"All for the church, and a little less for the State."--BELHAVEN.
I had taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There
was, I thought, a good deal of over-statement and exaggeration on both
sides. On the one hand, the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a
State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a
bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the
most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very
excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for
instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to
the death of Mr. Smith--in reality a valuable patrimony of the people
there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of
popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the parishioners would
have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr.
Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or
elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which
were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tangibility and solidity
about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings
pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the
over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favour.
But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the
endowment side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere
of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I
had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where
it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and
his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow.
Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of
the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some
retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I
forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed
in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south
of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters--most
of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntary principle. If the other
workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the
Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared
for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular
English belief, persons born at sea are held to belong to the parish of
Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into
which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both
sides; it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew
them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on
terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the
irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the
controversy, but a religious controversy it was not.
The position of my grandmother's family, including of course Uncles
James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the
Establishment. My grandmother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long
ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as
no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had
removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she
had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do--remained an
attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however,
married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald into the
ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry,
who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the
congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the
contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call
upon them every time he came to town; and my uncle James, in turn (Uncle
Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or
its neighbourhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of
intercourse kept up between the families, not without effect. Most of
the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books,
recommended by their cousin; and the religious magazine for which they
subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the
name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not
one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as
my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it; and there was,
in especial, one of the contributors whose papers they used to pick out
as of peculiar excellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They
bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of _Leumas_, as if the writer
had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to
whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his
epistles; but it was soon discovered that _Leumas_ was merely the proper
name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his
signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote
with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles
never knew. They had both passed away ere, in perusing the "Second
Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found myself introduced to worthy old
_Leumas_, also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father
of the writer of that brilliant work--the Rev. George Gilfillan of
Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my
uncles, and, through them, on the family: it kept up our respect for the
Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably
faulty institution. My uncles took an interest in missions; and the
Church had none: nay, its deliberate decision against them--that of
1796--remained still unreversed. It had had, besides, its forced
settlements in our immediate neighbourhood; and Moderatism, wise and
politic in its generation, had perpetrated them by the hands of some of
the better ministers of the district, who had learned to do what they
themselves believed to be very wicked things, when their Church bade
them--a sort of professional license which my uncles could not in the
least understand. In short, the Secession better pleased them, in the
main, than the Establishment, though to the Establishment they continued
to adhere, and failed to see on what Seceder principle their old friends
were becoming Voluntaries. On the breaking out of the controversy, I
remembered all this; and, when told by good men of the Established
Church that well-nigh all the vital religion of the country was on our
side, and that it had left the Voluntary Seceders, though the good men
themselves honestly believed what they said, I could not. Further, the
heads of a conversation which I had overheard in my cousin the Seceder
minister's house when I was a very young boy, and to which it could have
been little suspected that I was listening--for I was playing at the
time on the floor--had taken a strong hold of my memory, and often
returned upon me at this period. My cousin and some of his elders were
mourning--very sincerely, I cannot doubt--over the decay of religion
among them: they were falling far short, they said, of the attainments
of their fathers; there were no Donald Roys among them now; and yet they
felt it to be a satisfaction, though a sad one, that the little religion
which there was in the district seemed to be all among themselves. And
now here was there exactly the same sort of conviction, equally strong,
on the other side. But with all that liberally-expressed charity which
forms one of the distinctive features of the present time, and is in
reality one of its best things, there is still a vast amount of
appreciation of this partial kind. Friends are seen in the Christian
aspect; opponents in the polemic one; and it is too often forgotten that
the friends have a polemic aspect to their opponents, and the opponents
a Christian aspect to their friends. And not only in the present, but at
all former periods, the case seems to have been the same. I am sometimes
half disposed to think, that either the Prophet Elijah, or the seven
thousand honest men who had not bowed the knee to Baal, must have been
dissenters. Had the Prophet been entirely at one in his views with the
seven thousand, it is not easy to conceive how he could have been wholly
ignorant of their existence.
With all these latitudinarian convictions, however, I was thoroughly an
Establishment man. The revenues of the Scottish Church I regarded, as I
have said, as the patrimony of the Scottish people; and I looked forward
to a time when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which
the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served
only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end.
