1838-1843

LOUDOUN—NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY

Just after his return from this tour, Macleod was presented, virtually at the instance of Chalmers, to the living of Loudoun, in Ayrshire. On March 5, 1838, he was ordained. From this time onward his private journal is largely the record of religious introspection. With the other earnest ministers of that period, he took up the feelings and the language of the old Puritans. One cannot forget Robertson, on his appointment to the charge of Ellon, pacing the room for hours in the silence of the night, ‘and, all unconscious of being overheard, praying for mercy to pardon his sin and grace to help him in his embassy for Christ.’ This is good to know, but a little of it goes a long way. When my brother has entered into his closet and shut the door, I do not wish to spy upon his spiritual straits, or listen at the keyhole to his penitential groans. That Macleod, on assuming his first ministerial charge, deeply felt his responsibility, is clear from his doings as well as from his diary. The young minister had never doubted the truth of the religion which, more by example than by precept, had come down to him from his fathers. And the doctrines of Christianity were to him not merely true, they were vividly realised in his heart and imagination. In criticism, at this time, his highest flight was to name certain antinomies of Calvinism as nuts to crack. On the other hand, in his frank acceptance of the goodly world, and in his passion for characters (which was such that he would go scouting for the ludicrous), he seemed to have more of the humanist than the saintly temperament. Nothing could have been more alien to him than the plaint of a latter-day poet—

‘Strange the world about me lies,
Never yet familiar grown,

Still disturbs me with surprise,
Haunts me like a face half-known.’

And he had met in Germany, somewhat to his astonishment, men who danced on a Sunday, and still showed Christian graces; nay, men who were reverent and pious, though they could not have subscribed to the Westminster Confession.

The parish of Loudoun is a broad green wooded valley, through which runs the Irvine Water, celebrated in song. At one end, on a pleasant slope, the towers of the castle shine out above the trees; at the other, several miles distant, lie the villages of Newmilns and Darvel, where the mass of the population resided. The farmers were a sturdy, pious race, as befitted the descendants of the Covenanters; but in the weavers Macleod encountered a new and formidable type of sinner. The eighteenth century had spoken to their fathers; on matters of religion their authority was Tom Paine; of politics, Robespierre qualified by Chartism. Thus the minister, whose business, as he conceived it, was to pilot souls to heaven, had no sooner taken the helm than he found himself among rocks and breakers. He was little of a politician, and no priest, which was fortunate, as a formal defence of the Church or of Toryism against such antagonists would have been the worst tactics; but, being a man, he got hold of many of the weavers in the end. “Poor souls!” he could say; “how I do love the working classes!” and that was a note he never lost. Besides the human, he approached them on the secular ground. On geology, which was then a fine new weapon to the adversaries of the Church, he gave a course of lectures which made a sensation, particularly among the hand-loom atheists, many of whom became communicants.

The moral condition of Newmilns was terrible in the young pastor’s eyes, and he would sometimes despair, thinking that all his efforts were in vain. There was in him some touch of the divine yearning, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ If he woke in the night-time, he communed with God. Far from flagging, the ambassador for Christ piled agencies on means, and, as it were, took the place by storm. The church was crowded to suffocation; he preached on week-days in various parts of the parish, instituted Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and meetings for young men; and, for the sake of the poorest of the poor, held services to which none were admitted who wore good clothes. In the course of a year he would visit several thousand families, and as in public he denounced evil-doers in general, in private he singled them out for rebuke and exhortation.

In his Loudoun ministry there is just perceptible an official smack, a note of externality; he has not yet entirely freed himself from the mechanical theory of salvation. For example, he was much taken up with the work of winning or, if need were, extorting confessions of repentance and faith from dying unbelievers. There was one with whom the zealous young ambassador strove hard, all to induce the invalid to speak. ‘Before I go have you nothing to say?’ The man lifted up his skeleton hand and panted out—’No, no, noth—nothing.’ At a later period Macleod would rather have sympathised with the poet, who wanted no priest—

‘—to canvass with official breath
The future and its viewless things,
That undiscovered mystery
Which one who feels death’s winnowing wings
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he.’

