.•av JUL 5 , BX 9225 .C86 R34 1871 Rainy, Robert, 1826-1906. Life of William Cunningham, D.D. LIFE > IVOVv;;iS09 ■ WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, D.D. PRINCIPAL AND PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND CHURCH HISTORY, NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH. ROBERT RAINY, D.D, THE LATE KEY. JAMES MACKENZIE. LONDON: T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTEE EOW; EDINBURGH ; AND NEW YORK. 1871. CONTENTS, PREFACE CHAPTER I. E.VRLY DAYS (1810-1820). His Father's Death — Childhood at Hamilton — Removal to Lesmahagow — Drafane Farmhouse — The School at Bent — Love of Battle-Stories — "Preaching" to his Schoolfellows — Dunse — Dunse Law — Educational Advantages— Eastern's E'en — His Mother's Independence— Choice of a Profession ........ 9 CHAPTER II. COLLEGE LIEE (1820-1828). Edinburgh — Queen's Trial — John Brown Patterson — Other Friendships — Diagnostic Society — The Dunse Carrier — Love of Books — Visits Home— The Great Change — Tutorship at Synton — Enters Divinity Hall — Other Educating Influences — The Christian Instructor — The Little Dunkeld Case — Controversy about Pluralities — Apocrypha Controversy — Abolition of Slavery — Mismanagement of the Library — Church Law Society — Essay on Constitution of Church of Scotland — Housekeeping under Difficulties — Dr Knox's Anatomy Class — Dr Chalmers — Reminiscences of Cunningham by Dr Begg and Dr Duff — License to Preach and First Sermon . . 20 CHAPTER III. GREENOCK (1828-1834). Engagement as Dr Scott's Assistant— The Square Church — Settled as Colleague and Successor — His Estimate of the Church of Scotland — Pleasant Relations with Dr Scott — His Work — His Popularity — His Power over the Young — "Words in Season to the Afflicted — His Diary — His Reading — Anti-Patronage Society — Row Heresy — Mr Campbell's Trial — Modem Miracles — Lectures on Mark — Clearness and Power of his Discourses — Readiness in Public Speaking — His Mother's Visit — Declines St Andrew's, Glasgow— Preaches in London— Some's Catechism — Accepts Appointment to Trinity College Church — Farewell to Greenock • 43 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. FIRST YEARS OF PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH (1834-1835). Distinctive Principles of the Church of Scotland — Lay Patronage Imposed, and Why — Results seen in Secessions — And in Moderatism — Revival of Religious Life — Reforming Party attempt to give due Effect to the Call in the Settlement of Ministers — The Veto Law Lost in Assembly of 1833 — Cunningham's Speech on Calls — His Appointment to Trinity College Church — Evidence on Patronage before Select Committee of the House of Commons — Becomes Acquainted with Candlish — Veto Law Carried in 1834 — Cunningham's Marriage — Work in Trinity College Parish — Illustration of his Power to Win Hearts — Want of Success as a Preacher in Edin- burgh— Attends a Criminal upon the Scaffold ........ 61 CHAPTEE V. PUBLIC QUESTIONS (1836-1837). Sabbath Question — Sir Andrew Agnew — Cunningham's Views on Sabbath Legisla- tion— Popery — Gother's Work — Stillingfleet's Exposure of it — Cunningham's Edition of Stillingfleet — His Daughter Helen — Remarks upon Popery — The " Encyclopiedia Britannica " — Action against Cunningham by its Proprietors — Compromised . . 78 CHAPTER VI. THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY (1835-1839). Dr Duff at Home — Death of John Brown Patterson— Lectures on Church Esta- blishments—Mr Marshall's Sermon on Establishments — Vindication of them by Dr Inglis — The Controversy Grows Hot — Church Extension^Appeal to Government for Aid — Charles Leckie — Makgill of Rankeillor — Dr Cunningham's Controversy with Dr Ritchie — The Annuity-Tax— Dr John Brown's Clock — His Quotation from "The Hind Let Loose " — His Lectures on Civil Obedience— Cunningham's Reply . . 86 CHAPTER VII. CHURCH REFORMS. Cunningham's Proi^osal to revive " Presbyterial Visitations" — Discussion about Position of Chapel Ministers and Bonds for Stipends — Dr Muir's Rebuke— Cun- ningham's Confession of Shortcomings — Moderatorship Controversy— Its Results and Uses — Dr Lee made Principal of St Andrews — StiU holds his Charge in Edinburgh — After Six Months Resigns the Office of Principal — Cunningham's Motion to Prevent the Recurrence of such a Case ........... 99 CHAPTER VIII. JUDGE-MADE LAW (1834-1838). Dr Chalmers Lectures on Establishments— Illustrates their Consistency with Spiritual Independence, by the case of his own Church — Auchterarder Case- Mr Young Vetoed by the People, and Rejected by the Presbytery — The Dean of Faculty — Action of Declarator against the Presbytery — Assembly of 1837— Cunningham's Anti-Patronage Speech— His Notebooks— Decision of Court of Session on Auchter- CONTENTS. V arder Case — Mr Young Demands to be taken on Trials — Threatens the Presbytery with an Action of D.amages — Assembly of 1838 — Independence Kesolutions JNIoved by Rev. R. Buchanan — Dr Cook's Views of Spiritual Independence — Resolutions Carried by 183 to 142 — Case of St Paul's — Endowment Needed for an Extension Church — Cunningham Dangerously 111 of Typhus Fever — His Recovery . . . 108 CHAPTER IX. NEW CASES AND NEW EORCES (1838-1839). Mr Clark jiresented to Lethendy in 1835, as Assistant and Successor, Vetoed and Rejected — New Presentation in favour of Mr Kessen in 1837 — His Ordination Inter- dicted by Court of Session 1858 — The Presbytery of Dunkeld "Rebuked" by the Court in June 1859 —Bicentenary of the Assembly of 1638 — Speech of Mr Cun- ningham on the Occasion — His Motion in the Presbyteiy Approving of the Conduct of the Presbj^tery of Dunkeld — The Moderates this time Concur — The Tradesman's Association for Advancing the Interests of the Church of Scotland — Treatment of the Church by "\ATiigs and Tories —Decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder Case — Lord Brougham's Views of the Rights of the People — Views of John Knox on the same Subject — Assembly of 1839 — Dr Cook Proposes to Haul Down the Flag — Motion of Dr Chalmers carried by 204 to 155 — Mr Candlish's First Appearance in the Assembly — Want of an Evangelical Newspaper in Edinburgh — Hugh Miller turns up in the Nick of Time — His Great Services to the cause of the Church . . . 122 CHAPTER X. "strathbogie" (1839-1840). Pamphlets on the Chiirch Question — The Dean's Letter to the Lord Chancellor Answered by Dunlop, Chalmers, and Cunningham — The Mamoch Case — Presbytery of Strathbogie resolve to Settle ]Mr Edwards in spite of the Veto of the People, and the Orders of the Superior Church Courts — Commission, in December 1839, Suspends the Seven Ministers — Interdict against Publication of this Sentence — The "Extended Interdict" — The Gospel in Strathbogie — Cunningham moves, in his own Presbytery, for a Memorial to Government on the Subject — Case of Kemback— The Reel of Bogie — Popular Misconceptions regarding Cunningham's Character ..... 139 CHAPTER XI. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT (1840). Deputation to London — Interviews with "WTiigs and Tories — Lord Aberdeen under- takes to Solve the Difficulty — His Bill — Cunningham's Strictures on it in the Synod — The Assembly resolve to Oppose it — The Earl Abandons it 149 CHAPTER XII. CHURCH PRINCIPLES (1840-1841). Controversy with Mr Robertson of Ellon about the Rights of the Christian People in the Appointment of Pastors — Mr Marshall's Secession to the English Church — Cunningham's Letter to him thereanent 154 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XIII. TRAITS OF CHARACTER (1842). Sympathy of the Irish Presbyterians —Dr Cook's "Memorial" — Cunningham's Animadversions upon it — Threatened Actions of Damages — Retractation and Apology —His Candour — His Estimate of the Danger of Vanity ...... 169 CHAPTER XIV. "the last year of the unbroken church" (1842). The Crisis Approaches— The Church Invaded at all Points, Appeals to the Legis- lature— The Claim of Right — Motion for the Abolition of Patronage carried in the Assembly — Act placing the Appointment of Elders in the hands of Church Members — Act Abolishing the Restrictions on Ministerial Communion with other Churches — The Wodrow Society— Its Working Committee, Maitland, M'Crie, and Cunningham Bruce 's Life and Sermons —Cunningham receives Degree of D.D. from Princeton — The Queen's Visit to Scotland — Second Auchterarder Decision — Meeting of Convo- cation— Their Resolutions — Dr Cunningham's Address to liis Congregation — Notes of a Hard Day's Work in Dumfriesshire 173 CHAPTER XV. " the disruption " (1843). Fundamental Difference between the Moderates and Evangelicals — Cheerfulness of the Outed Ministers — The Wheat and the Chaff — Ross-shire Riots — Petty Persecution — Jokes against the Renegades — The Scots Greys— Visit to Canobie (November 1843) 190 CHAPTER XVI. Professorship— Deputation to America — Mr Ferguson — Death of "Willie" — Arrival in America — State Churches — Impressions of Dr Alexander and Dr Hodge — Letters — Baltimore — Washington — Dr R. Burns — American Friendships — Dr Breckinridge — Old Adam — Dr Leonard Words — Snuff — Return to Scotland — Assembly Speech — American Slavery — "Send Back the Money "—Si^eeches 202 CHAPTER XVII. professorship. Junior Professor of Theology — Dr Welsh's Death — Professorship of Church History — Conception of the Church History Course — Characteristics of it —Cunningham as a Teacher — Sources of Power — Spiritual Wellbeing of Students— Interest in their Sub- sequent Fortunes — Love of Students to him 222 CHAPTER XVIII. THE church and PUBLIC QUESTIONS. Influence in Free Church — Exposition of Free Church Principles— Headship of Christ — Free Church Success — Prevailing Temper — Peculiar Relation to Public Ques- tions— General Tendency of Dr Cunningham — Classification of Questions . . . 240 CONTENTS. Vll CHAPTER XIX. ALLIANCE AND UNION MOVEMENTS. Evangelical Alliance— Liverpool Meeting— Doubts in Free Church— Debate in Assembly 1846— Scene in Meeting of Alliance— Dr John Brown— Union Projects- Original Secession— Proposed Testimony— Sir George Sinclair's Resolutions, 1857 . 252 CHAPTER XX. PUBLIC QUESTIONS CONTINUED. Education — University Tests — Consequences of Disraption — Different Views in Free Church — Dr Cunningham's Views — Professor Macdougall — Established Com- mission— PubUc Meeting — Cunningham's Speech— Settlement of Question — Free Church Education Scheme — Origin — Difficulties — Convenership of Dr Cunningham —Of Dr Candlish— Controversy about the Scheme— Hugh Miller— National Educa- tion—Parish Schools — Effects of Disruption — Action of Established Church — Views of Free Chiirchmen with Respect to it — Privy CouncU Scheme — Assembly of 1847 — Parties in Free Church — "Association" — Discussions in Edinburgh Presbytery — I'roposal in 1851— Combination of Parties in 1853— Lord Advocate Moncreiff's Bill of 1854 — Cunningham's Opinion upon it — Tendency of his Mind 266 CHAPTER XXI. public questions continued. Relations of State to Truth and Error— Maynooth Grant — Diplomatic Rela- tions with Rome — Papal Aggression — Views of Popery in General — Existing Esta- blished Churches — Arguments Founded upon them — Declaration in 1845 . . 307 CHAPTER XXII. domestic questions of free church. Sustentation Fund — Hugh MiUer and the "Rating" Scheme— Form of Process —Nature of it— Defects— Proposed Amendments — Partly Effected— Dr Cunningham's Impressions on this Subject— His Judicial Qualities— College Question — Retro- spect— Early Plans and Efforts of Free Church — Reconsideration— Curriculum — Beginning of Controversy — Assembly of 1847 — Arguments— First Stage of Controversy —Second Stage— Third Stage— Fourth Stage— Last Year— Assembly of 1855— Reminiscences 320 CHAPTER XXIII. featuPvES and incidents of middle life. Want of Letters — Aversion to "Write — Family Life — Accessibility — Straightfor- wardness— View of his own Preaching — Visit to Paris—Assembly oi 1849 — Marriage Affinity— Visit to Holland— Dort-Leyden— Madame Zelte— Utrecht— Frankfort— Strasburg — Paris — Home — Bereavement — Letters to his Famdy — Continental Excur- sion of 1856— Care in Planning— Scenery— Recollections of Rev. W. B. Cunningham — " British and Foreign Evangelical Review " 380 Vlll CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXIV. MODERATORSHTP. Health— Loss of Sight in Right Eye— Sympathy — Reconciliations — Offer of Modera- torship — Meeting with Dr Candlish— Mr George Dalziel — Testimonial to Dr Cun- ningham— Bleeting of Assembly — Opening Proceedings — Address — Tricentenary of French Reformation — Public Welcome of Mr Brownlow North — Concluding Address 404 CHAPTER XXV. LATTER YEARS. Position and Influence — Deputation to Synod of English Presbyterian Church — Visit to Oxford — Tricentenaiy of Reformation in Scotland — Recollections of Country Visits — Revival Meetings — Ladies at the College — America — Deaths — Mr Earle Mon- teith— Dr Cunningham's Mother— Brother 425 CHAPTER XXVI. SUMMING UP — LAST GREAT SPEECHES. Cardross Case — Australian Union Debate — Summary of Principles laid down — Views on Confessions -440 CHAPTER XXVII. Last Illness 466 CHAPTER XXVIII. Concluding Remarks 480 ERRATA. Page 205, last line, after Appendix, insert B. Page 222, first line, /or Chapter XXL, read Chapter XVIL Page 342, last line, after Appendix, insert E. Page 349, lines 4, 7, and 11 from foot Page 350, lines 4, 5, 10, and 17 from top \ for Maclagan, read Maclaggan. Page 359, line 20 from foot Page 463, last line, after 52, insert 15G. PKEFACE. A FTER the death of Principal Cunningham, and the publication of his posthumous writings, Mrs Cunningham and the members of the family applied to two distinguished friends (both now taken from us) to prepare a memoir of his life. After very full consider- ation, the friends referred to felt constrained to decline doinor so. They saw obstacles to their discharging the duty to their own satisfaction, which they did not feel able to remove. Ultimately the task was committed to the hands of the late Rev. James Mackenzie, Free Abbey Church, Dunfermline. He brought to the work, along with his tried literary abilities, a very great veneration for Dr Cunningham's character, and a legitimate ambition to make the memoir worthy of it. His failing health, and ultimately his lamented death, interrupted his labours. Some time afterwards, arrangements were made which resulted in my being called upon to complete the work. For that purpose the unfinished MS., and the materials which had been collected, were placed in my hands, with full powers to use them at my own discretion. The MS. exhibited a continuous narrative up to the period of Dr Cun- ningham's American journey. Beyond that point Mr Mackenzie had prepared oidy some notes and jottings relating chiefly to per- sonal traits and special incidents of Dr Cunningham's life. -a. PREFACE. The Life as noAv published is written by Mr Mackenzie as far as the 15th chapter, and including three or four pages of the 16th. In editing this portion, I have made such alterations only as I felt satisfied Mr Mackenzie would himself have made before publishing. I have inserted in their proper places one or two matters which had been omitted, and also various incidents and reminiscences belonging to the earlier period of Dr Cunningham's life, which had not been brought under Mr Mackenzie's notice. These have not been distin- guished in printing. They consist of matters of fact only, without comment or expression of opinion. One or two footnotes, attached to the text by me, are distinguished by the letter " E.." For the remainder of the Life, I am solely responsible. The members of Dr Cunningham's family have manifested deep interest in this publication, and have aided me in every possible way. But I have relied exclusively on my own judgment : all statements of fact and expressions of oj)inion are to be taken on that understanding. Except in subordinate matters, no one has even been consulted. With a view to lighten the narrative of the College Controversy some portions have been thrown into the Appendix. They are chiefly digressions, intended to explain or vindicate the course taken by Dr Cunningham at particular stages. The reader will observe, that as originally written, they formed part of the text ; and I should wish them to be had regard to by those who may take any special interest in that part of the narrative. The want of letters, and of those elements of a life which familiar letters usually supply, has induced me to admit freely reminiscences by friends of common passages and incidents, even in cases where no important characteristic is illustrated, and merely the ordinary tenor of an unpretending life rises into view. PREFACE. xi The length of time during which tlie publication of the Memoir has been delayed, and some other special reasons, made it desirable to bring out the work by a fixed day. It seemed to be my duty to make every possible effort to meet this desire ; and if signs of haste are anywhere discernible, as there is reason to fear they may, I must trust to the reader's kindness to excuse them. One almost unac- countable mistake escaped me until the sheet concerned had been printed off. In page 299, I speak of the test for parochial school- masters as having been abolished in or about the year 1853. Uni- versity Tests were abolished about that time. There was discussion also regarding the School Test, which gave an impulse, as the text states, to the general question. But at that time, and for a good many years afterwards, the House of Lords successfully stopped the way. On page 18, the income of Mrs Cunningham senior, at the time she came to Dunse, is stated at no more than forty pounds a-year. No one would have more disliked than Mrs Cunningham, that undue credit should be accorded to her in respect of diflficulties overcome. It is due, therefore, to historic accuracy to say, that her income at that time was about one hundred pounds a-year. The sum of forty pounds a-year represents merely the amount of her own patrimony. The portrait inserted in this volume is taken from a group of Moderators of the Free Church photographed in 1860. Artistically it is defective, as bearing traces of the other members of the group. But it has been preferred notwithstanding, as more satisfactory and characteristic than any other. I may be allowed to express my regret that the conditions of time, above referred to, have thrown the composition of the last Xii PREFACE. chapter into circumstances very unfavourable for doing it justice. It is not the tribute I shoukl wish to have paid to my beloved master's theological powers and services. Happily his reputation in that respect is independent of any shortcomings of mine. ROBERT RAINY. 8 RosEBERY Crescent, Edinburgh, 10th May 1871. LIFE WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, D.D. CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS. /^N the last day of the year 181 0, a little family group of five ^ were on their way to spend the New Year's day in the parish of Lesmahagow, in the west of Scotland. The grandfather lived there ; and it was their custom to pass each New Year's day with him. The father rode on horseback ; the mother and her three little boys travelled in a light covered cart. Deep snow concealed the ground, and the day was clear, still, and keen. Close to the road, some farm labourers were at work on a huge heap of compost. An immense number of crows had gathered about the heap — after the manner of these birds when frost locks up the earth and forces them to "Seek a dole from every passing steed." As the cart rattled past, they rose on the wing in a noisy cloud, and startled the horses. The horse drawing the cart was quieted without harm done ; but the horse which carried the rider fell, and hurled him upon the frozen road. He rose, spoke cheerfully to his wife and frightened children, remounted, and rode on. But he had suffered some fatal inward injury, and was never well again. In a short time his wife was a widow with three fatherless boys, the eldest of whom was only five years of age. This eldest of three orphans was William Cunningham. 10 EARLY DAYS. Their father, Charles Cimningham, was a merchant in the town of Hamilton. When the father was laid in Hamilton Churchyard, and all his affairs settled, the widow found herself poor enough. But she was a woman of a strong independent spirit, after the old God-fearing manner of her country, and of much more than ordinary talent and force of character, and trustfully and bravely she set about the heavy task of bringing up her fatherless children. The town of Hamilton stands finely on the western slope of the Strath of Clyde. Beautiful by day, the Strath puts on a lurid splendour by night. The smelting fires of innumerable iron furnaces, spread- ing afar, round the magnificent slopes, and heightening as day declines, might be the camp fires of some mighty host. Hamilton, the centre of an important district, is quite a handsome town, with wide streets, good houses, elegant shops, a new town-hall, county buildings, and a Sebastopol cannon. Few places have asserted their townhood more vigorously. But in those days it was primitive, thatched, and quaint. The burgh prison stood with its gable to Castle Street — then the best in the town. The prisoners from the upper windows employed themselves in fishing for pence among the passengers, with a string and a stocking-foot. The whole locality is now Irish and low. The Dukes of Hamilton have bought up many houses and gardens, and pushed back the town to extend the Park, and a great sullen wall, twenty feet high, now stretches along the whole line of street. William Cunningham began to go to school at the age of five. It was a school taught by one Kemp, — a little lame man, but not a lame teacher. It stood near the gate of the old ducal palace of Hamilton, but has long since been swept away by the extension of the Park. One evening the young scholar was missing from home, and was sought for in a household panic. At last some one thought of looking in the school, and there sat the child alone, intent on his book. After this, when missed at home, his mother would say, " He'll be in the school again"; and there, accordingly, he was sure to be found. At the age of six, he was able to read fluently. He soon shot ahead of his companions ; but the praises he received did EARLY DAYS. H not spoil the modesty of his nature. The boys of Lichfield School are said to have carried little Samuel Johnson shoulder high, owning thus, as Boswell thinks, the predominance of his intel- lectual vigour. Once, on the occasion of some public exhibition in the school of Hamilton before the magistrates, little Cunninefham shewed such cleverness, and was so clearly the foremost boy there, that the rest of the boys carried him shoulder high in triumph through the streets. The boy said nothing to his mother of the ovation given him by his school-fellows. Sometime afterwards the affair came to her knowledge. She asked him why he had never mentioned it. " Mother," said he, " it was very foolish ; you would not have me tell you such nonsense." It is well known — ask the coming man — that a new turnip is one of the pleasantest of summer fruits. One day, William and his brother Andrew, with four or five other boys, had gone into a field on the errand, so aggravating to the agricultural mind, of pulling turnips. As they were busily engaged in selecting their esculents, " the Duke " himself came suddenly upon them. The other boys ran for it, but William Cunningham and his brother stood and faced the responsibilities of the situation. It was never in William Cunningham's nature to shrink from his responsibilities. The Duke demanded his name and his abode. William told them at once. " Now, tell me the names of the boys who have run away, and I will let you off." " But I cannot do that." " You know them, don't you ? " "Yes." " Then if you don't tell me their names, I will put you in prison." " I can't heljD that. I have told you my own name, but I won't tell you theirs." The Duke of Hamilton of that day was a proud, haughty man, very bitter when thwarted. Bafiled by William, he turned to Andrew, and tried to extract the names of the runaways from him ; but Andrew was stoutly silent. The Duke threatened the manly little lads, but he threatened them in vain. William would not utter a word to betray his comrades, and Andrew bravely backed 1 2 EARLY DAYS. his brother. The Duke gave it up ; but the boys lived in misery for days in dread of his threatened jail. For some years after her husband's death, Mrs Cunningham resided in Hamilton. Then came a change, and she found it necessary to seek a home in her father's house. She removed her family from Hamilton to Lesmahagow, where her father was the tenant of Drafane Farm, which lies in a beautiful part of the country, with sweet diversity of hill and dale. The little river Nethan flows close at hand, between finely wooded banks. Near the point where it joins the Clyde, stands, in the most romantic situation imaginable, the Castle of Craignethan, better known as the Tillietudlem of Sir Walter Scott. Drafane farmhouse stands on a broad low hill, which commands a wide view of the valley of Clyde. The tree-shaded garden re- mains as in the days when William Cunningham played there. There was an understood concession to the brothers of all the fallen apples. Such a premium on the law of gravitation was scarcely wise ; for gravitation can be tampered with. William had a gift of stone-throwing equal to that of the children of Benjamin, who could " sling stones at an hairbreadth and not miss." The trees surround- ing the garden masked his battery, and there was no want of fallen apples. Another farmhouse now stands Avhere the long, one-storey house stood in his time. A clachan of six or seven cottages stretches untidily down the northern slope of the hill. Bitter smoke from the calcining of the " black-band " ironstone of the neighbouring mines goes trailing over the ground. Away to the east, the Idfty top of Tintock looks down over the ridge of the Dillar hill on the beautiful valley of Clyde, like a giant looking over a garden wall. Drafane, when the Cunninghams lived there, was an unusually large farm for the district. The arrangement of the land is much altered now. Where different homesteads stand at present, each with its own system of hedgerows and fences, there were then breadths of corn and pasture land spreading away on one side to the " Cauder " water, and on the other to the banks of the Nethan. To work this " breadth of arable and tilth " a large number of EARLY DAYS. 13 servants was required. On the summer evenings a horn was wont to bo blown on a hillock near the house, to announce to the labourers that the welcome " loosing time " was come, and as a signal to the herds to bring in the cattle from the distant pasturages to the milking. This custom of the rustic horn is perhaps quite gone out in this country now ; but it will remind those who have travelled in Switzerland of the plaintive Alpine horn, heard amid the moun- tain ranges at summer eve. The Drafane horn, a gift from his mother, was kept by Principal Cunningham, as an interesting memorial, to his dying day. Visitors may remember to have seen that huge ox horn, yellow with age, and loaded with strange carv- ings of the rustic knife, as it lay conspicuous on the mantelpiece of his dining-room. Mr Eobert Burns Begg, sister's son to Robert Burns the poet, taught at that time a small side school at a place called Bent, on the estate of Blackwood, in the parish of Lesmahagow, two miles from Drafane. He afterwards became parish schoolmaster of Kin- ross. The Cunninghams attended his school at Bent in the year 1815. He well remembered the eldest of the three, a remarkable boy with a great curly head, clad in the schoolboy garb of those days — a close blue jacket, to which corduroy trousers were buttoned, and a white frill of a finger broad round the neck. " William," he says, " was a remarkably engaging boy, and very smart. His blue eyes were always beaming with love, and his light-coloured hair curled up to the very crown of his head. He was very kind and affectionate with other boys; and when convers- ing with any one, had a ha.bit of throwing his arm around the neck of his companion. He had an insatiable thirst for reading, and especially for reading stories of battles. When he had read all the books containing anything on the favourite subject that were to be found about the place, his mother said to him, ' I'll tell you what, Willie, there's no book that has so many battle stories as the Bible!' On this inducement he fell to, and read the whole Bible through, from Abraham's fight with Chedorlaomer to the battle of Armageddon." Drafane had another resource for battle stories. A discharged 14 EARLY DATS. Peninsular soldier, Roy by name, had drifted tliither, and opened a school for the younger children of the neighbourhood. " If a man is fit for nothing else, make him a schoolmaster." The Cunningham boys were all his scholars for a time, till they grew strong enough to walk the distance to the school of Mr Burns Begg. The old soldier frequently afforded them the glad surprise of unexpected holidays, when his potations were so deep as to unfit him for teaching.. But he told them glorious stories about the " blood-red fields of Spain," and especially about Vittoria, the last of his battles. The condescending warrior would sit on a dyke, with William Cunningham at his side, and other little folk around him, and pour his tales into their ravished ears. There is no game at which Scotch boys play more heartily than that of " stackie." It is an autumn game, and comes in season when harvest has filled the barnyard with corn stacks. The exuberant glee and merry shouts of the boys playing among the stacks seem to be a part of "the joy of harvest." The boys of the Bent school were great in this game, and stackie was at its height when Willie Cunningham played. It was not altogether for his powers at play, however, that his schoolfellows courted his company. To stackie, a quieter game succeeded. The boys gathered into a cosy nook among the stacks, to listen to Willie Cunningham speechi- fying or telling stories, which they were wont to call his " preaching." After a speech among the stacks, he used to break aAvay abruptly, with " the meeting " at his heels striving to get him back to give them another speech. When winter came on, and put a stop to speechifying out of doors, the old soldier's schoolroom was resorted to. There a fire was kept up with coals which the boys brought in alternate contributions. Forms were set, and " preaching " was the order of the evening. Other boys sometimes tried it, but Willie Cunningham was master of the situation. The old farmer of Urafane had some relation or friend in the office of the London Courier, by whom a copy of that paper was regularly sent to him. It was the only daily paper received at that time in those parts. There was a depot of French prisoners at Lanark, who were allowed to walk within assigned bounds, EARLY DAYS. 1 5 extcuding to four or five miles in a circuit. These sad exiles found out that Drafane farmhouse, by reason of its daily London paper, was a grand mart for the news of the world. A fever for news burnetl in their homesick hearts, and almost every day some of them broke their bounds to go to Drafane. One spring evening, as the Principal well remembered, he went down with his brothers to Burnfoot, on their customary errand to get the newspaper from the guard of the passing mail coach. They saw the coach coming with a white flag on the top, and the guard as he threw them the paper, shouted high above the rattle of the wheels, " Boney's beat ! " This was the first news of the surrender of Paris. The boys ran back, shouting in wild excitement, " Boney's beat ! " Near Drafane they met some French prisoners who had come as usual for news. To them in haste they told the news with boyish glee. Next moment they were subdued and awed by seeing those unfortunate warriors weeping sore for their country's disaster. DUNSE, During the time that the widow and her boys lived at Drafane, death twice visited the farmhouse. The stout old grandfather died early in 1814. His son Andrew succeeded him in the lease of the farm, and things went on as before. But exactly a year afterwards, Andrew also died. The lease then fell to another brother of the widow, the Rev. George Cunningham, minister of Dunse, on the east border. He disposed of the lease for the remainder of the time it had to run, to the landlord, the Duke of Hamilton. Then came the displenishing sale ; and the widow transferred her family back to Hamilton, where William attended the grammar school for a year or more, and then his mother resolved on removing to Dunse to be near her friends. Besides her brother, the minister there, she had a cousin, William Cunningham, who was married to her sister, established as a banker and writer in the town. Dunse presented another inducement. It was well-off in the matter of education. There was a special school there, got up by gentlemen in the neighbourhood, to prepare boys for the University. The master at ] 6 EARLY DAYS. that time was the Rev. Thomas Maiile, a man who had a fine antique zeal for the classics, and taught them admirably. The farm of Cheeklaw, about a mile south from Dunse town, was " led " at that time, — that is, one farmer had both that and another farm. Residing on the other, he had the Cheeklaw farmhouse to let, and Mrs Cunningham became the tenant. Fifty years ago, it would be thought rather a good house. On one side, the windows looked into an extensive nursery garden. A jjainted board, which loudly lied, told to all passers-by that man-traps and spring guns were set there. The house is now much altered, and the door has been made to open into the nursery. But in the time of the Cunninghams, the entrance was from the farmyard on the other side of the house. Dunse is a delightful little town in the midst of a rich and fertile country. Even in railway times, it is at a " competitive " distance from any large town, and hence better shops are to be seen there than in many places of more importance. The famous " Law " — which lies besides Bannockburn in a Scotchman's heart — is close to the town, which, in fact, has climbed as far up the Law as it conveniently can. On the top of the hill are still to be seen traces of the earthworks thrown up by that remarkable army in " hodden gray" in the summer of 1689. But, since Leslie's time, the old town has been destroyed by a great fire, and Dunse has rebuilt itself on the other side of the hill, leaving its former site to be still pointed out as the " Brunton," or burnt town. The school which the Cunningham boys attended, stood in a shady lane, beside the old churchyard. Close to the same church- yard stood also the Parish School, to which Thomas Boston (of the " Fourfold State ") went in his day " and there," as he tells, " I was providentially made to see, within an open coffin, in an unripe grave opened, the consuming body just brought to the consistence of thin mortar, and blackish, the which made an impression on me remaining to this day." Another memorable schoolboy once played in that shady lane, Thomas M'Crie, the biographer of Knox and Melville. William Cunningham left his mark in Mr Maule's school. The EARLY DAYS. 17 venerable master, noAV no more, seemed to dilate and grow taller as he spoke of his illustrious scholar. " At the annual examination of 1819," he said, "his extensive acquaintance with the classics of Greece and Rome astonished the examinators. '' In after years, when the examination day came round, the remark was often made that "while the pupils had acquitted themselves well, there was no Willie Cunningham among them." A friend has furnished the following tradition. Mr Maule had threatened to flog any boy found cutting the desks or benches. One day he found a desk freshly cut. Getting no answer to the general question, " Who cut that desk ? " he said, " William Cun- ningham, did you cut it ?" " No." " Do you know who cut it V "Yes." "Who did it?" No answer. "If you do not tell me, I must flog you; will you tell who did it?" "No." The flogging thereupon began, or was to begin, when his schoolfellow, John Thomson, started up and said, " Don't flog him ; it was me that did it." Some time before, the two boys had had a battle, which had ended in mutual respect. I find it recorded by Mr Thomson's widow, in a letter of reminiscences addressed to a member of Dr Cunningham's family : " Once