirk of Scotland.
These were words which the British Solomon was to remember. Over the
border, where the obedient English clergy, who looked from the humblest
curate to the highest dignitary to the throne alone for their support,
professed to find in the pedantic pupil of the great Buchanan the
wisdom of a present deity and regarded his slobbering utterances as
'the counsels of a god,' James found himself in more congenial society
for the promulgation of his views on kingcraft which were to embroil
the nation and drive his descendants from the throne. The preface to
the Authorised Version of the Bible by the translators of 1611 shews
the depth to which the Anglican clergy could sink. No wonder that James
found such men ready tools to his hand. In their company he could
complacently vapour about 'No bishop, no king,' or express his joy in
finding himself for the first time in the company of 'holy and learned
men.' When Melville, as professor of divinity at Sedan, was dying an
exile in 1622 James was dismissing the two English houses of Parliament
for what he was pleased to call an invasion of his prerogative; the
rumours of the Spanish marriage were in the air, the first instalment
of the royal legacy of kingcraft. 'No bishop, no king': The nation was
to take him at his word, and to demonstrate pretty effectively that
kingdoms can do without either--and both.
'Not a king--but a member;' 'in all matters ecclesiastical as well as
civil head supreme'--the whole history of Scotland was to run for three
hundred years in these grooves. This is the doctrine which, from 1560
till now, has in Scotland been known as the Headship of Christ. Without
a correct understanding of this question, not as a mere metaphysical or
theological figment, but as a reality most vitally 'within practical
politics' carrying effects direct and visible into every corner of the
national life, the history of Scotland must of necessity be a sealed
book--the play of _Hamlet_ without the royal Dane. To the English
reader this has been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief
sources of information open to him are not such as present a rational
or connected story. George Borrow found that Scott's caricature of _Old
Mortality_ was what Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin
romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end and substance of
their knowledge. Yet such a presentation would be no less absurd than
_Hudibras_ would be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too
much occupied with the external and material conditions of the country,
too much engrossed by obvious necessity of materials in the romantic
element of Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the
spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything like a complete
narrative, while his feudal sentiments were nourished by the almost
entire lack of the political instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in
John Hill Burton's _History_ are not equal to the main body of his
work; and, if the _Lectures_ of Dean Stanley are the characteristically
thin production of one confessing to but a superficial knowledge of the
vast literature of the field,' the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Grub is
only the work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of
judgment and political insight appears on every page. 'It seems to me,'
says Carlyle, 'hard measure that this Scottish man Knox, now after
three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the
world, intrinsically for having been, in such way as was then possible
to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen'--harder still, say we, that the
subject of Milton's great eulogy should be judged by minds of the
notes-and-queries order, or by those of the class of Hume and
Robertson, who have such a gentlemanly horror at everything that
savours of enthusiasm as to miss the central point, the _coincidence_
of civil and religious liberty.
'In every sense a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him.
A man's, or a nation of men's.' Yet we find Hume writing to Robertson
that if the divine were willing to give up his Mary, the philosopher
was willing to give up his Charles, and there would at least be the
joint pleasure of seeing John Knox made completely ridiculous. 'Who,'
writes Robertson to Gibbon, 'is Mr. Hayley? His Whiggism is so bigoted,
and his Christianity so fierce, that he almost disgusts one with _two
very good things_!' Christianity was then only a good thing when it
had good things to offer to pluralists of the Warburtonian order. Yet
these two garbled and distorted narratives are still the most widely
known versions in England. Little wonder, therefore, is it that Carlyle
should ask, 'I would fain know the history of Scotland; who can tell it
me? Robertson, say innumerable voices; Robertson, against the world. I
open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for
narrative, a cunning answer and hypothesis--a scandalous chronicle (as
for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but
over light-headed; and Henry Darnley, a Booby who had fine legs. Thus
is History written.'