What I specially wanted, in short, was, not the confiscation of the
people's patrimony, but simply its restoration from the Moderates and
the lairds. And in the enactment of the Veto law I saw the process of
restoration fairly begun. I would have much preferred seeing a good
broad anti-patronage agitation raised on the part of the Church. As
shrewdly shown at the time by the late Dr. M'Crie, such a course would
have been at once wiser and safer. But for such an agitation even the
Church's better ministers were not in the least prepared. From 1712 to
1784--a period of seventy-two years--the General Assembly had yearly
raised its voice against the enactment of the patronage law of Queen
Anne, as an unconstitutional encroachment on those privileges of the
Church and those rights of the Scottish people which the Treaty of Union
had been framed to secure. But the half century which had passed, since
through the act of a Moderate majority the protest had been dropped,
had produced the natural effect. By much the greater part of even the
better ministers of the Church had been admitted into their offices
through the law of patronage; and, naturally grateful to the patrons who
had befriended them, they hesitated to make open war on the powers that
had been exerted in their own behalf. According to Solomon, the "gift"
had to a certain extent "destroyed the heart;" and so they were prepared
to take up merely a half-way position, which their predecessors, the old
popular divines, would have liked exceedingly ill. I could not avoid
seeing that, fixed in a sort of overtopped hollow, if I may so speak,
between the claims of patronage on the one hand, and the rights of the
people on the other, it was a most perilous position, singularly open to
misconception and misrepresentation on both sides; and as it virtually
stripped the patrons of half their power, and extended to the people
only half their rights, I was not a little afraid that the patrons might
be greatly more indignant than the people grateful, and that the Church
might, in consequence, find herself exposed to the wrath of very potent
enemies, and backed by the support of only lukewarm friends. But however
perilous and difficult as a post of occupation, it was, I could not
avoid believing, a position conscientiously taken up; nor could I doubt
that its grounds were strictly constitutional. The Church, in a case of
disputed settlement, might, I believed, have to forfeit the
temporalities if her decision differed from that of the law courts, but
only the temporalities connected with the case at issue; and these I
deemed worth risking in the popular behalf, seeing that they might be
regarded as already lost to the country in every case in which a parish
was assigned to a minister whom the parishioners refused to hear. It
rejoiced me, too, to see the revival of the old spirit in the Church;
and so I looked with an interest on the earlier stages of her struggle
with the law courts, greatly more intense than that with which any mere
political contest had ever inspired me. I saw with great anxiety
decision after decision go against her; first that of the Court of
Session in March 1838, and next that of the House of Lords in May 1839;
and then, with the original Auchterarder case of collision, I saw that
of Lethendy and Marnoch mixed up; and, as one entanglement succeeded
another, confusion becoming worse confounded. It was only when the
Church's hour of peril came that I learned to know how much I really
valued her, and how strong and numerous the associations were that bound
her to my affections. I had experienced at least the average amount of
interest in political measures whose tendency and principles I deemed
good in the main--such as the Reform Bill, the Catholic Emancipation
Act, and the Emancipation of the Negroes; but they had never cost me an
hour's sleep. Now, however, I felt more deeply; and for at least one
night, after reading the speech of Lord Brougham, and the decision of
the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case, I slept none.
In truth, the position of the Church at this time seemed critical in the
extreme. Offended by the usage which she had received at the hands of
the Whigs, in her claims for endowments to her new chapels, and startled
by their general treatment of the Irish Establishment, and the
suppression of the ten bishoprics, she had thrown her influence into the
Tory scale, and had done much to produce that reaction against the
Liberal party in Scotland which took place during the Ministry of Lord
Melbourne. In the representation of at least one county in which he was
all-potent--Ross-shire--she had succeeded in substituting a Tory for a
Whig; and there were few districts in the kingdom in which she had not
very considerably increased the votes on the Tory, or, as it was termed,
Conservative side. The people, however, though they might, and did,
become quite indifferent enough to the Whigs, could not follow her into
the Tory ranks. They stood aloof--very suspicious, not without reason,
of her new political friends--no admirers of the newspapers which she
patronized, and not in the least able to perceive the nature of the
interest which she had begun to take in supernumerary bishops and the
Irish Establishment. And now, when once more in a position worthy of her
old character, and when her Tory friends--converted at once into the
bitterest and most ungenerous of enemies--were turning upon her to rend
her, she had at once to encounter the hostility of the Whigs, and the
indifferency of the people. Further, with but one, or at most two
exceptions, all the newspapers which she had patronized declared against
her, and were throughout the struggle the bitterest and most abusive of
her opponents. The Voluntaries, too, joined with redoubled vehemence in
the cry raised to drown her voice, and misinterpret and misrepresent her
claims. The general current of opinion ran strongly against her. My
minister, warmly interested in the success of the Non-Intrusion
principle, has told me, that for many months past I was the only man in
his parish that seemed thoroughly to sympathize with him; and I have no
doubt that the late Dr. George Cook was perfectly correct and truthful
when he about this time remarked, in one of his public addresses, that
he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding
respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the
Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the Church Courts.