The manse of Loudoun is a little way out of Newmilns, in the direction of the castle, and overlooking the road; on one side, a pretty garden, and at the back the glebe, a beautiful brae. In that very house Robert Burns once spent a night. Coming down in the morning, he was asked whether he had slept well. ‘I have been praying all night,’ the poet answered; ‘if you go up to my room you will find my prayers on the table.’ He had been thinking of the sweet life of the household and all he might have been. But this tradition did not move Macleod; indeed, at that time he was unjust to the poet, as what cleric was not? Invited to take the chair at a Burns Festival in Newmilns, he replied (disloyal to Wordsworth for once) that he could not, dared not, as a Christian minister, commemorate such a man.

His life at Loudoun, notwithstanding his professional industry, was full of brightness and charm. Much of his leisure was passed among his flowers, or he went into the woods and sat listening to the birds. In the winter evenings, to his sister Jane, who kept house for him, he read aloud from the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and, a new writer, Dickens; and she in turn entertained him with German sonatas and Gaelic songs. At Loudoun Castle, then inhabited by the Dowager Marchioness of Hastings, widow of the celebrated Governor-General, he was not only a welcome guest, but a trusted friend. His conversational gifts might account for his acceptability at the tables of the great, but he was never the mere diner-out, still less the nice chaplain. In any company he would speak, when occasion offered, from the heart to the heart, and it was at first startling to see the laugh die out of the face of the big jolly parson, and hear sudden lessons or tales that shook the inmost soul, and drew the awkward tear. Lady Hastings gave him the key of a vault in Loudoun Kirk where lay the right hand of her dead husband, which had been sent from Malta; and, sure enough one morning, as the Marchioness lay dying, he was summoned to fetch the relic that it might be buried in her grave.

The ‘coffee-room fellows’ held reunions at Loudoun. Referring to one of these, Shairp says: ‘We wandered by the side of the Irvine Water, and under the woods, all about Loudoun Castle, and Norman was, as of old, the soul of the party. He recurred to his old Glasgow stories, or told us new ones derived from his brief experience of the Ayrshire people, in whom, and in their characters, he was already deeply interested. All day we spent out of doors; and as we lay, in that balmy weather, on the banks or under the shade of the newly-budding trees, converse more hearty it would be impossible to conceive.’

Through Shairp (who was now a student of Oxford) he was kept abreast of the Tractarian movement; not to his peace of mind, for he was protestant and presbyterian to the core. Once, while staying at Moreby, he had attended a magnificent confirmation ceremony in York Minster, but his raptures over the stained windows and ‘the great organ booming like thunder through the never-ending arches’ suddenly vanished in the recollection of a sacramental scene which he had witnessed in the Highlands—’no minster but the wide heaven, no organ but the roar of the eternal sea, the church with its lonely churchyard and primitive congregation.’ So far from having any leanings to High Churchism, he saw no harm in a layman administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Another sign is that, Highlander as he was, he had no sympathy with the Jacobites; he said that Charlie was never his darling, and spoke of the low cunning and tyrannical spirit of the Stuarts. The Anglo-Catholic movement he simply abhorred. ‘Well,’ he wrote to Shairp, ‘what think you of Puseyism now? You have read No. 90, of course,—you have read the article on Transubstantiation,—you have read it! Great heavens! is this 1841?’ Shairp, who wet his feet in the rising tide, piped in vain to his friend about the greatness of Newman. Macleod could not understand a beautiful soul who spent his mornings in idolatry, a sage of the nineteenth century for whom the only question was—Anglican Church or Roman?

Into what hole, Bezonian? speak or die.

Protestantism is more than a creed. Men may rail at the Scarlet Woman, and yet, in the matter of ecclesiastical claims, be little Beckets. In the non-intrusion controversy, such as it was in the end, Macleod’s attitude was partly determined by his dislike of sacerdotal pretensions. Since the law courts had declared the measures of the General Assembly illegal, the non-intrusionists intrusionists had set themselves up against the judges, and in the course of their defiance were justifying, by word and deed, Milton’s saying, that ‘new presbyter was just old priest writ large.’ The question was not now of patronage, but of the Headship of Christ, the crown-rights of the Redeemer; practically the old quarrel between priests and kings.

