It was the religion of Scotland that first developed the intellect of the country. Nor would it be at all difficult to show how. It is sufficiently easy to conceive the process through which earnest feeling concentrated on the great concerns of human destiny leads to earnest thinking, and how thinking propagates itself in its abstract character as such, even after the moving power which had first set its wheels in motion has ceased to operate. The Reformation was mainly a religious movement, but it was pregnant with philosophy and the arts. The grand doctrine of justification by faith, for which Luther and the other reformers contended, was wonderfully linked, by the God from whom it emanated, with all the great discoveries of modern science, and not a few of the proudest triumphs of literature. It drew along with it in the train of events, as if by a golden chain, the philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the poesy of Milton and Shakespeare. But though the general truth of the remark has been acknowledged, the connection which it intimates––a connection clearly referable to the will of that adorable Being who has made ‘godliness profitable for all things’––has been too much lost sight of. Religious belief, transmuted in its reflex influences into mere intellectual activity, has too often assumed another nature and name, and forgotten or disowned its origin; and whatever is suited to remind us of the certainty of the 124 connection, or to illustrate the mode of its operations, cannot be deemed other than important. From a consideration of this character, we have been much pleased with a little work just published, which, taking up a single family in the humblest rank, shows, without any apparent intention of the kind on the part of the writer, how the Christianity of the country has operated on the popular intellect; and we think we can scarce do better than introduce it to the acquaintance of our readers. Most of them have perhaps seen a memoir of one Annie M’Donald, published in Edinburgh some eight or ten years ago. It is a humble production, given chiefly, as the title-page intimates, in Annie’s own words; and Annie ranked among the humblest of our people. She had never seen a single day in school. When best and most favourably circumstanced, she was the wife of a farm-servant,––no very exalted station surely; but still a lowlier station awaited her, and she passed more than half a century in widowhood. One of her daughters became the wife of a poor labourer, her two grandchildren were labourers also. It is not easy to imagine a humbler lot, without crossing the line beyond which independence cannot be achieved; and yet Annie was a noble-hearted matron, one of the true aristocracy of the country. Her long life was a protracted warfare––a scene of privation, sorrow, and sore trial; but she struggled bravely through, ever trusting in God, dependent on Him, and Him only; and if the dignity of human nature consist in integrity the most inflexible, energy the most untiring, strong sound thinking, deep devotional feeling, and a high-toned yet chastened spirit of independence, then was there more true dignity to be found in the humble cottage of Annie M’Donald, than in half the proud mansions of the country. Many of our readers must be acquainted, as we have said, with her character, and some of the outlines of her story. Most of them are acquainted, too, with the character of another very 125 remarkable person, John Bethune, the Fifeshire Forester,––a man whose name, in all probability, they have never associated with Annie M’Donald. He belongs to quite a different class of persons. The venerable matron takes her place among those cultivators of the moral nature who live in close converse with their God, and on whom are re-stamped, if we may so speak, the lineaments of the divine image obliterated at the fall. The poet, too early lost, ranks, on the other hand, among those hardy cultivators of the intellectual nature who, among all the difficulties incident to imperfect education, and a life of hardship and labour, struggle into notice through the force of an innate vigour, and impress the stamp of their mind on the literature of their country. Much of the interest of the newly published memoir before us arises from the connection which it establishes between the matron and the poet. It purports to be ‘A Sketch of the Life of Annie M’Donald, by her Grandson, the late John Bethune.’ And scarce any one can peruse it without marking the powerful influence which the high religious character of the grandmother exerted on the intellectual character of her descendant. The nobility of the humble family from which he sprung was derived evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustaining ‘stalk of carle hemp’ which bore it up and kept it from grovelling on the depressed level of its condition. How very interesting a subject of thought and inquiry! A little Highland girl, when tending cattle in the fields nearly a century ago, was led, through divine grace, to ‘apprehend the mercy of God in Christ,’ and to close with His free offers of salvation; and in the third generation we can see the effects of the transaction, not only in the blameless life and the pure sentiments of a true though humble poet, but in, also, the manly vigour of his thinking, and the high degree of culture which he was enabled to bestow on his intellectual faculties. 126