Could I do nothing for my Church in her hour of peril? There was, I
believed, no other institution in the country half so valuable, or in
which the people had so large a stake. The Church was of right theirs--a
patrimony won for them by the blood of their fathers, during the
struggles and sufferings of more than a hundred years; and now that her
better ministers were trying, at least partially, to rescue that
patrimony for them from the hands of an aristocracy who, as a body at
least, had no spiritual interest in the Church--belonging, as most of
its members did, to a different communion--they were in danger of being
put down, unbacked by the popular support which in such a cause they
deserved. Could I not do something to bring up the people to their
assistance? I tossed wakefully throughout a long night, in which I
formed my plan of taking up the purely popular side of the question; and
in the morning I sat down to state my views to the people, in the form
of a letter addressed to Lord Brougham. I devoted to my new employment
every moment not imperatively demanded by my duties in the bank office,
and, in about a week after, was able to despatch the manuscript of my
pamphlet to the respected manager of the Commercial Bank--Mr. Robert
Paul--a gentleman from whom I had received much kindness when in
Edinburgh, and who, in the great ecclesiastical struggle, took decided
part with the Church. Mr. Paul brought it to his minister, the Rev. Mr.
Candlish of St. George's (now Dr. Candlish), who, recognising its
popular character, urged its immediate publication; and the manuscript
was accordingly put into the hands of Mr. Johnstone, the well-known
Church bookseller. Dr. Candlish had been one of a party of ministers and
elders of the Evangelical majority who had met in Edinburgh shortly
before, to take measures for the establishment of a newspaper. All the
Edinburgh press, with the exception of one newspaper, had declared
against the ecclesiastical party; and even that one rather received
articles and paragraphs in their behalf through the friendship of the
proprietor, than was itself on their side. There had been a larger
infusion of Whiggism among the Edinburgh Churchmen than in any other
part of the kingdom. They had seen very much, in consequence, that the
line taken by the Conservative portion of their friends, in addressing
the people through the press, had not been an efficient one;--their
friends had set themselves to make the people both good Conservatives
and good Churchmen, and of course had never got over the first point,
and never would; and what they now proposed was, to establish a paper
that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, should be
as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchmanship. But there was a
preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the
ready-made editors of the kingdom, if I may so speak, had declared
against them; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in
originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal
recognition, in a few resolutions, of its desirableness and importance.
On reading my pamphlet in manuscript, however, Dr. Candlish at once
concluded that the desiderated want was to be supplied by its writer.
Here, he said, is the editor we have been looking for. Meanwhile, my
little work issued from the press, and was successful. It ran rapidly
through four editions of a thousand copies each--the number, as I
subsequently ascertained, of a popular non-intrusion pamphlet that would
fairly _sell_--and was read pretty extensively by men who were not
Non-Intrusionists. Among these there were several members of the
Ministry of the time, including the late Lord Melbourne, who at first
regarded it, as I have been informed, as the composition, under a
popular form and a _nom de guerre_, of some of the Non-Intrusion leaders
in Edinburgh; and by the late Mr. O'Connell, who had no such suspicions,
and who, though he lacked sympathy, as he said, with the ecclesiastical
views which it advocated, enjoyed what he termed its "racy English," and
the position in which it placed the Noble Lord to whom it was addressed.
It was favourably noticed, too, by Mr. Gladstone, in his elaborate work
on Church Principles; and was, in short, both in the extent of its
circulation, and the circles into which it found its way, a very
successful pamphlet.
So filled was my mind with our ecclesiastical controversy, that, while
yet unacquainted with the fate of my first _brochure_, I was busily
engaged with a second. A remarkable case of intrusion had occurred in
the district rather more than twenty years before; and after closing my
week's labours in the bank, I set out for the house of a friend in a
neighbouring parish on a Saturday evening, that I might attend the
deserted church on the following Sabbath, and glean from actual
observation the materials of a truthful description, which would, I
trusted, tell in the controversy. And as the case was one of those in
which truth proves stronger than fiction, what I had to describe was
really very curious; and my description received an extensive
circulation. I insert the passage entire, as properly a part of my
story.