In England, the Reformation took place in a way quite different from
that in which it was effected in Scotland. The strong hand of Henry
VIII. piloted the nation for a time through a crisis, and for a space
at least it would appear that the nation was content to surrender its
religious conscience into the hands of the king. He attempted, says
Macaulay with perfect truth, to constitute an Anglican church differing
from the Roman Catholic on the point of the Supremacy, and on that
alone. There can be little doubt that to the court of Henry the king
was the head of both church and state, and that the power of the keys
temporal as well as ecclesiastical resided in the Crown. So far did
Cranmer carry out this idea that, regarding his own spiritual functions
as having ceased with the death of Henry, he renewed his commission
under Edward VI., and for mere denial of the Act of Supremacy More and
Fisher were sent to the block. It is true that Elizabeth was induced to
part with a good deal of this exaggerated prerogative, yet she still
exercised such a domineering and inquisitorial power as threatened to
unfrock any refractory creature of her creation. It was natural,
therefore, that the church created almost exclusively by the will of
the Crown should for her rights and privileges rest entirely upon the
Crown. The people had never been consulted in her creation, and it was
to the Crown alone that the clergy could look. Her constitution, her
traditions, and her government were all monarchical; and if, at first,
she was moderate in her tone of adulation, it was easy to see that, led
largely by interest, she would begin to assert the divine origin of the
powers of the king, with the deduction of 'no bishop, no king' and of
passive obedience, which made itself heard from the pulpits of Laud,
Montagu, and Mainwaring, and in the treatise of Filmer.
Passing from the more servile ranks of the clergy to those of the laity
it appeared as the party cry of a class. To many it has often appeared
strange how such an absurd and illogical doctrine could become even the
shibboleth of a political party. Yet at bottom the doctrine of the
divine right of the king was not very unfavourable to the divine right
of squires, and king and cavaliers were bound together by obvious ties
of interest in the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the
rising tide of political opposition. Holy Alliances in recent times
have not found this doctrine strange to them, and a high elevation of
the prerogative and the mitre was the very breath of existence to a
church whose being depended on the stability of the throne. Passive
obedience was a convenient cry for those who never dreamed that the
breath of the king could unmake them as a breath had made. Never till
James VII. began to oppress the clergy did they begin to see what was
logically involved in their abject protestations of loyalty, and in
their professions of turning the right cheek to the royal smiter. Only
when the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, not for any loyalty to
the country or to the constitution, but through a selfish maintenance
of their own interests as a class, did the Anglican body bethink
themselves of resistance, and of texts that reminded them of the hammer
of Jael and the dagger of Ehud no less than of the balm of the anointed
of the Lord. History has repeated itself. The landed and clerical
classes associated their triumph with the triumph of Episcopacy, and
their humiliation with the triumph of the Independents. The exaltation
of the prerogative, therefore, again made its appearance at the
Restoration, to be shaken by the high-handed measures of James, and
pass to extinction at the Revolution. The same thing has practically
been seen in Spain. Spain, remarks Borrow, is not naturally a fanatical
country. It was by humouring her pride only that she was induced to
launch the Armada and waste her treasures in the wars of the Low
Countries. But to the Spaniard, Catholicism was the mark of his own
ascendency; it was the typification of his elevation over the Moor. The
Most Catholic King was therefore flattered to exalt the claims of the
Holy See no less than the English clergy had exalted the prerogative of
the king. Far different the condition of affairs in Scotland. When Knox
landed at Leith, in May 1559, he found the whole people ripe for a
change, so that by August of next year the Scottish Parliament could
pass a resolution to abolish the Papacy with the entire consent of the
nation, and in December 1560 the First General Assembly met. Its laic
element was strong and was emphasised from the beginning. To six
ministers there were thirty-four elders, and it met by no sanction of
the Crown, but by its own authority. At its second meeting, Maitland of
Lethington could craftily raise the question as to the legality of such
conventions without the consent of the Queen. It was retorted that, if
they were dependent merely upon the Queen for their liberty of meeting,
they would be deprived of the public preaching of the gospel. 'Take
from us,' said Knox, 'the freedom of assemblies, and take from us the
Gospel'; but it was left to her to send a commissioner. So early was
the doctrine of the Headship maintained by the Church of Scotland. In
1560, no less than 1843, the question was clear. In 1557 they had
resolved that the election of ministers, according to the custom of the
primitive church, should be made by the people; and in the First Book
of Discipline of 1560, re-enacted in 1578, it was laid down that 'it
appertaineth to the people and to every several congregation to elect
their minister, and it is altogether to be avoided that any man be
violently intruded or thrust in upon any congregation.' The fabric was
laid: three hundred years have not started a plank.