The story of Annie M’Donald is such an one as a poet of Wordsworth’s cast would delight to tell. She was born in a remote and thinly inhabited district of the Highlands, and lost her father, a Highland crofter, while yet an infant. She was his youngest child, but the other members of the family were all very young and helpless; and her poor mother, a woman still in the prime of life, had to wander with them into the low country, friendless and penniless, in quest of employment. And employment after a weary pilgrimage she at length succeeded in procuring from a hospitable farmer in the parish of Kilmany, in Fifeshire. An unoccupied hovel furnished her with a home; and here, with hard labour, she reared her children, till they were fitted to leave her one by one, and do something for themselves, chiefly in the way of herding cattle. Annie grew up to be employed like the rest; and when a little herd-girl in the fields, ‘she frequently fell into strains of serious meditation,’ says her biographer, ‘on the works of God, and on her own standing before Him.’ Let scepticism assert what it may, such is the nature of man. God has written on every human heart the great truth of man’s responsibility; and the simple, ignorant herd-girl could read it there, amid the solitude of the fields. But the inscription seemed fraught with terror: she was perplexed by alternate doubts and fears, and troubled by wildly vivid imaginings during the day, and by frightful dreams by night. Her mother had been unable to send her to school, but she got occasional lessons in the evenings from a fellow-servant; and through the desultory assistance obtained in this way, backed by her solitary efforts at self-instruction, she learned to read. She must have deemed that an important day on which she found she could at length converse with books; and the books with which she most loved to discourse were such as related to the spiritual state. She pored over the Shorter Catechism, and acquainted herself with her Bible. 127 But for years together, at this period, she suffered much distress of mind. Her imagination possessed a wild activity, and the scenes and shapes which it was continually calling up before her were all of horror and dismay––the place of the lost, the appalling forms with which fancy invests the fallen spirits, the terrors of the last day, and the dread throne of judgment. But a time of peace and comfort came; and she was enabled to lay hold on God in faith and hope as her God, through the all-sufficient blood of the atonement. And this hold she never after relinquished.

There was no pause in her humble toils. From her early occupations in the fields, she passed in riper youth to the labours of the farm-house; and at the age of twenty-five experienced yet another change, in becoming the wife of a farm-servant, a quiet man of solid character, and whose religious views and feelings coincided with her own. Her humble home was a solitary hut on the uplands, far from even her nearest neighbours; but it was her home, and she was happy. With the consent of her husband, she took her aged mother under her care, and succeeded in repaying more than the obligations incurred in infancy; for her instructions, through the blessing of God, were rendered apparently the means of the old woman’s conversion. There were sorrows that came to her even at the happiest, but they were mingled with comfort. She lost one of her children by small-pox at a very early age; and yet, very early as the age was, evidence was not wanting in its death that the Psalmist spoke with full meaning when he said that God can perfect praise out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But there was a deeper grief awaiting her. After a happy union of twelve years, her husband was seized in the night in their lonely shieling by a mortal distemper, at a time when only herself and her young children were present, 128 and ere assistance could be procured he expired. There is something extremely touching in the details of this event, as given by the poet, her grandson. They strongly show how real an evil poverty is, in even the most favourable circumstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper ceased to envy the “‘peasant’s nest” when he thought how its solitude made scant the means of life.’ We would almost covet the hut of Annie M’Donald as described by her grandson. ‘It appeared,’ he says, ‘as if separated and raised above the world by the cultureless and elevated solitude on which it stood. Around it on every side were grey rocks, peering out from among tufted grass, heath furze, and many-coloured mosses; forming what had been, till more recently––when the whole was converted into a plantation––a rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to more than half the horizon, the eye might stretch away to the distant mountains, or repose on the intervening valleys; and from the highest part of the hill, a little to the eastward, the dark blue of the German Ocean was clearly visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look gay––when the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening its tints to harmonize with the deep blue of the sky––when the hum of the bee is heard amid the heath, and the lark high overhead. But it must have been a gloomy and miserable solitude on that night when the husband of Annie lay tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour near to counsel or assist, her weeping children around her, and with neither lamp nor candle in the cottage. It was only by the ‘light of a burning coal taken from the fire, and exchanged for another as the flame waxed faint, that she was enabled to watch the progress of the fatal malady, and to tell at what time death set his unalterable seal on the pallid features of her husband.’