"There were associations of a peculiarly high character connected
with this northern parish. For more than a thousand years it had
formed part of the patrimony of a truly noble family, celebrated by
Philip Doddridge for its great moral worth, and by Sir Walter Scott
for its high military genius; and through whose influence the light
of the Reformation had been introduced into this remote corner, at
a period when the neighbouring districts were enveloped in the
original darkness. In a later age it had been honoured by the fines
and proscriptions of Charles II.; and its minister--one of those
men of God whose names still live in the memory of the country, and
whose biography occupies no small space in the recorded history of
her 'worthies'--had rendered himself so obnoxious to the tyranny
and irreligion of the time, that he was ejected from his charge
more than a year before any of the other non-conforming clergymen
of the Church.[17] I approached the parish from the east. The day
was warm and pleasant; the scenery through which I passed, some of
the finest in Scotland. The mountains rose on the right, in huge
Titanic masses, that seemed to soften their purple and blue in the
clear sunshine, to the delicate tone of the deep sky beyond; and I
could see the yet unwasted snows of winter glittering, in little
detached masses, along their summits. The hills of the middle
region were feathered with wood; a forest of mingled oaks and
larches, which still blended the tender softness of spring with the
full foliage of summer, swept down to the path; the wide undulating
plain below was laid out into fields, mottled with cottages, and
waving with the yet unshot corn; and a noble arm of the sea winded
along the lower edge for nearly twenty miles, losing itself to the
west among blue hills and jutting headlands, and opening in the
east to the main ocean, through a magnificent gateway of rock. But
the little groups which I encountered at every turning of the path,
as they journeyed, with all the sober, well-marked decency of a
Scottish Sabbath morning, towards the church of a neighbouring
parish, interested me more than even the scenery. The clan which
inhabited this part of the country had borne a well-marked
character in Scottish story. Buchanan had described it as one of
the most fearless and warlike in the north. It served under the
Bruce at Bannockburn. It was the first to rise in arms to protect
Queen Mary, on her visit to Inverness, from the intended violence
of Huntly. It fought the battles of Protestantism in Germany, under
Gustavus Adolphus. It covered the retreat of the English at
Fontenoy; and presented an unbroken front to the enemy, after all
the other troops had quitted the field. And it was the descendants
of those very men who were now passing me on the road. The rugged,
robust form, half bone, half muscle--the springy firmness of the
tread--the grave, manly countenance--all gave indication that the
original characteristics survived in their full strength; and it
was a strength that inspired confidence, not fear. There were
grey-haired, patriarchal-looking men among the groups, whose very
air seemed impressed by a sense of the duties of the day; nor was
there aught that did not agree with the object of the journey, in
the appearance of even the youngest and least thoughtful.
"As I proceeded, I came up with a few people who were travelling in
a contrary direction. A Secession meeting-house has lately sprung
up in the parish, and these formed part of the congregation. A
path, nearly obscured by grass and weeds, leads from the main road
to the parish church. It was with difficulty I could trace it, and
there were none to direct me, for I was now walking alone. The
parish burying-ground, thickly sprinkled with graves and
tombstones, surrounds the church. It is a quiet, solitary spot, of
great beauty, lying beside the sea-shore; and as service had not
yet commenced, I whiled away half an hour in sauntering among the
stones, and deciphering the inscriptions. I could trace in the rude
monuments of this retired little spot, a brief but interesting
history of the district. The older tablets, grey and shaggy with
the mosses and lichens of three centuries, bear, in their uncouth
semblances of the unwieldy battle-axe and double-handed sword of
ancient warfare, the meet and appropriate symbols of the earlier
time. But the more modern testify to the introduction of a
humanizing influence. They speak of a life after death, in the
"holy texts" described by the poet; or certify, in a quiet humility
of style which almost vouches for their truth, that the sleepers
below were "honest men, of blameless character, and who feared
God." There is one tombstone, however, more remarkable than all the
others. It lies beside the church-door, and testifies, in an
antique inscription, that it covers the remains of the
"GREAT.MAN.OF.GOD.AND.FAITHFUL.MINISTER.OF JESUS.CHRIST.," who had
endured persecution for the truth in the dark days of Charles and
his brother. He had outlived the tyranny of the Stuarts; and,
though worn by years and sufferings, had returned to his parish on
the Revolution, to end his course as it had begun. He saw, ere his
death, the law of patronage abolished, and the popular right
virtually secured; and, fearing lest his people might be led to
abuse the important privilege conferred upon them, and calculating
aright on the abiding influence of his own character among them, he
gave charge on his deathbed to dig his grave in the threshold of
the church, that they might regard him as a sentinel placed at the
door, and that his tombstone might speak to them as they passed out
and in. The inscription, which, after the lapse of nearly a century
and a half, is still perfectly legible, concludes with the
following remarkable words:--"THIS.STONE.SHALL.BEAR.WITNESS.