they quarrelled hotly, and fought it out until both, I suppose, were literally beaten to their heart's con- tent ; and from that time until death, their friendship continued without change or check. I have often heard my husband say that of all men he ever knew, Dr Cunningham was the most essentially true, single-heartedj and thoroughly unselfish. These are what we have all felt to be his crowning qualities — exemplified in a thousand ways." " He was a determined lover of impartial justice and fair play," Mr Maule said ; " ever ready to put forth his great bodily strength to back the right among his schoolfellows," — just as in after days he was wont to back the right with great strength of another kind. Mr Maule often Avatched with delight " with what energy he grap- pled with a difficult passage ; while his fine, mild, but penetrating blue eye was lifted to his teacher from time to time, appealing for the truth and correctness of his translation." "His teacher will never forget," adds Mr Maule, " the happy influence which his whole 18 EARLY DAYS. conduct and habits exercised over all his class-fellows, and all the puj^iJs then attending the school." Thirty years afterwards, Dr Cunningham went down the shady lane, and stopped opposite to the old school. " I received the most important part of my educa- tion there," he said ; and repeated it, as his manner was, when he wished to say a thing with emphasis. The annual game of handball between married and single on Fastern's E'en'^' is a great affair in the town of Dunse. The door of the Parish Church is set wide open. The ball is thrown up in the market-place. The married players endeavour to drive it, or carry it, into the church. The unmarried strive to get it to a mill, two miles from the town, which forms the other goal. The players, in a mass, close round the ball, and the tug of war begins. Sometimes the eager crowd will sway to and fro for an hour, before either side can advance a yard towards its goal. Then the single men, perhaps, get the ball passed to their rear, and a player, extricating himself from the crowd, speeds away on the road to the mill, and gets a good start before his evasion is discovered. Then the married men pursue, and the single hinder, and the tide surges backwards and forwards till one or the other goal be won. Boys, not too small, are allowed to join the host of the single, and nimble players they make. There was no keener player in this sturdy Border game than William Cunningham, and in the crowd of Fastern's E'en, his lithe figure and curly head were always to be seen. When Mrs Cunningham came to Dunse, her worldly wealth did not reach forty pounds a year. This was all her income for many years, but her good management made the most of it. Her brother, the minister, was kind enough. Her cousin, the banker, a vigorous and prosperous man of business, would often have helped her with his purse in the upbringing of her boys. She freely went to this most excellent man for advice in all her affairs ; she lived in most sisterly friendship with him ; but she never would accept the gift of a single shilling. The brave woman had a sore struggle for many years ; but she did her part nobly, and brought up her boys inde- pendently. William wore no clothes but such as were entirely of * Shrove Tuesday. EARLY DAYS. 19 his mother's making till he went to college. She was a tall, stately- looking woman, and a strict disciplinarian over her boys, to whom "she never needed to speak twice." Her family, as they could clearly trace, were descended from the old Covenanting Pedens. Alexander Pedeu left the cave which was his lurking-place in " the Killing Time," to die in his brother's house at Auchincloich, near Cumnock. From that brother the Cunninghams sprung. "Peden," says Dodds in his ' Scottish Covenanters,' " was a man of a massive frame, and a noble and impressive countenance One old jour- nalist, relating some of his conversations, begins with this expres- sion, 'and he laid his heavy head upon my shoulder,' implying weight and massiveness." Peden's massive build, as well as Peden's fearless spirit, came down to our Principal. William Cunningham was thirteen years old, when one evening, as his mother proceeded " to take the Book " for the usual family worship, he said, " Mother, I think I can do that for you." She was surprised, but allowed him to try. The boy read a chapter, and then knelt down and prayed. From that time forward, he con- ducted family worshijD every night as long as he remained in his mother's house. His choice of the ministry, as the work of his life, was early and decided. It seemed to be the result of long and deep thought. His mother asked him, searchingly, if he was aware of the deep responsibilities of the pastor's office. " He knew and felt all that,' he said, '' but still he felt that he must go on." CHAPTER II. COLLEGE. T?ARLY in November 1820, Cunningham left liome to enter the University. It was on a dark winter morning that he travelled on the outside of the Dunse coach to Edinburgh, where he was soon established in a lodging at the north-east corner of St Patrick Square ; and there he lived for four sessions. In after days, he never passed that way without looking up to the window of the old familiar room. It was the time of frantic excitement about the " Queen's Trial " when the young student arrived. Edinburgh, like other towns, burned much vain tallow in a grand illumination to celebrate the doubtful triumph of Caroline the Foolish over George the Gross. This was the first of city spectacles to William Cunningham. Much window-breaking, and a bayonet charge on the mob, but no skin scratched, gave variety to that lively evening. It was a vehement time, and politics intruded their ferocity every- where. John Wilson — "Christopher North" — had just carried the Moral Philosophy Chair in Edinbvirgh against Sir William Hamilton — that is, Tory had carried it against Whig — after a party contest described by leonine John as "of a most savage nature," and quite beyond our powers to conceive in these decorous days. The Scottish Universities divide the year into two nearly equal parts. The winter half-year is the session or term, and the summer half-year is the vacation. Two or three sessions of attendance in the Latin class, and as many in the Greek, two or three sessions in Mathematics, one in Logic, one in Moral Philosophy, and one in Natural Philosophy, make up the curriculum of arts. These classes COLLEGE. 21 are made to interlap, so that the whole attendance can be overtaken conveniently enough in four years. Falling in with the usual track, William Cunningham's work during the first session was to attend the Latin class under Professor Pillans, and the Greek, under Professor Dunbar. One of his fellow-students was John Brown Patterson, a little, dark, curly lad in spectacles, most gentle and loveable, and of rare promise. He was older than Cunningham by nearly two years. His widowed mother lived in Edinburgh, and he had been a distinguished scholar in the High School there. From the rectorship of the High School, Pillans had just been promoted to the professorial chair, so that Patterson, in changing from school to college, did not change his teacher. He carried with him an extraordinary share of classical knowledge. One is astonished at specimens of his Greek and Latin poetry, written in those early years, and preserved in a published memoir of his life. The High School dux, as the first few weeks of the session shewed, was the best and foremost scholar in the Latin class at College. But if the High School boy was first, the younger boy from the Border was clearly second. Patterson and Cunningham became most lovino- friends, till death parted them in their manhood. Old classfellows to this day never speak of the one without the other. Boyish friendships are lightly made and commonly soon forgotten; but the friendships which William Cunningham made in his first college year were to last for life. "In the first year of his attendance at the University," says the Rev. John Bonar of Greenock, " I made his acquaintance, and prevailed on him, and John B. Patterson, and Robert Johnstone, to join the Diagnostic Society." He never to his dying day had any friends more loved and trusted than these. That Diagnostic Society to which Dr Bonar introduced him, is quite a power in Edinburgh College. It was begun in the house of Mr Bonar's father. It then met in Robert Haldane's Tabernacle in Leith Walk, and there Cunningham made his first attempt at a speech. It next migrated to the vestry of St Andrew's Church, and finally rested in a cryptic apartment near the college gate. It was called at first the Speculating Society, then the Speculative, and lastly the Diagnostic, or Thorough Knowledge Society. 22 COLLEGE. lu those days, when the penny post was not, our young student's chief or only communication with home was through the carrier. Thomas Penney, the Dunse carrier, was an important institution for that pleasant town. Every week his slow-j^lodding cart went to Edinburgh and returned. Besides the ponderable goods which he carried, he was a vivacious retailer of news ; and for the sake of a little talk from home, William Cunningham loved to repair to the yard of the " Harrow " Inn, where, in ante-railway days, a synod of carriers met each Wednesday. Every third week he received a box by Thomas Penney's cart, containing his clothes, washed and done up by loving hands, and fragrant of the go wans of Ch eeklaw. Provisions, too, were sent in the box — welcome additions to his town fare, but more welcome still because they brought up *' Some thoughts sweet and kind," What Scottish student can ever forget his box from home, packed by a mother's hands — that toiling, loving, venerated mother ! That book -hunger which whole libraries could not satisfy, was already strong in young Cunningham. The boy was already a book- collector. He had a peculiar, restless, shuffling motion with his feet at study, a habit which never left him. To sit with these rest- less feet nnslippered was the ruin of stockings, and his stockings came to Cheeklaw a doleful wreck. Strict injunctions to buy a pair of slippers, and money to pay for them, were sent. But the stockings continued to reach Cheeklaw as woe-begone as ever. Explanation was demanded, and it came out that the slipper-money had gone to purchase some irresistible book. At the end of his first session at college, Cunningham gained the Brown bursary of d6*10. His first three vacations were spent under his mother's roof at Cheeklaw. The second summer he began to keep a journal of his reading, which he continued for the next six years, up to the termination of his course in Divinity. The books he read are carefully classified, with sub-divisions, under the heads of Classics, General Literature, Philosophy and Science, Theology. His read- ing, during the five months of the vacation first chronicled, amounts to eighty volumes. " The whole of ' Homer's Iliad ' " in Greek appears COLLEGE. 23 as one of tlic books read — not amiss for a boy under seventeen. By this time he had acquired French, for he reads Molifere. Barrow's Treatise on the Pope's Supremacy, and Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, also appear among the books read that summer. The entire list contains 530 distinct works, besides pamphlets, magazines, &c. It affords glimpses at once of the progress of his mind, and of the subjects that successively occupied or excited the public mind at that fermenting period. He reads Greek and Latin in immense quantities, and French in great abundance. There is evidently a strong tendency to metaphysics, but gradually theology carries it over everything. All the controversies of the day engage the young divine: "Sir John Leslie's case," when the old Moderates of the Scotch Church became suddenly hot in their zeal for orthodoxy : "The Apocrypha Controversy," when the gi'eat axe of Robert Haldane gleamed in the forest, and was lifted up on thick trees : "Dr Inglis on Church Establishments," when the Voluntary war was beginning. Many odd volumes and broken sets appear in the list, significant of the difficulty of access to books in far-off country quarters. Shakes- peare, Ben Jonson, Milton, Swift, Washington Irving, Scott, Byron, and the Ettrick Shepherd, indicate that lighter literature was not forgotten. In his second session, besides the classes of Greek and Latin, he attended those of Logic and Mathematics. In the third winter besides continuing his attendance upon the classes of Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, he studied Moral Philosophy under Professor Wilson, whom, with loving emphasis, Edinburgh students called "the Professor." His college friendships had opened to him a few houses in the city. "Young Cunningham," says Dr Alexander Patterson, brother of his classfellow, "was one of several likeminded youths who were then wont to visit us. But Cunningham was he towards whom my brother, and erelong I myself, felt most of the blended respect and love which, even in young hearts, eminent talents, a generous nature and downright honesty, are fitted to inspire. All these characteristics pertained to Cunningham, and were even then prelusive of what in maturer life he approved himself to be." The summer of 1823 was the last that he spent at Cheeklaw. If 24 COLLEGE. let alone, the young student would sit almost continuously at his books ; but if his brothers or cousins wished him to join in their plays, or in a walk, or to help them in any way, he rose from his work with his usual happy smile, and did it. A mile down the road from Cheeklaw runs the Verter Burn, in which name it needs the aid of a local interpreter to find the Virtue Burn, so called from the reputed virtues of a well springing on its margin. A large tree, supporting what is called a "water-gate," lay from bank to bank of the stream, and it was a feat for rustic lads to walk across it. The children liked to see this feat performed, and cousin William used to do it as often as they asked him. His ruling passion comes out strongly in a letter to his friend Patterson, written this summer : — " I bought a copy of Bishop Hoadley's Discourses on the terms of our acceptance with God, and several other scarce books in divinity, very cheap, at a sale of books in Dunse lately. I got St Chrysostom on the Priesthood, with a Discourse of St Gregory of Nazianzus on the same subject, with Notes, and a Latin translation, for sixpence; the whole works of Lactantius, excellent order, with Notes, for the same sum; the Apostolic Constitutions, by Clemens Romanus, for twopence. I bought also, for small sums, Clarke on the Attributes, Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity, Locke on the Reasonableness of Christianity, and several others." Considering that the writer was still under eighteen years of age, it must be owned that we have here a pretty decided indication of a strong natural taste. At this time, he was so sturdy a Tory that he would read no news- paper but the John Bull. " When I first knew him," says Dr Patterson, " he was a Tory in civil, and a Moderate in ecclesiastical politics. An admirer of Inglis in the latter of these departments, he was wont, in terms of surpassing laudation, to celebrate Burke, and especially Pitt in the other." During his fourth session at college, he renounced his sympathy with Moderatism. " In that year," continues Dr Patterson, " he came within the sphere of evangelical preaching ; and during the winter, and for several years thereafter, he attended, with great COLLEGE. 25 relish and hearty appreciation, the ministry of Dr Gordon, and very frequently that of Dr John Brown. Indeed, I have a strong im- pression that to these two distinguished ministers of Christ, as instruments in a higher hand than man's, he was indebted for his ' translation from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.' " Mr Bonar testifies that " his change was thorough, decisive, and manifest to all ; but those who were constantly with him, and to whom he revealed himself freely, saw its depth and intensity." The same early and greatly loved friend, speaking of the early years of his College course, says : " All this while he was without God. He was virtuous, but he was not hoi}'. He was amiable, but he was not renewed. He did not neglect the Bible, but he believed not in Christ. He was not far from the kingdom of God, but it was rather its bulwarks he admired than its fellow- ship he sought for. At length the SjDirit touched his heart, and the truth shone full upon his mind. By the end of his third literary year, the grand question of his relation to God had risen almost un- conciously within him ; and he earnestly waited Sabbath after Sab- bath on the ministers whom he was in the habit of hearing (at that time those of the Moderate party), with a view of being directed how a lost sinner might be saved. To that first of questions, how- ever, as he used to declare, ' not one of them gave him an answer.' And his anxiety might have ended in a profounder sleep. But what man could not furnish, he won from the Bible, and on his knees." A lady has kindly communicated reminiscences of those student days. This may be the best place to introduce them. " My acquaintance with Dr Cunningham began at the time of his coming to Edinburgh to attend College. Dunse having been my mother's native town, she was well acquainted with all his relations, and cordially welcomed the young student, then in his seventeenth year. His features, even then, were strongly marked — his person slender — his appearance interesting — his manner unassuming — and everything about him impressed one with the singular simplicity and straightforwardness of his character. As time went on he be- came more and more intimate in our family, and I being seldom from home — more seldom than any of the other members — came to 3 26 COLLEGE. be very much on the footing of a sister, doing any sisterly offices I could for him. " At that period there was nothing to impress me with the idea of his being religious, though I supposed that he must be so, as he intended to be a minister. He had been associated with, and ac- customed to hear. Moderate preachers, and then generally attended the Old Greyfriars' Church, having a great admiration- for the powerful intellect of Dr John Inglis — besides agreeing with him in Church politics. Happily, however, for himself, he became intimate with a number of superior and estimable young men — fellow- students — much about his own age and standing — the Kev. John Patterson, afterwards of Falkirk ; Rev. J. J. Bonar, now of Greenock; the late Robert Johnstone, W.S. ; and, at a later period, the Rev. Dr Bannerman, late of the Free Church College ; Rev. W. B. Cunning- ham, Prestonpans ; Rev. Mr Duncan, late of Newcastle, &c. They always wrote of each other, and were designated by us, as the 'Coterie,' and I feel assured exerted a most favourable influence on one another from the commencement of their friendship. " When Dr Cunningham began to appreciate Gospel truth, he frequently went to hear the morning lectures of Dr Thomas M'Crie, the venerable biographer of Knox and Melville ; but for the most part he attended the ministry of Dr Gordon, first at Hope Park, and then in the New North Church, to which Dr Gordon was translated. During his attendance at the Divinity Hall he used often to deplore the inefficiency of the Professors who filled the different Chairs, and so hailed with delight Dr Chalmers' appointment. In a letter, re- ceived in the autumn of 1827, I find him saying, ' with Thomson in St George's, and Chalmers in the Divinity Chair, we may hope that the time to favour Zion, yea, the set time, has come.' At first, Dr Chalmers, taking up too hasty an impression of him, described him to a friend as ' a fierce, redheaded* Moderate ;' but he very soon formed a different estimate of him on personal acquaintance, and gave him a cordial recommendation on going to Greenock. * An instance of genius idealising. It may be congruous to a 'fierce Moderate ' to be redheaded, but Cunningham was not so. No doubt there was a character about bis hair as impressive as if it had been red. COLLEGE. 27 " He had evidently undergone a very decided change, spiritually, after a few years' residence in Edinburgh ; one of the principal means being the singularly impressive ministry of Dr Gordon, for whom, to the last, he cherished the greatest reverence and affection. One Sabbath evening in 1828 (3d August), he had been reading to my mother and myself one of Dr Gordon's sermons, in the only volume published during his life, inscribed to the Hope Park congregation. The text was ' Being born again by the Word of God.' When he had closed, on my mother leaving the room, he said to me, ' That was the sermon that most deeply impressed me, and first led me to embrace right views of the truth.' I, of course, felt much interest in hearing this from himself, and immediately marked with my pencil the sermon, and the date of his reading it. " He used often to bring an essay or address, delivered at the de- bating or some other society with which he was connected, and read it aloud as we sat at work. Once I remember him standing, manu- script in hand, with his back to the fire, facing his little audience ; and, getting interested in his subject, he became very vehement in his gesticulations, so that my mother looked up from her work, and said, ' Willie, Willie, if you go on at that rate in the pulpit, you'll knock all the dust out, and blind the poor old bodies sitting below.' So that essay ended in a laugh. " Being first in lodgings, and then resident tutor in private fami- lies, he had no convenient place in which to deposit his many handsomely-bound books — prizes, or presents from admiring friends. From time to time, therefore, he had brought them to leave under my care ; and when the period arrived which was to transfer him to Greenock, and he came to remove the volumes which had so long had their place in my small bookcase, it seemed as if a friendship of so many years' standing, and in many respects so interesting to me, had now come to a close. He knew and saw how deeply I felt it, and evinced no little emotion himself. Coming back on the follow- ing day, on my entering the room, I was surprised to find him pacing backwards and forwards in a state of considerable excitement. Referring to our last meeting, he immediately said, ' I have just 28 COLLEGE. been praying for you.' I need not say that this touched me even Tnore than the removal of the books had done. "There are other reminiscences of my beloved friend which I cherish ; but, as you may think of those I have given, they are not very suitable for insertion in the life of such a man as Dr Cun- ningham." His fourth session was occupied with the study of Natural Philosophy under Sir John Leslie ; and at the end of it, Professor Pillans recommended him for tutor in the family of a country gentleman, Mr Scott of Synton. A tutorship, with bed, board, and forty or fifty pounds a year, is a great help to many a Scotch aspirant to the ministry. It is the first humble step on the way up. When the family which he enters is possessed of sense and kindliness, the situation is comfortable enough. The Scotts of Synton lived in George Square, Edinburgh, during the winter months ; removing to the family seat in the country in summer. Synton is a beautiful property on the water of Aill, known to anglers. It is a piece of Selkirkshire set down in the midst of Roxburghshire. Of old, it belonged, with much other land there, to Glasgow Cathedral, and the Bishops often came to enjoy the sport of falconry among the sweet pastoral hills. Cunningham went do^vn with the Scotts to Synton in May 1824, and resided with them in country and in town till the spring of 1827. These were years of anguish to the nation. In 1825 seventy banks broke in three weeks; and the commercial prostration of one year was followed by the drought and famine of the next. " The hind calved in the field, and forsook it ; because there was no grass." The only reminiscence of Cunningham which seems to linger about Synton is that he was a " very quiet, retiring young man." Its proximity to Dunse enabled him to enjoy the pleasure of frequent visits to his mother's house, when his gentle presence brought gladness to all the little circle. If the happy group of brothers and cousins wanted play he joined in it heartily. But if they were in a quieter mood, he seized the opportunity to turn the conversation to the one thing needful, "and," says a survivor of that j)leasant company, "most earnestly and decidedly, but COLLEGE. 29 with a kindness and gentleness peculiar to himself, he would say to us words which even at the time sunk more deeply than he knew, and which never have been, and never will be, forgotten while we live/' The strong bent of his mind appears in a letter to his friend Patterson during his first summer at Synton : — " I have spent a good deal of time in reading the famous Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants, more in consequence of Locke's well-kno'«Ti recommen- dation of him — ' If you wish your son to be a good reasoner, make him read Chillingworth ' — than from the subject of the work ; though I have always, I don't know why, felt considerable interest in the examination of the Roman Catholic Controversy. The work, I am inclined to think, is well deserving of the high character Locke has given it. The author is certainly a most acute and subtle disputant." In the beginning of November the Synton family returned to town, and Cunningham entered the Divinity Hall. Hugh Miller was working at Niddry House that winter, and perhaps the two men who were afterwards to love each other so well, may have met, all unconsciously, as the mason took his Saturday rambles in the town. According to the evil custom then tolerated, the Professors of Divinity were all clergymen holding parochial charges at the same time. An old Edinburgh student thus describes Brunton, the Professor of Hebrew:* — "An old gentleman with a great, squab, bald head, fat, pinkish- white cheeks, portly, and punctiliously clean general appearance and very fat calves neatly encased in black stockings. How so fat-faced and placid a man, in such specklessly clean linen and apparel, should have been so near an approach to inutility personified, I do not know." A very near approach certainly ; yet it is doubtful whether one or both of his colleagues did not make a nearer approach still. Dr Eitchie, Professor of Theology— the same who as incumbent of St Andrew's, Glasgow, began the organ controversy in the Church of Scotland — was described by Carlyle, as "simply raying out darkness for a quarter of a century." Dr Meiklejohn, Professor of Church History, was a * In Macmillan's Magazine. so COLLEGE. large, jolly man, who had a habit of yawning when engaged in public prayer, and these yawns seemed to express truly enough his interest in the whole business. The students quite freely indulged in newspapers and conversa- tion in the classes. Every day thirty or forty of them, after answering to their names at roll-call, slipped out, and wasted no more time on what they felt to be a sham. "We called out ' Here!' but the next moment we were there no longer." This was Dr Cunningham's own description of these doings in after days. EDUCATING INFLUENCES. The education for the work of his life was due to other powers than any within the classroom. The controversies of the time formed his mind. Controversies made Edinburgh in those days a very cave of ^olus, full of struggling wrecks and the din of tempests. These controversies, unintelligible to the hasty beholder as the airy " skirmishes of the kites and crows," had all a plan and a purpose, if we but believe in the providence of God. In the year 1820, war was declared between the Moderates in the Church and the Christian Instructor. The manasrers in the General Assembly, tortured by the trenchant periodical, passed a vote of censure upon it as " highly injurious and calumnious." The Instructor enjoyed the storm. If they wanted battle, they should have it. Month after month, the Instructor lashed them ; Assembly after Assembly, it kept them in fear. The evangelical party gathered courage as their champion dealt his telling blows. Other contro- versies, powerful in forming ecclesiastical character, contributed to the training of Cunningham for his great part in the discussions of a later period. The "Little Dunkeld Case " formed the subject of a three years' strife. Little Dunkeld, at the mouth of the Highlands, is a parish of 8000 people, four-fifths of them Gaelic-speaking. A person ignorant of Gaelic was presented for minister to the parish. The Moderates would have settled this man as spiritual instructor of a people whose language he did not understand, if they had not been prevented by the small majority of eight in the General Assembly. " Little Dunkeld, " said Andrew Thomson, " is the mouth COLLEGE. 31 of the Highlands, and ought certainly to have a Gaelic tongue in it. " It seems strange that there should have been any controversy about such a case. But it was necessary that the question should be raised : " For what use does a gospel ministry exist ?" Much came out of that question. It led at last to the Disruption of 1843. The controversy regarding pluralities was the same struggle under another name — the struggle to secure a qualified, a labouring, and an efficient ministry. The abuse of pluralities in the Church of Scotland was at that time amazingly barefaced. Thus, we read of " one individual uniting in his single person the offices of Professor of Humanity, and Natural History, and Chemistry, with the col- legiate charge of a tremendous parish of 20,000 people." " I see it," said an honest countryman to a pluralist, " I see it ; you just want to make a bye job of our souls." That was the time, too, when the Apocrypha controversy raged. Robert Haldane being in London, called at the office of the British and Foreign Bible Society in East Street, and forgot his umbrella. That umbrella had consequences. Returning for it next day, Haldane got into conversation with a sub-committee, and was surprised and pained to learn that it was the practice of the Society to intermingle the Apocrypha with their editions of the Bible, under the idea of rendering the Word of God more accept- able to the people of the Greek and Romish Churches. The great Apocrypha controversy ensued, a fierce battle that raged many years, agitating the whole Christian world, and involving the whole question of the canon and inspiration of Scripture. As Andrew Thomson said to Robert Haldane, " All of human infirmity that now obscures this great work will pass away like smoke, but the flame will continue to burn, and prove a beacon to distant posterity." It has been said with truth of the great cham- pion of a pure Bible : " He drove home to the mind of the Pro- testant world the conviction that the Bible must be purified from this remaining taint. It ought to have been accomplished by Luther ; its accomplishment will preserve for ever the name of Andrew Thomson." To that time, also, belongs the great agitation for the abolition 32 COLLEGE. of slavery in our West Indian Islands, in which Wilberforce and Buxton won their fame, and Brougham did valiantly ; and which issued, after a struggle of so many years, in freedom to 800,000 slaves, and our deliverance from a great national crime. These controversies were Cunningham's school. He took a pro- found interest in them. " I remember," says Dr Patterson, " how, when one of the controversies which raged in Edinburgh in his early days, had somewhat fretted and discoraj^osed his mind, he went and bought James's work on Christian Charity, alleging that he greatly needed admonition with respect to that grace." The public battles of the time were fought over again by the students in their debating societies. " The spirit and animation of these juvenile proceedings are extraordinary ; and the perfection of the drill for public life which college lads have contrived for themselves is quite wonderful." Not long after he had entered the Hall, great abuses were found to exist in the management of the theological library; and to secure their correction, and prevent their recurrence, a committee of students was organised, of which Cunningham was the secretary. This was the first controversy in which he had ever engaged, but he threw himself into it with great energy, and carried it on unweariedly for more than three years. Small as it now appears, it involved a collision with the whole theological faculty, and led to legal consultation with James Moncreiff and Thomas Thomson, as counsel for the students. Much time was in this way consumed, and a good deal of discussion was needed. Minutes had to be kept, memorials had to be drawn uj), counsel had to be instructed. But never did Cunningham seem more in his element than when carrying on this case ; and a friend well remembers that once, after a long day's sederunt on the matter, when he was asked, "Are you not tired of controversy ?" his reply was : " If my life is spared, it will be spent in controversy, I believe." In 1827, a few young men, students for the Church, formed themselves, into a " Church Law Society." Its object was to cul- tivate acquaintance with the history, constitution, laws, and forms of the Church of Scotland. In the course of its existence, the COLLEGE. 33 Society achieved a printed volume, " The Book of Styles/' whose red cover was long a familiar object on the table beside the clerk in church courts. At the meetings of the Society, an essay was read by one of the members, and then the subject, like the football at Dunse, was flung up for discussion. A heavy, folio volume, in shape and size like a ledger, was procured, into which it was intended that each essayist should copy his essay. The most part of this great book remains blank paper to this day, only three or four of the essayists having had the patience to copy out their essays. Among these, fortunately, was William Cunningham, who wrote the Introductory Essay. It is called " An Essay on the Constitution of the Church of Scotland," and occupies forty-seven pages of the great book. Considering that it was written by a young man of two-and -twenty, the remarkable thing about it is, that there is not the slightest flavour of youth in the whole of it. It is closely and securely reasoned, and every position in it bears unquestionable traces of having been elaborately thought out. The very same views of the nature and inherent powers of the Church of Christ, the very same singularly moderate but singularly firm Presbyterianism, the very same views of the peculiar constitutional standing of the Church of Scotland, exactly as he was wont to assert and maintain them in mature life, are all there. Cunningham's writings usually defy extracts. Everything of his is so logically compact, that the whole must be read in order to get the effect of any part. But the following passage from the Church Law Society Essay is extremely charac- teristic, and must not be omitted: — " Though the rights of the Church are confirmed and sanctioned to her by the law of the land, it is not to be supposed for a moment that they are derived originally from that authority ; especially when, as in our own Church, the State has expressly sanctioned the claim which the church advances to these rights from her intrinsic and inherent power as a Church. It was a missing of this distinction, simple and obvious as it is, which occasioned the broad and un- qualified assertion of the infidel doctrine of Hobbes in that strange display of ignorance, folly, and arrogance which was made by the 34 COLLEGE, supreme civil judge of Scotland in the General Assemby before last (1826) — a doctrine which made the Church in the fullest sense the tool and creature of the State. The doctrine was substantially this, that the Church of Scotland has no power or authority as a Church, but derives whatever power or authority she has, or can have, from the State; a doctrine, the very reverse of which is asserted in express terms in our Confession of Faith, and is of course confirmed by the law of the land itself. Had the doctrine of the learned judge been the law of the land, then the Church of Scotland would have been bound to have renounced her connection with the State which had thus deprived her of her inherent and in- alienable right as a Church of Christ." The supreme civil judge of Scotland whose speech is thus commented on was the Right Honourable Charles Hope, Lord President of the Court of Session. Citizens of Edinburgh yet remember his erect figure and determined step, as he walked the streets with a staff of the old school as tall as himself. " He was," Lord Cockburn says, " a man of a hot temperament not cooled by a sound head." We shall have more of him anon. The occasion of his speech in the General Assembly of 1826 was a debate on the subject of pluralities. The evangelical party had renewed their attack on that great abuse. Godly Makgill of Glasgow, outspoken Garment of Rosskeen, and other earnest men lifted up their voices against it. The Lord President was a member of Assembly, and took upon him to lecture them roundly. " It was in vain," he said, " for the Church to talk of inherent powers. It has neither legal nor delegated powers except what it has received from Parliament." During the year 1827 and the half of 1828, Cunningham lived as tutor in a family where his work appears to have been unin- teresting enough, but he did it faithfully. As Samuel Johnson said of the dull book which he had undertaken to read, " Why, sir, I cannot say that I like it much; but I'll go through with it." When the duties of this situation became too irksome, he gave it up, and betook himself to private teaching while living in lodgings with his brothers Andrew and Charles, who were now in Edinburgh learning the writer and accountant business. The three brothers COLLEGE. 