The difference of the Reformation in England and in Scotland at once
emerges. Knox had the nation at his back; and, besides being, as Milton
said, 'the Reformer of a nation,' he had found the people by mental
temperament, or by concurrent historical reasons, anchored to a
doctrinal system with a political side which has coloured ever since
the stream of its existence. Calvinism, in every one of its forms,
exaggerated or diluted, has this double side. It is felt in this way.
To a nation believing that the divine decree of election has singled
out the individual, the claims of a church with the greatest of
histories and the most unbroken of descents are of slight value. To the
individual believing it is God's own immutable decree that has made his
calling and election sure, the whole retinue of priests and priestly
paraphernalia appears but an idle pageant. To the nation, and to the
individual alike, regarding itself or himself as fellow-workers with
God in the furtherance of His immutable decrees, thrones, dominions,
principalities and powers have for ever lost their awe or a power to
coerce. Wherever the belief has been carried these results have been
seen. There has been, what Buckle failed completely to see, a rooted
aversion to ecclesiasticism, and a no less rooted aversion to tyranny.
And in no better words could the doctrinal and political principles be
laid down than in the famous words of Andrew Melville which we have set
at the head of this chapter.
Again, when Knox laid hold of the nation his schemes in their very
first draft embraced the people as a whole. It was not a merely
piecemeal or monarchical business as in England. The Reformers were not
content with merely formulating an Act like Henry; they proceeded to
carry out in detail their plans for a national system of education.
They had no idea of setting up a church of their own invention. There
is something in the Scottish intellect, in this resembling the French,
that seeks for the completest realisation in detail of its ideas. As
Professor Masson has said, its dominant note is really not caution,
with which it is so frequently credited, but _emphasis_. While the
English Independents during the later years of the Civil War appear as
either sectaries or as individualists, the contention of the Scots was
ever for a national system. This feature in the character of the nation
is really at the root of what Hallam calls the 'Presbyterian
Hildebrandism' of the elder M'Crie. Johnson, too, could with some
considerable truth say to Boswell, 'You are the only instance of a
Scotchman that I have known who did not at every other sentence bring
in some other Scotchman.' But this is the very feature that Buckle has
overlooked, and it is this that explains how the new church spoke in
the authoritative tones of the old; this, too, which explains how,
outside of the waning Episcopalian sect, there are no dissenters in
Scotland in the true sense. We have parties, not sects. While the
Secession, the Relief, the Cameronians, the Burghers were all mere
branches of the parent stock, retaining in detail its fundamental
nature in discipline and worship, the established church in England
finds itself face to face with organised and hostile dissent. So
entirely has the national unity been preserved in Scotland that
Professor Blackie has said, with no less truth than pith, that while
Presbyterianism is the national and the rational dress of the land,
Episcopacy is but the dress coat by which the nakedness is hid of the
renegade from the nation, and the apostate from its church. Dean
Stanley found that 'the questionable idols' of the Episcopalian sect
were Mary Queen of Scots, Montrose, and Dundee. These have never been
the idols of the Scottish people: the last, indeed, occupies in its
memory the peculiar niche of infamy.
The political side of the national religion is expressed no less
clearly in facts. The Scottish Crown is held by a contract,[1] and the
coronation oath is the deliberate expression of it. In his _De Jure
Regni_ in 1579, dedicated to the king, Buchanan had made this apparent
to Europe, and in his _Lex Rex_, in 1644, Buchanan was reinforced by
Rutherfurd in the doctrine that the people is the source of power, and
his officers are merely _ministri regni non regis_, 'servants of the
kingdom, not of the king.' Startling doctrine this to the slobbering
vicegerent of God, conceding to the people acts to be revoked at his
pleasure. In the light of ordinary facts, therefore, what are the
national covenants of 1580 and 1638, but very simple Magna Chartas or
Reform Bills with a religious colouring? One half of the statements of
Hume and Robertson about fanaticism, austerity, gloom, enthusiasm,
democracy, and popular ferocity, and all the bugbears of the writers so
terribly 'at ease in Zion,' would be discounted by a simple regard for
facts. When Leighton and Burnet went into the west in 1670 to try and
induce the people to recognise the establishment of Charles, what did
they find? Wranglings or harangues after the manner of Scott's Habbakuk
Mucklewrath? 'The poor of the country,' says Burnet, 'came generally to
hear us. We were amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue
upon points of government, and on _the bounds to be set to the power of
the civil magistrate_ and princes in matters of religion: upon all
these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with
their answers to everything that was said to them. This measure of
knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, their cottagers
and servants.' Leighton might well have remembered the case of his own
father. History loves not the Coriolani, says Mommsen, and Miller has
well seized this incident to bring out the popular side of the national
religion. To the question, in an inn at Newcastle, what the Scottish
religion had done for the people, he could reply, 'Independently
altogether of religious considerations, it has done for our people what
your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and all your Penny
and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours; it has awakened their
intellects and taught them to think.'