AGAINST.THE.PARISHIONERS.OF.KILTEARN.IF.THEY.BRING.ANE.UNGODLY.
MINISTER.IN.HERE." Could the imagination of a poet have originated
a more striking conception in connexion with a church deserted by
all its better people, and whose minister fattens on his hire,
useless and contented?
"I entered the church, for the clergyman had just gone in. There
were from eight to ten persons scattered over the pews below, and
seven in the galleries above; and these, as there were no more
'_Peter Clarks_' or '_Michael Tods_'[18] in the parish, composed
the entire congregation. I wrapped myself up in my plaid, and sat
down; and the service went on in the usual course; but it sounded
in my ears like a miserable mockery. The precentor sung almost
alone; and ere the clergyman had reached the middle of his
discourse, which he read in an unimpassioned, monotonous tone,
nearly one-half his skeleton congregation had fallen asleep; and
the drowsy, listless expression of the others showed that, for
every good purpose, they might have been asleep too. And Sabbath
after Sabbath has this unfortunate man gone the same tiresome
round, and with exactly the same effects, for the last twenty-three
years;--at no time regarded by the better clergymen of the district
as really their brother;--on no occasion recognised by the parish
as virtually its minister;--with a dreary vacancy and a few
indifferent hearts inside his church, and the stone of the
Covenanter at the door. Against whom does the inscription testify?
for the people have escaped. Against the patron, the intruder, and
the law of Bolingbroke--the Dr. Robertsons of the last age, and the
Dr. Cooks of the present. It is well to learn from this hapless
parish the exact sense in which, in a different state of matters,
the Rev. Mr. Young would have been constituted minister of
Auchterarder. It is well, too, to learn, that there may be
vacancies in the Church where no blank appears in the Almanac."
On my return home from this journey, early on the following Monday, I
found a letter from Edinburgh awaiting me, requesting me to meet there
with the leading Non-Intrusionists. And so after describing, in the
given extract, the scene which I had just witnessed, and completing my
second pamphlet, I set out for Edinburgh, and saw for the first time
men with whose names I had been familiar during the course of the
Voluntary and Non-Intrusion controversies. And entering into their
plans, though with no little shrinking of heart, lest I should be found
unequal to the demands of a twice-a-week paper, that would have to
stand, in Ishmael's position, against almost the whole newspaper press
of the kingdom, I agreed to undertake the editorship of their projected
newspaper, the _Witness_. Save for the intense interest with which I
regarded the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I believed, by
the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have induced me to
take a step so fraught, as I thought at the time, with peril and
discomfort. For full twenty years I had never been engaged in a quarrel
on my own account: all my quarrels, either directly or indirectly, were
ecclesiastical ones;--I had fought for my minister, or for my brother
parishioners: and fain now would I have lived at peace with all men; but
the editorship of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a portion of
its duties, war with all the world. I held, besides--not aware how very
much the spur of necessity quickens production--that its twice-a-week
demands would fully occupy all my time, and that I would have to resign,
in consequence, my favourite pursuit--geology. I had once hoped,
too--though of late years the hope had been becoming faint--to leave
some little mark behind me in the literature of my country; but the last
remains of the expectation had now to be resigned. The newspaper editor
writes in sand when the flood is coming in. If he but succeed in
influencing opinion for the present, he must be content to be forgotten
in the future. But believing the cause to be a good one, I prepared for
a life of strife, toil, and comparative obscurity. In counting the cost,
I very considerably exaggerated it; but I trust I may say that, in all
honesty, and with no sinister aim, or prospect of worldly advantage, I
_did_ count it, and fairly undertook to make the full sacrifice which
the cause demanded.