35 occupied a room and two bed-closets in Adam Street. Andrew took charge of the housekeeping, and was notable for making the most of their slender means. Dr Chalmers, at Kilmany, invented a coffee of his own, the beverage being an infusion of burnt rye. Some ingenious shoj)keeper in Edinburgh invented a coffee also, made of roasted oats. Andrew Cunningham bought a supply for breakfast ; and William, with an utter indifference to small com- forts which characterised him all his life, placidly drank the gruel- like beverage without a single remark. During his last session at the Divinity Hall, he attended a class of Anatomy under Dr Knox, who was in great repute then as a lecturer and demonstrator. Sir George Sinclair and Lord Glenorchy, afterwards Marquis of Breadalbane, attended the class that session. It was remarked among the students that subjects for dissection were very plentiful that winter, — a fact which came to have a shocking significance when the dreadful story of the West Port murders broke out immediately afterwards. There could be no doubt that the bodies on which they had seen the demonstrations given were those of the victims in those appalling atrocities, by which, as Sir Walter Scott said, the beggar had lost his privilege of being safe from robbery, and the poet's saying was no longer true — " Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator." Meanwhile his correspondence with his friend Patterson goes steadily on. Books read and essays written occupy, as may be supposed, a good deal of it. An essay, for instance, on the Evi- dences, and " the controversy between Mearns and Chalmers," leads him, as in after days, into wide mazes of reading. The literature "on the origin of evil " has to be read up, among other departments; and here he " can as yet hardly form any estimate of its satis- factoriness as a solution of the whole of this very difficult question." In later days he had formed a decided estimate. Not without interest, we see Clarke's a •priori argument carrying him captive. "Law* reasons very strenuously and very ably against it." But " I don't think that Law is successful. To be sure, every person capable of understanding must, I think, have a predilection for this * Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle. 36 COLLEGE. celebrated argument, and wish it to be conclusive. For there is something very sublime in the simplicity of the argument by which the existence of the infinite and eternal Being is deduced imme- diately from the nature and existence of space and duration. The argument, indeed, is so simple, that its conclusiveness must be determined, not so much by reasoning, as by a simple appeal to consciousness." On which follows a compact statement of the gist of it, and wdiat the acceptance or rejection of it must turn upon. Yet though he sympathises mth Clarke, he cannot but admire Law ; and so he gets his " Considerations :" — " He is one of those sleepers and filthy dreamers, as Warburton calls them, who deny the immateriality and natural immortality of the soul, and, of course, its existence as a sentient and percipient being between death and the resurrection." Here follows a brief and complete indication of the relation of this view to Socinianism, especially in its bearing on Christology and the Atonement, quite in the style of the notes on books which his students knew so well. Yet he can forgive Law much for one thing : — "One thing I like very much in Law's works is the great number of references he makes to other authors who have already treated of these subjects. It is a kind of knowledge of which 1 am very fond." In November 1828 Dr Chalmers came to Edinburgh, and Cun- ningham's connection with the Library immediately brought them into contact. " Dr Chalmers came to town, and was installed on Thursday se'ennight. He sent a message to me that night, and I had a long conversation with him next morning on the subject of the Divinity Library. I have talked a good deal with him, not only about the Library, but also about his plans of teaching ; and from all I have seen and heard, both in public and in private, I have no doubt, looking only to the natural operation of means, that he will prove an instrument of almost incalculable usefulness, and that his appoint- ment will form a bright era in the history of our Church. It is impossible not to indulge the hope that the time to favour our Zion, yea, the set time, is come." COLLEGE. 37 The following is not exactly the subject on wbich those who only half knew Cunningham would expect him to become enthusiastic. No doubt Dr Chalmers swept all before him in the rush of his eloquence. But it was in the hearer as well as in the orator. Cunningham had in him, and kept to the end, that which thrilled to the assertion and vindication of the main Christian interests, and the vitalities of the Christian experience. It might be his lot to spend much of his life in harness, contending on the borders ao-ainst Edom and Moab. But what moved his arm and animated his battle was that which those frontiers defended — the length and breadth of the Promised Land, and that goodly mountain and Lebanon : — " Chalmers' first lecture lasted an hour and three-quarters. It was most decidedly successful — worthy of the man, the occasion, and the subject. It contained a general view of the subjects and divisions of theological science, and a view of the general principles of philo- sophic investigation, as applicable to theology. He concluded with a splendid pleading in behalf of men of imagination and feeling against the charge of being mere declaimers; and shewed, with great strength of argument and force of illustration, that in theology, the feelings and emotions which the contemplation of truth is fitted to excite are the ultimate and terminating object of our labours ; and that the discovery and establishment of truths, or the operations of the understanding on divine things, are essential, indeed, but still essential only as means to an end — that is, as the proper means of producing emotion or feeling in a rational being." It can be discerned, also, that there has been speculation in the community and among the students, whether Dr Chalmers, with all his eloquence and power, will prove well enough read, and sufiS- ciently careful of doctrinal accuracy, for the work of a Professor of Divinity. No doubt, those of the Moderate side have been doubt- ful and supercilious on this subject. Cunningham, as the champion of the Evangelicals in the Divinity Hall, has doubtless had his private anxieties, looking forward to possible weak points in the Professor which would have to be covered and defended. All the more does he triumph in announcing that — " The most surprising, and at the same time the most valuable, 38 COLLEGE. feature in all his lectures, has been the singular soundness and correctness* of the views and opinions which they brought before us. Upon all the difficult subjects of theology, and the connection between natural theology and the evidences of Christianity ; and where, per- haps, he was more likely still to have failed, on the nature aud importance of the relative objects and spheres of Biblical criticism and systematic theology, his views have been as judicious, the lights in which he has viewed the subject have been as correct, as if he had been one of those cold and heartless syllogisers whom he ridiculed in his first lecture as dealing only in the 'osteology,' the 'technology,' and the ' mere nominalities of science.' " Who does not see the expression of approving satisfaction on this student's face as the lecture clears the rocks he knows so well ? who does not hear the decisive utterances as he issues from the class, which make it plain that if any one has any objection to make to this professor, such objector's do-wnfall is prepared for him then and there ? James Begg came to Edinburgh that winter to enjoy a closing session under Chalmers. He joined a debating society connected with the University. It was the hot time of the Row heresy, and the subject of debate one evening was. Whether assurance is, or is not, of the essence of faith ? The debate was opened for the affirm- ative by one student. Then a very tall and thin young man rose and delivered a speech on the other side, of astonishing power, and shewing a wonderful command of language. This was William Cunningham ; and Dr Begg says that, magnificently as he spoke in after years, he perhaps never surpassed this speech in the debating society. If, according to Macaulay, every speaker learns his art at the expense of his audience, few speakers have ever cost their audi- ences less than William Cunningham. In the autumn of 1828, when he was looking forward to receive his licence to preach the gospel, he expressed himself thus on the choice of a profession, in a letter to his friend Patterson : — " I don't think it at all necessary, to entitle a man to adojat any profession, that he be, or think himself, more fit for that particular * Underlined in the original. COLLEGE. 39 profession than for any other. I think myself entitled and called upon to become a minister, although I believe there are other pro- fessions for which I am more fit than this ; for there are profes- sions, the duties of which I could discharge adequately, which is a great deal more than I expect ever to be able to do with regard to the duties of the pastoral office. All that appears to be necessary to entitle a man to adopt a profession is simply, that he he fit for that profession. When a man is fit for any particular profession, his oivn inclination to engage in it, concurring with an opportunity in God's providence, seems to me all that is necessary to constitute a call upon him to adopt it." Early in December 1828, he went out to Dunse to be licensed by the Presbytery there to preach the gospel. A friend met him in a state of great agitation on his way to the place where the Presby- tery met that day. It was a room in the Swan Inn at Dunse. He writes to Patterson on the occasion: "I have been so much occupied of late with business, that I am afraid I have not devoted sufficient time to the proper and peculiar preparation for this interesting transaction — to meditation and prayer, and to the serious and careful examinations of those doctrines to which I have expressed my solemn assent. How very imperfectly do we often employ, for the purposed deepening of our impressions of divine things, even those dispensations which are best fitted in their own nature to produce this ! With regard to the Confession of Faith, I think I can say sincerely, that I believe the whole doctrine contained in it. I believe to be true every doctrine which is really and expressly asserted in it, though I don't feel myself called upon to maintain that all its statements are expressed in the most strictly correct and appropriate language." His first sermon was preached in Mr Bonar's Church at Larbert. He took for his text. Psalm xxiii. 6, " Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever" — that grand strain of exulting hope to which the soul rises in contemplation of the loving-kindness of the Lord. The Sabbath following, he preached the same sermon for Dr Jones in Lady Glenorchy's Church, Edinburgh. A number of 40 COLLEGE. his fellow-students were present to hear. The discourse was read; and the young preacher, not perfectly self-possessed perhaps, hap- pened, in the course of it, to turn over two leaves at once, and did not discover his mistake till it was too late to correct it. Deeply annoyed, he met his friends after service, expecting no mercy at their hands. But a more mortifying discovery was behind. Not one of them — alas for logic ! — had noticed the gap in the sermon at all. Dr Alexander Duff has a vivid recollection of meeting him about this time. " The first occasion," says Dr Duff, " on which I ever saw him, or heard him speak, or even heard his name, was when on a visit to Edinburgh in the early spring of 1829, to consult with Drs Inglis, Muir, Chalmers, and Thomson, relative to my proposed appointment as the Church of Scotland's first missionary to India. The whole country was then in the throes of a most violent con- vulsion and upheaving on the subject of 'Catholic Emancipation,' as it was called. The great Edinburgh meeting had newly been held, at which Dr Chalmers delivered his celebrated speech that shot with the rapidity and force of forked lightning over the whole land. A meeting of theological students was to be held to discuss the subject. Curiosity drew me to it. After several speakers had addressed it, one rose up, taller than his fellows, with a head which, once seen, left an indelible impression on the mind. His speech was as remarkable as his personal aj)pearance. Fraught with varied information, closely argumentative in its style, sharp in repartee, terrible in invective, merciless in its exposure of fallacies, and yet translucently clear in expression, without any flowers of rhetoric — it evidently produced a deep impression. With eager anxiety I asked for the name. It was ' Mr Cunningham,' who was then ' finishing his studies at the Hall.' ' Well, well,' was my involuntary exclamation, ' if that man live, he will, in debate and controversy, be another Dr Andrew Thomson.' " Looking forward to his life's work, he received from his friend Patterson the news that the latter had been appointed to the charge of the parish of Falkirk. The letter which this drew from Cunningham, affords the best illustration of the nature of their COLLEGE. 41 friendship, and it brings to view the deeper springs of his own life. It is therefore printed nearly entire : — " I most sincerely rejoice that the parish of Falkirk Ls to have you for its minister. I look upon it as a special interposition of the great Head of the church, and as a subject of heartfelt gratitude. In the circumstances of the case there was little probability that, except by your appointment, the vacancy would be well supplied." ..." You will, I have no doubt, see in this matter, especially when viewed in connection with your recent prospects and situation, an additional instance of that goodness which has led you all your life long ; and I trust and pray that you may be enabled to devote faithfully all your faculties and all your energies to the work which is to be committed to you. The parish of Falkirk will afford abundant scope for all your energies of body and of mind ; but you will not attempt the discharge of your duties in your own strength, for the fulness that is treasured up in Christ is inexhaustible. You have before you a larger scope for Christian ambition, — that of turning many to righteousness, and shining as the stars for ever and ever, — and a wider field of Christian usefiUness in promoting God's glory and the interests of Christ's kingdom, — than you would probably have had in any other parish in Scotland. I cannot help thinking, from the present state of religion in Falkirk, viewed in connection with the general spirit and prospects of the age, there is good reason to hope that the introduction of a faithful, zealous, and pains- taking ministiy among them would produce a great reaction, and is likely to be eminently blessed. Should you be instrumental in producing this reaction, I trust that you will feel that it is a work which God claims as peculiarly his own, and the glory of which He will not give to another ; and that you wQl be enabled at all times to feel, as you have felt in regard to honours infinitely inferior, that you have nothing which you have not received, that it is wholly of God's grace that you are what you are. Whatever may be your success, you will certainly meet with many difficulties and many crosses. You will see the preaching of the gospel proving in many cases a savour of death unto death. But you know where to apply for encouragement and consolation. You must make great sacrifices of ease and taste ; but you are in possession of principles which, if conscientiously applied, will enable you to make them cheerfully and willingly. The great principle which a parish minister ought always to keep in view is, that the spiritual edification of the people committed to his charge is his direct, immediate, and paramount duty — the duty which supersedes every other. In Falkirk you will be under the necessity of deriving your chief enjoyment from the discharge of your parochial duties ; and this very necessity win be a valuable principle in the formation of character. It is not unattended with collateral advantages and pleasures." Here, or a little later probably, belongs an incident which may 4 42 COLLEGE. best be told in the words of the lady who witnessed it, the widow of Dr Cunningham's dearest friend, addressed to Mrs Cunningham. An amusing instance of your husband's fearlessness occurs to me. There was to be a great debate in the General Assembly, and the crush on entering the house was great. Instead of going to their allotted places in the house, Cunningham and Patterson went with a party to the gallery. Most of us had got established to our satis- faction, when we perceived your poor husband wedged into the crowd at the door, his lofty head bending against a gothic arch. A scrap of pencilled paper conveyed to him the intelligence that there was room for him beside us, if he could reach us. He looked before and behind, but there was no road. In a moment he mounted the book-board in front of the gallery, and, to the dismay of the Moderates below, half-a-dozen of whom his fall would have annihilated, he balanced himself from the one end of the gaUery to the other — a feat which drew from the house a deafening cheer, such as would have shaken the nerves of any ordinary man. That was the first cheer with which he was gi'eeted in the General Assembly — the first time he scattered dismay in the Moderates' side of the house." CHAPTER III. OREENOCK. "IN the month of May 1829, among other ministers who came up -^ to Edinburgh to attend the Assembly, was Dr Scott, the vener- able pastor of the New Middle Parish, Greenock. He was walking and talking with a friend, when a sudden attack of paralysis came on. From this attack he recovered to some extent. But he remained permanently disabled, and never again took part in public service. Thenceforward his ministerial work had to be done by substitute. As soon as he saw that he was to remain " feeble and sore broken/' he requested a friend in Edinburgh, the Rev. James Marshall, then of the Tolbooth parish, to look out for some promising young preacher to be his assistant. Mr Marshall spoke to Mr John J. Bonar, and asked him to go. But Mr Bonar was prevented by a previous engagement of the same nature in another part of the country. " Is there any preacher of your acquaintance whom you can recommend?" was the next inquiry. Bonar suggested his friend Cunningham, whose name was thereupon reported to Dr Scott. Dr Chalmers, who knew and greatly loved Dr Scott, wrote to him with characteristic warmth in favour of his young friend. The result was an arrangement that Mr Cunningham should give a trial of his Qjifts to the Conoregation. He went to Greenock with seven sermons — his whole stock — in his valise, preached for three Sab- baths and on one week-day, and then returned to Edinburgh. Soon afterwards he received a kindly letter from Dr Scott, who, with the hearty concurrence of the Kirk-session and Congregation, engaged him to be his assistant for one year from January 1830. It was in the end of December ] 829 that Mr Cunningham was thus welcomed 44? GREENOCK. to his first sphere of labour as a preacher of the Gospel. It was a pleasant introduction to his life-work. The town of Greenock is beautifully set between its fine stretch of hills and the noble Clyde. That part of a plant which is below the earth does not differ more from the part above the earth, than one end of the town differs from the other. The old town, a black, unsightly root, has shot out towards the west, and flowered into as beautiful a city as one could wish to see. Greenock is as lively and as full of bustle as a town upon the Clyde should be. Much that was characteristic of the West of Scotland, so stout and true in the old time, still lingers about it. There is something droll in its kindly and homely familiarity. People, even of good position, who have anything of the old school in them, address each other as ' Sandie," and " Willie," and " Robbie." " Much of my good nature towards mankind," says John Gait in his Autobiography, " is owing to my associates in Greenock. Even when dipping the tip of its rod into the honey of gossip, practical Greenock is good-natured. Its people are as void of malice as the leech that sucks blood from instinct, and sometimes effects a cure, when it only thinks of gratify- ing an appetite." The Middle Parish Church, situated in Cathcart Square, and therefore known locally as the "Square Church," is a large, comfort- able, elderly building, capable of containing fourteen or fifteen hundred people. When Cunningham entered on his labours, it was full, but it soon became overflowing. Additional sittings were fitted up in window recesses and other spare corners. The pulpit and gallery stairs were crowded. More and more impressed by his discourses, people remarked: "There is great outcome in that young man." After he had been assistant to Dr Scott for four or five months, the growing attachment of the Congregation shaped itself into a movement to have him ordained and settled as his colleague and successor. In this movement the venerable Dr Scott heartily con- curred. To the Magistrates, in whom jointly with other parties the patronage of the living was vested, he addressed a letter conveying his own and his people's desire : — " To this situation," he said, " Mr Cunningham's relation to the GREENOCK. 45 Congregation and me recommend him in a peculiar manner. He came to us a stranger, recommended by the most competent judges, and for nearly six months has he more than sustained the high character given him, in private society, as a catechist, as visitor of the sick, or leader of the exercises of religious societies, and as a lecturer and preacher of the gospel. His youth, vigour and talents, his piety and zeal, with modesty and prudence, his learning and good taste, fit him in a singular manner for the arduous duties of this parish and Congregation. To me he has been all I could wish in his situation, and to him I desire to be all he could wish in my situation. But while Mr Cunningham acquires esteem and affection among us in proportion as he becomes known, I cannot but perceive that he commends himself to other parishes looking out for a minister, and who naturally desire one so tried and approved. And could any one blame a young man of distinguished abilities for relinquishing an uncertain for a certain situation?" Mr Cunningham received a "presentation" as colleague and successor. He was ordained by the Presbytery of Paisley, to which ecclesiastical division Greenock then belonged, on the 15th of October 1830, a few days after he had completed his twenty-fifth year. On the following Sabbath he was " introduced " to his flock, as the custom is, by his friend Mr Patterson of Falkirk. In the afternoon of that day, he preached on the text : " I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling " (1 Cor. ii. 3). Many in Greenock still remember the touching humility and noble manli- ness of that sermon. He was now a minister of that Church of Scotland regarding which he had thus expressed himself to his friend Patterson, in a letter ^nritten a few months before. If it be written in a tone of youthful enthusiasm, the sentiments are such as Cunningham in his maturer years would not have modified : — " What an admirable system ours is for the Christian government of a country! and how admirably suited, when admininistered by faithful men, for subordinating all the relations of society and all the occupations of life, as well as the duties resulting from them, to the obligations incumbent upon men as members of Christ's 46 GREENOCK. church and subjects of Christ's authority. In fact, I do not recollect in the history of Christianity, anything at all corresponding to the idea of a Christian Church except what was exemplified when Presbyterianism flourished in its glory and in its strength. There is no other example of a country where Christianity, viewed both as a system of faith and manners, and also as a system of government and discipline, so moulded the general aspect of society, and gave it its peculiar and distinctive character. There is no example of a nation, where all the obligations incumbent upon men as members of the Christian Church were so thoroughly enforced, and so generally and distinctly recognised as operating principles. Perhaps Edward Irving and some of his followers make too much of the Church, and have too great a tendency to sink our character as individual Christians in one general character as Churchmen or Church mem- bers ; but I cannot help thinking that there is a much more general tendency to the other extreme, viz., to sink our character as members of the Christian society in our character as individual Christians, and to lose sight of the Church as a distinct society, divinely con- stituted, and invested with certain rights and prerogatives." Dr Scott had been minister of the Middle Parish for nearly forty years. A powerful, useful ministry his had been. He had known great sorrows, and his life, as well as his lips, had taught great lessons to his people. His weight of character gave him great authority in the parish. The relation of colleague and successor to an aged minister does not always work well. It is not easy for the old and failing man to witness the favour and popularity of the younger. It is not easy for the younger man to accommodate himself to the ways of the older. "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together." But Mr Cunningham's connection with Dr Scott was free from all such unpleasing features. Two or three times every week the assistant went up to the manse to converse about the state of the parish. Every Saturday he spent an hour or two with the old divine in talking over his intended subjects of discourse. Every Monday morning he invariably took breakfast at the manse. The Sabbath services were talked over, with all manly frankness on the GREENOCK. 47 one side, and all the rich fulness of Christian experience on the other. Whenever Cunningham had to go from home on any of the numerous calls of duty which keep a Presbyterian minister so much on the highway, the first thing he did on his return was to visit Dr Scott, and tell him all the news. At communion seasons, Dr Scott, very frail and tottering, was assisted to the table by the young minister with gentle care, as a father by a son. Many years afterwards, Dr Cunningham thus expressed himself in an introductory notice to a volume of Dr Scott's sermons : — " I can only say of him, as Burnet said of Leighton, that I have the greatest veneration for his memory, and that I reckon my knowledge of him among the greatest blessings of my life, and for which I know I must give an account to God in the great da}^" It was not a light thing for a young man of twenty-five to become the instructor of the people who had so long enjoyed the thoroughly able ministry of Dr Scott. The amount of his labours would have broken down most young men. He lectured and preached every Sabbath, according to the wise old custom of Scotland, which requires the combination of textual with expository preaching. He lectured every Wednesday evening. Every Thursday he had a large class of young men, and another of young women. He was most laborious in pastoral visitation and in visiting the sick. He found in the Middle Parish a vigorous specimen of the noble old parochial economy. There was a fine staff of elders and of deacons. There was an admirable system of Sabbath Schools. The minister who is the centre of a machinery like this does not lack work. Dr Scott, appreciating his gift for the systematic treatm.ent of theology, advised him to preach a course of sermons upon the basis of the Shorter Catechism. He did so ; and, beginning with the first question, he went regularly on, taking up a question along with a suitable text of Scripture every Sabbath afternoon. The congregation of the Square Church early became aware that their young minister was a rising man. Long before this, his old Hamilton teacher, Mr Kemp, had come to settle in Greenock. A lady, who happened to be a member of Dr Scott's congregation, asked him once whether he ever had among his pupils one in whom 48 GREENOCK. he saw the promise of future eminence. " Yes," he said, " there was a boy named William Cunningham, once a scholar of his, in whom he certainly saw the elements of future greatness. If that boy lived, time would shew that he had not erred in his anticipation." He spoke so emphatically, that the scholar's name was imprinted on the lady's memory, and when Cunningham filled the Middle Parish pulpit, she called to mind the prediction, and, in the matchless power and vigour of the young divine, she saw its approaching fulfilment. His frank, kindly, simple ways, had a great charm for that frank and cordial people. The Scottish people are quick to mark the slight indications of character — those unconscious discoveries of himself in little things by which a man is most truly and thoroughly known. In these unconscious ways the young pastor discovered himself to a flock who grew more attached to him every day. A sailor had died at sea, leaving a widow and young family, one of them an infant that had never seen its father. Cunningham frequently called to comfort the sorrowing heart. Entering the house one day, he found the babe alone in its cradle, the mother having gone out on some little errand, as poor full-handed women must. The child stirred and began to cry, and when the mother returned the minister was busy rocking the cradle — a simple act, which, of course, never was forgotten. A gentleman, with whom I have conversed, gave me a curious proof of the ardent love in which Cunningham was held by his Greenock flock. It was the custom of himself and* some others of the congregation to follow him home from the church to liis lodging on prayer-meeting nights. They never made up to him or spoke to him. They merely kept his tall figure in sight, as he walked home with his usual rolling stride ; and the pleasure of simply looking upon one so beloved was all they sought. Blessings on their kindly hearts that could so love a servant of Jesus for the Master's sake ! " I have everything to learn," the young pastor had said, when paying his first visit as an ordained minister to one of the families of the Middle Parish, and he said it so humbly that he won their hearts. There was no stifihess or formality about him. He would GREENOCK. 49 enter the shop of some hearer, and chat for half an hour if business was not brisk. If he found a sympathiser — and Greenock seems to have produced sympathisers rather abundantly — a raj)id intercom- munion of snuff boxes went on the while. The elders of the Middle Parish were in the habit of holding a fellowship meeting among themselves. A portion of Scripture was read, and they all gave their remarks upon it. Cunningham, identifying himself like a true presbyter with his brother elders, attended the meeting, joining in the exercises, and quietly giving his remarks on the portion of Scripture when it came to his turn. At any hour of the day or night he was ready to visit the sick. A dying man wished to see him on one occasion, and a message was sent him to that effect. Something hindered his getting away immediately, but he promised to come that same evening. He fell, however, into other occupations, and forgot. Next morning he remembered, and set off immediately to visit the sufferer. Meet- ing one of his elders, he told him where he was going. " Ah ! sir, he is beyond your reach ; he died this morning." The young minister was greatly affected. "That is a lesson to me," he said, "never to trifle with such a solemn duty." He went straight to the new-made widow, and told her his fault, with strong words of self-condemnation^ and with a humility at which she wondered. A young man lay ill of typhus fever. Mr Cunningham went to visit him. The young man's sister thoughtfully placed a chair for the minister as far as possible from the bed, to lessen the danger of infection. She had occasion to leave the room, and returning, she found that Mr Cunningham had moved the chair close up to the bed, and was bending over it, earnestly speaking to the patient. He had evidently forgotten the danger in the desire to do good to the sick man's soul. He had a rare power of winning the affections and confidence of children. To the end of his life it was wonderful to hear him talk to a child. He seemed to be able to seize a boy's heart at once. Mr Henry Scott, a commercial gentleman in Glasgow, thus describes the commencement of his love for Cunningham, and enduring vene- 50 GREENOCK. ration for his name. His parents attended the Square Church in Greenock. His father died, leaving him a young orphan. On .the funeral day friends gathered in the room beside the coffin. Cun- ningham was there, and read the Scriptures and prayed as usual. The company then moved out, and as it happened, the minister and the fatherless boy were last in the room. Mr Scott remembers the inexpressibly kind and pitying look which he fixed upon him. Putting his arms round him, and holding him for an instant to his breast, he passed out without a word, but the boy's heart was gained for life. The skill to deal profitably with the afflicted scarcely comes to us before sorrow has visited ourselves. We learn that strange and painful love in the furnace. It is remarkable that among surviving members of Cunuingham's Greenock flock such amjjle testimony is borne to the richness and fulness of his conversations with the afflicted, and to the weight and ripeness of his counsels, young as he then was. During the greater part of his ministry at Greenock, Cunningham kept a regular diary or journal. It is kejDt with the most perfect exactness for three years, all but a few weeks, literally not a single day beiug omitted. But a man must have more self-consciousness than Cunningham ever had to make a good diary-"\\Titer. He could not sit before the looking-glass and write about himself His diary is a mere day-book, shewing the expenditure, not of money, but of time. It seems to have been kept entirely as a means to the economy of time. Higorously watching against a besetting sin, he tied himself down to keep an account-book of time, as other men, to check expense, keep an account-book of money. In a letter to a friend, which nearly corresponds in date with the beginning of the diary, he says, " I am very thankful that I have been placed in a situation where I cannot with any decency be idle; for I am afraid that in a small country parish I would have been ver}^ lazy. And sometimes I think of it as a delightful aspect in which heaven is set before us in Scripture as a o^est that remaineth for the people of God." It is very evident from the diary that the habit of putting off GREENOCK. 