[1] For this important point in its bearing upon the position
of the Cameronians, and the 'Testimony' of Richard Cameron at
the market-place of Sanquhar, June 22, 1680, see Buchanan's
_History_, XX. 36-47, and Milton's _Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates_, with the coins of James VI. stamped in 1570.
Thus, while James VII.'s creatures, the Bishops, maintained
the 'divine right' of their creator, led by Paterson, the
Archbishop of Glasgow, Dalrymple could carry the resolution
on the constitutional question of tenure that the king had
'forfaulted the throne.'
But the exigencies of the romance-writer are often the means of
corrupting history, and the largest class of readers will ever prefer
to read it, in the phrase of Macaulay, with their feet on the fender.
To that class, therefore, the political crisis of 1638, one of no less
magnitude than the French Revolution, will ever be obscured by airy
talk about religious intolerance and popular fanaticism. The history of
Scotland in consequence becomes either, as Carlyle said, a mere
hunting-ground for intriguing Guises or else is left to the novelist
with the Mucklewraths, wild men, and caricatures. Even yet the mere
English reader of Hume and Robertson has not got beyond the phrases of
'iron reformers' and 'beautiful queens.' The intrepidity of Knox, like
the conduct of Luther at the Diet, becomes material for the
sentimentalist to decry or the latitudinarian to bewail. The courtly
Dean Stanley approaches the maudlin in his remarks at this stage, and
he thinks of Scott as he 'murmured the lay of Prince Charlie on the
hills of Pausilippo, and stood rapt in silent devotion before the tomb
of the Stuarts in St. Peter.' But the admirers of the greatest of all
novelists will remember also no less his statement that he gave the
heart without giving the head, and will even regard it as a merely
temporary aberration, like his presence at Carlton House with the
Prince Regent, where, says Lockhart with curious lack of humour, 'that
nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs!' The
spell of Sir Walter should not blind us to the real and the false in
the national story. Eminently clear-headed and politically sound were
the men of 1638, worthy compeers of the great men that sat in England's
Long Parliament. The Jacobite Rebellions are a mere extraneous incident
in the history of Scotland, and the events of 1638, 1698, and 1843 will
show the peculiar spirit of the people in a fairer flowering. How
curiously illusory are the generalisations of philosophers!
Calculation, shrewdness, pawkiness--these are the traditional marks of
the stage-Scotchman from the days of Smollett. But Buchanan's
_perfervidum ingenium_ is surely much truer, and mere calculation
is just what is _not_ the national mark. If her poverty and pride
were seen in Darien, no less truly was her religious and political side
seen in these other events. But the question of the Headship still
awaits us. On the accession of William, the shattered remnants of the
kirk were gathered together by Carstares after twenty-eight years of
persecution: _nec tamen consumebatur_. Perhaps, in the circumstances
under which both king and country found themselves, no other compromise
could so well have been come to as that of 1690. The election was left
in the hands of elders and the heritors, to be approved of by the
people, leaving an appeal to the Presbytery. At the Union, Scotland
seeing the danger to which she was exposed by her scanty band of
forty-five members being swamped in the English or Tory phalanx--a
danger to which every year subsequent has added but too evident a
commentary--had exacted the most strenuous obligations for the
unalterable preservation of her ecclesiastical system. But five years
witnessed the most shameless breach of public faith, by an Act which
had the most ruinous effects, political and religious, upon the people.
