THE PROFESSOR
It had all along been felt that Dr. Cairns must sooner or later find
scope for his special powers and acquirements in a professor's chair.
In the early years of his ministry he received no fewer than four
offers of philosophical professorships, which his views of the
ministry and of his consecration to it constrained him to set aside.
Three similar offers of theological chairs, the acceptance of which
did not involve the same interference with the plan of his life, came
to him later, but were declined on other grounds. When, however, a
vacancy in the Theological Hall of his own Church occurred by the
death of Professor Lindsay, in 1866, the universal opinion in the
Church was that it must be filled by him and by nobody else. Dr.
Lindsay had been Professor of Exegesis, but the United Presbyterian
Synod in May 1867 provided for this subject being dealt with
otherwise, and instituted a new chair of Apologetics with a special
view to Dr. Cairns's recognised field of study. To this chair the
Synod summoned him by acclamation, and, having accepted its call,
he began his new work in the following August.
As in his own student days, the Hall met for only two months in each
year, and the professors therefore did not need to give up their
ministerial charges. So he remained in Berwick, where his congregation
were very proud of the new honour that had come to their minister, and
that was in some degree reflected on them. Instead of "the Doctor"
they now spoke of him habitually as "the Professor," and presented him
with a finely befrogged but somewhat irrelevant professor's gown for
use in the pulpit at Wallace Green.
Dr. Cairns prepared two courses of lectures for his students--one on
the History of Apologetics, and the other on Apologetics proper, or
Christian Evidences. For the former, his desire to go to the sources
and to take nothing at second-hand led him to make a renewed and
laborious study of the Fathers, who were already, to a far greater
extent than with most theologians, his familiar friends. His knowledge
of later controversies, such as that with the Deists, which afterwards
bore fruit in his work on "Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century," was
also widened and deepened at this time. These historical lectures were
almost overweighted by the learning which he thus accumulated; but
they were at once massive in their structure and orderly and lucid in
their arrangement.
In the other course, on Christian Evidences, he did not include
any discussion on Theism which--probably because of his special
familiarity with the Deistical and kindred controversies, and also
because the modern assaults on supernatural Christianity from the
Evolutionary and Agnostic standpoint had not yet become pressing--he
postulated. And, discarding the traditional division of the Evidences
into Internal and External, he classified them according to their
relation to the different Attributes of God, as manifesting His
Power, Knowledge, Wisdom, Holiness, and Benignity. With this course
he incorporated large parts of his unfinished treatise on "The
Difficulties of Christianity," which, after he had thus broken it
up, passed finally out of sight.
The impression which he produced on his students by these lectures,
and still more by his personality, was very great. "I suppose," writes
one of them, "no men are so hypercritical as students after they have
been four or five years at the University. To those who are aware of
this, it will give the most accurate impression of our feeling towards
Dr. Cairns when I say that, with regard to him, criticism could not be
said to exist. We all had for him an appreciation which was far deeper
than ordinary admiration; it was admiration blended with loyalty and
veneration."[16] Specially impressive were the humility which went
along with his gifts and learning, and the wide charity which made
him see good in everything. One student's appreciation of this latter
quality found whimsical expression in a cartoon which was delightedly
passed from hand to hand in the class, and which represented Dr.
Cairns cordially shaking hands with the Devil. A "balloon" issuing
from his mouth enclosed some such legend as this: "I hope you are very
well, sir. I am delighted to make your acquaintance, and to find that
you are not nearly so black as you are painted."
[Footnote 16: _Life and Letters_, p. 560.]
During the ten years' negotiations for Union a considerable number of
pressing reforms in the United Presbyterian Church were kept back from
fear of hampering the negotiations, and because it was felt that such
matters might well be postponed to be dealt with in a United Church.
But, when the negotiations were broken off, the United Presbyterians,
having recovered their liberty of action, at once began to set their
house in order. One of the first matters thus taken up was the
question of Theological Education. As has been already mentioned, the
theological curriculum extended over five sessions of two months. It
was now proposed to substitute for this a curriculum extending over
three sessions of five months, as being more in accordance with the
requirements of the times and as bringing the Hall into line with the
Universities and the Free Church Colleges. A scheme, of which this was
the leading feature, was finally adopted by the Synod in May 1875.