51 work — the preparation of sermons, for example, till the pressure of approaching Sabbath drove him to it — was strong upon him. The light in his lodging at the corner of Nicolson Street, or the shadow of his tall figure striding through the room, was to be seen long after every other window in the street was dark. Many traces appear of those tremendous spells of labour by which arrears of work are overtaken at so heavy a cost to the constitution. In the diary, he does not indulge in a single reflection or remark of any kind. He records with great minuteness the occupations in which each day was spent, — study, parochial visitation, classes, prayer- meetings, Board of Health meetings in the dismal cholera time of 1832, Bible Society meetings, Anti-Patronage meetings, lectures on popery, and all the endless details of a minister's work in a popu- lous town. One duty he evidently rated high, that, namely, of maintaining a free, friendly, unofficial intercourse with his people. Nearly every day he calls in an easy way upon several families. He drops in and drinks tea with one or another household three or four times a week. In fact, tea-drinking seems to have been quite as great an institution with him as it was with Robert Hall himself. Happy is the minister who can make social intercourse a power for good. In the hours of relaxation he is enlarging his place in the hearts of his people, and disposing them to receive the lessons which intercourse with them is teaching him to adapt. But what- ever might be his employments, the habit of enormous reading suffered no intermission and no abatement. Luther de Servo Arhitrio, Marckii Medulla, Picteti Theologia, Curcellceus, Amesius, Cloppenhergiiis, Ernesti Interpres, and many other formidable names figure in his diary. Even on Sabbath evenings, when his tired mind might have craved lighter food, many hours are spent over these and other such ponderous divines. Many still live who remember the Anti-Patronage Society of Dr Andrew Thomson's time. The idea then was to raise money and buy up the patronages. For this purpose there was an organisation and collectors who went round collecting quarterly subscriptions. Directly this endeavour did not come to much, but the agitation thus carried on unquestionably had a great effect on the public I 52 GREENOCK. mind. Greenock had its branch of the Anti-Patronage Society. It happened once, when there was a remittance of J'SO to make to Edinburgh, an elder of the Middle Parish was going there, and took the money with him. He found out Dr Thomson, and was shewn into a room where Watson Gordon was in the act of painting his portrait. The painter was just saying as the elder entered, "Doctor, I can't make you out." The Greenock man told his errand, and presented the money. Thomson brightened immediately. "What," he said, "from my old friends at Greenock, Willie Cunningham at the head of them !" The painter caught his expression that instant. "Now, Doctor, I have got you," he said ; and the portrait, of which the engraving is still to be seen in many Scotch houses, owes its joyous expression to the Greenock man's visit. But Cunningham, though his views were strongly anti-patronage, was not a leader of the Greenock Anti-Patronage Society, nor did he quite agree with it, although co-operating with it, and lending his help at its meetings. ROW HERESY. Soon after the commencement of his ministry in Greenock, another subject claimed his attention. It was about this time that those wild vagaries arose which made Edward Irving pass away like a blazing meteor, instead of shining as a fixed star of the first mag- nitude. The memory of the " Row heresy," the Scottish offshoot or affluent of the London extravagances, is now faint enough, but the bruit of it was loud in those days, John Campbell, minister of the parish of Row in Dumbartonshire, was an earnest, affec- tionate preacher, whose ministry had told with no small effect on his own flock and neighbourhood. But he lost his doctrinal way, and ended by holding universal pardon and other errors. Perfectly candid and honest in avowing his doctrines, he was strangely insensible to the dishonesty of eating the bread of a church from whose doctrines he differed. The Church was certainly not hasty with him, for he had gone on preaching his errors for three or four years before he was deposed in 1831. When his trial for heresy first came on before the Presbytery of Dumbarton, in June 1830, Mr GREENOCK, 53 Cumiiiigliam was summoned as a witness against him. He appeared and underwent a short examination. He had gone one evenincf in the previous spring into the floating chapel which was kept moored in Greenock dock to suit the convenience and the taste of sea- faring men. There he heard Mr Campbell preach the doctrine of universal pardon, and utter sentiments so strange, that he took them down in writing on the spot. These notes he now produced, and gave evidence accordingly. His evidence had an important share in establishing one of the counts or charges in the libel. While the process against Mr Campbell was agitating all Scot- land, Edward Irving, with the lurid splendours of his eloquence, was exciting the public mind about the mysteries of prophecy, and the immediate personal advent of the Lord. Among other wild follies of that lamentable time, devout and honourable women kept covered tables, with bread and wine set forth, and window open to the east, to receive the immediately expected Saviour. Another dream of the great visionary was, that the miraculous powers of the apostolic age belong to the church in all ages, but have been kept in abeyance by the weakness of faith. " These signs shall follow them that believe " — now, as well as in the age of Paul. Many ardent souls caught up the idea, and gave themselves to prayer for " the power." The fire smouldered for a time, and then burst out. On a Sabbath evening, in the month of March 1831, Mary Campbell, an excitable invalid, broke forth with a stream of sounds, which she and a few friends who were present, believed to be a tongue like the tongues at Pentecost. There was at that time in the town of Port-Glasgow, on the opposite side of the Clyde, a family of Macdonalds, consisting of two brothers and three sisters. One of the sisters was an invalid. They, too, were expectants of " the power." One day when the brothers came in for dinner, the invalid sister addressed them at great length, " concluding with a prayer for James, that he might at that time be endowed with the power." James said calmly, " I have got it." He walked up to his sister's bedside, took her by the hand, and said, " Arise, and stand upright,^' which she did. James wrote that same day to Mary Campbell. This young woman with whom the "gift of 54 GREENOCK. tongues " began, was a sufferer from abscesses in the lungs, which from time to time burst, and in doing so, reduced her to great weakness. During the intervals, she would rally and enjoy com- paratively good health. James Macdonald related in his letter to her what had happened to his sister, and commanded her also to arise in the name of the Lord. She obeyed, and arose immediately. The excitement spread like wildfire. Miracles — "modern mir- acles"— abounded. Many congregations were disturbed with the unknown tongues. As loaded guns go off in a burning ship when the fire reaches them, so the strange sounds burst forth in one place after another. Gifts of healing were supposed to be found in many places, and even raising of the dead was tried ! All which things astonish us no more than the doings of any other fanatics or ecstatics, from Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, to Luckie Buchan in the days of William Pitt. Admiral Duncan of Camperdown was uncle to the Haldanes. " I remember, when I was a child," says James Haldane, " asking him whether he thought he was as strong as the devil, and I asked the question in all seriousness. He told me he was not, and I believed him. Now, if I thought myself as strong as the devil, I should be less afraid of quitting the plain ground of Scripture, and embarking in specula- tive enquiries." But what he remembered, many dreamy sons and daughters of the mist forgot, and quitting the sure Word of God, they made pitiful shipwreck. The town of Greenock, situated in the very district where this wild outbreak began, shared in the commotion. One most sad and touching incident was, that the Rev. Alexander Scott, assistant to Edward Irving in London, and son to the venerable Dr Scott of Greenock, had to be deprived of his license to preach the gospel by his native presbytery, for participating in his master's error. Mr Cunningham, as a member of presbytery, was a party to this most painful act of discipline, and while he sat in judgment upon the son, he was in close and affectionate communication with the father — surely a delicate and difficult position ! But the noble old man, loyal to the cause of truth, approved the righteousness of the sen- tence, and bowed his head to the sore affliction. GREENOCK. 55 Another painful duty devolved upon Cunningham in connection with the Row heresy. An estimable elder of tlie Middle Parish had a son, a member of the congregation, who was carried away with these errors. In regard to him, the session was obliged to take action, for he "had lifted up a testimony," and the matter was public. The father, firm for the truth, sat in the session and concurred with his brethren in carrying out the discipline of the Church in the case of his own son. Mr Cunningham, as moderator of the session, had to state the case before the Presbytery (December 1831). Wlien Dr Andrew Thomson, who " knew a man when he saw him," was told that Cunningham was to be settled at Greenock, he said, " Good, he'll be a capital fellow for knocking the Row heresy on the head." And the event justified his anticipation. The Row heresy awoke all Cunningham's energy, and proved the occasion of drawing out his great powers as a controversialist. The congrega- tion of the Middle Parish, so long and so thoroughly trained under the able ministry of Dr Scott, were unusually well able to apj)reciate a theological argument. Their warm appreciation gave him the encouragement he required. Recognising himself as set for the defence of the truth, he threw himself, heart and soul, into the battle. In delivering a course of lectures on the Gospel of Mark, he was led to deal with the whole subject of miracles, and stood before his people in all his strength, Sabbath after Sabbath, as a champion for the truth. Rowites, and persons having a twist that way, came to hear ; but each mighty blow " took away their breath for a while." The lectures soon drew the attention of the whole district, and gave the young pastor a commanding position in the community. He learned at the same time where his strength lay, and acquired confidence in his own powers. A stirring seaport town of the busy Clyde seemed a place ill adapted for a man whose tastes lay so decidedly in the direction of books and study; yet Providence had sent him thither as to a school, where, all uncon- sciously, he was prepared for the great work of his life. His discourses were profoundly logical and argumentative, but withal so clear that even children could understand them. Some 56 GREENOCK. • waters are so magically transparent and pure, that the coral floor of the ocean, and the beautiful things of the deep, can be clearly seen fathoms down. He shewed the things of God in beauty, for he shewed them in clearness, and these holy beauties, once seen, draw the heart for evermore. I have conversed with many who declare that the love of Bible truth was first awakened in them by the arresting clearness of Cunningham's expositions. One illustration of his power as a preacher was published in 1885, in the Scottish Christian Herald, by Mr Alexander Tough, a citizen of Greenock. The circumstances did not come to Mr Cunningham's knowledge till he read them there. As Mr Tough was passing down the mid quay of Greenock, he noticed two old men in close conversation, each leaning on the toj) of his staff. His attention was powerfully arrested by hearing from one of them these words : " Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, poor miserable sinnei\s, that we should be called the sons of God." He was so much struck by hearing these words, amid the bustle of a wharf, that he lingered near and listened. " I am truly glad to hear you speak in this manner," said the other old man. " Yes," was the reply, " you know well that I was one of the chief of sinners, when the Lord arrested me in my mad career. One Sabbath morning as I was carelessly j)assing through the Square, I heard the voice of praise coming from the Middle Parish Church. I stood for a moment, and the thought immediately passed through my mind that I would enter the church. I went in and sat down on the stair. Mr Cunningham preached from the text, ' Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.' His words entered into my soul like a sword, and laid open the awful wickedness of my heart. I went home in great distress of mind. I tossed and tumbled like a wild bull in a net. Day after day I saw more of the wickedness of my heart. I found it was impossible for me to answer the demands of the law, though I made many vain attempts for many weeks. After all these attempts had failed, the Lord heard my cry, and, by giving me to see that salvation is entirely by . faith in Christ, gave me peace and joy in believing." Mr Tough adds, that his desire to know something more of the GREENOCK. 57 old mail induced him to seek him out, and call upon him. " I found him in very poor circumstances in relation to this world, but rich in faith. He had been a great sinner, but his conversion to God was sound and genuine. He lived but a few weeks after I became acquainted with him. During that time, however, I saw him once and again, and had much pleasure in conversing with him, and I rejoice in the conviction that he died in the faith and hope of the gospel." It was Mr Cunningham's practice, during a considerable portion of his Greenock ministry, to preach without " the paper." The journal shews him engaged every Saturday in "mandating" his discourses. But this begins to be omitted, and finally ceases to occur, and he ever after used the manuscript in the pulpit — a great error in any man, but in him very great. Gladstone has said of the mutual influence of the orator and the audience, that what goes down to them in rivers, comes back to him in vapours. This influ- ence of his audience Cunningham felt as much as any speaker ever did. It roused him, he shook himself and put forth his strength. But with the eye and the mind arrested on the paper, the speaker cannot freely quaff this animating influence. No man ever less needed to read his discourses, for his readiness was wonderful. One Sabbath, about the height of the Kow heresy, Campbell of Row himself walked into the Square Church, after the sermon had begun, and placed himself conspicuously in front of the pulpit. The discourse was one levelled against the Row errors throughout. Next day, one of the elders remarked to him, " Mr Cunningham, you were fortunate in having your discourse prepared for Mr Camp- bell's hearing." "It was not what I had prepared at all," he answered, " but I thought it better to say to the man's face what I have been saying behind his back." On one occasion, there was to be a meeting in the Gaelic Church on Highland Schools. Cunning- ham undertook to make the first motion, a motion simply for approval of the Report. Something occurred to detain him, and the motion assigned to him had to be got over without his helj). When he came into the Church, the form of a motion was slipped into his hand, to this effect : " As the apostles were commanded to 58 GREENOCK. preach repentance and the remission of sins, in the name of Jesus, among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, so Christians in this country should recognise the same principle in providing the means of grace for their own countrymen." Without even sitting down, he stepped at once to the platform, and delivered upon this motion one of his most telling speeches. At the close of the meeting, an old woman in a cloak — to appearance not one of the guinea-giving sort — gave a guinea to the treasurer, whispering that after such a speech she felt bound to do it. In the summer of 1832 Mr Cunningham enjoyed a visit from his mother. It had been remarked by his people, as an indication of his rightmindedness and simplicity of character, how much he liked to talk of that noble, self-denying mother to whom he owed so much. And now they were a noticeable pair, as they were to be seen on Greenock streets together ; the mother, erect and stately, leaning' with such evident gladness of heart on the arm of her manly son. He had the satisfaction of introducing her to many a hospitable house, where they delighted to shew her kindness for his sake. Above all, he had the pleasure of introducing her to the family of the Dennistons, — a family from which she was, by-and- bye, to receive a daughter. In many personal characteristics, and ways both of speaking and acting, the son greatly resembled the mother. Persons who knew her long tell me that the leading fea- ture of her mind was an entire and most uncompromising devotion to what she believed to be duty. Duty was her life-plan. Duty was to be done at any cost of effort or of pain ; and when done, it was its own reward. This was the root and core of her strongly- marked character. And it was in this that Cunningham's resem- blance to his mother was strongest. Towards the end of 1832 the parish of Old Kilpatrick, upon the Clyde, was vacant. The parishioners had hopes that the patron would give some heed to their wishes in the appointment of a pastor. They turned their eyes, among others, to the young minister of the Middle Parish of Greenock. A report arose in the town that he was actually to receive the appointment. A question on the subject from a jealous and loving elder made Cunningham GREENOCK, 59 aware of the rumour. A few days afterwards Cunningham entered the cider's shop. Slapping the counter with his glove, he ex- claimed, " Well, I'll take Kilpatrick if I can get it, to keep out a Moderate of the name of Candlish, assistant at Bonhill." Such was his first knowledge of his future fellow-labourer in the great work of his life. It was not long after this, that the parish of St Andrew's, in Glasgow, being vacant, the charge was offered to Cunningham, and, as it appears, pressed upon him. The income offered him was more than double that which he had in Greenock, and the posi- tion was of course much higher than that of a mere assistant. He declined it, however, not being able to see that a superior field of usefulness was offered. In his journal he despatches the matter thus sententiously : " Wrote to Glasgow declining St Andrew's." Then, some days later : " Have an interview with the Provost about St Andrew's Church." And, finally : " Wrote to the Provost of Glasgow again, declining St Andrew's Church." In August 1833, the first publication to which he ever put his hand issued from the press. It was an edition of Some's Cate- chism which he published, with an introduction recommending it to the public. Some's Catechism is so happily contrived for its purpose, — " exceedingly well adapted to lead young persons not only to search the Scriptures, but really to exercise their faculties on them," — that one wonders it is so seldom to be seen. " Among the many works that have been written to illustrate the Shorter Catechism," says Cunningham in his preface, " we know none better adapted for common use in schools and classes than that published by Mr D. Some, an excellent Dissenting minister in Leicestershire. His personal excellence, his very superior ministe- rial qualifications and success, must be familiar to all who have read the works of Doddridge, who was at one time his assistant in the ministry." After his refusal to go to Glasgow, the Greenock people calcu- lated on keeping their minister a good space among them. But it was not to be so. " He was on a visit to the manse of Falkirk," says Dr A. S. 60 GEEENOCK. Patterson, '' when lie received the intelligence of his appointment to Trinity College Church, Edinburgh. The intelligence greatly disconcerted him. Half in jest, I said to him that I considered what he took so much to heart one of the lesser trials oi life." He did not hesitate, however. His journal devotes a whole line to the matter : " Write agreeing to accept the College Church." He had little more to do among his Greenock fluck, except to bid them farewell. The parting was a keen trial on both sides. To this day, old people speak of it as men speak of a great affliction. He was not the man to part with a loving people without deep pain. His farewell call is still remembered in many families. Be- fore parting with his class of young men, he got them to promise to keep up a prayer-meeting among themselves ; which they did, meeting each Friday evening for many years. He preached his farewell sermon on the first Sabbath of 1834, the anniversary of the day on which he had first preached in the Square Church as Dr Scott's assistant. The four years of his ministry he might hope had been successful, as they certainly were happy. " The kind- ness of the Greenock people," he said, " I can never forget on this side the grave." i ^v^ v^:^*-'- ACTATIS SUAE 55 CHAPTER IV. FIRST YEARS OF PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. TXTHEN Cimniiigham removed from Greenock to Edinburgh, the ' * Church of Scotland was entering upon " actions of a very high nature, leading to untrodden paths." The Church in Scotland is Presbyterian. An Englishman may be surprised to hear that the British Constitution is also Presby- terian. Yet it is so. The government of this country is a Parlia- mentary government, a free government, by the freely chosen representatives of the people. And a Presbyterian Church is simply a Church with a free representative government — a govern- ment by the people for the people. Presbyterians do verily think that free representative government — a thing so excellent in the State — is an excellent thing' in the Church as well. Britain, with- out her free government, would soon find among the nations none so poor as do her reverence. Presbyterians think that freedom, vital to the nation as the breath of life, is not less vital to the Church. The people of England in times past have struggled wisely and nobly for freedom in the State. As wisely and nobly have the people of Scotland struggled for freedom in the Church — which two facts are a great part of the history of England and of Scotland during the last three centuries. Look into our history. It is the record of an undying struggle for liberty, maintained with varying success ever since the Reformation, — " Advanced, forced back, now low, now high, The banner sunk and rose. " The profligate politicians of Queen Anne's time filched away the freedom of the Scottish Church among their intrigues to bring 62 FIRST YEARS OF back the house of Stuart, and thereon hangs a tale of a century of mischiefs. The Pretender to the British throne had no stouter enemy tlian the Church of Scotland. She was strong at that time in the attachment of her people — that resolute and noble people who had clung to her through eight-and-twenty years of suffering and blood. She was strong in the confidence and love with which the people regarded their clergy. But she might be weakened. The people might be made to distrust their clergy. So the system of lay-patronage in the appointment of ministers was forced on. The effect expected from it was to raise a mist between clergy and people, A minister who held his living by the gift of some great man could scarcely be so much identified with the people as one chosen by their own free vote. A minister who owed his making to a patron was likely, they thought, to be the patron's most humble servant. " Why should he not worship his creator?" as the Scottish people bitterly said. A patron's man was sure to be very unlike a people's man. The man sent do-vvn to them by a Jacobite pro- prietor could scarcely be the trusted friend and counsellor of an anti-Jacobite people. All this was calculated. The law for impos- ing patronage, as Bishop Burnet tells, was " made on design to weaken and undermine " the Church of Scotland. It is worth a curious man's while to mark how the appointment of Scotch parish ministers was planned at St Germains. Some burglaries are found to have been committed by " persons evidently well acquainted with the premises." The Jacobite scheme of patronage was plainly the work of persons well acquainted with the premises ; intriguers who knew well the disposition of the Scot- tish people, and who calculated with nice cunning the effects of their plan for disgusting them with their Church. In one point only they erred. The process of disg^^sting the people with their Church went on less quickly than Jacobite politicians expected. The scheme was not so rapidly prolific of mischiefs as they hoped. But within forty years it had driven out two Secessions from the Church of Scotland. From the time that the first meeting-house was built for manly Ralph Erskine, at Dunfermline, — a building, with a tar roof, which old men there still remember as the " Pic," PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. 63 or Pitch Chiii'ch, — the Seceders built a himdrcd and twenty churches in less than thirty years. At the end of a century, the two Secessions comprehended between them a full third of the Scottish people. Under the system of patronage, there grew up, like an unwhole- some fungus in the dark shadow of the wood, the thing called Moderatism; which, however, is by no means an exclusively Scot- tish thing. When Cunningham visited America, he found it there also. " The Unitarianism of Massachusetts," he said, " is neither more nor less in substance than just the religion which prevailed so extensively in the Continental Churches, and in the Established Churches of England and Scotland during the latter half of last century. On the Continent it was called Rationalism ; in the Church of England, Orthodoxy ; and in the Church of Scotland, Moderatism ; but, in all, it was just substantially Pelagian Unitar- ianism ; i.e., the natural religion of irreligious men, who had no sound views and impressions of the doctrines of the Gospel, but who did not find it convenient to throw off altogether a profession of Christianity." Many high and brave things are to be found in the history of the Church of Scotland. The flowers of truth and worth, taking may- hap peculiar tints from our northern soil, bloom there so abundantly that Scotland may be said to have a Flora of her own. But such things do not occur during the age of Moderatism. That period is incredibly mean in the annals of our Church — as mean as a clergy, alike sycophant and tyrannical, could make it. Dr Carlyle of In- veresk, whose autobiography should have been called, " The Con- fessions of a Moderate," tells us, " that acting once as carver at a public table, he had " to divide a haunch of venison among fifteen without getting any portion of the fat for myself." Men intent on getting portions of the fat to themselves make a mean appearance in history ; and, therefore, the age of Moderatism is mean. Once, in the course of a debate in the General Assembly, a clever gentleman illustrated the inexpediency of giving the people a voice in the choice of their minister, by referring to a well-authenticated tradition of the Western Isles. To avenge some injury inflicted on them by the Macdonalds of Eigg, the Macleods of Skye landed on 64 FIRST YEARS OF Eigg, tracked the inhabitants to a cave where they lay concealed, heaped fire over the cave's mouth, and stifled every creature within. The bones of the victims still lie thick on the floor of the cave. " Now," said the speaker, " my name is Macleod ; if I were presented to the island of Eigg, the Macdonalds might object to me, just be- cause I am a Macleod. And would not this be very hard \" Mr Begg of Liberton, a stout man-at-arms, and afterwards well- known, spoke in the same debate. He dwelt upon the doings of the Moderates — how a minister was forced upon Jedburgh, though all the parishioners but five were against him, and two thousand people forsook the church in a single day in conse- quence— how a minister, useless, because destitute of an audible voice, was forced upon Biggar — how a minister, stone-blind, was forced upon Kirkcudbright. Here the clever gentleman interrupted the speaker, for such things could not be pleasant for a Moderate to hear. " Sir," said Begg, " I was only inviting gentlemen on that side of the house to view the bones of the murdered Macdonalds." He who wishes to understand Cunningham's work, and the times that went over him and over Scotland, must visit the cave of the bones. The first thirty years or thereby of the present century form an animating chapter in the history of religion in Scotland. A life- wave rose and spread. The Spirit of God breathed, and life began to return after long years of death, and the rottenness of death. The noble works of M'Crie, his Lives of Knox and Melville, which have been justly termed the " Iliad and Odyssey of the Scottish Church," revived the slumbering veneration for its great Reformers in the heart of the nation. Men lived when they touched the bones of these old prophets. "Chalmers and his consequences arose." The consequences of Chalmers ! "Who can tell how great they were and are ? The only image that Francis Jeffrey could find to sug- gest an idea of his eloquence and stupendous energy was, " He buried his adversaries under the fragments of burning mountains." Then the vehement, impetuous agitation for Reform in Parlia- ment came on, with its thousand exciting incidents. The people demanded their rights ; and the Legislature granted, trembling. PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH, G5 what could no longer be withheld. But why should we be politically free and ecclesiastically enslaved ? The awakening Church of Scotland arose and shook herself Amid impulses of various kinds, but above all, under the impulse of growing spiritual life, the reforming movement set in and gathered strength. There were plenty of abuses to correct, and foremost among these, the abuses connected with Patronage. The people had long been robbed of their right of freely choosing their spiritual guides, and their own clergy connived at the robbery. At first this evil was attacked with great caution. The reforming party in the Church conceived that they could obviate it by arranging that no minister should be settled in a parish when the majority of the male heads of families formally signified their disapproval of him. In the General Assembly of 1833, Dr Chalmers made a motion to this effect, but did not succeed in carrying it. It was the first stricken field in which the rights of the people were fairly set before the combatants as the object of the struggle. At this stage of the strife Cunningham dealt his first blow. The Assembly met that year in the Tolbooth Church, one of the three churches — amazing achievements in ugliness — into which St Giles' Cathedral is divided. Centuries of Scottish history look out upon us from the windows of that venerable sanctuary. Here Knox thundered, and here the bones of Regent Murray lie. James VI. made his farewell speech here, before he departed to wear the English crown. Here Janet Geddes threw the stool that levelled a king's throne. Cromwell's tread has sounded under that portal. Past that doorway almost every current of Scottish history has rolled. Early in the day, the debate began, and continued till the evening was wearing late. The house was thin. Members who wished to slink away and shun the vote had left. Many who meant to vote, had gone out for a breath of cool air. The debate was at that languishing stage when all the arguments have been used up, and the threshed straw is threshed over again. A tall young man with an immense curly head arose, under the gallery beside a pillar, and began to speak. " Who is that ?" ran in loud whispers about the 66 FIRST YEARS OF house, and the answer was not at once forthcoming — " Cunningham of Greenock." The attention of the house was roused in a moment. The loungers in the Parhament Square crowded back to their places. It required but a few minutes to shew that a man had stepped into the arena. The speech is evidently unpremeditated, an answer to other speeches delivered during the debate. The Presbyterian Review, then a vigorous quarterly, publishes a report of the debate. To twelve speakers immediately preceding Cunningham, it devotes just sixteen lines ; but Cunningham was requested to write out his speech in full for it. He did so, after the violently condensed manner in which a man who dislikes writing — and he did dislike it wonderfully — forces himself to go through a task of penmanship. The speech of two hours is contained in less than six octavo pages. Those who heard it, speak of it with wonder to this day. Such power, wealth, and precision of language they had never heard. Dr Duncan Macfarlane, Principal of the University of Glasgow, rashly put himself in Cunningham's way, and suffered a fall in the shock. The Moderate leaders had admitted in that day's debate, that Presbyteries had a right to take into account not only a man's general fitness to be a minister, but his special qualifications for the particular parish to which he is presented. " This principle," Cunningham said, " has often been denied in theory ; it has been almost wholly overlooked in practice. Principal Macfarlane, indeed, was pleased to say, that he did not know that it had been overlooked in practice. This, Sir, is a very strange assertion." Principal Macfarlane rose and said that he did not remember of having said so, but that he had said that he would enquire. " Moderator, " said Cunningham, " this does not mend the matter ; for men are not in the habit of enquiring into those things which they know already. Now, Sir, short as my life has been, and small as my knowledge is in comparison wnth that of the Rev. Principal, I know and I assert that the principle now conceded has been overlooked in practice ; nay, more, that this very principle foraied the main subject of controversy in the grand struggle between the two parties in the Church during the latter half of last century, and that the result PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. 