It was arranged that our new paper should start with the new
twelvemonth (1840); and I meanwhile returned to Cromarty, to fulfil my
engagements with the bank till the close of its financial year, which in
the Commercial Bank offices takes place at the end of autumn. Shortly
after my return, Dr. Chalmers visited the place on the last of his
Church Extension journeys; and I heard, for the first time, that most
impressive of modern orators address a public meeting, and had a curious
illustration of the power which his "_deep mouth_" could communicate to
passages little suited, one might suppose, to call forth the vehemency
of his eloquence. In illustrating one of his points, he quoted from my
"Memoir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in description of a
kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming
from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigour and force. The
extraordinary impressiveness which he communicated to the passage served
to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be
represented by their written speeches. Admirable as the published
sermons and addresses of Dr. Chalmers are, they impart no adequate idea
of that wonderful power and impressiveness in which he excelled all
other British preachers.[19]
I had been introduced to the Doctor in Edinburgh a few weeks before;
but on this occasion I saw rather more of him. He examined with curious
interest my collection of geological specimens, which already contained
not a few valuable fossils that could be seen nowhere else; and I had
the pleasure of spending the greater part of a day in visiting in his
company, by boat, some of the more striking scenes of the Cromarty
Sutors. I had long looked up to Chalmers as, on the whole, the man of
largest mind which the Church of Scotland had ever produced;--not more
intense or practical than Knox, but broader of faculty; nor yet fitted
by nature or accomplishment to make himself a more enduring name in
literature than Robertson, but greatly nobler in sentiment, and of a
larger grasp of general intellect. With any of our other Scottish
ministers it might be invidious to compare him; seeing that some of the
ablest of them are, like Henderson, little more than mere historic
portraits drawn by their contemporaries, but whose true intellectual
measure cannot, from the lack of the necessary materials on which to
form a judgment, be now taken anew; and that many of the others employed
fine faculties in work, literary and ministerial, which, though
important in its consequences, was scarce less ephemeral in its
character than even the labours of the newspaper editor. The mind of
Chalmers was emphatically a many-sided one. Few men ever came into
friendly contact with him, who did not find in it, if they had really
anything good in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited
themselves; and I had been long struck by that union which his
intellect exhibited of a comprehensive philosophy with a true poetic
faculty, very exquisite in quality, though dissociated from what
Wordsworth terms the "accomplishment of verse." I had not a little
pleasure in contemplating him on this occasion as the _poet_ Chalmers.
The day was calm and clear; but there was a considerable swell rolling
in from the German Ocean, on which our little vessel rose and fell, and
which sent the surf high against the rocks. The sunshine played amid the
broken crags a-top, and amid the foliage of an overhanging wood; or
caught, half-way down, some projecting tuft of ivy; but the faces of the
steeper precipices were brown in the shade; and where the wave roared in
deep caves beneath, all was dark and chill. There were several members
of the party who attempted engaging the Doctor in conversation; but he
was in no conversational mood. It would seem as if the words addressed
to his ear failed at first to catch his attention, and that, with a
painful courtesy, he had to gather up their meaning from the remaining
echoes, and to reply to them doubtfully and monosyllabically, at the
least possible expense of mind. His face wore, meanwhile, an air of
dreamy enjoyment. He was busy, evidently, among the crags and bosky
hollows, and would have enjoyed himself more had he been alone. In the
middle of one noble precipice, that reared its tall pine-crested brow
more than a hundred yards overhead, there was a bush-covered shelf of
considerable size, but wholly inaccessible; for the rock dropped sheer
into it from above, and then sank perpendicularly from its outer edge to
the beach below; and the insulated shelf, in its green unapproachable
solitude, had evidently caught his eye. _It_ was the scene, I
said--taking the direction of his eye as the antecedent for the
_it_,--it was the scene, says tradition, of a sad tragedy during the
times of the persecution of Charles. A renegade chaplain, rather weak
than wicked, threw himself, in a state of wild despair, over the
precipice above; and his body, intercepted in its fall by that shelf,
lay unburied among the bushes for years after, until it had bleached
into a dry and whitened skeleton. Even as late as the last age, the
shelf continued to retain the name of the "Chaplain's Lair." I found
that my communication, chiming in with his train of cogitation at the
time, caught both his ear and mind; and his reply, though brief, was