As to the necessity of checking the power of the patron there was not from the first any difference between the two sides. Everybody recognised that the people, having won political freedom, would have a voice in the appointment of ministers. To patronage, indeed, the Scots never consented, were never reconciled; they always looked upon it as a wrong, they could always say, ‘An enemy hath done this.’ Both Knox and Melville asserted the right of the people to elect their ministers, and the Kirk, as often as it had the chance, got rid of patronage. The evil seemed to be cast out for ever at the Revolution, but in 1712 it was surreptitiously restored. The Act of Queen Anne, which was nothing but a Jacobite intrigue, handing over the Kirk to the Pretender’s friends, was introduced behind the nation’s back, and passed in spite of the strenuous opposition of the General Assembly. For many years and in various ways the Kirk tried to get it repealed. In a single decade there were upwards of fifty disputed settlements before the courts, and about the middle of the century the dissenters numbered a hundred thousand. To make matters worse, the party which, under the name of Moderates, systematically championed the patrons, rose to absolute power in the Kirk. Before a presentee could be settled he had to receive the call, a document in his favour signed by the heads of families: this the Moderates treated as a mere form, and minimised it more and more till they got quit of it altogether—except the name. Ministers were inducted with the military at their back. At length, weary of the struggle, the people gave in, and the descendants of the Covenanters endured intrusion almost dumbly for twenty years, under the iron rule of Robertson. As Dr. Chalmers said in his grandiose way: ‘The best, the holiest feelings of our Scottish patriarchs, by lordly oppressors, sitting in state and judgment, were barbarously scorned.’

After the French Revolution the awakening of man’s spirit, extending from letters and politics to religion, led in Scotland to the rise of the Evangelical party. They had lofty notions of ecclesiastical authority, and manifested their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose holiness was qualified by originality, such as Macleod Campbell, whom they incontinently deposed. But, for all that, they were the best of the clergy, because they were in vital earnest with the highest things.

What was their policy on the question of intrusion? In some way it should prevent the patron from thrusting in a minister against the will of the congregation. The General Assembly of 1834, the first in which the Evangelicals outnumbered the Moderates, conferred upon the majority of heads of families (being communicants) the right of vetoing, without assigning reasons, the settlement of a presentee. Now it is conceivable that one might be eager for reform, and yet disapprove of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stop intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it would have led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees on trivial and absurd pretexts, rejection for rejection’s sake. Popular election entails complete responsibility, but when men have to take their ministers from a patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another without saying why, they will be apt to use their licence to make up for their slavery. This were hardly worth remarking but for the assumption, conveyed in many an oration, that the policy was as admirable as the principle which it embodied. Let the non-intrusionists have all the praise of meeting, in some sort, the just claim of the people.

The General Assembly, however, had gone beyond its powers. Both the House of Lords and the Court of Session pronounced the Veto Law to be ultra vires, the judges holding that the presbytery was bound to take on trials any presentee to whom there was no objection on the ground of morals, scholarship, or doctrine. Notwithstanding this, the General Assembly stuck to the veto. So there would be rejected presentees demanding, in accordance with the law, to be taken on trials, and presbyteries at their wits’ end, pulled one way by the General Assembly, and another way by the civil Court. The General Assembly ordered the presbytery of Strathbogie not to take on trials a certain presentee who had been vetoed. The presbytery obeyed. But the Court of Session declared the order of the General Assembly to be illegal. Thereupon the presbytery, by a majority of seven, admitted the presentee. For that the seven were deposed. And now came the event which was the cause of the Disruption. The minority in the General Assembly, failing to see how it could be rebellion to obey the law of the land, treated the deposition of these men as null and void. The question then was, which of the two sides was the Church of Scotland? Parliament, all the time, was trying to reconcile parties by changes in the law, but as it always insisted on making the presbytery the final judge of the fitness of presentees, the non-intrusionists would not hear of legislation.