The Tories had come into power on the crest of the Sacheverel wave, and
in 1712 Bolingbroke proceeded to carry out his scheme of altering the
succession and securing the return of the Pretender. An Act of
Toleration was passed for the Episcopalian dissenting sect in Scotland,
and an oath of abjuration sought to be imposed upon the Scottish Church
for the sake of exciting confusion. An Act restoring patronage was
rushed through the House by the Tory squires, who composed five-sixths
of the House of Commons. Against this the Whigs and Carstares protested
vigorously, and appealed to the Treaty of Union, but appeal was lost
upon the ignorant class, who were not overdrawn in the Squire Western
of Fielding's novel. For a hundred years this Act bore evil fruits. The
nobility of the land were only too ready to seize upon the poor spoils
of the national endowment in order to renew their waning power in the
country, and in so doing they managed to set themselves and their
descendants in hereditary opposition to the great mass of the people.
The English peerage has done much for the English people. In Scotland,
it may be asked, which of the four Scottish Universities has had a
farthing of the money of the nobility, and what have they done for the
Church in any one of her branches?
In Miller's _Letter to Brougham_ this cardinal point of 1712 is made
clear:--
'Bolingbroke engaged in his deep-laid conspiracy against the
Protestant succession and our popular liberties; and again the law
of patronage was established. But why established? Smollett would
have told your Lordship of the peculiarly sinister spirit which
animated the last Parliament of Anne; of feelings adverse to the
cause of freedom which prevailed among the people when it was
chosen; and that the Act which re-established patronage was but one
of a series, all bearing on an object which the honest Scotch
member who signified his willingness to acquiesce in one of those,
on condition that it should be described by its right name--an
Act for the Encouragement of Immorality and Jacobitism in
Scotland--seems to have discovered. Burnet is more decided. Instead
of triumphing on the occasion, he solemnly assures us that the
thing was done merely "to spite the Presbyterians, who, from the
beginning, had set it up as a principle that parishes had, from
warrants in Scripture, a right to choose their ministers," and "who
saw, with great alarm, the success of a motion _made on design_ to
weaken and undermine their establishment"; and the good Sir Walter,
notwithstanding all his Tory prejudices, is quite as candid. The
law which re-established patronage in Scotland--which has rendered
Christianity inefficient in well-nigh half her parishes, which has
separated some of her better clergymen from her Church, and many of
her better people from her clergymen, the law through which
Robertson ruled in the General Assembly, and which Brougham has
eulogised in the House of Lords, that identical law formed, in its
first enactment, no unessential portion of a deep and dangerous
conspiracy against the liberties of our country.'
The immediate result was seen in the conduct of the patrons. As the
Regent Morton had established tulchan bishops and secured the revenues
of the sees, the patrons now named such presentees as they deliberately
saw would be unacceptable to the people, protected as they were by the
appeal to the Presbytery, so that during the protracted vacancy they
drew the stipend. No actual case of intrusion, however, seems to have
occurred until 1725, but the rise of moderatism[2] within the Church
gave too frequent occasion for such forced presentations as, we have
seen, took place at Nigg, in 1756, in the days of Donald Roy, Miller's
relative. The secessions of the Erskines in 1733 and of the Relief
under Gillespie in 1752 were the results of intolerant Moderatism, and
its long reign under Robertson the historian, lasted for well-nigh
thirty years in the Assembly, till his withdrawal in 1780.
[2] For the similar rise of the spirit in England see Mark
Pattison's excellent paper in _Essays and Reviews_,
'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.
Were we to credit the eulogies of Dean Stanley and others upon Home,
Blair, and Robertson, we should regard this as the golden age of the
Church of Scotland. Robertson he describes as 'the true Archbishop of
Scotland.' But there are men who seem fated, in the pregnant phrase of
Tacitus, to make a solitude and call it peace. The reign of Robertson
was simply coincident with the very lowest spiritual ebb in the
country, to which his own long régime had in no slight degree
contributed. The Spaniard dates the decline and fall of his own country
from the days of Philip II., _segundo sin segundo_, as Cervantes
bitterly calls him, 'the second with (it was to be hoped) no
successor.' Even in 1765, such had been the spread of religion outside
the national establishment that the Assembly was forced to reckon with
it. They found 'a hundred and twenty meetinghouses, to which more than
a hundred thousand persons resorted.' Patronage was found, after
debate, to be the cause. It is no tribute to Alva that he found the Low
Countries a peaceful dependency of Spain and left them a free nation;
none to the policy of 'thorough' that it sent Laud and Strafford to the
block. An impartial verdict will be that Robertson undermined for ever
the edifice which Carstares had reared.