expressive of the gratification which its snatch of incident had
conveyed. As our skiff sped on a few oar-lengths more, we disturbed a
flock of sea-gulls, that had been sporting in the sunshine over a shoal
of sillocks; and a few of them winged their way to a jutting crag that
rose immediately beside the shelf. I saw Chalmers' eye gleam as it
followed them. "Would you not like, Sir," he said, addressing himself to
my minister, who sat beside him--"Would you not like to be a sea-gull? I
think _I_ would. Sea-gulls are free of the three elements--earth, air,
and water. These birds were sailing but half a minute since without
boat, at once angling and dining, and now they are already rusticating
in the Chaplain's Lair. I think I could enjoy being a sea-gull." I saw
the Doctor once afterwards in a similar mood. When on a visit to him in
Burnt-island, in the following year, I marked, on approaching the shore
by boat, a solitary figure stationed on the sward-crested trap-rock
which juts into the sea immediately below the town; and after the time
spent in landing and walking round to the spot, there was the solitary
figure still, standing motionless as when first seen. It was
Chalmers--the same expression of dreamy enjoyment impressed on his
features as I had witnessed in the little skiff, and with his eyes
turned on the sea and the opposite land. It was a lovely morning. A
faint breeze had just begun to wrinkle in detached belts and patches the
mirror-like blackness of the previous calm, in which the broad Firth had
lain sleeping since day-break; and the sunlight danced on the new-raised
wavelets; while a thin long wreath of blue mist, which seemed coiling
its tail like a snake round the distant Inchkeith, was slowly raising
the folds of its dragon-like neck and head from off the Scottish
capital, dim in the distance, and unveiling fortalice, and tower, and
spire, and the noble curtain of blue hills behind. And there was
Chalmers, evidently enjoying the exquisiteness of the scene, as only by
the true poet scenery can be enjoyed. Those striking metaphors which so
abound in his writings, and which so often, without apparent effort, lay
the material world before the reader, show how thoroughly he must have
drunk in the beauties of nature; the images retained in his mind became,
like words to the ordinary man, the signs by which he thought, and, as
such, formed an important element in the power of his thinking. I have
seen his Astronomical Discourses disparagingly dealt with by a slim and
meagre critic, as if they had been but the chapters of a mere treatise
on astronomy--a thing which, of course, any ordinary man could
write--mayhap even the critic himself. The Astronomical Discourses, on
the other hand, no one could have written save Chalmers. Nominally a
series of sermons, they in reality represent, and in the present century
form perhaps the only worthy representatives of, that school of
philosophic poetry to which, in ancient literature, the work of
Lucretius belonged, and of which, in the literature of our own country,
the "Seasons" of Thomson, and Akenside's "Pleasures of the Imagination,"
furnish adequate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating
critic who would deal with the "Seasons" as if they formed merely the
journal of a naturalist, or by the poem of Akenside as if it were simply
a metaphysical treatise.
The autumn of this year brought me an unexpected but very welcome
visitor, in my old Marcus' Cave friend Finlay; and when I visited all my
former haunts, to take leave of them ere I quitted the place for the
scene of my future labours, I had him to accompany me. Though for many
years a planter in Jamaica, his affections were still warm, and his
literary tastes unchanged. He was a writer, as of old, of sweet simple
verses, and as sedulous a reader as ever; and, had time permitted, we
found we could have kindled fires together in the caves, as we had done
more than twenty years before, and have ranged the shores for shell-fish
and crabs. He had had, however, in passing through life, his full share
of its cares and sorrows. A young lady to whom he had been engaged in
early youth had perished at sea, and he had remained single for her
sake. He had to struggle, too, in his business relations, with the
embarrassments incident to a sinking colony; and though a West Indian
climate was beginning to tell on his constitution, his circumstances
though tolerably easy, were not such as to permit his permanent
residence in Scotland. He returned in the following year to Jamaica; and
I saw, some time after, in a Kingston paper, an intimation of his
election to the Colonial House of Representatives, and the outline of a
well-toned sensible address to his constituents, in which he urged that
the sole hope of the colony lay in the education and mental elevation of
its negro population to the standard of the people at home. I have been
informed that the latter part of his life was, like that of many of the
Jamaica planters in their altered circumstances, pretty much a struggle;
and his health at length breaking down, in a climate little favourable
to Europeans, he died about three years ago--with the exception of my
friend of the Doocot Cave, now Free Church minister of Nigg, the last of
my Marcus' Cave companions. Their remains lie scattered over half the
globe.