It was not till near the end of the struggle that the minister of Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The thunder of the captains and the shouting had been long in his ears without stirring him to action. He was all in his vocation, the cure of souls,—the mystery of existence ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and death, or remembered his days upon the hills. ‘I wished,’ he said, ‘to keep out of this row, and to do my Master’s work and will in my dear, dear parish.’ Some clerics are listless in religion; but when a question of church politics is raised, alert as a horse at the sound of the trumpet. Macleod hated controversy, and said it was the worst way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he might have sung, ‘How happy could I be with neither!’ In him the opposing types were blended; he had all the humanism which marked the one,—the love of letters, the relish of things, the superiority to clerical prejudice,—with all the zeal of the other for the cause of the gospel. But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred ‘the cold gentlemanly Moderate’ to ‘the loud-speaking high professor.’ And the non-intrusionists were claiming to be the only true Christian ministers in the land, nay more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared that they were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes of the Moderate clergy, and preached, telling the people that now, for the first time, the gospel was in their ears. ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ they said, ‘will have left the Church when we go.’ In a pamphlet written by Macleod, ‘A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk,’ which had a large sale, Saunders observes: ‘I ken mony that are foremost eneuch in this steer that in my opinion hae little o’ the meekness and gentleness o’ Christ.’ He must have been thinking of the minister who said that ‘the devil was preparing a cradle in hell for the opposition.’ Everything in the popular cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ‘earthly, sensual, devilish’; vox populi, vox Dei, and no mistake. The struggle against the civil courts was ‘one of the most illustrious conflicts for the spirituality and liberty of the Church of Christ of which any record can be found either in modern or in ancient times.’ What Macleod could least endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper. They insisted on remaining in an Established Church, while flying in the face of the law by which it was established. The Headship of Christ was bound up with the resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an order of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh.

As for patronage, Macleod was probably willing that it should be abolished altogether, but he could not support the veto in defiance of the declared law of the Church. ‘I’m desperate keen for gude reform,’ says Saunders again, ‘and would like the folk to hae mair poo’er, but I would like to get it in a legal way.’ Macleod believed that the Establishment was necessary for the religious welfare of the country, and saw nothing that was worth the risk of its existence. Not till it became evident that the non-intrusionists were bent on destroying the Church did he join in the conflict. ‘It will be our bounden duty,’ one of the leaders had said, ‘to use every effort that if we be driven out, they shall be driven out too; it is our bounden duty to bear this testimony that the Church ought to be established on the principles which we are contending for, or that there should be no establishment in the land at all.’ When things like that were being said, Macleod, in alarm, plunged into the whole literature of the controversy. The position he reached was this, that when there was a dispute as to the privileges granted by the State to the Church, it was for the civil court to interpret the terms of the contract. He became one of the Forty, a set of Independents, whose chief distinction is that they promoted parliamentary legislation for the reform of patronage. While opposed to the revolutionary policy, they were not Moderates, for they countenanced some of the acts of the majority. They were as little for Erastus as for Hildebrand.

A non-intrusionist deputation came to Newmilns. Macleod allowed them to harangue in the church, but he took care to be present, and when they invited the auditors to sign certain resolutions, springing up, he asked the people to wait till they heard from their minister the other side of the question. ‘The evening came, and the church was crammed with all sects and parties. I do believe I never had a greater pressure on my soul than I had before this meeting. I did not so much possess the subject as the subject possessed me. Between anxiety to do right and a feeling of degradation that I should be looked upon by even one Christian brother as inimical to the Church of Scotland, not to speak of the Church of Christ, I was so overcome that during the singing of the psalm—

“Therefore I wish that peace may still
Within Thy walls remain”—

I wept like a very child. I spoke, however, for three and a half hours, and not a soul moved!... The result has been most gratifying. Of ten elders not one has left me. The people are nearly unanimous, or at all events so attached to me personally that they are about to present to me a gold watch and an address from all parties.’

About the same time (February 1843) circumstances compelled him to take action in the presbytery. Along with the Veto Law the Chapel Act had been passed, giving seats in the church courts to the ministers of non-territorial charges. The House of Lords had just declared that also to be illegal, when the Presbytery of Irvine met to elect commissioners to the General Assembly. The minister of Loudoun happened to be Moderator. Should he allow the chapel ministers to vote? There was more in his mind than the law; ‘it was the avowed intention,’ he says, ‘of the High Church party to get the majority in the Assembly by means of the Quoad Sacras ... and then, as the Assembly of the National Church, to dissolve the connection between Church and State, excommunicating those who might remain.’ Refusing the illegal votes, he set up a separate presbytery; and here was the first actual split in the Church.