07 of that struggle was, that the principle of the Preshytcry having no right to judge of a man's special fitness to be minister of the particular parish to which he was presented, was established by the votes of a decided majority of this house, and constantly acted upon." The magnates, or " specials of the kirk," sit about " the table," and a man must have begun to be somebody before he ventures on that upper ground. Dr Macknight (son of the commentator, who expounded the Epistle to the Komans without discovering the doctrine of justification by faith) looked over to Dr Cook. "That's Andrew come back," said he — Andrew Thomson come alive again to be the hammer of the Moderates. Men's minds went back to George Gillespie, who, in riding-boots, and with whip in hand, as he had just ridden up from Scotland, delivered such a speech in the famous Westminster Assembly, that great Selden said : " This young man, by a single speech, has swept away the learning and labour of my life." And, indeed, no two men would have resembled each other more, in vastness of learning acquired long before youth was past, in free and perfect command of it, and in the instantaneous readiness and marvellous accuracy with which they could use it. It was in that same Assembly that for the first time was heard the gentle voice of Alexander Dunlop, who soon became as loved and trusted as Warristoun, the learned and eloquent lawyer of Covenanting days. John Learmonth of Dean, Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh at the time, sat in the Assembly of 1833 as an elder. When Cun- ningham sat down, Learmonth turned to his neighbour and said, " Well, if a vacancy occurs in a City charge during my term of office, that young man shall have it." A vacancy did occur a few months thereafter, in consequence of the deposition of the Rev. Adam Tait, minister of Trinity College Church, who, though a sincerely good man, became involved in the Row heresy ; and, as has already been stated in a previous chapter, Cunningham received and accepted the appointment. Trinity College Church, taken down now, and removed amid Lord 68 FIRST YEARS OF Cockbum's tears, was a notable architectural feature of Edin- burgh. " The last and finest Gothic fragment of Edinburgh, though implored for by about four centuries," had to disappear for the accommodation of a railway. It was built by Mary of Gueldres, Queen of James of the fiery face, and it held her bones. It had stood there, low in a deep valley, through a " thousand heavy times" of fierce old Scotland. It was there when the Scottish king and host marched to their doom at Flodden ; it was there when Mary was brought in from Carberry Hill, her fair face all defiled with tears and dust ; it was there when Edinburgh fought its own Castle in the Douglas wars. It lay under the guns of the battery erected on the overhanging crag to protect the cool Scottish Parliament which sat for three days, under a fire of musketry and artillery, be- side the Cross of St John in the Canono-ate. When Cunningham was appointed to this Church, it was almost without a congregation. The abeiTations of poor Mr Tait had driven many away, and many had followed him to a place of worship in which he continued to minister. But Cunningham's great reputation immediately filled the Church. Every seat was taken in which it was possible to obtain a view of the pulpit, past the great gothic pillars. The pew-rents of the City Churches were fixed and levied by the Corporation or Town Council. The Corporation was bankrupt then, and it was their practice to require the highest pew- rents iu those Churches whose pulpits were filled by the most popular ministers. Cheap seats and poor preaching went together ; and good preaching was a luxury kept for the rich. Viewing Mr Cunningham as a good speculation, the Town Council greatly increased (even to the double in some cases) the pew-rents in the College Church ; and as so promising a speculation justified some outlay, they outraged the fine old Gothic building by creating three hideous galleries — all in the way of business. Very soon after his removal to Edinburgh, Cunningham was sum- moned to London to give evidence on the subject of Patronage before a Committee of the House of Commons. The history of this matter will be best given in the words of Sir George Sinclair, who had the most to do with it : — " During ujd wards of twenty years PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. CO before that period " says Sir George in a communication with which he has favoured me, " I had taken a great interest in the Anti- patronage movement, and co-operated with Dr Andrew Thomson and Dr M'Crie in furtherance of several plans for the mitigation of an evil, which (as we thought) would, if persevered in, prove fatal to the Church of Scotland, to which we were devotedly attached. Our efforts, however, were only partially responded to. They were strenuously opposed by the then dominant party in the Church, and even Dr Chalmers, Sir Henry Moncreiff, and his excellent son. Lord Moncreiflf, gave no countenance to the movement, and contended, in preference, for the Veto, to which, however, at that time the Mode- rates were as adverse as to the entire abolition of Patronage. " When I was unexpectedly returned to Parliament (after a long interval of retirement) in 1831, the friends with whom I had for some years been acting upon this question, strenuously urged me to bring the abolition of Patronage under the consideration of the House of Commons. To this course I was myself opposed, not from any change of opinion, but from a conviction that success was altogether hopeless, there being very few Scotch, and no English or Irish, members in favour of such a motion ; and with the exception of my late friend. Lord Breadalbane, not a single adherent of the cause in the House of Lords. In order, however, to satisfy them on that head, I obtained from Lord Althorp, with the sanction of Lord Jeffrey, at that time Lord Advocate, the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry, of which I, of course, acted as chairman. The great majority of its members were opposed to my views, in fact, my worthy friend Andrew Johnston, Member for the Fife Burghs, was my only decided supporter. I was anxious, however, to procure a mass of useful and important evidence which might enlighten the minds of those who perused it, and perhaps be found serviceable at some future time. " I accordingly wrote to each of the witnesses, both friendly and adverse, and intimated what were the points on which he would chiefly be examined, and I informed him that being anxious to secure judicious and carefully considered statements, I wished him to draw up a series of questions and answers in writing, which I 70 FIRST YEAES OF would put seriatim from the chair, and when they had been gone through, the members of committee would put such additional queries as they might deem necessary or desirable. This plan was approved of, and adopted by all the witnesses (with the exception of Dr Lee). Dr Chalmers, at his own urgent request, and to my great regret, was not examined before the Committee, but his sentiments were understood to be fully developed in the evidence of Lord MoncreijBf, both in favour of the Veto, and against the abolition of Patronage. " I remember having the honour to receive Lord Moncreiff at breakfast, after which he placed his manuscript in my hands, and we drove together to the Committee room on the most amicable terms, although he was diametrically opposed to me. The great advantage of this plan was, that it afforded to the distinguished j)arties on both sides an opportunity to state their views much more fully and more explicitly than if they had been elicited by a series of loose and independent interrogations. Mr Cunningham was one of the witnesses on whose evidence I mainly relied. He prepared a very able and elaborate series of questions and answers, which excited, by their uncomi^romising straightforwardness and strength of expres- sion, no small displeasure in the minds of my friends, Admiral Gordon, Major Cummiug Bruce, and several other members of the committee, of whom I am bound to record, that though altogether adverse to my views, they manifested on all occasions the greatest courtesy and forbearance. Mr Cunningham, when his written evidence had been gone through, was cross-examined at great length by the Committee, but maintained his presence of mind undiminished, and used great plainness of speech. " When the inquiry was at length concluded, I saw that if a careful and circumstantial report adverse to Patronage were drawn up by me, it would be negatived by an overwhelming majority, and I was glad to compromise by submitting to the Committee a few brief sentences in which the question of Patronage was altogether waived." It was about this time that Cunningham became acquainted with that Mr Candlish, once assistant at Bonhill, now assistant at St PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. 71 George's, Edinburgh, of whom he had said, " I'll take Kilpatrick if I can get it, to keep out a Moderate of the name of Candlish." But Mr Candlish, if a Moderate then, which wc doubt, was now a Moderate no more. Worsted in the General Assembly of 1833, the Evangelical party achieved its first notable success in the Assembly of 1834. This Assembly met in the Tron Church — the Church built near by the ancient "Tron" or public weighing-machine of the city. An anxious crowd filled the place of meeting, for all felt that a crisis had arrived. Moderatism and Evangelism were come to Bethshemesh, and " looked one another in the face." The two conflicting principles which gendered instincts and tendencies so opposite, and which had struggled in the Church, like Rachel's twins, for more than a century, were to try wager of battle that day. The question between the parties was to be debated with much recondite learning repulsive enough, and mingled with many technical terms uncouth to the general ear. Formally the difference between them regarded merely a question of Church arrangement. But at root it was the differ- ence which mere men of the world never do understand, which they even angrily deny. On a May forenoon the debate began. Lord Moncreiff was a member of Assembly, and the husky voice of the learned judge was heard supporting the motion he had brought forward to this efiiect, that if the majority of the male heads of families in full communion with the Church shall disapprove of the person "presented " to be their pastor, such disapproval shall be deemed sufficient ground for the Presbytery rejecting that person, and declining to settle him as minister of that congregation. It was an old and fundamental law of the Church of Scotland, that " no pastor shall be intruded on a congregation contrary to the will of the people." For generations this law had been tyrannically violated, and the motion only proposed that the Church should violate her own law no more. After a long day's discussion, at midnight victory rested with the Evangelical side by a majority of forty-six. Thus the Veto Law passed, — a thing once famous in Scotland. It is gone from the 72 FIRST YEARS OF earth, and the history of it is already gi-owing dim, as if it were written in black letter. But it has left results — deeper, perhaps, and wider than we see as yet. Curiously enough, with the excep- tion of Dunlop, none of the men who afterwards bore the burden of defending the Veto Law had a part in passing it. Neither Chalmers nor Cunningham was a member of the Assembly of 1834, and Candlish had not yet a seat in Church Courts at all. In July that year, Cunningham was united in marriage to Miss Denniston, a young lady every way suitable for a helpmeet to him. A " servant of the Book," the sentiment of duty had the same com- manding hold and noble mastery of her that it had of his mother. The Dennistons were a family of great Christian worth and of old commercial repute in the town of Greenock. The marriage cere- mony was performed by John Brown Patterson, in the old family house of the Dennistons, which stands on the strangely-metamor- phosed glebe land of Greenock. Thus early in life — he was little more than eighty-and-twenty — he had reached the summit of professional advancement. He was an Edinburgh minister ; and our Scottish folks have a saying that " every minister would like to go to heaven by the way of Edin- burgh." A life of quiet labour and "worksome blessedness" seemed to lie before him. Trinity College Parish, in the Old Town of Edinburgh, contained as deep strata of heathenism as ever cried for excavation. The dark-mouthed closes which ran down the steep slope from the north side of the High Street might be caves or passages in a mine, but for the narrow slit high up at the distant eaves, through which a thin slice of the sky is seen. The population swarms enormously. In some tall tenements, a population almost equal to that of a small parish lived up a single stair. One such tenement (or "land," as they call it in Edinburgh) fell to the ground in an avalanche of ruins, one bright moonlight night some years ago. It was six storeys high at the front and seven at the back, and was inhabited by twenty-five families, many of whom kept lodgers. There were probably not fewer than a hundred and fifty human beings dwelling in that house. It was very old, and in the dead of night it fell to rUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH, 73 the ground with a dull crash, hurliug more than thirty of its sleep- ing inmates to destruction. That crowded tenement was far from being the most populous in the College Parish. From the beginning of Cunningham's ministry, the whole machin- ery of an evangelical church was set in motion there. Week-day and Sabbath schools were established. The parish was divided into districts, to which elders were appointed. On Sabbath even- ings the minister and the elders visited the schools, which were taught by zealous, active young men. When Elisha of old w^ould raise to life the Shunamite's dead son, " he put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands, and he stretched himself upon the child," suiting himself to the little form. It is not easy to suit ourselves to little minds, but Cunningham did it in a way that was quite wonderful. It was delightful to hear him, the man of iron logic, talk to children. Some of us who were Sabbath-school teachers under him remember it with admiration to this day. He had a singular power of winning hearts. On one occasion a man and his wife, very young persons, called at his house in Clare- mont Street, wishing to be admitted to the communion. It is always a weighty matter for Scottish youth to call upon the minister on such an occasion. It was, besides, the hot time of the Voluntary war ; and the idea of Cunningham, as he appeared on platforms, a mighty, iSghting man, bore heavily on the minds of the young people. They slipped timidly into the formidable presence ; but his frank, kind manner and gentle voice soon jDut them at their ease, and they were surprised to find themselves conversing quite freely. The Communion Sabbath came. The young couple, after hearing the action sermon, retired from the church, intending to be back in time for the last table. They returned too late, and would have missed the opportunity of receiving the communion, had not one of the elders taken them in hand, and introduced them to Lady Glenorchy's Church, a few yards off, where they were still in time to partake. Such a misadventure was sure to be keenly felt. Mr Cunningham had seen it, and the very next morning he called upon the young people at their house. It was a simple, friendly call, in- 6 74 FIRST YEARS OF tended, as they gratefully felt, to soothe their hurt feelings, though the fault was all their own. It was but a sample of his loving care and attention to his flock. The young man had just begun business in a very small way as a bookbinder. Mr Cunningham entered into conversation with him about his trade and prospects. One advice which he gave, the young man never forgot : " When making a purchase of leather or any other material, if you really think the article worth the price asked for it, do not undervalue it or affect to depreciate it. By doino- so, you may sometimes get it a little cheaper ; but it is neither truthful nor honest, and it will not be for your advantage in the long run." Solomon had the same thing in his eye when he sketched the homely picture : " It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer ; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth." Only a shrewd and true man would have thought of giving such an advice. But if a tradesman is taught to set his standard of integrity so high that he conscientiously abstains from undervaluing the article he wishes to buy, there is little fear that he will overvalue the article which he wishes to sell. The young bookbinder had a sore struggle, and through many an anxious day he thought he would be beaten. Often he thought of giving in, and seeking work as a journeyman. But for one thing he would have yielded. His minister had taken an interest in him, had given him much kindly encouragement, and had acquired such an ascendancy over him, that he could not bear the idea of owning defeat and failure to him. He must hold on. He held on, and thino-s began to be more hopeful. One day he shewed to Mr Cun- ningham his humble balance-sheet. Cunningham saw that, though it was the day of very small things, the business had a look of health. He advised him to strike out a little sail, to procure a good journeyman at once, and go hopefully on. He did so, and became a prosperous and successful tradesman. Long afterwards, when Cunningham was Principal of the New College, the book- binder testified his gratitude in a pleasing way. He bound, free of charge, five hundred volumes of the College Library, to mark his deep sense of obligation to his old minister. I rUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. 75 Besides the Sabbath work, Cunningham instituted regular week- day visitations throughout the parish of all and sundry, whethei- they belonged to the congregation or not. There were regular weekly prayer-meetings in the districts. A preacher was employed in the parish as missionary, whose salary Mr Cunningham paid wholly himself. The Rev. Thomas Wilson, of Friockheim, filled the situation of missionary for two years. "I never can forget," says Mr Wilson, " the delicacy which he manifested when he had anything to mention which he would like me to attend to in the parish, or when he wished me to preach for him, or assist him in any other way. He kept the furthest away possible from speaking in anything like the tone of authority. He seemed afraid lest he should seem to be asking anything on the ground of right. It was only on such occasions, or in reference to such matters, that he ever seemed to have the slightest difficulty in expressing himself." Trinity College Church, beautiful as a specimen of Gothic archi- tecture, was miserable as a place of worship. It was cold and damp as a cellar, and had wretched access. The passenger along the North Bridge, as he looked down upon its roof, wondered that men should even have thought of building a church in that deep bottom. Such a church was cruelly adverse to the efforts of the minister and to the prosperity of the congregation. Still, it is not to be denied that Cunningham did not succeed as a preacher in Edinburgh. Some accounted for it by saying that he forgot wherein his great strength lay, and became too practical. There was, however, a much simpler and more obvious explanation, quite sufficient, when taken with the church he preached in. Sagacious Hugh Miller said, as we left the College Church one day after hearing its minister, " Oh that Cunningham would preach a speech !" That was it. If his sermons had been like his speeches, the church would have been crammed to the door. There is a generation that is far too wise to believe in so simple a cause for so great an effort ; but every man who really knows the Scottish people is perfectly aware that they have in their hearts an intense dislike to sermons read from the manuscript. " And the people," as Sir David Brewster once said, " have the philosophy of the matter on their side." Let it be 76 FIRST YEARS OF granted that a read discourse can be better ordered and better digested ; yet as to the power of rousing and sustaining attention between the two modes, there is simply no comparison. In Greenock, Cunningham did not read his sermons, or, at most, read them very seldom; and in Greenock he was a popular minister with a crowded church. The sacrifice of pulpit power which he incurred through reading was immense. The congregation did not keep up in spite of the abundant careful labours of the minister in his parish. Not long after he came to Edinburgh, a deplorable occurrence, which took place in a country parish in the neighbourhood, brought the ignorance of the population under his notice in a way that took a strong and painful hold of his mind. Mrs Elizabeth Banks, a woman of fifty-four, dwelt in the hamlet of Dewarton, in the parish of Borthwick. She had lived happily for thirty years with her first husband, to whom she bore two sons and six daughters. The husband of her youth died, and she married again, but the marriage turned out so miserably, that she became desperate, and made up her mind to seek death. She bought arsenic to destroy herself. According to the loose practice then endured, she obtained for twopence in a village shop as much of the deadly drug as would have destroyed three lives. She went home thus fearfully provided, and laid up the arsenic in a secret corner. Then her temptation changed. The husband one day ill-treated her worse than usual, struck her, and left the marks of his violence on her face. Maddened by this outrage, she mixed the arsenic with some Epsom salts which the husband had procured for his own use. He drunk, and died in horrible agonies. She was tried and condemned on the clearest evidence. Accord- ing to old use and wont, the city ministers of Edinburgh take in rotation the sad duty of attending as spiritual advisers on prisoners under sentence of death. It fell to the minister of College Parish to attend Mrs Banks. He visited her daily in prison, and was with her on the scaffold. He found her in a deplorable state of ignorance as to all religious truth. A church was a place to which she and her family had never entered. At first she tried to die by refusing all food. But hunger was too mighty for her. With true PUBLIC LIFE IN EDINBURGH. 77 Scottish feeling slic deplored the disgrace which she had brought upon her family and friends ; but she never shed a tear for an3rthing else. As her fatal day approached she became subdued and gentle, and confessed her crime. "My heart is like to burst/' she said, as the hangman's hands were busy pinioning her arms. Supported on Cunningham's arm, she stepped out upon the scaffold. "I am come to the place at last," she said. She was a thin, spare woman, and appeared on the scaffold neatly clad in black, with a widow's cap. She leaned heavily on Cunningham, while he offered up a most solemn prayer, quickly cast away the handkerchief, and went on her dark journey. This affair made a deep impression on Cunningham. It deepened his feeling of solemn pity for his perishing countrymen. He spoke of it with an emotion which filled his boys with awe, as he pointed out to them, many years afterv/ards, the spot where the scaffold stood. CHAPTER V. PUBLIC QUESTIONS. T)EFORE pursuing the history of these discussions directly affecting ■^ his own church, in which Cunningham took so prominent a part, it may be well to advert to some other subjects which engaged his attention during the first few years after his settlement in Edin- burgh. The first of them is THE SABBATH QUESTION. Sir Andrew Agnew, of the ancient Norman house of the Agnews in Wigtonshire, found his way on a certain Sabbath into Dr M'Crie's chapel in Edinburgh, and there heard a robust sermon on the text, " Eemember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Before that day he had looked upon the Sabbath as little more than a church holiday. But thenceforward he knew that Sabbath observance is an essential branch of morality, based on the eternal law of God. He was a mild, humble-hearted man, and his staunch per- severance was power. Returned to Parlia^ment a year or two later, he took up the cause of the Sabbath with beautiful devotedness. The Lord's-Day Society requested him to move in the House of Commons for a Select Committee to inquire into the laws and practices relating to the observance of the Sabbath. He did so in 1832. The committee was granted, and he entered upon a struggle which, in Parliament and out of it, he never relaxed to the end of his life. The conflict was unpopular, because it was holy. It exposed him to much obloquy. But still he held on his way undaunted. His "Bill to promote the better observance of the Lord's Day " had a parliamentary history of five years. It was on PUBLIC QUESTIONS. 79 the table of the House when William IV. died, and Parliament was dissolved. In the general election which followed, Sir Andrew Agnew failed to secure his seat, and his bill fell to the ground. Cunningham felt a deep interest in the Sabbath question, and took his full share in supporting Sir Andrew Agnew. There is an article from his pen on the subject of Sabbath Legislation in the Presbyterian Revietv for November 1837. It is a paper of remark- able logical completeness, though hardly exceeding a dozen pages. A time will come when the work of Sabbath legislation will be taken up again — when the sons of toil will see that the Sabbath rest is their right, and will demand it. When that time comes, the pro- found and thoughtful views of Cunningham may chance to be sought out in the old sets of the Presbyterian Review. No human laws, he says, can directly promote the cordial and conscientious observance of the Lord's day. You may by Sabbath legislation deprive men of some of their ordinary indulgences on that day, but this, instead of keeping the fourth commandment, will probably lead them to break the third. But much may be done by legislation to promote the outward rest of the Sabbath. Much may be done to afford protection to those Avho are desirous to rest on that day from their ordinary occupations, and to devote it to religious purposes if they are inclined to do so. The object of Sabbath legislation is therefore protection to those who cannot protect themselves — protection of many thousands and tens of thousands of the lower orders, who are made the slaves of their fellow-subjects, and sacrificed, body and soul, for their comfort and convenience. But how far can this protective legislation go ? There are certain obvious limits within which it ought to be restricted. Two rules define these limits. The first rule is, that no act of Sabbath violation should be prohibited under a penalty unless it is capable of being clearly and unambiguously described and defined, so as to be easily distinguished from other similar acts. The other rule is, that no act of Sabbath violation should be prohibited unless it is capable of being detected and proved without any interference with the privacy of domestic arrangements. Sabbath legislation is sound 80 PUBLIC QUESTIONS. and safe within these limits, otherwise its operation would be oppressive and inquisitorial. Now, upon these two grounds jointly, it is necessary to set aside the whole intercourse between master and servant, as not coming under the proper province of Sabbath legislation. To attempt legislation for the observance of the Sabbath in the intercourse between master and domestic servant would be unwarrantable, since the ofifences in general could not be described with sufficient precision, and could not be proved -without an inquisitorial investi- gation into domestic privacy, which should not be tolerated. It is quite true that many violations of the Sabbath, most offensive in the eyes of God, will thus escape all legal punishment. But this is no reason for attempting to stretch the province of law and its penalties beyond what sound reason prescribes. True, this leaves the appearance of ground for the objection of partiality to the rich. Such legislation, it may be said, leaves the rich untouched, and interferes with the enjoyment of the poor. The rich, just because of their riches, can always command greater means of sinful enjoy- ment on the Lord's day ; but we must not be tempted to pass the safe bounds of Sabbath legislation merely for the sake of escaping a cavilling objection. Upon these principles, then, the law should prohibit all places of public amusement on the Lord's day, all trading, and all travel- ling by public hired conveyances. All these can be clearly described and defined. All these can be detected and punished by means of a public police without intruding into the privacy of domestic arrangements. POPERY. Another subject which deeply engaged Cunningham's mind about this time was that of Popery. Part of the appointed punishment of Popery would seem to be to roll the stone up the hill, and as often as the summit is all but reached, to see it rolling down again. The stone was well up the hill when the last of the Stuarts came to the throne, and it rushed thundering down, at the Revolution three years afterwards. The PUBLIC QUESTIONS. 8 J popish controversy raged hotly about that period. An Eno-Hsh priest named Gother, published a book under the title, " A Papist Misrepresented and Represented," a plausible, clever, Jesuitical book. Gother's papist is a much-wronged, greatly calumniated personage, suffering grievously under the mistakes and misrepre- sentations of Protestants. The papists of succeeding times have thought so much of the dashing, unscrupulous Gother, that some thirty editions of his work have been published. Stillingfleet, the illustrious Bishop of Worcester, published a reply to Gother under the title, " The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome truly Represented ;" and the able, true man rent the soi)histries of the clever, lying man like a spider's web. Cunningham had occasion, at a meeting of the " Protestant Association" in Edinburgh, in December 1835, to quote Gother's book. He described it as being "full of misrepresentations from beginning to end ;" " a Jesuitical gloss upon all their doctrines and opinions ;" " a tissue of falsehoods from beginniug to end." At the same time, he admitted, with characteristic fairness, that it was a '' very clever pamphlet." Soon afterwards, a prospectus of a new edition of Gother appeared, and was profusely circulated from house to house, in newspapers, and on the walls. It was written in such a style, that it was scarcely possible for laics to guess whether Gother was in favour of Popery or against it. But it quoted pro- minently Cunningham's words, " a very clever pamphlet," and omitted everything else that he had said about it. This smart trick, as the way is with most tricks, turned out to be rather foolish. Cunningham immediately resolved to reiDublish Stillingfleet. He carried out the design in 1837. The original matter added by him forms one half of the volume, and the book, Stillingfleet plus Cunningham, is perhaps the best summary of the whole Popish controversy in existence. The reader will find in it heads of argument on every point of the controversy, and most ample directions to the best sources of information on all the sub- jects in dispute between us and Rome. Cunningham has not left anything behind him that displays his learning more remarkably than his edition of Stillingfleet. It is a lasting service to the 82 PUBLIC QUESTIONS. student of theology, a very tower of David, on which hang a thousand shields. The book was finished and ready for the printer on the day that his third child, a daughter, was born. The preface, therefore, became a household memorial, as it bore the date of that daughter's birthday — his Helen, who, in mental characteristics, resembled him most of all his family, and who has already, in the flower of her youth, resembled him in the serene triumph of her deathbed. Few things that ever came from his pen are more character- istic than the following remarks taken from the Preface to Stillingfleet : — " Since man fell there have been three leading forms of the true religion, all embodying the same fundamental principles ; the Patriarchal, the Jewish, and the Christian. The great enemy of mankind, ha^ang secured a most important advantage in man's fall, has exerted himself to corrupt and pervert each of those forms of the true religion, and to make them subservient to the accomplish- ment of his own purposes. He has displayed his cunning in this respect, by adapting his measures not merely to the leading features of man's depraved nature, but likewise to the particular circum- stances in which men in these different periods were placed, the degree of light which they enjoyed, and the character of the dis- pensation under which they lived. Under his agency the Patri- archal religion degenerated among the mass of mankind into Paganism ; the Mosaic, into that state of things which is described in the gospel history, and which, for want of a better word, may be called Pharisaism ; and the Christian religion into Popery. There is a very remarkable resemblance among these three con'uptions of the true religion, which might be traced at once in their leading principles, and in many minute points of detail, and especially in the singular conformity between the rites and ceremonies of Pagan- ism and of Popery. Men must have something in the shape of religion, and the object of their great enemy is to provide that they shall have as little as possible, and that what they shall have shall be inconsistent with the great principles which God has revealed as regulating his intercourse with fallen man. The leading feature of PITBLIC QUESTIONS. 83 Paganism is idolatry, that is, worshipping those who are no gods, or worshipping God by images. This was addressed to that feature in the character of fallen man which prompted our first parents to hide themselves among the trees of the garden, and to that evil heart of unbelief which inclines all their posterity to depart from the living God. This very idolatry, although in a more mitigated form, corresponding to the greater light of the Christian dispensa- tion, is still a leading feature of Popery, and serves to a large extent, among its deluded votaries, the object of withdrawing men from contemplating God, and holding communion with the Father of their spirits. The Jewish religion, in many of its provisions, was specially intended to guard the chosen people of God from the idolatry that prevailed among the rest of mankind ; and it effected that important object to a great extent, especially during the latter period of that dispensation ; for it is well known that there was no open idolatry among the Jews after the retvirn from the Babylonish captivity. The state of religion among the Jews in the time of our Saviour, however, was such as to afford abundant proof of the ingenuity and activity of the great enemy of God and man. Phari- saism was a complete perversion of the true religion as revealed by God through Moses, and had a very striking resemblance to Popery, especially in these important particulars, — that it was founded, not upon the written word of God, but upon the traditions of men ; that the true ground of a sinner's hope was obscured, if not over- throTvai, by a principle of self-righteousness ; that personal religion was supposed to consist in the observance of outward rites and ceremonies, rather than in genuine holiness of heart and life ; and that, to a considerable extent, the authority of the Divine law was made void by human traditions. The Sadducees may be fitly regarded as representing that infidelity which, in certain circum- stances, has been generally the fruit of the prevalence of Popery ; and the union of the Pharisees and Sadducees in opposing the Lord Jesus Christ bears a striking resemblance to the combination of papists and infidels in the present day in opposing the true Protestantism of the Bible." Not long after the republication of Stillingfleet, an affair which 84 PUBLIC QUESTIONS. gave him some annoyance arose out of his share in the Popish controversy. The Eoman Catholics were full of hope and insolence at that time. They had got emancipation, and they had O'Connell. A Protestant meeting was held in Edinburgh in 1836. The Marquis of Tweeddale was in the chair. The Earl of Dalhousie, afterwards Governor-General of India, and a quite weighty platform of gentry and clergy, graced the occasion. Cunningham spoke at length, for the Popish controversy was his favourite subject, and the insolence of the Papists had made men keen. In the course of his speech he said, they " all knew the ' Encyclopaedia Brittanica,' a valuable and very important work, and that a new edition of it had lately been issued. At the time it began, the Papists, ever alive to the ad- vancement of their own purposes, sent a communication to the publisher, to the effect that unless he would allow them to revise and superintend the articles in the work in connection with Popery, they would use their influence to prevent its circulation. He referred to this as an illustration of the zeal of the Papists. With the mode of its reception he had nothing to do, but he might take the liberty of saying, that he believed concessions were made by the proprietors of the work ; and he knew that in the new edition of it, to which he was a subscriber, there were various plain traces of Popish influences in altering several articles from the way in which they stood in former editions." This statement was held to mean " that in consequence of an application by Eoman Catholics to write or revise the articles affecting them, a concession had been made inconsistent with the proper editorial care of the ' Encyclopaedia ' " ; and Mr Adam Black, the proprietor of the 'Encyclopaedia,' immediately raised an action of damasres afjainst him. The information on which Cunningham had spoken was given to him by a minister of the Episcopal Church, then ofiiciating in Edinburgh. A man needs to burn his fingers once or twice before he learns to be sufficiently careful of his facts, and perhaps Mr had not been sufficiently careful. At all events, though a most excellent, he was a timid man, and Cunningham found at PUBLIC QUESTIONS. 