It necessarily involved the separation of the professors from their
charges, and accordingly the Synod addressed a call to Dr. Cairns
to leave Berwick and become Professor of Systematic Theology and
Apologetics in the newly constituted Hall, or, as it was henceforth to
be designated--"College." In this chair it was proposed that he should
have as his colleague the venerable Dr. Harper, who was the senior
professor in the old Hall, and who was now appointed the first
Principal of the new College.
Dr. Cairns had thus to make his choice between his congregation and
his professorship, and, with many natural regrets, he decided in
favour of the latter. This decision, which he announced to his people
towards the close of the summer, had the incidental effect of keeping
him in the United Presbyterian Church, for in the following year the
English congregations of that Church were severed from the parent body
to form part of the new Presbyterian Church of England; and Wallace
Green congregation, somewhat against its will, and largely in response
to Dr. Cairns's wishes, went with the rest. He had still a year to
spend in Berwick, broken only by the last session of the old Hall in
August and September, and that year he spent in quiet, steady, and
happy work. In June 1876 he preached his farewell sermon to an immense
and deeply moved congregation from the words (Rom. i. 16), "I am not
ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto
salvation unto every one that believeth." "For more than thirty
years," he concluded, "I have preached this gospel among you, and I
bless His name this day that to not a few it has by His grace proved
the power of God unto salvation. To Him I ascribe all the praise; and
I would rather on such an occasion remember defects and shortcomings
than dwell even upon what He has wrought for us. The sadness of
parting from people to whom I have been bound by such close and tender
ties, from whom I have received every mark of respect, affection, and
encouragement, and in regard to whom I feel moved to say, 'If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,' inclines me
rather to self-examination and to serious fear lest any among you
should have suffered through my failure to set forth and urge home
this gospel of salvation. If then any of you should be in this case,
through my fault or your own, that you have not yet obeyed the gospel
of Christ, I address to you in Christ's name one parting call that you
may at length receive the truth."
A few weeks later he and his sister removed to Edinburgh, where they
were joined in the autumn by their brother William. William Cairns,
who had been schoolmaster at Oldcambus for thirty-two years, was in
many respects a notable man. Deprived, as we have seen, in early
manhood of the power of walking, he had set himself to improve his
mind and had acquired a great store of general information. He was
shrewd, humorous, genial, and intensely human, and had made himself
the centre of a large circle of friends, many of whom were to be found
far beyond the bounds of his native parish and county. Since his
mother's death an elder sister had kept house for him, but she had
died in the previous winter, and at his brother's urgent request he
had consented to give up his school al Oldcambus and make his home for
the future with him in Edinburgh. The house No. 10 Spence Street, in
which for sixteen years the brothers and sister lived together, is a
modest semi-detached villa in a short street running off the Dalkeith
Road, in one of the southern suburbs of the city. It had two great
advantages in Dr. Cairns's eyes--one being that it was far enough away
from the College to ensure that he would have a good walk every day in
going there and back; and the other, that its internal arrangements
were very convenient for his brother finding his way in his
wheel-chair about it, and out of it when he so desired.
The study, as at Berwick, was upstairs, and was a large lightsome
room, from which a view of the Craigmillar woods, North Berwick Law,
and even the distant Lammermoors, could be obtained--a view which was,
alas! soon blocked up by the erection of tall buildings. At the back
of the house, downstairs, was the sitting-room, where the family meals
were taken and where William sat working at his desk. He had been
fortunate enough to secure, almost immediately after his arrival in
Edinburgh, a commission from Messrs. A. & C. Black to prepare the
Index to the ninth edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, then in
course of publication. During the twelve years that the work lasted he
performed the possibly unique feat of reading through the whole of the
twenty-five volumes of the Encyclopaedia, and thus added considerably
to his already encyclopaedic stock of miscellaneous information.
