1851-1860

THE BARONY PARISH—MACLEOD AS PASTOR—AS PREACHER—HIS SYMPATHY—POSITION IN THE CITY.

The minister of the Barony—henceforth for many years commonly called ‘young Norman’ to distinguish him from his father—was a shining exception to the prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, was going on prospering and to prosper,—her tabernacles set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the ‘bond’ Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a Church, when it was visibly tottering to its fall. Gradually the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasm went far beyond theirs; he was as much devoted as they were to the cause of foreign missions; in pulpit unction he surpassed them: if their voices quivered, his shook; if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with tears.

Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and contained, in 1851, a population of 87,000, for whom, besides attending to his own vast congregation, the minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating personality; to make Christians of the common people, whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had been his ‘one aim, one business, one desire,’ both in Loudoun and Dalkeith; and the Barony, as a sphere of ministerial service, presented no problem which his experience had not prepared him to encounter. The preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended him as the one man fitted for the post, and the congregation, to whom ‘young Norman’ had been known from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment.

The spirit of Macleod’s ministry is partly to be traced to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early master in the neighbouring parish of St. John’s must have been in his mind. These two pastors were equal in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisation of the masses, equal in their capacity for work. But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the people like a statesman, and had his principles and plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual, and thought most of a moral change. Of the social question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy. Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart; which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the tenderest of men. The minister of St. John’s, with all his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers, however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony.

Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park, Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration, with something even of romance, when he heard the first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. ‘People talk,’ he wrote, ‘of early morning in the country, with bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day—the type of a new era. I feel these are awake with me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on—to fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work, and fulfil my grand and glorious end.’ And he thought, with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability, many working men shunned the churches, and looked askance at ‘the lads in black.’ Ah! if they only knew, thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour. He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But how was he to reach the masses scattered through his enormous cure? In his hands the Barony congregation became what every muster of converts was in the days of the apostles,—a society for Christian work. Worship, meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacraments, is a mediÆval invention. Norman Macleod held that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good actions. Indeed, for Æsthetic and ceremonial (since there must be forms) he had too little care. Of the Barony Church a certain noble lord remarked, ‘I have seen one uglier’; and once Macleod had to admonish the congregation in these terms: ‘Scripture commands us to sing, not grunt; but if you are so constituted that it is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is best to be silent.’ But here were people who met to engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good advice. ‘A Christian congregation,’ he says, ‘is a body of Christians who are associated not merely to receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public worship, but also “to consider one another and to provoke to love and good works,” and as a society to do good to all as they have opportunity.... The society of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct organisations or congregations like an army acting through its different regiments, is the grand social system which Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing all that pertains to the well-being of the community.’

Having made himself personally acquainted with his congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, educational, and social needs of the parish should be met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary network. By means of meetings, for which given agents were responsible, the minister came in contact with his parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerous Sunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he furnished both pastors and congregations. In the first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually raised from the congregation, which was one of the poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-buildings for thousands of children; with evening classes for adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at their A B C. He started congregational savings banks, and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment-rooms attractive with books and amusements; in which things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer.

The best organisation would have been of little avail but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by his personal influence, which was at once paternal and commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church was crowded; and here was no organ, no stained glass, no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the emptiness of churches; and the foolishness of preaching is obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have no creed at all. There would be no outcry against preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that ‘old, old story’ which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth these eighteen hundred years. ‘There is a Father in Heaven who loves,’ so ran Norman Macleod’s confession of faith, ‘a Brother Saviour who died for us, a Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we will all meet at last.’ See him in the pulpit, a man of majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; intense in look and voice; as natural in his utterance as one conversing with friends; not an orator conscious of his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found themselves as it were in a different world, so changed was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself was in the pulpit—bearded, bronzed, and dilated to a giant’s girth. The sermon was on God’s love to man; it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out upon the streets, the face of things wore ‘the light that never was on sea or land,’ and at his heart there was a vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the evening service was to be conducted by the minister of the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, and here and there you might see some flagging of attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience bound as with a spell; his utterance waxed rapid and passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in building the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold. Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of Macleod’s that ‘it was all true and very moving’—the ne plus ultra of praise—and that he did not know ‘the man in the Church of England who could have preached such a sermon.’ ‘The greatest and most convincing preacher I ever heard,’ is the confession of Sir Arthur Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching was ‘the perfection of art without art,’ ‘he spoke as a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower order,’ his effectiveness was due to ‘truth and honesty, guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed in manly speech face to face.’ His power in the pulpit seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass into the church. It was no uncommon thing for gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce; and they must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had himself rigged out in ‘the cast-off working dress of a coach-builder—a dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.’ ‘I stood,’ he says, ‘waiting among the crowd of poor men and women that were shivering at the gate, biding the time. Many of these women were very old and very frail.... Poor souls! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and his sayings. I conversed with several working men who had attended all the series from the first, three or four years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotch who attended. He said, “All nations go and hear the Doctor.” ... “A’body likes the Doctor,” said another. One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said “he kent great lots o’ folk that’s been blessed by the Doctor, baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that wrought wi’ me, o’ the name o’ Boyd, and he came ae nicht out o’ curiosity, and he was convertit afore he raise from his seat, and he’s a staunch Protestant to this day, every bit o’ him, though his father and mother, and a’ his folks, are sair against him for’t.”’ None of the cushions or books were removed from the seats, and the witness says that the decorum was as good as at the regular service. ‘In reference to the mother and grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand stand for character, which made the poor man next to me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor’s remarks on the subject been delivered from a platform, they would have elicited thunders of applause.’ If one realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons, commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses. ‘Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to understand, the misery which his loss has created in the paternal home! He is bringing down the grey hairs of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him, and loved him ere he could know of the existence and unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest day or night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.’

Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats: of a horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat, he says, ‘I wish he could have known how much I pitied him’; and of the camel, ‘The expression of his soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek submission and patient endurance ever since travelling began in these deserts. The poor “djemel” bends his neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be redressed by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftesbury.’ In the scene of man’s life his spirit eagerly responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be, never recovering from the surprises of existence. So, with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both human and religious, he sometimes found himself in strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight, surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence with the working folk was that he felt no difference from their social position, but spoke to them on the ground of common humanity, without affected familiarity or priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience was that the lower and the upper classes were very much alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.[1] The preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ‘O sickness, pain, and death! what republican levellers are these of us all!’[2] There is a zeal for the people, a worship of humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory. The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of the suffering race. Macleod’s sympathy was for the individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man’s experience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner had excused himself to his wife as follows: ‘Dinna be ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief from the parish, and I didna like to beg; but I kent if I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow and orphans.’ Always, when Macleod told that story, he went into an ecstasy, shouting, ‘That man was a hero!’

Considering the moral and material plight of the masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At Dalkeith he had written A Plea for Temperance, in which, while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating the working classes from the charge of drunkenness. The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying grace!

For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general development of Christian life. He was not apt to quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like the mother of ‘wee Davie,’ in ‘acts out of Parliament,’ Yet he could exclaim, ‘O selfish pride! O society, thou tyrant!’ and when his foot was on his native heath he was a regular Radical.

The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting the lines—

‘From the dim shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas,

But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’

Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no indictment of the social structure; there was nothing for it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of the boarding-out system; but it was for those whom legal relief might not reach that his heart bled. ‘There is many a desolate cry of pain,’ he wrote, ‘smothered within the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon.’ To aid the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest objects that could engage the attention of good men;—one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, from New York to Elberfelt; but vain was his dream of building a bridge between east and west by charity,—the wary remorse and discount of the Vandals.

The working men of Glasgow more than once testified in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and gold they had none, they said, but they would retain for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, ‘hundreds,’ he wrote, ‘called to read the daily bulletin which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it was the same. Free Church people and people of all Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me; cab-drivers, ‘bus-drivers, working men in the streets, asked after her with much feeling.’ Many a time a surreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now summoned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His name was oftener heard in common talk than that of any other man, and was seldom more than ‘Norman.’ Stories about him were current in Glasgow. One day a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom he did not know. Thinking that they might be new adherents, he went to the house, which was up three flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill. After praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his congregation. ‘Oh no,’ said the wife, ‘we belang to the Barony; but, ye see, this is a catchin’ fivver, an’ it would never dae to risk Norman.’[4]

There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,—his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5] ‘As for sadness and gloom,’ he says somewhere, ‘in accepting all things from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see—— drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were never written, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters——?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?

‘It’s a queer trade our trade,’ a minister’s wife used to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. ‘Fine profession ours,’ remarked a gay licentiate, ‘if it were not for the preaching and the visiting.’ Some are no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, and vice versÂ: some avoid Church courts; others glory in them. Macleod not only attended to all departments of a minister’s work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it implied service to the Church or the community. Early in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the General Assembly, and that in two directions,—ecclesiastical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establishment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiastical barriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the repeal of the theological tests for university professors. But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen that his name rose in the religious world. He preached every year for the London Missionary Society, and when he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission Reports there was always a crowd.