An attempt has been recently made again to cast a glamour over the old
Scottish moderates of the eighteenth century. Their admirers point to
Watson the historian of Philip II., to Henry the historian of Britain,
to Robertson, to Thomas Reid the philosopher, Home the dramatist, Blair
the sermon-writer, Adam Ferguson, Hill of St. Andrews, and George
Campbell of Aberdeen. Not even the Paraphrases have escaped being
pressed into the field to witness to the literary and other gifts of
Oglivie, Cameron, Morrison, and Logan. But the merits of a class are
not best seen by the obtrusion of its more eminent members, but by the
average. We do not judge the provincial governors of Rome by such men
as the occasional Cicero and Rutilius, but by the too frequent
repetition of men like Verres and Piso. Nor even in these very upper
reaches will the Moderates bear a close inspection. No one now reads
Home's _Douglas_. Young Norval has gone the way, as the critic says, of
all waxworks, and curious is the fate of the great Blair: he lives not
for the works upon which immortality was fondly staked, but for having
given breakfasts to Burns in his Edinburgh days. 'I have read them,'
says Johnson of these sermons; 'they are _sermones aurei ac auro magis
aurei_. I had the honour of first finding and first praising his
excellencies. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public. I
love Blair's sermons, though the dog is a Scotchman and a Presbyterian,
and everything he should not be.' This avalanche of laudation seems
strange to the modern reader, who will find in them the rhetoric of
Hervey's _Meditations on the Tombs_, united to a theology that could
pass muster in a deistical writer. Burns, though he lent himself to be
the squib-writer of the Ayrshire Moderates, was fully aware of the
merely negative tenets of the school, and in his _Holy Fair_ he asks
'What signifies his barren shine
Of moral powers and reason?
His English style, and gestures fine
Are a' clean out o' season.
Like Socrates or Antonine,
Or some old pagan heathen,
The moral man he does define,
But ne'er a word of faith in,
That's right this day.'
But the spirit of Moderatism was to be fully seen in the debate upon
Missions in 1796. It was moved in the General Assembly by Robert Heron,
the unfortunate friend of Burns, and deeply shocked was old Jupiter
Carlyle. It wounded the feelings for the proprieties of the old man.
For half a century, said he, had he sat as a member, and he was happy
to think that never till now had he heard such revolutionary principles
avowed on the floor of the house! Clergymen of lax life, and whose
neglect of parochial duties was notorious, were unanimous in declaring
that charity should begin at home. The spectre of Tom Paine rose before
them. Never, they maintained, while still there remained at home one
man under the influence of attack from the _Age of Reason_, should such
a visionary overture be entertained. But there was worse behind this.
The missionary societies were united with various corresponding
centres; accordingly, in the days of the Dundas dynasty, when Burns
during this very year was reminded that it was his place to act and not
to think, when the Alien and Traitorous Correspondence Act of 1793 and
the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794 had revived the worst
of obsolete and feudal enactments, a wily use of this reign of terror
was made to defeat missions by an attack on their supposed insidious
and political designs. The lawyer who was afterwards to sit on the
bench as Lord President Boyle, rose and said: 'The people meet under
the pretext of spreading Christianity among the heathen. Observe, sir,
they are affiliated, they have a common object, they correspond with
each other, they look for assistance from foreign countries, in the
very language of many of the seditious societies. Already, it is to be
marked, they have a common fund. Where is the security that the money
of this fund will not, as the reverend Principal [Hill of St. Andrews]
said, be used for very different purposes? And as for those Missionary
Societies, I do aver that, since it is to be apprehended that their
funds may be in time, nay, certainly will be, turned against the
Constitution, so it is the bounden duty of this House to give the
overtures recommending them our most serious disapprobation, and our
immediate, most decisive opposition.' The legal mind is not often
remarkable for profundity, but the fine violation of reasoning in the
'nay, certainly will be,' is just on a par with Jonathan Tawse's 'clean
perversion of the constitutional law,' which we have seen before. The
detection of treason, too, lurking in the apparently harmless missions
fairly rivals Serjeant Buzfuz in _Pickwick_, with his exposure of the
danger underlying the 'chops and tomato sauce' of the defendant. Such
had been the unhappy legacy of Robertson. Such was the legal spirit
infused from the bar to the bench that was to act in decisions against
the true interests of the Church during the Ten Years' Conflict.