Opening off the sitting-room was a smaller room, or rather a large
closet, commanding one of the finest views in Edinburgh of the
lion-shaped Arthur's Seat; and here of an evening he would sit in his
chair alone, or surrounded by the friends who soon began to gather
about him,
"And smoke, yea, smoke and smoke."
Sometimes a more than usually resounding peal of laughter would bring
the professor down from his study to find out what was the matter, and
to join in the merriment; and then, after a few hearty words of
greeting to the visitors, he would plead the pressure of his work and
return to the company of Justin or Evagrius.
His three nephews, who during the Edinburgh period were staying in
town studying for the ministry, always spent Saturday afternoon at
Spence Street, and sometimes a student friend would come with them.
Dr. Cairns was usually free on such occasions to devote an hour or two
to his young friends. He was always ready to enter into discussions on
philosophical problems that happened to be interesting them, and the
power and ease with which he dealt with these gave an impression as of
one heaving up and pitching about huge masses of rock. His part in
these discussions commonly in the end became a monologue, which he
delivered lying back in his chair, with his shoulders resting on the
top bar of it, and which he sometimes accompanied with the peculiar
jerk of his right arm habitual to him in preaching. A _snell_ remark
of his brother William suggesting some new and comic association with
a philosophic term dropped in the course of the discussion, would
bring him back with a roar of laughter to the actual world and to
more sublunary themes. When the young men rose to leave he always
accompanied them to the front door, and bade each of them good-bye
with a hearty "[Greek: Panta ta kala soi genoito],"[17] and an
invariable injunction to "put your foot on it,"--"it" being the
spring catch by which the gate was opened.
[Footnote 17: "All fair things be thine."]
Once a week during the session a party of six or eight students came
to tea at Spence Street, until the whole of his two classes had been
gone over. After tea in the otherwise seldom used dining-room of the
house, some of the party accompanied the professor to the study.
Here he would show them his more treasured volumes, such as his
first edition of Butler, which he would tell them he made a point of
reading through once a year. Others, who preferred a less unclouded
atmosphere, withdrew with his brother into his sanctum. Soon all
reassembled in the dining-room, and a number of hymns were sung--some
of Sankey's, which were then in everybody's mouth, some of his
favourite German hymns with their chorals, which might suggest
references to his student days in Berlin or to later experiences in
the Fatherland, and some by the great English hymn-writers. At last
came family worship, always impressive as conducted by him, but often
the most memorable feature by far in these gatherings. It was a very
simple, and may seem a very humdrum, way of spending an evening; but
the homely hospitality of the household--the conversational gifts,
very different in kind as these were, of himself and his brother--and,
above all, his genial and benignant presence, made everything go off
well, and the students went away with a deepened veneration for their
professor now that they had seen him in his own house.
During his first two years in Edinburgh he was busily engaged
in writing lectures and in adapting his existing stock to the
requirements of the new curriculum. Of these lectures, and of others
which he wrote in later years, it must be said that, while all of
them were the fruit of conscientious and strenuous toil, they were
of unequal merit, or at least of unequal effectiveness. Some of
them, particularly in his Apologetic courses, were brilliant and
stimulating. Whenever he had a great personality to deal with, such as
Origen, Grotius, or Pascal, or, in a quite different way, Voltaire,
he rose to the full height of his powers. His criticisms of Hume, of
Strauss, and of Renan, were also in their own way masterly. But a
course which he had on Biblical Theology seemed to be hampered by
a too rigid view of Inspiration, which did not allow him to lay
sufficient stress on the different types of doctrine corresponding
to the different individualities of the writers. And when, after the
death of Principal Harper, he took over the entire department of
Systematic Theology, his lectures on this, the "Queen of sciences,"
while full of learning and sometimes rising to grandeur, gave one on
the whole a sense of incompleteness, even of fragmentariness. This
impression was deepened by the oral examinations which he was in the
habit of holding every week on his lectures.
For these examinations he prepared most carefully, sitting up
sometimes till two o'clock in the morning collecting material and
verifying references which he deemed necessary to make them complete.