Of all the members of the General Assembly who witnessed or took part in the procession from St. Andrew’s Church on May 18, 1843, there were none more sorrowful than the minister of Loudoun. But ere the day was over a little indignation came to his relief. ‘How my soul rises against those men who have left us to rectify their blundering, and then laugh at our inability to do so!’ Principal Tulloch has said that the act of secession would always be deemed heroic in the history of Scotland; but Norman Macleod, who, unlike the other, was an eye-witness and in the thick of events, wrote in his journal immediately after the Disruption: ‘The great movements, the grand results, will certainly be known, and everything has been done in the way most calculated to tell on posterity (for how many have been acting before its eyes!): but who in the next century will know or understand the ten thousand secret influences, the vanity and pride of some, the love of applause, the fear and terror, of others, and, above all, the seceding mania, the revolutionary mesmerism, which I have witnessed within these few days.’ For himself he felt how much easier it would have been to go than it was to stay. ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘did I have such a fortnight of care and anxiety. Never did men engage in a task with more oppression of spirit than we did, as we tried to preserve the Church for the benefit of our children’s children. The Assembly was called upon to perform a work full of difficulty, and to do such unpopular things as restoring the Strathbogie ministers, rescinding the Veto, etc. We were hissed by the mob in the galleries, looked coldly on by many Christians, ridiculed as enemies to the true Church, as lovers of ourselves, seeking the fleece; and yet what was nearest my own heart and that of my friends was the wish to preserve the Establishment for the well-being of Britain. While the “persecuted martyrs of the Covenant” met amid the huzzas and applauses of the multitude, with thousands of pounds daily pouring in upon them, and nothing to do but what was in the highest degree popular; nothing but self-denial, and a desire to sacrifice name and fame, and all but honour, to my country, could have kept me in the Assembly. There was one feature of the Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the fever of secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to the Free Church.’ In the course of one of his speeches in the rump Assembly he exclaimed: ‘We shall endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled, and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which we shall, I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the beautiful spectacle which was presented to us on Sabbath evening, in the dense crowd assembled here to ask the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me to distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing out, Nec tamen consumebatur. We shall try to bring our ship safe to harbour, and if we haul down the one flag, “Retract: no, never,” we shall hoist another, “Despair: no, never.” And if I live to come to this Assembly an old man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate our present position, in endeavouring through good report and bad report to preserve this great national institution as a blessing to them and to their children’s children.’

The Free Church was always in his eyes ‘just an outburst of presbyterian Puseyism,’ and undoubtedly its rise was marked by a clerical reign of terror. Mr. Skelton testifies: ‘The air of Edinburgh is generally bitter with Calvinism, and in 1843 it was particularly inclement. The Free Kirk, having just made a heroic sacrifice, were naturally rather out of temper. Cakes and ale, consequently, were quite at a discount. The re-enactment of the old sumptuary laws of the Puritans began to be talked of again. The national beverage was interdicted. Young professors could not be permitted to indulge in promiscuous dancing. The presbytery thundered hoarsely against the profanation of the Sabbath as practised on Leith Pier, or round Arthur’s Seat. The slightest sign of independent vitality, intellectual or religious, was sourly repressed by a party in which the secular intolerance of the democracy was curiously combined with the spiritual pretensions of the hierarchy.’ ‘A gloomy fanaticism,’ writes the father of Norman Macleod, ‘followed the breaking up of the Established Church, and perhaps in no part of the country did this bitterness exist more strongly than in the Western Islands. In Skye, especially, it led to dividing families, and separating man from man, and altogether engendered strife which I fear it will take years to calm down.’

Although too young, even if he had been fit, to be in the front of the battle, the minister of Loudoun was notable among the remnant; and with his repute, besides, as a pastor, it was no wonder that he was besieged with offers of livings. He refused the first charge of Cupar, Fife; the Tolbooth and St. John’s, Edinburgh; Campsie, Maybole, St. Ninian’s. He accepted Dalkeith. Then he learned how much his people at Loudoun were attached to him. Many whom he had thought rocks sent forth tears. At the church gate, after his farewell sermon, there was a mournful crowd; and as he walked home he was waylaid by watchers, who seized his hand, and invoked upon him the blessing of God.