I closed my connexion with the bank at the termination of its financial
year; gave a few weeks very sedulously to geology, during which I was
fortunate enough to find specimens on which Agassiz has founded two of
his fossil species; got, at parting, an elegant breakfast-service of
plate from a kind and numerous circle of friends, of all shades of
politics and both sides of the Church; and was entertained at a public
dinner, at which I attempted a speech, that got on but indifferently,
though it looked quite well enough in my friend Mr. Carruthers' report,
and which was, I suppose, in some sort apologized for by the fiddlers,
who struck up at its close, "A man's a man for a' that." It was, I felt,
not the least gratifying part of the entertainment, that old Uncle Sandy
was present, and that his health was cordially drunk by the company in
the recognised character of my best and earliest friend. And then,
taking leave of my mother and uncle, of my respected minister, and my
honoured superior in the bank, Mr. Ross, I set out for Edinburgh, and in
a few days after was seated at the editorial desk--a point at which, for
the present, the story of my education must terminate. I wrote for my
paper during the first twelvemonth a series of geological chapters,
which were fortunate enough to attract the notice of the geologists of
the British Association, assembled that year at Glasgow, and which, in
the collected form, compose my little work on the Old Red Sandstone. The
paper itself rose rapidly in circulation, till it ultimately attained to
its place among what are known as our first-class Scottish newspapers;
and of its subscribers, perhaps a more considerable proportion of the
whole are men who have received a university education, than can be
reckoned by any other Scotch journal of the same number of readers. And
during the course of the first three years, my employers doubled my
salary. I am sensible, however, that these are but small achievements.
In looking back upon my youth, I see, methinks, a wild fruit tree, rich
in leaf and blossom; and it is mortifying enough to mark how very few of
the blossoms have set, and how diminutive and imperfectly formed the
fruit is into which even the productive few have been developed. A right
use of the opportunities of instruction afforded me in early youth would
have made me a scholar ere my twenty-fifth year, and have saved to me at
least ten of the best years of life--years which were spent in obscure
and humble occupations. But while my story must serve to show the evils
which result from truant carelessness in boyhood, and that what was
sport to the young lad may assume the form of serious misfortune to the
man, it may also serve to show, that much may be done by after diligence
to retrieve an early error of this kind--that life itself is a school,
and Nature always a fresh study--and that the man who keeps his eyes and
his mind open will always find fitting, though, it may be, hard
schoolmasters, to speed him on in his lifelong education.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Thomas Hog of Kiltearn. See "Scots Worthies" or the
cheap-publication volumes of the Free Church for 1846.
[18] Peter Clark and Michael Tod were the only individuals who, in a
population of three thousand souls, attached their signatures to the
_call_ of the obnoxious presentee, Mr. Young, in the famous Auchterarder
case.
[19] The following is the passage which was honoured on this occasion by
Chalmers, and which told, in his hands, with all the effect of the most
powerful acting:--"Saunders Macivor, the mate of the 'Elizabeth,' was a
grave and somewhat hard-favoured man, powerful in bone and muscle, even
after he had considerably turned his sixtieth year, and much respected
for his inflexible integrity and the depth of his religious feelings.
Both the mate and his devout wife were especial favourites with Mr.
Porteous of Kilmuir--a minister of the same class as the Pedens,
Renwicks, and Cargils of a former age; and on one occasion when the
sacrament was dispensed in his parish, and Saunders was absent on one of
his Continental voyages, Mrs. Macivor was an inmate of the manse. A
tremendous storm burst out in the night-time, and the poor woman lay
awake, listening in utter terror to the fearful roarings of the wind, as
it howled in the chimneys, and shook the casements and the doors. At
length, when she could lie still no longer, she arose, and crept along
the passage to the door of the minister's chamber. 'O, Mr. Porteous,'
she said, 'Mr. Porteous, do ye no hear that?--and poor Saunders on his
way back frae Holland! O, rise, rise, and ask the strong help o' your
Master!' The minister accordingly rose, and entered his closet. The
'Elizabeth' at this critical moment was driving onwards through spray
and darkness, along the northern shores of the Moray Firth. The fearful
skerries of Shandwick, where so many gallant vessels have perished, were
close at hand; and the increasing roll of the sea showed the gradual
shallowing of the water Macivor and his old townsman, Robert Hossack,
stood together at the binnacle. An immense wave came rolling behind, and
they had but barely time to clutch to the nearest hold, when it broke
over them half-mast high, sweeping spars, bulwarks, cordage, all before
it, in its course. It passed, but the vessel rose not. Her deck remained
buried in a sheet of foam, and she seemed settling down by the head.
There was a frightful pause. First, however, the bowsprit and the butts
of the windlass began to emerge--next the forecastle--the vessel seemed
as if shaking herself from the load; and then the whole deck appeared,
as she went tilting over the next wave. 'There are still more mercies in
store for us,' said Macivor, addressing his companion: 'she floats
still' 'O, Saunders, Saunders!' exclaimed Robert, 'there was surely some
God's soul at work for us, or she would never have _cowed_ you.'"
_Edinburgh: Printed by M'Farlane & Erskine._
End of Project Gutenberg's My Schools and Schoolmasters, by Hugh Miller