Long years of incessant labour followed; her children 129 were young and helpless, and her aged mother still with her. She removed to another cottage, where she rented an acre or two of land, that enabled her to keep a cow, and gave her opportunity, as the place was situated beside a considerable stream, of earning a small income as a bleacher of home-made linen. The day, and not unfrequently the night, was spent in toil; but she was strengthened to endure, and so her children were bred up in hardy independence. ‘During the weeks of harvest,’ says her biographer, ‘she was engaged as a reaper by the farmer from whom she rented her little tenement; and when her day’s work was done, while her fellow-labourers retired to rest, she employed herself in reaping her own crops, or providing grass for the cow, and often continued her toil by the light of the harvest moon till it was almost midnight. After a number of years thus spent, the expiration of the farmer’s lease occasioned her removal. Her family were now grown up; she could afford, in consequence, to have recourse to means of subsistence which, if more scanty, were less laborious than those which she had plied so long; and so, removing to a neighbouring village, she earned a livelihood for herself and her infirm mother by spinning carpet worsted at twopence a-day, the common wages for a woman at that period.’ ‘The cottage which she now occupied,’ we again quote, ‘happened to be one of a number which the Countess of Leven charitably kept for the accommodation of poor people who were unable to pay a rent. She, however, considered that she had no right to reckon herself among this class, so long as it should please God to afford her strength to provide for her own necessities; and therefore she deemed it unjustifiable to deprive the truly indigent of what had been intended exclusively for them. Influenced by these motives, she removed at the next term to an adjacent hamlet, and here her aged mother died.’ We need not minutely follow her after-course: it bore but one 130 complexion to the end. She taught a school for many years, and was of signal use to not a few of her pupils. At an earlier period she experienced a desire to be able to write. There was a friend at a distance whom she wished to comfort, by suggesting to her those topics of consolation which she herself had found of such solid use; and the wish had suggested the idea. And so she did learn to write. She took up a pen, and tried to imitate the letters in her Bible; an acquaintance subsequently furnished her with a copy of the alphabet commonly used in writing; and such was all the instruction she ever received in an art to which in after life she devoted a considerable portion of her time, and in the exercise of which she derived no small enjoyment. In extreme old age she was rendered unable by deafness properly to attend to her school, and so, with her characteristic conscientiousness, she threw it up; but bodily strength was spared to her in a remarkable degree, and her last years were not wasted in idleness. ‘Her spinning-wheel was again eagerly resorted to; even outdoor labour, when it could be obtained, was sometimes adopted.’ And the editor of the memoir before us––Alexander Bethune, the brother and biographer of John––relates that he recollects seeing her engaged in reaping, on one occasion, when in her eighty-second year; and that on the same field her favourite nephew the poet, at that time a boy of ten, was also essaying the labours of the harvest. In one of the simple but touching epistles which we owe to her singularly acquired accomplishment of writing––a letter to one of her daughters––we find her thus expressing herself:––

‘We finished our harvest last Monday, and here again I have cause for thankfulness. I would desire to be doubly thankful to God for enabling my old and withered arms to use the sickle almost as well as they were wont to do when I was young, and for the favourable weather and abundant crop which in His mercy He has bestowed on us. But, 131 my dear child, there is in very deed a more important harvest before us. Oh! may God, for Christ’s sake, ripen us by the sunshine of His Spirit for the sickle of death, and stand by us in that trying hour, that we may be cut down as a shock of corn which is fully ripe.’

Annie survived twelve years longer; for her life was prolonged through three full generations. ‘In the intervals of domestic duty, her book and her pen were her constant companions.’ ‘The process of committing her thoughts to paper was rendered tedious, latterly, by the weakness and tremor of her hand; and her mind not unfrequently outran her pen, leaving blanks in her composition, which she did not always detect so as to enable her to fill them up. And this circumstance sometimes rendered her meaning a little obscure. But with all these deficiencies, her letters were generally appreciated by those to whom they were addressed. Her conversation, too, was much sought after by serious individuals in all ranks in society; and occasionally it was pleasing to see the promiscuous visitors who met in her lowly cottage laying aside for a time the fastidious distinctions of birth and station, and humbly uniting in the exercise of Christian love.’ At length she could no longer leave her bed: ‘her hearing was so much impaired, that it was with the greatest difficulty she could be made to understand what was said to her; and those friends who came to visit her were frequently requested to sit down by her bedside, where she might see their faces, though she could no longer enjoy their conversation. After raising herself to a convenient position, she generally addressed them upon the importance of preparing for another world while health and strength remained; and tried to direct their attention to the merits and sufferings of the Saviour as the only sure ground of hope upon which sinners could rest their salvation in the hour of trial.’ As for her own departure, she ‘had a thousand reasons,’ she said, ‘for 132 wishing to be gone; but there was one reason which overbalanced them all––God’s time had not yet arrived.’ But at length it did arrive. ‘Lay me down,’ she said, for the irritability of her nervous system had rendered frequent change of posture necessary, and her friends had just been indulging her,––‘Lay me down; let me sleep my last sleep in Jesus.’ And these were her last words. Her grandson John seems to have cherished, when a mere boy, years before she died, the design of writing her story; and the whole tone of his memoir (apparently one of his earlier prose compositions) shows how thorough was the respect which he entertained for her memory. She forms the subject, too, of a copy of verses evidently of later production, and at least equal to any he ever wrote, in which he affectingly tells us how, when sadness and disease pressed upon the springs of life, and he lingered in suspense and disappointment, the hopes which she had so long cherished––

‘The glorious hopes which flattered not––
Dawned on him by degrees.’