85 once that ho was to have no backing from him. He compromised the action, consenting to pubUsh a statement, in which he said, — " I am now satisfied that the information on which I acted does not warrant the inference that any concession was made, or any inference injurious to the character of the ' Encyclopaedia Brittanica.'" He engaged, at the same time, to pay the expense of publishing the apology, so that it might circulate as widely as the offence. This was an engagement of which ungenerous advantage might easily be taken. Indignant friends did say to him that ungenerous advan- tage was taken, but he only smiled his quiet smile, and said nothiuij. He was all his life ready — ^too ready — to make apologies and retractations. Whenever he thought he had gone too far, there was a reaction in his nature which caused him, almost with a kind of self-contempt, to make the most ample acknowledgments against himself. He was a mighty defender of a principle, but he was a poor defender of William Cunningham. Disagreeable as the affair of the 'Encyclopaedia' was, it wanted not a compensation in the love and confidence of many generous friends which it brought out. They raised among themselves a sum suffi- cient to cover all expenses. CHAPTER VI THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. rriHE General Assembly of 1835 was made glad by the presence -^ and wonderful eloquence of Duff the missionary. Even Moderatism was almost galvanised into life for a time. But this gladness was dashed by the death of Cunningham's friend, John Brown Patterson, on whom so much hope had fixed. On the Sabbath before the meeting of the Assembly, after preaching twice in his own pulpit, he walked to Grangemouth, three miles, preached, and walked home through the rain. When he arrived at home, he threw himself, wet and exhausted, upon a sofa, and dropped asleep. Next day, he went to Edinburgh, and took up his residence under his mother's roof. He attended the Assembly, but he seemed to sit in a state of abstraction, as if he neither saw nor heard what was going on around him. Next day he fevered, and was unable to leave his room. He recovered so far as to go abroad, but then a fatal relapse came on. His mind wavered, and consciousness was lost. " He wandered, but it was from earth to heaven." In less than three days after the second attack, his life was cut off, with all its brilliant promise unfulfilled. A widow remained to moum him, and an infant son, too young to know his loss. It was a bitter sorrow to Cunningham, and caused him to walk softly many days. Never were two men more entirely unlike, yet so perfectly united. From early college days, each had seen in the other the promise of future eminence. Each rejoiced in the success and honours of the other as in his own. By word and by letter they cheered each other on in the preparation for the ministry ; and, when student life was THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 87 finished, and they had entered upon their separate fields of labour, they remained the same to each other that they had ever been. The only public work in which they were associated was in the Edinburgh course of lectures on Church Establishments in the winter of 1834-5, a few months before Patterson's death. These lectures were given at the instance of the " Edinburgh Young Men's Society for promoting the interests of the Church of Scotland." Cunningham was president of this society, and delivered the first lecture ; and the series, consisting of twelve lectures, was afterwards published. The volume, one well-thumbed in many a Scottish household, is still sometimes to be seen on cottage shelves. Cunningham's introductory lecture was on " The Nature and Law- fulness of Union between Church and State." The principles there laid down regarding the only possible lawful union between Church and State, is exactly that which, at the Disruption, he was called upon to " translate into fact." " It is willingly conceded that Christ's Church or kingdom is not of this world, but is purely spiritual, and that if it can be proved that union or connection between Church and State, of any kind or in any degree, necessarily implies the headship over the Church of any other than Jesus Christ himself — the subtraction of any of the privileges conferred by Christ on the office-bearers or members of his Church — or the imposition of any restraint upon them in the discharge of any of their duties ; all such union or connection is unlawful." A principle to be heard of yet again before the Church and State question is settled ! Some of the lecturers were the very flower of the rising minds of Scotland. Besides Cunningham and Patterson, there was Charles J. Brown, who, when health allows, sometimes rises even yet to rare heights of Christian eloquence ; Candlish, the most lithe and agile intellect of his day ; Dunlop, with his high-toned chivalry of spirit, and his penetrating sagacity ; Andrew Gray, with weight and sharpness like the keen and heavy Indian Tulwar, which, lightly dropped on a man's arm, shreds it like a sapling ; John Bruce, "An opulent soul Dropt in my path, like a great cup of gold." 88 THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. At that time the Vokmtary controversy was at its height. After all, it was but a preliminary skirmish of the great Church and State battle. Here, in Scotland, it commenced on this wise. About the year 1829, the Rev. Mr Ballantyne, a Dissenting minister in the northern town of Stonehaven, published a " Com- parison of Dissenting and Established Churches." He was a man of considerable parts, but his book attracted little notice. Cobbett says that the profits of his first publishing adventure " amounted to eleven pence three farthings, quite entirely clear of all deduction whatsoever." It is doubtful if Mr Ballantyne came off so well. Some little time afterwards, the Rev. Mr Marshall of Kirkin- tilloch picked up the spent shot and fired it off anew. He preached a sermon before the " Glasgow Association for propagating the gospel in connection with the United Secession Church," which sermon was immediately published under the title of "Ecclesiastical Establishments Considered." Marshall was a bold, honest, strong- willed man, and a vigorous preacher. The Glasgow sermon, which subsequent events rendered historical, was preached from the words: " Have respect unto the covenant, for the dark places of earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." He argued that Ecclesiastical Establishments are unscriiDtural, unjust, inefficient, and unnecessary. The sermon produced an immense impression, aud ran raj)idly through several editions. The Scotch Seceders, it is well known, had long been more or less leavened with anti-Establishment prin- ciples, so that the sturdy preacher in the west scattered his seed in fully prepared soil. Except an anonymous writer in the Christian Instructor, whose article was republished in a sej^arate form, no one took the field on the side of Establishments for a considerable time. The diffusion of Voluntary principles went on briskly. The Dissenters organised. Every towa and village throughout Scotland had its Voluntary Church Association. At length, the friends of the Establishment began to stir. Mr Marshall, unhappy in quotation, cried in the words of Goliath of Gath, "Give me a man, that we may fight together." He had his wish. Dr John Inglis, a profoundly saga- cious and able man, came out, in 1833, with his " Vindication of THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 89 Ecclesiastical Establishments;" and Mr Marshall was more than matched. The conflict waxed warm. By this time, the Reform Act had given political power to the great middle class. Men in their hot youth will mistake their strength and overstrain them- selves in attempting feats beyond it. The Dissenters, greatly mistaking their strength, thought that the time had come for the overthrow of the Established Church. They began an attack so brisk, that it seemed for a time not unlikely to succeed. They had newspapers and monthly magazines, and it snowed pamphlets and tracts. They had itinerant lecturers constantly addressing public meetings, whose incessant activity kept the country in a flame. The question of Church or no Church divided every hamlet. If the friends of the Church had been slow to meet the attack, they, at least, shewed no want of vigour when they had begun. The Controversy accumulated a multitudinous literature, able, trenchant, unsparing. Seven quarterly or monthly magazines laboured at the furnace. The Voluntary Magazine and the Church of Scotland Magazine were got up expressly for the battle. The Secession Magazine, and the Christian Journal, the Christian Instructor, the Presbyterian Review, and the Pi^eshyterian Maga- zine, previously existing organs, ranged themselves on their respec- tive sides. There was an endless procession of books and treatises, j)amphlets, essays, letters, and lectures. About fifty thousand tracts on the Establishment side alone, left Collins' warehouse each month during the heat of the Controversy. The pulpit took a vehement part in the discussion. Public debates, in which the champions met by challenge to discuss the question, gave the greatest possible impulse to the common people who gathered to see them fight it out. Many of the meetings were wild and fierce to an incredible de- gree. The saintly Robert M'Cheyne — no agitator, certainly — thought it his duty to stand up on behalf of the Established Church. One evening he appeared before a meeting in a village of the county of Fife. He came forward, and attempted to speak. But the storm of yells and groans which saluted him, and the sea of angry faces before him, were too much for his gentle nature. He turned pale, and gave up the attempt. 7 90 ' THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. The population of Scotland, believed to be about a million at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had increased to two millions and a-half. But the Moderates, each man looking after his own portion of fat, had never thought of extending the Church to meet the wants of this rapidly-extending population. As soon, however, as the reforming party became the majority, there was a grand out- burst of energetic endeavour to provide gospel ordinances for every soul in the land. The number of new churches built in connection with the Establishment during the previous hundred years was just sixty-three. In the very first year after the evangelical and reform- ing men became a majority, the number of additional churches built was sixty-four. In four years they had built 1 87 new churches, raising for this purpose a yearly revenue of £50,000, — a thing not so wonderful now, when Christian liberality has grown familiar with far greater deeds, but amazing enough then. The Church, as a National Church, thought that if she built the places of worship by her own endeavour, the State ought to provide, at least, a partial support for the ministers. The assistance of the State was accordingly solicited. Nearly seven hundred petitions in favour of this object were presented to Parliament, — a thing totally unprecedented from Scotland, as the Lord Advocate of the day told the House of Commons, on any subject since the Union. The Ministry of the day put a recommendation of it into the King's Speech, at the opening of Parliament in 1835. The Dissenters, who saw in the efforts of the Church to extend herself to the " out- field population," a plan to crush themselves, were roused to the most vigorous opposition. It was the old battle of State Churches over again, with a slight change of ground. All that Government ever did was to appoint a Royal Commis- sion to inquire into the whole subject of the means of religious instruction in Scotland. The Commission did their work labori- ously and honestly enough. They visited every town. They held open sittings, examined witnesses of all kinds, and allowed every one who chose to cross-examine them through the chairman. Church- men and Dissenters badgered each other before the Commission in every town. Bitter disputes and controversies sprang up behind THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 91 them like a crop of nettles wherever they came. The visit of the Commission opened the lists for combat in every locality, and the battle, like Absalom's, " was scattered over the face of the whole country." Many speakers, good and bad, took part in the Voluntary agitation, from pulpit and platform, who must go down to forget- fulness, like yesterday's murmur of the waves on the shore. But among them were two remarkable men who cannot easily be forgotten. Charles Leckie was born in Ireland, of a Scotch father and an Irish mother. He came over to Scotland when a boy, and ob- tained work in a cotton mill at Barrhead. At a Sabbath school there, divine truth took hold of his mind. The lad devoted him- self to his Bible till he almost had it by heart ; and to Church History, till his proficiency in it was amazing. The only school that he ever attended was the Sabbath school. But the mightiest educational influence in Scotland is that to which men go at the sound of the Sabbath bells. Charles Leckie enjoyed that in great excellence under the ministry of the Rev. Dr Symington, of the Reformed Presbyterians. He was first heard of in connection with a public discussion which he maintained with some Romanists in the town of Paisley, The " Reformation Society " of those days took hold of him, and employed him as their travelling agent. His debating power was quite marvellous. His ready wit and brilliant repartee came, perhaps, from his Irish blood ; but he drove home the rivets of his argument like a Scot of the Scots. He was a slightly-made man, of middle height. His features were small and regular, his comiDlexion dark, and his coal-black hair stood straight up from his compact forehead. A working man himself, he could deal mth meetings of the working classes as no other man in Scotland could do. He encountered many a stormy scene, battling with the fierce democracy ; but his good humour was never ruffled, and his cool self-possession never failed. He was a gentle, happy^ humble-hearted Christian. The Established Church found one of its most effective defenders in this remarkable cotton-spinner. Some of his public debates lasted for three, and one of them for 92 THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. ten, consecutive evenings. Sometimes the eager crowd sat on till gray daylight streamed in upon them. The Voluntary controversy drew another remarkable combatant into the field. This was Makgill of Eankeillour, a gentleman of ancient family in the county of Fife. He Avas a man of distin- guished personal appearance ; for the Makgills, like the Bertrams of Sir Walter's tale, were "aye the wale of the country side." Perhaps since Erskine of Dun, the friend of Knox, went about preaching the gospel in Angus, no Scottish gentleman gave his life with a more heroic heart to the cause of God and his Church. His mind was rich with the treasures of English literature; he was intrepid and ready in debate ; he possessed a fervid and stirring eloquence ; and his voice of immense power, and yet silvery charms, Avas such as is seldom given to man. He itinerated with Charles Leslie in the cause of the Church against the Voluntaries. It will be long enough before such a pair of travellers visit our towns and villages again. Cunningham's language was very strong — as strong as John Milton's in his pamphlets. At the first meeting held in Edinburgh in defence of the Church, he used words to this effect: "The friends of the Church had determined to stem the tide of atheism, infidelity, popery, and voluntaryism, and to resist the attacks made upon them by an apostate and perjured Secession." He meant those who professed Secession principles in connection with Volun- taryism, and to whom he did not hesitate to apply the epithets of apostacy and perjury. " This statement," he says himself, " occa- sioned a considerable sensation, and called forth a great deal of wrath and bitterness" — not wonderful, upon the whole. The Voluntary Seceders challenged him to make good the charge. Long afterwards, Dr Cunningham described what took place in these words : " I was led in the excitement of debate to ajDply a very strong and unwarrantable expression to the position of the Voluntaries in the Secession. I applied the terms apostacy and perjury — terms which were used by some of our friends among the Old Light Seceders, and which I inconsiderately adopted in debate. In the articles," which had been referred to, " there was certainly an THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 93 explanation or defence of the grounds of the statement ; but the expression I at once admitted was unwarrantable and improper." The articles referred to were no fewer than seven in as many con- secutive numbers of the Church of Scotland Magazine. The aim of them was to prove or establish the inconsistency to which Dr Cunningham's expression pointed. He confessed the expression to be unwarrantable, but he " asserted and maintained " the incon- sistency. All ministers of the Secession Church at that time declared, at their ordination, their approval of the principles and design of the Secession, and pledged themselves to prosecute that " design." Was that consistent with Voluntaryism ? The first Seceders were no Voluntaries ; they left the Established Church with a noble sorrow in their hearts, and reserved their right to return in better days. Their successors were of quite another mind. How could they keep on swearing to follow up the design of their fathers ? Cunning- ham, to whom truth was a sacred nuraen whose very skirts were holy, could not understand this, and pressed the charge vigorously. Moreover, they signed the Westminster Confession, bating only a caveat against intolerance and persecution. But did that cover, or was it wide enough to permit. Voluntaryism ? There were replies, of course, both as to the " design," and as to the "Confession." They did not satisfy Cunningham's judgment. But some moral- isings of his on this whole collision will meet us later. Dr John Eitchie was a well-known character in those days. He was minister of the Secession Church in Potterrow, Edinburgh, where the Covenanters had their cannon-foundry blazing in Dunse Law days. He had natural eloquence, humour, and cleverness; was impulsive and ardent, and liked the excitement of popular agitation. Under the influence of that excitement, he no doubt sometimes made demonstrations which his friends would have wished unmade. But yet he was a man in whom those that knew him found not a little to love. He is daguerreotyped in the minds of most survivors of that generation. His pleasant countenance and handsome person were set off by peculiar integuments. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, saucer deep in the crown ; a quaker-cut coat ; 94) THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. and, discarding pantaloons, his shapely calves were attired in silk stockings. His activity in the Voluntary controversy was immense. He made speeches of five hours and a half. He expatiated over the whole of Scotland, nothing but the bar of the Gaelic vernacular keeping him out of any corner of it. Many stories are yet alive of his pleasantries and audacities, his adventures, and also his misad- ventures, in the course of his career. Dr Ritchie became in a manner the focus of some of the severest hitting connected with this " perjury and apostacy " business ; be- cause he met the challenge with great emphasis of repudiation, and yet was not circumspect in the handling of his line of battle. He said, or was said to have said, that it was utterly impossible he could be perjured, for he had never taken an oath. Hereupon his adversaries went about to prove that he had " engaged in Covenanting work," i.e., joined in renewal of the Covenant, which involved words of solemn swearing ; and, as it was maintained, riot swearing to Volun- taryism. Nobody spared anybody in those days, if anybody was in a corner. It may be supposed, therefore, what high words of denunciation were levelled at Dr Ritchie. In the year 1847, when Dr Cunningham took up his abode in Salisbury Road, his next door neighbour was the same Dr Ritchie. Not waiting to be called upon, Dr and Mrs Cunningham made the first step in an intercourse which became extremely cordial. Dr Ritchie, indeed, was known to have averred that he must have the garden wall pulled down, and suffer no dividing lines between him- self and his friend. He sympathised strongly with many of Dr Cunningham's theological tendencies; and was wont to compare notes with his old antagonist with great satisfaction. When he was laid upon his deathbed, Dr Cunningham repeatedly visited him, and prayed with him, as an intimate Christian friend ; and he mourned with the bereaved family. Within a year afterwards, he had himself followed him beyond the veil.* OBEDIENCE DUE TO CIVIL RULERS. The reforming party in the Church of Scotland were advancing * Letter from Miss Pdtcliie. THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 95 towards a point where tlicy would have to choose between obeying God and obeying man. It was surely a kindness of Providence that while that hour was approaching, circumstances forced upon them the consideration of a Christian's duty to the law of the land from various standpoints. The great question of the duty of civil obedience came up about this time in a very animated form, and received a most thorough discussion. Naples has its Vesuvius, with its sullen rumblings, and fiery emissions, and perpetual bitter smoke. Edinburgh had its Vesuvius, too, in the shape of the Annuity-Tax, a very lively Vesuvius indeed. The Annuity-Tax was a tax of six ^er cent, on rental paid by the occupiers of houses for the support of the Edinburgh city clergy. It has been the cause of untold irritation in that fair towTi. It is an old tax, going back as far as the time of Charles I., and suitable enough, perhaps, when the whole nation was of one church, but quite obnoxious now, and fitted to make the support of the clergy an occasion of strife and bitterness. Since the days we speak of, successive battles have as good as made an end of it. In the heat of the Voluntary controversy, popular fury turned against the Annuity-Tax, and many who had hitherto paid it unwillingly, refused to pay it any more. Warrants went out against two thousand persons. The state of inflammation in the town may be imagined. Dr John Brown, the eminent minister of Broughton Place, and Professor of Divinity to the United Secession Church, had long filled an important and influential place in Edinburgh. He was a man of great polemical power and Biblical skill, and a beautiful cha- racter, admired and loved by all who knew him. In the midst of the excitement, a great meeting was held to form an association for the abolition of the Annuity-Tax. At that meeting, Dr Brown came forward and read a formal paper, in which he pledged him- self to suffer any penalty, even to bonds and imprisonment, rather than pay the Annuity-Tax any more. He was as good as his word. On his refusal to pay, warrant went out against him, the ofiicers of the law entered his dwelling, and laid their hands on his eight-day clock, an article which was destined to make more noise than any other eight-day clock ever did 96 THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. before, Dr Broivn suffered the law to take its course, and the clock was put up to public sale. A rough and clamorous mob crammed the place of sale, and performed the operation of " bonnetting " any one who was seen to make a bid. However, in spite of the tumult, the clock was sold, for as much happily as paid the debt and expenses ; but the exasperation in Edinburgh is not to be told. Bobert Haldane, to whom Scotland and the truth owe so much, viewed the conduct of Dr Brown with strong disapprobation, and told him, in a letter published in the Edinburgh Advertiser, that his refusal to pay tribute was plain disobedience to the law of Christ. Dr Brown replied through the same channel, and alleged, among other things, the example of " our covenanting ancestors," as refusing to pay taxes levied for purposes which they considered sinful. He referred to the book called, " The Hind let Loose," by Alexander Shields, as containing an able abstract of their case. " The Hind let Loose " does not contain the case of our " cove- nanting ancestors," but only the case of a small party of them, who broke off from the rest towards the end of the great persecution. Memory does play a man annoying tricks, and Dr BroAvn, in making the statement, must have trusted to memory. " There is no one," said Wellington, " in whose presence it is more unsafe to make a false movement than in that of Napoleon." It was very unsafe to make a mistake with Cunningham in front. He at once exposed the weakness of the historical plea in the Advertiser. Dr Brown, in his reply, appealed to the relations in which Cunningham had formerly stood to him as " his grateful pupil." But he was met in that blunt fashion which is destructive to sentiment. Cunning- ham acknowledged that, as a student, he had derived both pleasure and profit from hearing Dr Brown preach, and from attending a class which he conducted for the critical study of the New Testa- ment, but he would not allow that these circumstances had any bearing on the question whether " The Hind let Loose " was a proper authority for the opinions of our " covenanting ancestors." Since, however, personal relations had been appealed to, he ex- plained what these were, and did so pretty sharply. THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. 97 Robert Haldanc continued his letters in the Advertiser, and Dr Brown delivered two Sabbath evening lectures in reply to them. These lectures were published, and ran through several editions, which were gradually enlarged by an immense body of notes and extracts, till the thick pamphlet grew into a volume of 500 pages. Dr Brown's biographer says, " Probably none but its author could have drawn from so wide a range of reading in the Biblical, and especially in ecclesiastico-political literature — the whole number of authors quoted being upwards of three hundred. Almost the whole history of opinion in regard to the province of the civil magistrate is contained in the selected extracts."* Perhaps there was only one man on the other side who could have taken up this remark- able publication, with its enormous erudition, and put his finger upon its weak points. That Cunningham could do it, the Presby- terian Review for October 1839 abundantly proved. The powerful article on Civil Obedience from his pen, which appears in that number, was written almost off-hand, amid the distractions of those conflicts which had meanwhile arisen within the Established Church. It is written with unsparing keenness. In open battle, Cunning- ham was always the keenest of combatants, but no heart had ever more generous reactions than his. What he thought of his con- troversy with Dr Brown will be seen in the sequel. Why should we scruj)le to speak of these old heats between two Churches which are evidently destined to become one in the hand of the Lord ? It is a mere question of time. And they will not honour one another the less because each has proved to the other in keen conflict its invincible loyalty to the truth. Surely it ought to be noticed as one of the many marked pro- vidences which preceded the Disruption, that this memorable dis- cussion arose reo-ardino- the limitations of the obedience due to civil rulers. There are such limitations, as every Christian man admits. When God was about to bring his people to a point where they would be compelled to recognise such a limitation. He sent them to study the whole question, and to reason it out in an intense and animated controversy. Whoever shall seek out the Presbyterian * "Memoir of Jolin Biwra, D.D.," p. 189. 98 THE VOLUNTARY CONTROVERSY. Revieiu for 1839, for the sake of Cunningham's articles, will be astonished at the marvellous learning which they display, and will regret that they should be buried in an old ephemeral. But they served their, end ; nor can we doubt that the controversy ripened men's minds upon the duty of refusing to Caesar the things that are God's. CHAPTER VI I. CHURCH REFORM. TT is now time to resume the narrative of those internal reforms -*- and controversies which agitated the Church of Scotland during the years preceding the Disruption. Cunningham, writing to his friend Patterson, had declared that he " did not know, in the history of Christianity, anything coming up to the idea of a church," so fully as was the case in Scotland when Presbytery flourished in its glory and in its strength. But the Church of Scotland had thrown away her strength during a false, hollow, and "Moderate" age. The story of the infant baptized in a frozen pool, in a Highland moor, is but a vivid illus- tration of the miserable carelessness to be found in many a parish. James Macdonald, catechist in the parish of Peay, had a son born during a vacancy in the parish. He was obliged, therefore, to apply to a neighbouring minister for the baptism of his child. On a December day, he and his wife set out with the infant to that minister's house. On reaching it, they found that the minister was out shooting, and would not be back till night. They set out across the moor on their way home again. As they j)lodded on, they met the reverend sportsman. He had no idea, however, of leaving his sport to return with them to the house, but he was quite ready to baptise the infant on the spot. They were standing beside a frozen pool, and, after muttering a few words of prayer, he broke the ice with the butt of his gun, lifted a little water in the hollow of his hand, and sprinkled it on the face of the infant, as he repeated the solemn words of baptism. The infant thus baptized 100 CHURCH REFORM. from a frozen pool, on the ojDcn moor, lived and grew, and became the celebrated Dr Macdonald, the Apostle of the North. The deepest wish of Cunningham's heart was to see the Church, which he loved with such reverent affection, reanimated to the efficiency of former times. He burned to see her delivered from the corruptions of a hundred years. This was the ruling passion of his heart, and in the years before us, the hope of success was as ardent as the desire was deep and strong. Our fathers had a sharp, decisive way of reaching their drones by " j^resbyterial visitation." Each presbytery, in the exercise of its episcopal power, visited all the parishes within its bounds at short intervals, and the circuit went on continually. They ex- amined into the state of matters with unflinching rigour. They looked to see that the minister's library was sufficiently stored with good and useful books. They inquired into the matter and manner of his preaching, his constancy in study, his visitation of the sick and of his parish, his rule in his o-wn house, his faithfuluess in reproving sin, his prudence, his laboriousness in teaching the young and ignorant. Under such a system, if a sentinel fell asleep, it was at his peril. The system, no doubt, was primitive in its details, and might be found something less than suitable to modern times. But the idea of it was excellent, and it might be revived and adapted to the present day. Cunningham introduced an overture''''' in the provincial Synod of Lothian in the autumn of 1835, to revive the practice. The overture was carried, and went up to the General Assembly. That cautious body, after taking a year to think of it, declared that Presbyteries had the right to make parochial visitations if they thought jDroper. Many presbyteries, in which evangelical men had the majority, did think jDroper. The Moderates, where they were in a majority, thought proper to let them alone. This same master-desire to see the beloved Church of Scotland purged from every blot and flaw, and filled with fresh energy to bless the land, drew him into many a vehement collision, for which ample occasion arose in the miniature parliaments of * Overture — opening of the question. CHURCH REFORM. 101 the Presbyterian church, where parties met face to face every month. One of many sharp fights which took place between Moderate and Evangelical was on the question of bonds for the stijoend of ministers in the new churches. When a gospel labourer is set down among a neglected population, it would be a comfort, no doubt, if you could obtain for him legal security for his income, or, at least, for as much of it as would be subsistence-money. But suppose that a poor and humble community have been engaged in building a church. They have watched it as it rose from the first stone, till, after long months of painful effort, the cope-stone has been brought forth with shoutings. They come before the Pres- bytery, and state that it is impossible, and indeed would be a mockery, for them to give a bond, but that they are willing to do all they can for the support of their minister. Shall they be told, There must be a legal bond, or you can have no minister ? The Evangelical party were for declaring it competent for presbyteries to settle ministers without bonds. A labourer of the right sort would have no fear about his hire in God's vineyard, and this matter of stamped paper should not be suffered to prove a hindrance to the work of Christianising the land. The Moderates were for what they called "soberer views," and were stout for bonds. The question happened to be before the Presbytery of Edinburgh one day. Mr James Macfarlane, minister of St Bernard's Church, made a long speech in favour of bonds. Referring to this speech, Cunningham remarked that Mr Macfarlane had had recourse to sneers. He had talked of their hopes that blessings would descend upon the land like showers of gold, from the mere building of chapels. But for the sake of a sneer, he had grossly misre- jDresented the truth, and cast candour and fairness aside. Some- body rose to order. Mr Macfarlane would simply remark, that there were some people whose tongues were no scandal. Dr Muir of St Stephen's, a man full of deep reverence for the " clerical enamel," also rose and put it to Mr Cunningham, whether on his knees in secret, and in the presence of his God, he could justify to himself the language he had now been using? Mr 102 CHURCH REFORM. Cimningham said, "I believe that no debate or discussion ever occvirred in which men did not speak in a manner which, when tried by the standard of God's law, might be properly called sinful. Mr Macfarlane was guilty of sin when he misrepresented the senti- ments of those who advocated the admission of chapel ministers into the Church Courts. I was guilty of sin in the sight of God when I characterised his conduct as I did. Although I cannot admit the necessity, or see the propriety of such a direct personal application to myself as Dr Muir has made, I desire to receive the rebuke in a right spirit, and to improve it as a call to guard more carefully against the appearance of evil." Perhaps there was no man in the Presbytery that day who did not assent to the remark made by one of its members : " The way in which Mr Cunningham has received the animadversions of his brethren does equal honour to his head and his heart." A LESSON. For some years previous to 1834, the General Assembly had a Committee on Church Accommodation, of which Dr Brunton was Convener. But the Committee effected nothing, until, on Dr Brunton's resignation in 1834, the Assembly appointed Dr Chal- mers to the charge of the business. The torpid Committee became vital and full of force immediately, and the work of extending the Church, and bringing the blessings of religion to the homes of the poorest in the land, went on with amazing energy and success. Just in the midst of this energetic and happy time, a sudden quarrel blazed up among the leading men of the enterprise. We have learned much confidence since those days in the power of the Christian church to support and extend herself. We thought then that if the people built churches in poor and destitute localities, it was necessary, and might fairly be expected, that the Government should bear the annual expense. A national church is charged with the duty of putting the ordinances of religion within the reach of all in the land. It is reasonable that the state should afford some measure of assistance, and at that time we verily thought that without Government assistance it could not be done. This, then, CHURCH REFORM. 