His aim in them was not only to test the students' attention and
progress, but to communicate information of a supplementary and
miscellaneous character which he had been unable to work into his
lectures. And so he would bring down to the class a tattered Father or
two, and would regale its members with long Greek quotations and with
a mass of details that were pure gold to him but were hid treasure
to them. His examination of individual students was lenient in the
extreme. It used to be said of him that if he asked a question to
which the correct answer was Yes, while the answer he got was No,
he would exert his ingenuity to show that in a certain subtle and
hitherto unsuspected sense the real answer _was_ No, and that Mr.
So-and-so deserved credit for having discovered this, and for having
boldly dared to _say_ No at the risk of being misunderstood. This, of
course, is caricature; but it nevertheless sufficiently indicates his
general attitude to his students.
It was the same with the written as with the oral examinations.
In these he assigned full marks to a large proportion of the papers
sent in. Once it was represented to him that this method of valuation
prevented his examination results from having any influence on the
adjudication of a prize that was given every year to the student who
had the highest aggregate of marks in all the classes. He admitted the
justice of this contention, and promised to make a change. When he
announced the results of his next examination it was found that he
had been as good as his word; but the change consisted in this: that
whereas formerly two-thirds of the class had received full marks,
now two-thirds of the class received ninety per cent.!
And yet the popular idea of his inability to distinguish between a
good student and a bad one was quite wrong. He was not so simple as he
seemed. All who have sat in his classroom remember times when a sudden
keen look from him showed that he knew quite well when liberties were
being attempted with him, and gave rise to the uncomfortable suspicion
that, as it was put, "he could see more things with his eyes shut than
most men could see with theirs wide open." The fact is, that all his
leniency with his students, and all his apparent ascription to them of
a high degree of diligence, scholarship, and mental grasp, had their
roots not in credulity but in charity--the charity which "believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." His very defects
came from an excess of charity, and one loved him all the better
because of them. Hence it came about that his students got far more
from contact with his personality than they got from his teaching.
It is not so much his lectures as his influence that they look back
to and that they feel is affecting them still.
When Dr. Cairns came to Edinburgh from Berwick, it was only to a
limited extent that he allowed himself to take part in public work
outside that which came to him as a minister and Professor of
Theology. There were, however, two public questions which interested
him deeply, and the solution of which he did what he could by speech
and influence to further. One of these was the question of Temperance.
During the first twenty years of his ministry he had not felt called
upon to take up any strong position on this question, although
personally he had always been one of the most abstemious of men. But
about the year 1864 he had, without taking any pledge or enrolling
himself on the books of any society, given up the use of alcohol. He
had done so largely as an experiment--to see whether his influence
would thereby be strengthened with those in his own congregation and
beyond it whom he wished to reclaim from intemperance.
When he became a professor he was invited to succeed Dr. Lindsay
as President of the Students' Total Abstinence Society, and, as no
absolute pledge was exacted from the members, he willingly agreed
to do so. From this time his influence was more and more definitely
enlisted on behalf of Total Abstinence, and in 1874 he took a further
step. In trying to save from intemperance a friend in Berwick who was
not a member of his own congregation, he urged him to join the Good
Templars, at that time the only available society of total abstainers
in the town. In order to strengthen his friend's hands, he agreed to
join along with him. This step happily proved to be successful as
regarded its original purpose, and Dr. Cairns remained a Good Templar
during the rest of his life.
While there were some things about the Order that did not appeal to
him, such as the ritual, the "regalia," and the various grades of
membership and of office, with their mysterious initials, he looked
upon these things as non-essentials, and was in hearty sympathy with
its general principles and work. But, although he was often urged to
do so, he never would accept office nor advance beyond the initiatory
stage of membership represented by the simple white "bib" of infancy.
On coming to Edinburgh, he looked about for a Lodge to connect himself
with, and ultimately chose one of the smallest and most obscure in the
city. The members consisted chiefly of men and women who had to work
so late that the hour of meeting could not be fixed earlier than 9
p.m. He was present at these meetings as often as he could, and only
lamented that he could not attend more frequently.