But the tide was to turn. Years of dissatisfaction had at last produced
the inevitable reaction, and in 1834 the General Assembly had bowed to
the storm and passed the Veto Act. Then were discovered the evils of
co-ordinate jurisdictions, the mistake committed in 1690 and 1707 by
which no provision had been made for a line of clear demarcation
between the ecclesiastical and civil courts, and the blunder committed
in intrusting great questions affecting Scotland to the judgments of
aliens in political sympathies. The tone of many a decision of the
House of Lords was to make people think upon Seafield's brutal jest
about 'the end of an auld sang,' and Belhaven's trumpet-warning about
the risks to the 'National Church founded on a rock, secured by a claim
of right, descending into a plain upon a level with Jews and Papists.'
There were limits even to the loyalty of the most faithful, and for ten
weary years the conflict between the courts was to run its course. In
1842 the Church had instructed its Lord High Commissioner to lay before
Her Majesty a series of resolutions by which it was hoped that a
rupture could be averted. On the 18th of May 1843 the Commissioner for
the Crown was the Marquis of Bute, and after the levée in Holyrood
Palace, the retiring Moderator, Dr. Welsh, preached in St. Giles, and
in St. Andrew's Church the Assembly--the last Assembly of the real
Church of Scotland--met. The scene so often described had best be given
in Miller's own words, as at once affording a capital specimen of his
editorial style and as the work of an eye-witness. We abridge from his
leader of May 20:--
'The morning levée had been marked by an incident of a somewhat
extraordinary nature, and which history, though in these days
little disposed to mark prodigies and omens, will scarce fail to
record. The crowd in the Chamber of Presence was very great, and
there was, we believe, a considerable degree of confusion and
pressure in consequence. Suddenly,--whether brushed by some passer
by, jostled rudely aside, or merely affected by the tremor of the
floor communicated to the partitioning, a large portrait of William
the Third, that had held its place in Holyrood for nearly a century
and a half, dropped heavily from the walls. "There," exclaimed a
voice[3] from the crowd,--"there goes the Revolution Settlement."
For hours before the meeting of Assembly, the galleries of St.
Andrew's Church, with the space behind, railed off for the
accommodation of office-bearers, not members, were crowded to
suffocation, and a vast assemblage still continued to besiege the
doors.... The Moderator rose and addressed the House in a few
impressive sentences. There had been infringement, he said, of the
constitution of the Church,--an infringement so great, that they
could not constitute the Assembly without a violation of the Union
between Church and State, as now authoritatively defined and
declared. He was, therefore, compelled, he added, to protest
against proceeding further, and, unfolding a document which he held
in his hand, he read, in a slow and emphatic manner, the protest of
the Church. For the first few seconds, the extreme anxiety to hear
defeated its object,--the universal "hush, hush," occasioned
considerably more noise than it allayed; but the momentary
confusion was succeeded by the most unbroken silence; and the
reader went on till the impressive close of the document, when he
flung it down on the table of the House and solemnly departed. He
was followed at a pace's distance by Dr. Chalmers; Dr. Gordon and
Dr. Patrick M'Farlan immediately succeeded, and then the numerous
sitters on the thickly occupied benches behind filed after them, in
a long unbroken line, which for several minutes together continued
to thread the passage to the eastern door, till at length only a
blank space remained. As the well-known faces and forms of some of
the ablest and most eminent men that ever adorned the Church of
Scotland glided along in the current, to disappear from the courts
of the State institution for ever, there rose a cheer from the
galleries. At length, when the last of the withdrawing party had
disappeared, there ran from bench to bench a hurried, broken
whispering,--"How many? how many?"--"_four hundred_": The scene
that followed we deemed one of the most striking of the day. The
empty vacated benches stretched away from the Moderator's seat in
the centre of the building, to the distant wall. There suddenly
glided into the front rows a small party of men whom no one
knew,--obscure, mediocre, blighted-looking men, that, contrasted
with the well-known forms of our Chalmers and Gordons, Candlishes
and Cunninghams, M'Farlans, Brewsters, and Dunlops, reminded one of
the thin and blasted corn ears of Pharaoh's vision, and like them,
too, seemed typical of a time of famine and destitution.'