103 was the point of intensest interest in tlio Church of Scotland in the years 1 83G-7, — Will the Government support, or help to support, the churches Ave have built and are building ? The head of the Government of that day was the able and indolent Lord Melbourne, that servant of the hour, who " tried letting it alone " with every- thing that would let him alone. Dr Lee, at that time minister of the Old Church, Edinburgh, was a prominent man in the Church of Scotland, and has left some memory of himself on the earth. His knowledge of old books and of Scottish antiquities was extraordinary, and his library was a book-hunter's paradise. He was principal clerk to the General Assembly, where his worn, sad looking face and rigorous costume were a familiar sight. When he rose to speak, he held his lono- feathery quill in his gloved hand, sawing the air with mild flourishes. He had been spoken of as Moderator of the next General Assembly. He was clearly a vir papahilis, and his friends made no doubt of his appointment to the honour. The mode of designation for the Moderatorship was certainly too much like the close system of the old town corporations. The former Moderators met and agreed among themselves whom to recommend to the approaching Assembly, and this recommendation was usually adopted as a matter of course. On this occasion, the conclave of old Moderators did not recommend Dr Lee, but quite a different man, Dr Gardiner of Bothwell. They notified it, as the manner was, by circular to the different Presbyteries. The friends of Dr Lee were not slow to express their surprise and displeasure. They held a meeting, and issued an indignant manifesto. The old Moderators were quite ready to tell why they had passed by Dr Lee. He was understood to be indifferently affected to the cause of church extension. He had given evidence before the Royal Commission in Edinburgh — "a question process of two days" — and his evidence was " most injurious to the cause of Church exten- sion." Were they, just at that time, to elect to the highest honour in the Church a man whom they could not trust upon by far the most important question before the Church ? Could they place him in a position where he would be called upon to represent 104 CHURCH REFORM. the views and wishes of the Church to the Government of the day?* Ano-ry sparks began to fly about in the • shape of newspaper paragraphs. Then came all the heavy artillery of articles and pamphlets. Dr Chalmers published a pamphlet against Dr Lee. The friends of Dr Lee replied in a " Statement " keen and cutting. Procurator Bell published a pamphlet. John Bruce of St Andrew's Church also published one, phosphorescent with the light of his quaint and sterling genius. Cunningham came into the field with a Reply to the " Statement," in a pamphlet of fifty pages. The authors of the Statement seemed to him to have forgotten the respect due to the great name of Chalmers, and Cunningham's heart swelled with indignation. He strikes his blow on the side of Chalmers with all his immense force. The help thus generously rendered was received with touching gratitude. Cunningham ap- pears to have reverently preserved every line from Chalmers that he ever received in the course of his life, down to dinner invitations, and there is one note among them, in which Chalmers says of this pamphlet, " I cannot help viewing it as the most important act of kindness which I and my family ever have received from any individual." Dr Lee pubhshed a refutation of the charges brought against him, and his complaint, uttered in his quaintly beautiful Bible style, is really touching. "Alas!" he cries, "that the days of our years should be passed away in unprofitable contention, which, if I have in any way contributed to begin, assuredly I meant not so, neither did my heart think so. I was not panting for any pre- eminence ; I was not seeking to be exalted to an ephemeral dignity that I might be better known in the gates, sitting among the elders of the land ; nor had I been vainly dreaming that during the toils and the joy of harvest my brethren's sheaves should do obeisance * The case of the supporters of Dr Lee rested on two allegations : 1st, That the old Moderators, or the most influential of them, had committed themselves to a nomination of Dr Lee, and made that known ; 2d, That after this they withdrew his name and substituted another in a manner fitted to fix on Dr Lee an aspersion which was groundless. The other side met the first assertion with a " distinguo," and on the second, they undertook to prove the charge against Dr Lee.— R. CHURCH REFORM. 105 to mine. As little did I suspect that I was to be branded as the enemy of the Church for speaking the things which I knew, or that I would be accused before the whole world of having harboured malignant devices which my heart within me abhors. It is not in man to sit tamely by, when they who are younger than I are hold- ing me in derision." The vote of the General Assembly went against Dr Lee, and Dr Gardiner was Moderator by a majority of nearly five to one. But the moderatorship controversy, a huge fire kindled by a wretchedly small spark, left a trail of miserable consequences. Like the whisperer, it separated chief friends. So deep was the alienation, that some of those who were afterwards to be leaders in the Dis- ruption, ceased to be on speaking terms. Yet the hand of Providence is clear even in this seemingly de- plorable controversy. As far as man is concerned, we might wish it forgotten, for it tended to no man's praise. But it is to be remem- bered to the praise of Him who can work out His wise purposes by our follies. The Lord was about to lead his people into a moment- ous conflict. But before the Disruption came on. He permitted those whom He designed to make the leaders in His cause, to learn by painful experience in this moderatorship controversy the bitter fruits of self-will. They had quarrelled about a matter really of no moment. They came out of the embroilment humbled and saddened ; but they had received a lesson which men of generous minds could never forget of the danger and misery of falling out by the way. A small affair which occurred about the beginning of ] 837 is so illustrative of Cunningham, as to be worth noticing in spite of its insignificance. Dr John Hunter, Principal of one of the colleges of St Andrews, died. The great scholar was carried to his long home under the shadow of the grand cathedral ruins, with simple and affecting state, his gown of office covering his coffin instead of a pall, and the students following, a sad and silent throng. Very soon the college had a new principal appointed over it, — Dr John Lee of the Old Church Parish, Edinburgh, he of the unlucky 8 106 CHURCH REFORM. moderatorship controversy. He accepted the new office of Principal, but month after month passed, and he did not resign his old office of pastor. After all that had taken place on the subject of pluralities, it was not supposed that he could dream of keeping both. Still the parish which could not tell whether it had a minister or not, was entitled to call itself ill-used. The members of the Edinburgh Presbytery were indignant, and Dr Lee's conduct was the subject of much severe remark in private. Time wore on, and still Dr Lee was a parish minister in Edinburgh, and principal of a college in St Andrews. Other members of Presbytery might talk, but Cunningham brought the matter to an issue. It was not in his nature to hesi- tate or shrink. He gave notice of a motion that unless Dr Lee should resign his parochial charge by a certain day, the Presbytery should take up his conduct for consideration. Before the day came for discussing this motion, Dr Lee, to the astonishment of all, resigned the office of Principal. As Principal, he had voted in the Senatus of St Andrews, had delivered an introductory lecture at the commencement of the session, and had drawn half a year's salary. There is no doubt that he had fully intended to remove to St Andrews, and that he incurred expenses in connection with the principalship, which the half year's salary did not cover. Probably he found upon trial that he could not affijrd to be Principal, as his income in that capacity would have been much less than what he had in Edinburgh. No one questioned his integrity ; but the affair had an awkward apj)earance. On Dr Lee's resignation, Mr Cunninsrham at once intimated that he would not press any motion against him personally. He would still, however, call on the Presbytery to take steps to prevent the recurrence of any such proceeding. It was an unpleasant affair, and it would seem that the Presby- tery were very reluctant to meddle with it at all, for Dr Lee com- plained, that " inasmuch as all the Presbytery, with one exception, had preserved a total silence on the subject, he was altogether unable to gather the general opinion of the Presbytery with respect to the matter." It takes a firm as well as an unselfish man to CHURCH REFORM. 107 incur odium, when lie might pass by on the other side, Cunnino-- ham was a young minister then, and it would have been no dis- credit to him to refrain, when so many older men were silent. But there was that in the aspect of the transaction which his sense of duty could not brook. He had divested his motion, he said, of all personal reference to Dr Lee, but he might not find it possible to omit aU reference to Dr Lee in his speech. He must refer to what Dr Lee had done as the very kind of thing which ought not to be allowed. When a minister accepted the office of professor or prin- cipal, held it for six months, then resigned it, and returned to his parochial charge, it was dealing in a very light and unbecoming way with the sacred office. It was fitted to bring the office into con- tempt. Besides, it afforded endless facilities for jobbing. If a clergyman might hold such an office for half a year or a year with- out vacating his parochial benefice, he might have half a year's or a year's salary of it, as payment, perhaps, for some political service done to the Government of the day which gave him the appoint- ment. The motion which Cunningham made and supported by a powerful address, and the Presbytery adopted unanimously, called uj)on the General Assembly to declare that induction into one charge necessarily involved the abandonment of the other. CHAPTER VIII. JUDGE-MADE LAW. T\R CHALMERS, in 1838, delivered those London lectures on •^ Church Establishments which made a greater sensation than any other lectures in the modern times. Dukes and marquises, earls and viscounts, barons and baronets, bishops and members of Parliament, swarmed in the brilliant throng, and joined in the tumultuous cheer when the lecturer asserted the freedom and independence of our Scottish Church under the happy similitude of the Englishman's castle. " What Lord Chatham said of the poor man's house is true, in all its parts, of the Church to which I have the honour to belong : ' In England, every man's house is his castle — not that it is surrounded with walls and battlements. It may be a straw-built shed ; every wind of heaven may whistle round it, every element of heaven may enter it, but the king cannot — the king dare not.' " What if the Englishman should awake to find all the mighty legal entrenchments of his cottage gone, and his house, his castle no more, but open to every ruffian tread ? It was this very thing that befell the Church of Scotland. All the legal entrenchments of its freedom and independence were swept away by a form of iniquity which Englishmen once understood very well — the iniquity of judge-made law. The fisherman in the Eastern tale, drawing his net, brought up out of the sea a casket sealed with the seal of Solomon. When he had opened it, a thick smoke arose, towered aloft to the height of a palm tree, and gradually took the form of a destroying genie. The reader must have patience to watch the development of the malig- JUDGE-MADE LAW. 109 nant genie out of the smoke, if he would understand a memorable period in Scottish history. Even if the Church of Scotland had kept on in the old "Moderate" way, — each man intent on getting his own " portion of the fat," — it is by no means certain that she could have made good weather to herself as times went then. At all events, her attempt at self- reform brought trouble soon enough. Auchterarder is a long, large village in Perthshire, notable for assiduous weavers and diligent shuttle-driving. It is an old place, old enough to have been the subject of a jest of George Buchanan's in the days of James VI. An Englishman was boasting the great- ness and grandeur of the towns in England, and running down the Scotch towns. " Tush, sir," said Buchanan, " I know a town in Scotland that has fifty drawbridges." Auchterarder had a " stank " which ran through the middle of its one long street, and every cottage had a plank laid across for communication with its opposite neighbour. In the year of Sherififmuir, the man who called himself James VIII. burned the long village to the ground, promising to pay for damages done, but never paying. It was a cruel scene, in a wild winter morning, amid driving snow. In quieter times, the government paid " burning money " to the poor people thus summarily unhoused. In 1834 was kindled in Auchterarder the first spark of a fire which was to blaze through all Scotland. A certain Mr Robert Young, a probationer for the ministry in the Scottish Church, was nephew to the Earl of Kinnoull's factor. Auchterarder falling vacant, the Earl of Kinnoull, as patron, presented Mr Young to the living. He went to Auchterarder, and preached two several Sabbaths in the Parish Church, as Church law required. It was the law of the Church of Scotland, that while the title to a benefice is founded on the patron's presentation, the title to the pastoral ofiice is founded on the call of the congregation. Mr Young had got the one title, but he failed to obtain the other. A few years earlier, that would not have been a material circum- stance. He would have got the benefice of Auchterarder, whether the people liked or no. But now the people had the means of pro- 110 JUDGE-JIADE LAW. tecting themselves. By the Veto Law just passed, no man could be inducted into a parish in the teeth of a dissenting majority. Seven-eighths of those entitled to a voice, dissented from Mr Young's settlement ; while out of a poj)ulation of 3000, he had only two supporters, a banker, named Michael Tod, and a farmer, named Peter Clark. These names were destined to become historical. Mr John Hope was Dean of the Faculty of Advocates at that time. His father, a high Tory, was Lord President of the Court of Session. That is to say, the father was head of the Scottish bench, and the son was head of the Scottish bar. How the Dean of Faculty and the presentee to Auchterarder got together, and became the authors of that mighty mischief which the one could not have wrought without the other, must remain a point for the curious. The conjunction of these two certainly did produce a very remarkable revolution in our ancient kingdom. When the Veto Law first came into operation, it entered into no man's idea that it was beyond the power of the Church to pass such a law. The form of a call, signed by the people, had always existed in the Church from her earliest time. No man could be inducted to a parish without it. But for generations it had become a sham. All that the Church now did was to require that it should once more become a reality, as the very existence of the form proved that it had once been a reality. Accordingly, Mr Young and his friends did not at first make any complaint whatever against the Veto Law, but only alleged some paltry informality in its applica- tion to him. This gave room for an appeal to the Assembly of 1835, and served to waste some months of time. The Assembly found the objection futile, and ruled that the proceedings of the Presbytery had been quite in order. Whereupon the Presbytery, at their next meeting, finally rejected Mr Young. At this stage, it seems that Mr John Hope took him up, and undertook to put him into the priest's office, that he might eat his bit of bread. In November 1835, the Commission of the General Assembly, or Standing Committee of the whole house, held its ordinary quarterly meeting. The Scottish Guardian, a newspaper JUDGE-MADE LAW. 1 1 1 long extinct, but still lovingly remembered by all who have any memory of those struggling days, in its report of that meeting says : " The moderator brought before them the case of the Parish of Auchterarder. It will be recollected that this is a case where the patron, Lord Kinnoull, had presented Mr Young to the parish, who was rejected by a majority of the communicants in the parish, according to the recent law of the General Assembly. In conse- quence of this, his Lordship and Mr Young have raised an action of declarator against the Presbytery of Auchterarder, in which they demand to have it found that the presentee is entitled to the emoluments of the living, the same as if he had been inducted into the parish ; and failing the presentee, that the emoluments ought to go to the patron." The emoluments of Auchterarder benefice are worth some four hundred pounds or thereby in the year, and this is the sum for which an ancient national institution, more precious to Scotland than anything else which she possessed, was to be riven and destroyed. Lord Kinnoull allowed his name to be used in the action, but further he neither knew nor cared. Dwelling in his superb palace of Dupplin, with its long-withdrawing beech-tree aisles, what was our " poor man's castle " to him ? The Church seems to have heard of the action with some sur- prise, but no uneasiness. There was, and is, an old law of the Church of Scotland which declares that no man shall attempt to obtain "any ecclesiastical function, office, promotion, or benefice," by means of the civil power, under pain of summary excommunica- tion-— so utterly resolute were our fathers against any such thing. Perhaps the Commission that day thought, that when Mr Young came to be aware of the position in which he had placed himself, he would be glad enough to draw out of his action. At any rate, the matter was very little talked about, on this, the first occasion on which the attention of the Superior Church Court was called to it. Mr Dunlop, alone of those present, seemed to have a suspicion that large consequences might ensue, and evidently did not like the look of it at all. Nevertheless, this action in its first form was a perfectly com- 112 JUDGE-MADE LAW. petent action for tlie civil court to take up. " Give me the stipend of Aucliterarder," was all that Mr Young craved. The answer which the presbytery made to the action was, that as they pretended no right to the stipend, they had been improperly called as parties in the cause at all, and had nothing whatever to say. Mr Hope felt himself checkmated for the moment. He craved leave to amend his action, and got it. By this time, he saw well enough that no law could be found to warrant the giving of the benefice to a mere laymen without ordination or induction. The form of the action was changed accordingly ; and now the thing sought was to have it declared, that the Presbytery of Aucliterarder was bound to take Mr Young on trials for ordination, and if he could pass them, to ordain ; and that the presbytery had acted illegally in rejecting him in respect of the veto of the parishioners. According to this new form of action, it was not the jDecuniary interest of Mr Young, but the conduct of the presbytery which was brought before the civil court. The Court of Session was asked to exercise powers of review over the courts of the Church. It was called upon to assert its ovra jurisdiction over a Church which had always maintained that " the Lord Jesus, as King and Head of his Church, hath therein appointed a government in the hands of church officers, distinct from the civil magistrate, and not subordinate thereto." The reforming party in the Church began to see the formidable consequences to which this might lead. Cunningham was pro- foundly moved by it. " The thing is of the Lord," he said to an old Greenock friend, " and we shall know more about it a few years hence." The Presbytery of Auchterarder came to the General Assembly of 1836, asking to be advised as to the steps they ought to take. The advice they got was to do nothing till the action was decided. The Church might have taken from Mr Young his licence as a preacher. There was clear law for the deprivation of any man seeking any " ecclesiastical function, office, promotion, or benefice," by aid of the civil power without the authority of the Church. They might have cut away the ground from under his feet by depriving him of his ecclesiastical status which gave him his right JUDGE-JMADE LAW. 113 to appear in the case. But this they woukl not do. They would not even seem to try to get rid of the case by a side wind. The civil court, as the Church held, had no right to command or forbid ordinations, or to entertain any action with a view to a decision of that kind. Why, then, did the Church plead before the civil court at all ? Just because the stipend of Auchterarder is not a spiritual thing. The Church followed the action into the law courts, because it was her duty to secure the stipend for the maintenance of a gospel ministry at Auchterarder, if she could. The matter was clear enough for a child to understand, yet the confusion of ideas which ran riot in men's minds on this point was indescribable. While the Auchterarder case was still before the Court of Session, another topic, though a closely related one, became the subject of renewed debate. Cunningham was a member of the General As- sembly of 1837. "In our last number, published immediately before the meeting of Assembly," says the Presbyterian Bevieiu for August of that year, " we expressed some doubts as to the usefulness of debating the Patronage question again this year, without any interval after the discussion in the immediately preceding year, unless for the purpose of obtaining a speech on it from Mr Cun- ningham. That speech has been obtained, and it more than realises all our expectations. Never was a challenge to discuss a great question of principle more courageously given, or more powerfully maintained ; and never was it more feebly answered or more wretchedty evaded. No one on the Patronage side ventured to grapple with the argument of Mr Cunningham, and had it not been that one or two speakers on the anti-Patronage side unhappily took up the argument on expediency, and thereby afforded an oppor- tunity to their opponents to expatiate on another field, they would have been reduced to absolute silence." The Scottish Guardian (of 6th June 1837) said : " That debate will form an era in the history of the controversy, on account of the admirable speeches of Mr Cunningham, both in opening the question and in reply. Mr Cunningham's great logical powers and talent in debate were never exhibited to more advantas^e than on this occa- 114 JUDGE-MADE LAW. sion. With uncommon force of argument, he shewed how the Scriptures bore upon the question, and how the present law inter- fered with the independent, spiritual constitution of the Church ; that the evil principle did not consist in one man or many men being vested with the power, but in the qualification being fixed, and the power regulated by the civil law ; and that the sound principle consisted not so much in the power being lodged with one man or many men, as in the right of the Church to regulate and determine the whole matter of the appointment of ministers as part of her own proper jurisdiction." Many years afterwards, Dr Cunningham shewed to his daughter Helen three notebooks, and said, " these are all the speeches I have made in my life." The three notebooks represent the complete series of his speeches from 1832 down to 1860. The first is a speech before the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, on the division of the Greenock Presbytery into a Greenock Presbytery and a Paisley Presbytery. The last is a speech at laying the foundation-stone of the Free Church at Pitlochrie, within a few months of his death. He always had one of these notebooks in his hand while delivering a speech. Very thumbed and brown they are — affecting memorials of the vast power that William Cunningham wielded over his fellow- men. At sight of the notebook, the sign that a speech from him impended, friends exulted, and opponents looked nervous and uneasy. He held the notebook commonly in his left hand, with his forefinger between the leaves. A very few glances at it in the course of a speech was all the use he made of it. The best way to give an idea of his method in preparing his speeches, is to print a specimen of his notes entire. In the Appendix* will be found the notes of his great speech in the General Assembly of 1837 on Patronage. These notes contain all his written preparation, and he never followed any other method. The skeleton thus framed, he developed in language of the moment into perfect proportion, breathing into it the intensity of his own convictions, and pervading it with the uprightness, energy, and clearness of his own intellectual process. At last the Auchterarder case, slowly hauled through the tortuous * See Appendix A. JUDGE-MADE LAW. 115 channels of law, came to a hearing in the Court of Session. This was towards the end of November 1837. The leading Edinburgh newspaper of the 29 th of that month devotes to it a paragraph of about a finger-length, so faintly had the idea of its importance dawned as yet on the public mind.-'^' The whole court of thirteen Lords gave judgment upon it — most of them, not likely to be remembered beyond their day ; but there Averc three of them who will not be so soon forgotten. Lord Jeffrey, so long the editor of the Edinburgh Revleiu, had occupied for thirty years the highest literary tribunal in Europe. Lord Cockburn has left in his "Life and Times" a piece of our domestic history written with genius so quaint and rare, that it will be read in distant times with boundless curiosity and delight; and wherever our famous judges are named, the name of Lord Moncreiff will not be omitted. The debating of the case by a numerous and learned Bar occupied seventeen days. Their Lordships then took two months to consider, and then delivered their opinions in the beginning of March, a process which occupied eight days. Seven of the judges gave their opinions in succession against the Church, before one spoke on her side, and judgment was ultimately given against her by a majority of eight to five — Jeffrey, Cockburn, and Moncreiff, being in the minority. The printed report of the Auchterarder case fills two large octavo volumes — a vast dead sea of legal eloquence. If any man of a future generation, when the spirituality of the Church shall perhaps be better understood than it is now, shall happen to read the report, he will be astounded at the gross secularity of the views put forth by the pursuers in the action. Not the barest rudiment of an idea have these lawyers of Christ's spiritual kingdom. "The question I advert to," cries Dean Hope, "involves the claim of Divine right, of a power to legislate and govern, as bestowed on the Church by its great spiritual Head, and inalienable, as in a pre-eminent manner derived from the authority, and accompanied * The public mind is not quick to discover the germ of a great thing. In that same paper, five lines are devoted to inform the public that a Committee of the House of Commons had been appointed to examine into the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage, in a pamphlet published by Mr Eowland Hill. 116 JUDGE-MADE LAW. by the blessing, of God. This, my Lords, is the most pernicious error by which the blessed truths of Christianity can be perverted, and its influence on the social system blighted and destroyed." The judgment of the court, when given, was rather a threat than a blow. It merely laid down a general doctrine. The Presbytery was declared to have acted illegally in rejecting Mr Young on the sole ground of the people's veto according to the law of the Church. But the court did not, at this stage, venture to apply its own doctrine. It enjoined nothing ; it only declared a principle. What bitter things lay in that principle time would shew. INDEPENDENCE EESOLUTIONS. A huge encroachment on the liberty and independence of the Church had commenced, beyond a doubt. But the mind of Scotland was only beginning to awake to it. Here and there Scotchmen of the old type, earnest. God-fearing men, deeply read in the history of our old religious struggles, had begun to feel an uneasy interest in the proceedings of the civil court. Men of this sort were to be found in almost every village, humble men whose minds dwelt with strong, quiet enthusiasm on the good fight fought by the Scottish Church for her freedom in other days, and who had drunk deej)ly into the spirit of our fathers. In the eyes of this type of Scotchmen, lay-patronage in the Church was the worst of all abuses, no better than making the temple a house of merchandise. They had exulted to see the resolution and vigour with which the growing spirit of reform in the Church had striven to rejjress the evil. And now that the threat was muttered to jDut back the course of reformation by force, they felt it to be an ominous thing. From every corner of the Presbyterian Church there is the easiest access to the supreme court. Any one of her Presbyteries through- out the land has only to send to the Assembly in Edinburgh an over- ture or proposal to open any question, and the Assembly takes up that question as a matter of course. Many overtures from Presby- teries in all parts of the countr}^ came to the General Assembly of 1838, calling upon that venerable court to take fitting steps for vindi- cating the threatened independence of the Church. Meanwhile, Mr JUDGE-MADE LAW. 117 Young had returned to tlic Presbytery of Aucliterarder armed with the judgment of the Court of Session, and demanded to be "taken on trials " preparatory to ordination for the ministry. For a man who had sworn obedience to the courts and laws of the Church, this was an astonishing impudence. It was a demand that the Presbytery should set aside itsown deliberate recorded judgment,and should act in direct violation of a law of the Church, merely at the bidding of a civil court. The Presbytery were cautious and temperate. They simply resolved to refer the whole matter to the Synod, as next superior Church court, for advice. Mr Young thereupon handed in a formal legal protest, holding them, and each one of them, liable to him in damages, for all loss that he might incur by their delay. Perhaps Mr Young's managers thought that a little wholesome intimidation would induce the presbytery to yield. It was so rumoured at the time. It was this vulgar idea that drew on the conflict. No persecutor of the Church of Christ ever had an idea at first how far he would go. When a little pressure failed to bring submission, a little more pressure would certainly do it — and then a little more — on to the rack and the stake. When the General Assembly came on in May, the subject which was daily exciting a deeper interest in the public mind was duly taken up. The Rev. Robert Buchanan of Glasgow began the debate by moving certain resolutions, still vivid in the memories of the men who fought in those battles, as the "Independence Resolu- tions." These famous resolutions are very brief. They embody an unqualified acknowledgment of the exclusive jurisdiction of the civil courts in civil things, and an emphatic declaration of the exclusive jurisdiction of the spiritual courts in spiritual things. " And the General Assembly resolve that this spiritual jurisdiction, and the supremacy and sole Headship of the Lord Jesus Christ, on which it depends, they will assert, and at all hazards defend, by the help and blessing of that great God who, in the days of old, enabled their fathers, amid manifold persecutions, to maintain a testimony, even to the death, for Christ's kingdom and crown ; and finally, that they will enforce obedience upon ail members and ministers of this 118 JUDGE-^klADE LAW. Churcli, by the execution of her laws, in the exercise of the ecclesi- astical authority wherewith they are invested." Buchanan was a young man then, and when he rose in the Assembly that day his person was unknown to many of the members. It is scarcely too much to say, that his is as clear and sure a head for business as can be found in all Scotland, and there is no man who has a more perfect power of clear and forcible statement. The General As- sembly had an eminent example of his gift in the speech which he delivered on that memorable day. A calm, temjDcrate, luminous, impressive, resolute speech it was. Dr Cook, a consummate tactician, with an unrivalled knowledge of the forms and precedents of the house, put forth all his skill on behalf of the cause which had so long been in the ascendant there. His sonorous, pathetic, plausible voice, rolled forth assertions of the Church's independence, which sounded as brave and stout as if they had meant something. " There is no language which Mr Buchanan could use, stronger than I should be inclined to adopt to assert the spiritual independence of the Church, and to vindicate the power which we have received from its great Head." "My reverend friend will find that if there is any opj)osition to this doctrine, if we conceived there was any danger of its violation, we and he would display the banner of our great King and Head, and, if necessary, perish under it." Dr Cook asserted the spiritual independence of the Church, but then if the civil court should say that the proceedings of the Church affected any man's civil interests, he held that the Church ought to yield. The Church was sujDreme in spiritual matters, but he left it to the civil courts to say what matters are spiritual. An ancient Queen-Regent of Scotland pressed a Douglas to give over to her his Castle of Tantallon, the pride of old Scottish fortifications. " Yes, Madam," said the Douglas, " Tantallon shall be yours, but I shall keep it for you." Dr Cook said to the Church, Independence is yours, but the Court of Session shall keep it for you. The Independence Resolutions were carried by a majority of forty-one. The effect of a great debate in the General Assembly in maturing public opinion is vast and rapid. Intelligent readers JUDGE-aiADE LAW. 119 tbrouglioiit all Scotland devour it eagerly, and canvass it shrewdly; and in an incredibly short space of time, the sentiments which have been under discussion percolate the public mind. A deep excite- ment spread through the nation upon the decision of this As- sembly. The General Assembly is the most characteristic institution in Scotland. It has had a mighty influence in the development of the national liberties. It is an embodiment of the national opinions, a vivid expression of the national character, and the truest representative of the national will. Altogether there is not a more Scottish thing in Scotland. The Church had now formally committed herself to her course, and the many friends of her cause over the country were now convinced that she meant to stand to her colours. The Assembly of 1838 must hold a great place in our history. If its decision on the great question of spiritual independence had been different, it would have changed the course of events down to the present time, and perhaps to the remote future. Mr Cunningham was not a member of this Assembly : but seated among the " ministers not members," he missed scarce an hour of its sittings, or a sentence of its debates. He was at the bar for the Presbytery of Edinburgh in a transla- tion case. A new church, which they named St Paul's, had been built in a poor and populous part of Edinburgh. This church was regarded as a most interesting experiment. " It was the first," said Cunningham from the bar, " by which the truth of the extension principle was to be tested. It was to have an endowment attached to it, so as not to render it necessary to collect a congregation from all quarters, but to enable one to be formed from the locality. One of the main principles of the Church Extension scheme, is to shew that without some endowment it will be impossible to meet, to the full extent, the destitution which exists." Great care had been taken to select a likely man to conduct the St Paul's experi- ment. Mr M'Naughton of Paisley was a man so popular then that he would have " filled a church on the top of Arthur's Seat." Yet it was thought impossible that such a man could support himself in a locality inhabited by working men without some endowment. 