While fully recognising the right of others to come to a different
conclusion from his own, and while uniformly basing his total
abstinence on the ground of Christian expediency and not on that of
absolute Divine law, his view of it as a Christian duty grew clearer
every year. And he carried his principles out rigidly wherever he
went. He perplexed German waiters by his elaborate explanations as to
why he drank no beer; and once, as he came down the Rhine, he had a
characteristically sanguine vision of the time when the vineyards on
its banks would only be used for the production of raisins. At the
same time his interest in Temperance work, alike in its religious,
social, and political aspects, was always becoming keener. He was
frequently to be found on Temperance platforms, and was in constant
request for the preaching of Temperance sermons. Some of his speeches
and sermons on the question have been reprinted and widely read, and
one New Year's tract which he wrote has had a circulation of one
hundred and eighty thousand.
The other question in which he took a special interest was that of
Disestablishment. To those who adopted the "short and easy method"
of accounting for the Disestablishment movement in Scotland by
saying that it was all due to jealousy and spite on the part of
its promoters, his adhesion to that movement presented a serious
difficulty. For no one could accuse him of jealousy or spite. Hence
it was a favourite expedient to represent him as the tool of more
designing men--as one whose simplicity had been imposed upon, and who
had been thrust forward against his better judgment to do work in
which he had no heart. This theory is not only entirely groundless,
but entirely unnecessary; because the action which he took on this
question can readily be explained by a reference to convictions he had
held all his life, and to circumstances which seemed to him to call
for their assertion.
He had been a Voluntary ever since he had begun to think on such
questions. His father, in the days of his boyhood, had subscribed,
along with a neighbour, for the _Voluntary Church Magazine_, and the
subject had often been discussed in the cottage at Dunglass. It will
be remembered that during his first session at the University he was
an eager disputant with his classmates on the Voluntary side, and that
towards the close of his course, after a memorable debate in the
Diagnostic Society, he secured a victory for the policy of severing
the connection between Church and State. These views he had never
abandoned, and in a lecture on Disestablishment delivered in Edinburgh
in 1872 he re-stated them. While admitting, as the United Presbyterian
Synod had done in adopting the "Articles of Agreement," that the State
ought to frame its policy on Christian lines, he denied that it was
its duty or within its competence to establish and endow the Church.
This is, to quote his own words, "an overstraining of its province,--a
forgetfulness that its great work is civil and not spiritual,--and an
encroachment without necessity or call, and indeed, as I believe, in
the face of direct Divine arrangements, on the work of the Christian
Church."
These, then, being his views, what led him to seek to make them
operative by taking part in a Disestablishment campaign? Two things
especially. One of these was the activity at that time of a Broad
Church party within the Established Church. He maintained that this
was no mere domestic concern of that Church, and claimed the right as
a citizen to deal with it. In a national institution views were held
and taught of which he could not approve, and which he considered
compromised him as a member of the nation. He felt he must protest,
and he protested thus.
The other ground of his action was the conviction, which recent
events had very much strengthened, that the continued existence of
an Established Church was the great obstacle to Presbyterian Union
in Scotland. It is true that there was nothing in the nature of things
to prevent the Free and United Presbyterian Churches coming together
in presence of an Established Church. As a matter of fact, they have
done so since Dr. Cairns's death, though not without secessions,
collective and individual. But experience had shown that it was the
existence of an Established Church, towards which the Anti-Union
party had turned longing eyes, which was the determining factor in
the wrecking of the Union negotiations. Besides, Dr. Cairns looked
forward to a wider Union than one merely between the Free and United
Presbyterian Churches, and he was convinced that only on the basis of
Disestablishment could such a Union take place. To the argument that,
if the Church of Scotland were to be disestablished, its members would
be so embittered against those who had brought this about that they
would decline to unite with them, he was content to reply that that
might safely be left to the healing power of time. The petulant threat
of some, that in the event of Disestablishment they would abandon
Presbyterianism, he absolutely declined to notice.
The Disestablishment movement had been begun before Dr. Cairns left
Berwick, and he supported it with voice and pen till the close of his
life. He did so, it need not be said, without bitterness, endeavouring
to make it clear that his quarrel was with the adjective and not with
the substantive--with the "Established" and not with the "Church," and
under the strong conviction that he was engaged "in a great Christian
enterprise."