1860-1866

TRAVELS—BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS

No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; but the best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this in Good Words, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’

His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’

In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher of Good Words, Alexander Strahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has no trace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayeeb, tayeeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,—there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the Dead Sea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.

In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of Norman Macleod, ‘as large as life, and bluff and sunburnt from a tour in Syria.’ To this meeting, at which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesiastical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part certain events which make 1865 the most memorable year in the history of the Church since the Disruption.

By this time it was evident that the Secession had in a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams had taken off their coats. The ‘bond’ Establishment was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of Scotland was risen again! For ten years its destiny had hung in the scales; but in the middle of the fifties, the most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester’s, Edinburgh, was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod and John Caird had convinced the astonished people that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service,—the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generation of parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not in doctrine, liberal,—a man singularly forgotten. He took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, only where the master had looked to the State the pupil was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he had raised more than half a million of money, with which about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates (although it was a Moderate who founded the India Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church could now bear the test of interest in dark continents was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the Highlands the word went,—’There’s life in the Auld Kirk yet.’

Religious activity was one thing; but there was a movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived religion at some expense to freedom and the rights of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were to Macaulay ‘a sullen priesthood,’ and Carlyle talked of ‘the Free Kirk and other rubbish.’ Nor were the leaders of the Establishment more the children of light; they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls were putting in bricks; but when intellect and the progressive spirit went into the business, there began developments that were not in the bargain. The modern note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renaissance is due. In the Ten Years’ Conflict this warrior had taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight years he made a great figure, he might any day have said in the language of the hymn, ‘I’m but a stranger here.’ A century before he would have been at home with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he would give, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of impugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the opposition; but nothing of the kind ever came from the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, and would not pretend to be; rather he seemed to take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the cloth. Of missionaries he said: ‘They fancy there is no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that they have no faculty to find it even there.’ For some reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have preferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) a few big prizes. He spoke against ‘fanaticism’ in the approved tone of the literary Whigs; and when he points out ‘the intellectual errors’ of the Covenanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In short, he was a superior person, meeting his opponents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert Lee was admirable—always just to the intellect, a hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that there was more wrong with the Church than pious works could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as inviting disputes; he objected to the Confession of Faith because, by the advance of thought and knowledge during two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated; he objected to the church services, they were so rude and bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Greyfriars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our forefathers, it is true, wanted no such forms; a moor, a hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral estate summed up in the word Scotch, a significant word in the world these three centuries, is the monument of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesiastical storm. That many were favourable to them was indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered ‘a terrible onslaught on effectual calling.’ But this was a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the whole affair. ‘I don’t wish to be thought a terrorist. I don’t pretend to be prophetic; but it is most evident to me that the work that has been begun and carried on so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister influence of the great enemy of the Church—that enemy who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion—I mean Satan himself.’ Owing to an illness that befell Lee the case was suspended; he died, and it was never renewed. The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are tragic figures both; but to read how Robert Lee was harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would not pray extempore, is like a bad novel—no dignity in the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All which he contended for he won. If an Englishman may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be supposed that in this reformation there was any aping of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christendom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, dubbing them ‘poor, silly, gullible mortals.’ And Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee’s party, said explicitly, ‘There never was a greater delusion than to imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more cultivated form of worship has anything to do with Episcopacy.’

Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, though he called them improvements; but in all such matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general principle, he held that the Church should be moulded to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate of 1865 he said: ‘It is on the broad ground of our calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as a national Church that I would desire to entertain with kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.’ The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far greater evil than its decisions. ‘There is but very little freedom,’ he sighs.

Before the year was out, striking his own blow for liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, and even within living memory, the best evidence that we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: ‘Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, are accustomed to wander in the fields.’ The presbytery of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in which the sanctity of the Lord’s day was based on the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the views which the minister of the Barony had for years been putting before his congregation. He read the pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk about the continued obligation of a commandment which no Christian kept? But the Judaical spirit was preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came; he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till he came to the bone. Further he would not go; to saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got parks for working men—men who rose at five in the morning, drudged during the day, and came home weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the Lord, ‘Kennel up into your wretched abodes!’ We must not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let children amuse themselves in any way,—all because of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no man who went in a train on Sunday could have in him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching morality was corrupted! Some would go for a walk, believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians had changed the day named in the commandment, whereas the moral law could not be altered even by God. What had we to do with a covenant made with Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and the future prospects of the Jewish nation? The Mosaic economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, or make right and wrong change places? ‘I should be ashamed not to declare before the world that one intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never produce.’ To go to the Jewish law for a rule of conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly moral significance, if it was not contained in the law of life which was in Christ.

The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of his argument, is powerful in its way, but it fails to show that the Lord’s day is a scriptural institution; the question as to what is lawful or unlawful being left to ‘the common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of Christians.’

There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. Macleod awoke one morning and found himself infamous. Anathemas were hurled from almost every pulpit. Every newspaper and many magazines took up the question. Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. There were innumerable squibs,—the cleverest in prose The Trial of Dr. Norman Macleod for the Murder of Moses’ Law, by David Macrae, in verse the lines by Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has brought to light, beginning—

Have you heard of valiant Norman,
Norman of the ample vest—

How he fought the Ten Commandments
In the Synod of the West?

Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’ he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With the common folk it was probably the word Decalogue that did all the mischief. What it was they did not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer—his old friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow—he wrote—

My dear Erskine,—Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all a sell together! We are sold to Donkeys, and for them we write, and so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat! Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or that I am a devil—like yourself.

Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic) called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language, the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’ This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests on no authority of Scripture at all, but the said observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered probable that the valiant Norman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the Church.

This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. In the General Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that the Confession was ‘the truth of the living God,’ but Tulloch had said, ‘With the spirit of the seventeenth century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.’ A few months later he published an address on The Study of the Confession of Faith, which is a remarkable piece, every word weighed, and every word in its place. He begins by brushing aside, as utterly worthless, all such knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the letter, asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession ‘must be studied both philosophically and historically.’ The manifesto of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities which that party had gathered in the course of a struggle for ascendancy, insomuch that a historical student, well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell, by the internal evidence alone, the decade in which the document was put together, and the men who had the chief hand in the work. Further, many of the ideas used in the Confession to explain the mysteries of Christianity were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain theological school, which was peculiarly under the influences and the prejudices of the period. To claim infallibility for such an instrument is the worst kind of Popery—’that Popery which degrades the Christian reason while it fails to nourish the Christian imagination.’

Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse—

‘Brother, up to the breach
For Christ’s freedom and truth;
Let us act as we teach,

With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth.

Heed not their cannon-balls,
Ask not who stands or falls;

Grasp the sword
Of the Lord,
And Forward!’