[3] The 'voice' of this now famous utterance was William
Howieson Crauford, Esq. of Craufurdland.
'I am proud of my country, no other country in Europe could have done
it,' said Lord Jeffrey. The Church had simply, in 1843, reverted to the
precedents of 1560 and 1578, and had, in the simile of Goldsmith
happily used by Miller on the occasion, returned like the hare to the
spot from which it flew. Edinburgh, he maintained, had not seen such a
day since the unrolling by Johnston of Warriston of the parchment in
the Greyfriars'. There was a secession, not from the Church, but from
the law courts, and temporary majorities of the Assembly. But the evil
men do lives in brass after them, and the Act of 1712 had rent the
Church of Scotland. No other country had been so fortunately situated
for the exemplification of an unbroken and a National Church. It was
left to two Tory Governments to ruin it, but opportunities once lost
may not thereafter be recovered. Under the long reign of Moderatism it
looked as if the _Nec tamen consumebatur_ were indeed to be a mockery.
But the revival of national feeling at the beginning of the century,
and the expression of popular rights in the Reform Bill of 1832, were
waves that were destined to extend from the nation to the Church. The
great book of M'Crie in 1811 had truly been fruitful of results. For a
century Moderatism had reigned on a lost sense of nationality. But, as
for long the history of Rome had been written with a patrician bias and
an uneasy remembrance of that figure of Tiberius Gracchus, so through
the influence of M'Crie the figure of John Knox had again risen to
popular consciousness in Scotland. There they could see a greater than
the Boyles, the Hopes, the Kinnoulls, the Broughams, and the Aberdeens.
Yet, till its publication, the face of M'Crie had been almost unknown
upon the streets of Edinburgh.
And the Succession? Did it abide with the Free Church or the residuary
Establishment? Lord Macaulay will show, in his speech in the House of
Commons on July 9, 1845, what the violation of the Treaty of Union had
effected in 1712, and that 'the church of Boston and Carstares was not
the church of Bryce and Muir, but the church of Chalmers and Brewster.'
No one knew that better than Hugh Miller, and no one had done more to
make the issues plain to the people of Scotland. To him it was 'the
good cause,' as Macaulay in his address to the Edinburgh electors had
styled his own. While a plank remained, or a flag flew, by that it was
his wish to be found. It was the cry which M'Crie had said, 'has not
ceased to be heard in Scotland for nearly three hundred years.' From
his first leader in _The Witness_, of January 15, 1840, to the close
of his life in 1856, he was to send forth no other sound. 'Your
handwriting did my heart good,' he writes in a letter before us, of 9th
October 1840, to his friend Patrick Duff in Elgin, 'and reminded me of
old times long before I became ill-natured or dreamed of hurting any
one. I am now "fighting in the throng"--giving and taking many a blow.
But I am taking all the care I can to strike only big wicked fellows,
who lift hands against the Kirk, or oppress the poor man.'
Napoleon feared three papers more than ten thousand bayonets, and
certainly Miller was a tower of strength not to be found in the adverse
battalions. None of the merely 'able editors' of the Establishment
party, much less the pamphleteers of the quality of Dean of Faculty
Hope, could touch him or find a link in his armour. This was a tribute
to character. The men of the opposition had 'nothing to draw with, and
the well was deep'; and many names then blown far and wide by windy
rumour, such as Dr. Cook, Robertson of Ellon, Dr. Bryce, and Principal
Pirie of Aberdeen, survive like flies in amber only because it was
their misfortune to be associated with great men. He might have said
with Landor that he did not strive with these men, for certainly of
them all 'none was worth his strife'; yet, though individually
contemptible, they formed a solid phalanx of Moderatism and of dead
resistance to argument and conviction. It was a time of great men. If
Chalmers was the incarnation of the country and the movement, Murray
Dunlop its jurist, Cunningham and Candlish its debaters, it was yet to
the leaders in _The Witness_ that the great mass of his countrymen
looked for the opinions of Hugh Miller. His relative, Dr. Gustavus Aird
of Creich, the late Moderator of the Free Church, has informed us that
in his own parish he learned the paper was read out in the mill, and
that in many places the same thing took place. It is well to have the
ear of the country, and it was well at the critical hour that there was
a man found who was heard gladly of the common people.