120 JUDGE-MADE LAW. Mr M'Naiif>'hton himself was undecided, and the Assembly refused to translate. In the summer of 1838, Cunningham was brought to the gates of the grave by a dangerous illness. He had gone with his wife and little ones — he had now two — to the pleasant watering place of Ashton, on the Clyde, within easy walking distance of his old Greenock home. Here he enjoyed a few weeks' rest and leisure, as only hard wrought men can enjoy them. One day he went to Greenock on the pleasant errand of marrying his old friend, the Rev. J. J. Bonar. He was very happy that day, but he came home at nio-ht with a strange shiver upon him. Then came a burning heat, with dull pains in the head and back. He grew rapidly worse, and his anxious wife sent for the doctor. The disease soon declared itself to be typhus fever of the most alarming kind. For many days his life hung in doubt. Dr A. D. Anderson of Glasgow visited him at the request of his friend, Mr Thomas Farie. " I found him," says Dr Anderson, "labouring under an aggravated attack of tyjDhus fever, with the eruptive character of that disease, but which had not been previously noticed. It was then about the ninth or tenth day, and he was delirious, and totally prostrate. He continued so for five days more, when, at my daily visit, I found him so ill, that I remained with him all night. He had the crisis next morning, and knew and named me before I left him. His convalescence was slow, he having had a relapse, with returning incoherence, which seemed to be connected with extensive exfolia- tion of the cuticle after the eruption." When it was known in Edinburgh that a dangerous illness had stricken him down, a deep and painful sensation was produced. Meetino-s for prayer were held to ask of God to spare a life so valuable to the Church. Dr Gilchrist, one of the ministers of Canongate parish, was a wellknown personage in the Presbytery of Edinburgh in those days. He was a Moderate, — dry, blunt, caustic, and shrewd. Meeting Mr Begg of Liberton on the street one day, while Cunningham lay sick at Ashton, he anxiously inquired if there was any fresh news of him. " Yes, and I'm glad to say he is somewhat better." " I'm JUDGE-MADE LAW. ] 21 happy at that," said the crusty doctor; "I'm happy at that. I wish we had him back again ram2xigin'' among us." Considering the tremendous execution which Cunningham was in the habit of doing on the Moderates of Edinburgh Presbytery, it really was a good-natured thing for Dr Gilclirist to wish him back so kindly. But his opponents in his own Presbytery, who saw his gentle ways in private life, and knew him so much better than he could be known from his mere public gladiatorship, could not choose but feel kindly towards him. Robert Paul, a venerable man long known and loved amongst us, was at Ashton that summer, and saw much of Cunningham at that stage of recovery when, as a popular writer has it, the patient, lifting up his hands, wonders that they are so thin, and yet they are so heavy. " I used to go in and out to see him," says Mr Paul, " when the immediate danger was past, and he was slowly recover- ing. I remember how exceedingly interesting I thought it was to observe a strong, vigorous, and manly mind like his emerging again into life, after a season of great prostration and suffering, and, for some days, of unconsciousness. Everything looked new and strange to him, and yet there was a vis vitce about him which, even when he was in a state of great weakness, crept out in inquiries as to what was going on in the world and in the Church, blended with a childlike subduedness of feeling, and many expressions of the great mercies he had received. Altogether, it was very touching." His recovery, once fairly begun, was steady. Before the middle of October, he was on a visit at Dunse. Dr Chalmers writes him from Haddington, gladly agreeing to his request to preach for him, and " rejoicing to see your fist again, though the characters which are traced by it are fully as obscure and mystical as my own." CHAPTER IX. NEW CASES AND NE^Y FORCES. "11/ HILE Cunningham was prostrate on his fever-bed at Ashton, " a new complication of the Church's difficulties rose to public view. The Presbytery of " fair Dunkeld " came up to Edinburgh to the quarterly meeting of the General Assembly's Commission, or Committee of the whole house, and craved advice in a matter which had occurred in their bounds. Lethendy is a small and thinly-peopled parish, lying picturesquely among its lochs in the district of "the Stormont," at the head of the great valley of Strathmore. The minister of this parish was an infirm old man. To him the Crown, as patron, had appointed a certain Mr Thomas Clark for colleague and successor two or three years before. The parish, exercising the right which the Veto Law gave them, declined to receive this person as their minister, with good reason too, as his subsequent life but too clearly proved. The Presbytery accord- ingly set him aside, and no more was heard of him for a time. Then he came to the surface again, brought up, as it was believed, by the hand of Dean Hope. When the old minister of Lethendy died, the Crown appointed another man to the parish, — Mr Kessen, — an honest, true-hearted labourer in the gospel. The steps pre- paratory to ordination in the Scottish Church are elaborate and formal certainly, but no one will think them too much so, who feels what a solemn thing it is to be ordained to the ministry of Christ. All was ready for the ordination of Mr Kessen, when an interdict from the Court of Session, or prohibition under pains and penalties, was served upon the Presbytery in the name of Mr Clark. The Presbytery, thus molested in the act of making their arrangements NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. 123 regarding the preaching of the gospel, reported to the General Assembly the strange interruption. A Presbyterian Church is an admirable thing for prompt and combined action. The whole strength of the Church can be directed immediately to the front. It added immensely to the power of the old English archery that they " shot wholly together." A Presby- terian organisation shoots wholly together. It cannot be taken in detail. He who meddles with any part, meddles with the whole. The General Assembly forthwith made the affair of Lethendy its own. They ordered the Presbytery of Dunkeld to go on with the ordination of Mr Kessen. They did not pretend to have any power over the benefice. It might turn out that he had no legal title to it. But the Church had a perfect right to ordain Mr Kessen, and to support him, if necessary, at her own expense. No man had ever yet disputed that. On such terms, the Church was perfectly free to ordain whomsoever she pleased. The Presbytery of Dunkeld was, therefore, ordered to ordain Mr Kessen simply upon the call which he had received from the people. But even this was not to be per- mitted. A new interdict, served upon the Presbytery, prohibited them from ordaining Mr Kessen on any ground whatever, and pro- hibited Mr Kessen from accepting ordination. The Presbytery had thus an order from their ecclesiastical supe- riors commanding them to ordain, and a threat of pains and penalties from the Court of Session if they did ordain. It was the second interdict that had again brought up the Presbytery of Dunkeld to ask the instructions of their ecclesiastical superiors. The instructions they got were, to meet on a certain fixed day, and straightway to ordain Mr Kessen, a purely spiritual act, with which the Court of Session had nothing to do. The day came, and the Presbytery met. It was only by the casting vote of their Moderator, that a motion was carried for immediately proceeding with the ordination. An attempt to intimi- date them by coarse threatenings was tried. A law agent appeared on the part of Mr Clark, and read an " opinion " from Mr John Hope, in which that unflinching believer in brute force told them : " The expectation that the supreme court will allow its interdict to 124 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. be set at defiance is the most vain and idle with which parties can delude themselves ; and it is equally absurd to imagine that (what- ever be the nature of the case) there will be the smallest difficulty in compelling the ultimate submission of all other bodies, whether of the Established Church or not. The members of the Presbytery of Dunkeld will most infallibly be committed to prison, and most justly, for an offence of a most grave character, and the more aggravated in proportion to the station of the parties by whom it is committed." These insulting menaces from the head of the Bar were, no doubt, expected to terrify simple countiy ministers. But the majority of the Presbytery of Dunkeld were not men to be frightened. The orders of the General Assembly were carried out to the letter, and Mr Kessen was ordained to the ministry of the Gospel among the people of Lethendy, according to their own call. The Presbytery were not long left in doubt as to the real hazard in which they stood. Mr Thomas Clark (or the Dean of Faculty through him) presented a petition and complaint to the Court of Session, calling upon them to fine or commit to jail the men who had dared to exercise their spiritual functions without regard to mandates of a civil court. The court pronounced the members of Presbytery who concurred in Mr Kessen's ordination, and Mr Kessen himself, guilty of breach of interdict, and summoned them to appear at their Bar. The set day came, and the Presbytery made their appearance before their assembled Lordships. The senior Minister of the Presbytery, " with a demeanour touching from its calm, respectful simplicity," read a short statement: "My Lords, we appear in obedience to the citation of your Lordships, inasmuch as we hold it to be the duty of all subjects to render their personal compearance when cited by the civil courts ; and being deeply impressed with the obligation of giving all honour and reverence to the Judges of the land, we dis- claim any intention of disrespect to the court in what we have done; but in ordaining to the office of the holy ministry, and in admitting to the pastoral charge, to which in our proceedings we limited our- selves, we acted in obedience to the superior Church judicatories, to NEW CASES AND NEW FOECES. 125 which in matters spiritual we are subordinate, and to which at ordination we vowed obedience." The court adjourned the matter for four days to consider their sentence. Five of the Judges voted for a sentence of imprisonment; six voted for a rebuke, and the Lord President did not vote at all. The rebuke was accordingly adminis- tered, with a threat, that any other Presbytery doing as that of Dunkeld had done, would be sent to prison. The law expenses thrown upon them came to fifty pounds each man — a tolerably smart fine to begin with. Never, since the days of Charles II., had men stood at the Bar for refusing to acknowledge the civil supremacy in matters spiritual. Had the shadow gone back on the dial ? Such was the Lethendy case, which, so far as it had then emerged, Robert Paul narrated at Cunningham's bedside at Ashton, in reply to his inquiries as to what was going on in the world and the Church, THE BONES OF THE PROPHETS. The year 1838 fell in remarkably with the revival of the prin- ciples and recollections of old Scotland. That year was the second centenary of the famous General Assembly of the Church of Scot- land, held in Glasgow in 1638. Those were the times when England and Scotland, little aware what a great thing they were doing, raised the question. Shall Rex be Lex, or shall Lex be Rex ? ■ — shall the king be the law, or shall the law be king ? England raised the question in its civil branch, Scotland in its religious ; and the debate went on till the Revolution of 1688 brought in a verdict. The Glasgow Assembly was a capital event in the fifty years' struggle of the Scottish Covenanters, and in the history of our freedom it has a place for evermore. The first thing that Scotland did, after being organised and banded together under the Covenant in those old heroic days, was to demand from King Charles a free Parliament and a free General Assembly. There had been neither for many a year. The Cove- nanters were strong and resolute, and they made it very plain, that if they could not obtain the king's permission to hold their General Assembly, they would hold it unpermitted. Seeing this 126 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. the king caused an Assembly to be summoned, to amuse them until it was convenient to put them down. The Assembly might meet, but the king would take care that it should do no harm. Many years before, he and his father, King James, had thrust bishops upon the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and she had always been restive under their yoke. Charles was determined that the Assembly should not meddle with his bishops. If it ventured to do so, the Royal Commissioner then present, the Marquis of Hamilton, had instructions to dissolve it on the instant in the king's name. The Assembly did meddle with the bishops, and that trenchantly. It proceeded to sit in judgment upon their right to be bishops at all. The Commissioner, acting upon his instructions, dissolved the Assembly, and withdrew. The Assembly declined to be dissolved, but continued to meet from day to day till it had finished its work. Just before the Commissioner departed, the Moderator said they would do to their king what the Jews did to Alexander the Great. " When he came to Jerusalem, he desired that his picture might be placed in the temple. This they refused to grant unto him, as being unlawful so to pollute the house of the Lord. But they granted him a thing less blameable, and far more convenient for the promulgation of his honour — to wit, that they would begin the calculation of their years from the time that he came to Jerusalem, likewise that they would call all their male first-born by the name of Alexander. Which thing he accepted. So, whatever is ours, we will render it to his Majesty, even our lives, lands, liberties, and all; but for it that is God's, and the liberties of his house, we do think neither will his Majesty's piety suffer him to crave; neither may we grant them, even though he should crave it." Alexander the Great accepted the offer of the Jews, but Charles Stewart had not sense to accept the offer of the Covenanters. If he had accepted it, he would not have come to the front of Whitehall. To the simple and brave hearts who held the Glasgow Assembly, this was most clear, that as Christ has appointed a kingdom in this world, surely, if the subjects of that kingdom have any rights at all, they have a right to meet peacefully together, and consult about its NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. 127 affairs, Christ's servants surely have a right to do their Master's work. The right of serving Him is all they ask. When will worldly policy cease to misunderstand them, and begin to see that it is just, wise, and safe, to let them have this right in peace ? As the bicentenary period approached, the famous Glasgow Assembly came much into mind. Ouce more things were driving on to a crisis wherein men would have to ask their magistrates ■■' Whether it be right, in the sight of God, to obey man rather than God, judge ye ? " History seemed about to repeat itself. The idea of a commemoration of the Glasgow Assembly was started, was received with fervour, and was rapidly brought into shape. His- torical commemorations are usually artificial affairs. Not so this commemoration, into which the circumstances of the time put immense life and force. It took place on the 20th of December, the day on which the Glasgow Assembly terminated, after filling one great month with its deeds. It was quite a festival in many towns over Scotland. Glasgow made the day her own, as she had a good right to do. Her magistrates, in their robes of office, accompanied by the magistrates of Anderston, Gorbals, and Calton, the Presbytery, and a large body of citizens, walked in procession through an immense crowd of spectators to the High Church — the very Church that heard the great voices of 1638. There sermon was preached to a vast crowd. In the evening there were services suited to the occasion in several churches. Five hundred of the most influential citizens met in the Trades' Hall, and held the commemoration after a truly aldermanic conception. They dined, and toasted the principles of 1638 in after-dinner speeches. Dr Chalmers was among them, and gave his toast with the rest. " Union with Seceders adhering to the constitution and standards of the Church of Scotland." This was his toast, but his speech was upon the great ruling idea of that time — Church Extension. In Edinburgh, the commemoration was limited to one great meeting. A short account of the General Assembly of 1638, from the graphic pen of the younger M'Crie, had been previously circulated. The place of meeting was the Assembly Kooms in George Street, a huge hall which is still the great arena for Edinburgh eloquence. 128 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES, Sir George Sinclair presided, and the exquisitely classical address with which he opened the meeting was characteristic of the man. The flower of the rising talent of the Church was there. Begg, in whom keen sagacity rises to genius — Charles BrowTi, than whom no more acute intellect has appeared in our time — Candlish, whose voice has often sounded so stirring when intrepid action was wanted in a critical time — and Guthrie, who was then beginning to discover the charm which he has wielded over the Scottish metropolis for well-nigh a generation. But as an artist, looking at a photographic group, can point out the special figure on which the whole group has been focussed, so it is easy to see that Cunning- ham was the central figure that evening. " It was a fine thing," says the Scottish Guardian of the day, " to witness the prolonged enthusiasm of that great meeting when Cunningham rose. Since he had appeared at any meeting, the Christian people of Scotland had been tried with anxiety and fear lest his talents and gifts should have been withdrawn from the service of the church below. And their recognition of him now, when his health is almost re-established, was a gratifying tribute to one who, among public men, is distinguished, not only by his intellectual power, but by the soundness of his principles, very uncommon honesty of purpose, and fearlessness in applying his principles to the regulation of conduct." The speeches, sent abroad in the poor reports given by the news- papers of the day, and more sufficiently in a pamphlet form, made many a bosom beat high with the old Scottish feeling. Scotland contains thousands among her humble folk, cobblers in their stalls, weavers at their looms, shepherds on their hill-sides, to whom the Covenanters and their doings are familiar as household words. To all such the commemoration shewed that a race of ministers had risen up in whom was the very spirit of the Covenant. They who commemorated 1638, who revived its great names, and gloried in its principles, did but act up to these principles in 1843. Men need not have been surprised. The principles of the Covenanters, which produced such great results in the seventeenth century, were capable of doing great things in the nineteenth. But some very NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES, 129 sharp minds never can see the possibility of a generous or heroic action. A few days after the commemoration, crusty Dr Gilchrist had his wish. Cunningham was back again " rampar/in' " in the presby- tery. He moved in a powerful speech a resolution approving the conduct of the Presbytery of Dunkeld in settling Mr Kessen at Lethendy in disregard of the interdict by the Court of Session. There was no difficulty in carrying the motion. At this time, the Moderates themselves were indignant at the invasion of the Church's freedom by the civil power. Even Cunningham's old Hebrew pro- fessor, Dr Brunton, was aroused to unwonted animation, and de- clared that " he must proceed in the exercise of his ecclesiastical functions, disregarding any such interference." SYMPATHY OF THE PEOPLE. At this time the working classes were only beginning to be roused to take an interest in the fast-deepening struggle in which the Church was engaged. The first sign of it, perhaps, was given by the " Tradesmen's Association for advancing the interests of the Church of Scotland " in Edinburgh. These working men got up a meeting in the " Great Assembly Koom," in George Street — the second within a few months — at which Mr Cunningham complied with their request to deliver a plain and simple exposition of the Independence question. The spirited and intelligent work- ing-men immediately published it in a separate form with a preface of their own. " The question," they say, " relative to the independ- ence of the Church, possesses, under existing circumstances, a peculiar interest, in reference particularly to the Auchterarder case. The arguments with regard to this great question have hitherto been stated more or less in technical language, adapted to the civil and ecclesiastical judicatories before which the subject has been discussed. It is thought, however, that a perspicuous and popular exposition (as the speech now published is) of the views enter- tained by the party, of which Mr Cunningham is one of the most distinguished leaders, will not be unacceptable, and indeed is exceedingly desirable, with the view of imparting correct informa- 130 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. tion to the public as to the principles involved in the controversy on the subject of the intrinsic authority of the Church — a contro- versy which is little more than commenced, and which is obviously destined to exercise a powerful influence on the fortunes of the Church of Scotland." Remarkable sentences to have been penned by working men surely ! In what other country of the world could working-men be found to care about such things ? The reforming party did not delude themselves. If their cause was Christ's cause, they could not expect the favour of the world ; and they did not expect it. Cunningham, in the address which the working-men published, gives this most unpromising view of their position : — " We have been assailed on all hands, — by men of all descriptions of politics, by men of the most opposite parties. By asserting the independent jurisdiction of the Church, we have drawn upon our head the wrath of Tories, Whigs, and Radicals. We have been attacked by High Church Episcopalians on the one hand, and by ferocious Voluntaries on the other. There is scarcely an organ of 'public opinion that supports our principles ; and if you attend to the public press, you will find perhaps the attack of a High Church journal on Friday followed up on Saturday by a Voluntary print. .... I tliink we are somewhat to blame in not having taken sufficient pains to explain this matter ; but in spite of all misrepre- sentation from such a variety of quarters, we are confident in the goodness of our cause, and are most anxious to make a full and frank appeal on this subject to the understandings and consciences of our countrymen." The men of the reforming party knew full well that they had nothing but the goodness of their cause to depend upon. The Whigs were in office at that time, but a deep alienation had taken place between them and the Scottish Church. The conduct of the party in the Chapel Endowment question had been faithless and mean. Dr Chalmers publicly called their treatment of the Church "jockeyship." The Church thoroughly distrusted them; and, not yet so enlightened about politicians as she afterwards became, threw her influence into the Tory scale. There is no doubt that NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. ] 31 this cause did much to produce in Scotland that reaction against the Whigs which took place during the ministry of Lord Melbourne. The Tories affected friendship, and made a good deal of political capital out of the opportunity. But the Church had now taken up a position which converted the Tories at once into her bitterest enemies. The claims that she was now putting forward, as to popular rights and spiritual independence, were abhorrent to Toryism. The two great political parties of the nation were hostile, and the people were still, to a great extent, indiiFerent. If any calculation of probabilities had been allowed to have a feather's weight with them, the Non-Intrusionists would have abandoned their cause. THE FIRST AUCHTERARDER CASE DECIDED. In the beginning of May 1839, came the decision of the House of Lords upon the Church's appeal in the case of Auchterarder. Lord Brougham had an old classmate in Edinburgh College, a much respected minister of the reforming party in the Church, — Dr Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, the founder of savings' banks. Urged by the deep anxiety then painfully felt by thousands in Scotland about the forthcoming decision, Dr Duncan wrote to his eminent friend. Brougham gave good words, and Dr Duncan, a man guileless as Nathanael, believed them. He published a single-hearted, sanguine letter in the newspapers, which raised to a high pitch the hopes of a favourable decision. That was soon at an end. The judgment of the House of Lords unhesitatingly affirmed the judgment of the Court of Session. The idea that the people had any rights in the calling of ministers was treated with scorn. Lord Brougham con- temptuously declared that the objections of the people were of no more consequence in the settlement of ministers, than the recalci- tration of the champion's horse in Westminster Hall, at the corona- tion of our kings. And this in the church of John Knox ! The reader may chance to remember how Knox himself became a minister. "After sermon, John Bough directed his speech to John Knox, saying, ' Brother, You shall not be offended although I speak to you that 132 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. which I have in charge from all those that are here present, which is this : — In the name of God and of his Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of those that do presently call you by my mouth, I charge you that you refuse not this holy vocation, but that you take upon you the public office of preaching, even as you look to avoid God's heavy displeasure. Was not that your charge to me,' he said to those present, 'and do ye not approve?' They answer, 'It was, and we approve it.'" It required the call of the people to make John Knox a minister, and without that call he immovably refused to open his mouth. Without their call, he saw no warrant to enter, and no possibility of entering, the preacher's office. Is it within any man's power of credulity to believe that the call of the people had no place what- ever in the Church founded by him? It might as well be said that there is no Wesleyanism in the Church founded by Wesley, and no Lutheranism among the followers of Luther. But it was now ruled by the court of last resort, that the people had no standing whatever in the settlement of their ministers. Their conscientious objections signified no more than the recalcitration of the champion's horse. It was on the 2d of May that the House of Lords pronounced its decision, — just fourteen days before the meeting of the General Assembly. Wliat could the General Assembly do ? The ship was upon the rocks, beyond a doubt. She might be backed off, but how much would need to be thrown overboard first ? If the Church would have consented to give up the rights of the people, and to surrender what the civil courts were usurping, — her own right of self- government, — all would have been smooth enough. Her enemies seemed to have had no doubt that she would give way, as a matter of course. The whole struggle, as they saw it, was but an affair of wire-pulling, and of pride and positiveness, among a few ecclesiastics. Checkmated in the game, the beaten players must now retire with what grace they could. Men of the world thought the matter quite simple. One thing which was very marked on the eve of this Assembly might have warned them if they could have understood it. That thing was the NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. 133 multiplication of special meetings for prayer throughout the country, to supplicate the Lord on behalf of the Assembly, that it might have wisdom to know, and boldness to do, the right. At Bannock- burn, the Scottish army knelt and made a short prayer before the battle began. " Yon folk kneel to ask mercy," said King Edward. "You say true," quoth the Earl of Umfraville; "They kneel, but not to you. Believe me, they will win or die." But men of the world could not understand what the kneeling meant. Dr Cook, the leader of the Moderates, began the great debate in the Assembly of 1839 with a motion astounding for its servility. It involved nothing else than the entire and absolute surrender of the Church's independence. It simply proposed to haul down the flag. Because the Veto Law had been found to touch civil interests, he moved, not its repeal, but that it should be held to have been null and void from the first. There was no need of the form of repealing it. They should proceed as if the Veto Law had never been passed, and the decision rejecting the unacceptable presentee to Auchterarder had never been pronounced. He never hinted at any limitation of the obedience due by the ecclesiastical to the civil courts. His principle seemed to be, that whenever the civil courts say that any act of the Church has infringed upon civil rights, the Church must cancel her decisions and throw aside her laws. And yet this man had written a three-volume history of the Reformation in Scotland, and surely knew that three-fourths of our history as a Church consists of struggles against the supremacy of the civil power, in behalf of that liberty of conscience which is the inalien- able right of all men, both collectively and individually. Could a man traverse Scotland, and not see our mountains ? Dr Chalmers rose in his great strength to the height of the occasion. His speech that day was one of the most splendid efforts of his genius. The motion with which he met that of Dr Cook, admitted, of course, that the judgment of the civil court settled all questions of civil right. But it declared that the principle that no presentee shall be forced on a parish contrary to the will of the congregation, could not and would not be abandoned. It was lawful for the Church to surrender any of the State's gifts, but it was not 134) NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. lawful for the Church to surrender one of her own fundamental principles, which she believed to be according to the Word of God. Such was the substance of the motion, which ended by proposing the appointment of a Committee to confer with the Government, in the hope that some way might be found of keeping the harmony between Church and State unimpaired. The debate began at mid-day, and the vote was taken in the broad daylight of next morning, when the motion of Dr Chalmers was earned by the decisive majority of forty-nine. Cunningham was not a member of this Assembly. But Candlish was. It was his first Assembly, and he effectively took his place among the foremost there. "I remember," said Dr Buchanan, from the Moderator's chair of the Free Assembly in 1861, " I remember as if it had been yesterday, though it is nearly a quarter of a century ago, WTiting an urgent letter to the then comparatively youthful minister of St George's, entreating him to be prepared to take a part in the pro- ceedings of the Assembly of 1839, wdiich it was known was to be an Assembly of vital importance to our cause. Up till that time, no fitting opportunity had occurred of bringing into the arena of ecclesiastical discussion those extraordinary powers which he subse- quently exhibited, and the fact of his possessing which, from the veiy first, no one doubted but himself. His answer assured me that he was no speaker, and that he could be of no use in a debate, and concluded with these words : ' Novus homo et inexpertus non loquor.'" Such was the humble self-estimate of him who was to surpass in facility and readiness every speaker of his age. THE " WITNESS. The leadins: actors in this memorable conflict were now all before the public, except one. The Evangelical party never did a wiser thing than when they set up the Witness newspaper. There were sixty-three newspapers published in Scotland at that time, and only eight of them took the side of the Church. The Evangelical leaders had long set their hearts upon having an organ in Edinburgh. The difficulty was to NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. 135 find an editor. They were keenly on the outlook, when the man wanted turned up in a most unexpected quarter. Hugh Miller, the Cromarty mason, had been thoughtfully lookinf on as the entanglements of the Church thickened around her. His anxiety deepened, till it began to break his rest. " For at least one night," he tells, "after reading the speech of Lord Brougham and the decision of the House of Lords on the Auchterarder Case, I slept none." It troubled the sleep of the Cromarty mason, and yet, years after this, men called it a mere clerical question. Feeling thus deeply, he wrote his "Letter from one of the Scottish people to the Right Honourable Lord Brougham, on the opinions expressed by his Lordship on the Auchterarder Case," Miller had by this time laid down his mallet, having obtained a situation of seventy pounds a year in a branch bank in his native town. He sent the manu- script of his letter to Brougham, to the head of his bank in Edinburgh, Robert Paul. Mr Paul took it to Mr Candlish. The stone mason wrote a very minute hand, due, as he was won't to tell, to the strong necessity of economising paper in his early days. The clear, minute manuscript was read, and Candlish cried at once, "That's your editor!" The newspaper was started upon a small capital. Forty members of the Evangelical party made up a thousand pounds by subscribino- £25 a-piece. A publisher was found, the once well-kno-wn John Johnstone of Hunter Square, to whom the sum was paid over, he undertaking to carry on the paper for one year. A practical printer put some hundreds more into the concern. Better still, he put himself into it, — a quiet man, with perfect practical skill, and — rare combination — the highest literary discernment. Robert Fairly became to Hugh Miller all that William Laidlaw was to Walter Scott. Cunningham was, of course, one of the projectors of the Witness, and a subscriber to its capital fund. Miller came to Edinburo-h, and entered on his new duties. His writing was not, at first, free from a certain stiffness and formality, but he soon found his hands. A powerful combatant had entered the field, and all who dared to ficrht with him sunk under the weight of his blows. Rival 136 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. editors lie tomahawked and scalped. Despairing pamphleteers called him "the sledge-hammer of the Non-Intrusion party." His style was clear, strong, Cobbett-like English, rich with allusion and illustration, irresistible in mirth, and terrible in sarcasm. He wrote slowly, and made laborious corrections, speaking out to him- self as he wrote, and trying every sentence upon his ear, as a money-changer weighs a piece of gold on his practised finger-tip. "You must write very easily," said a complimentary gentleman to him one day. " Let me tell you, sir," was the reply, " that it takes a good deal of hard labour to make writing look easy." The publishing days of the Witness were Wednesday and Satur- day. Each of these was preceded by labour in writing so severe that Miller used to say, " I can never remember the names of my fossils on publication days till about tea-time, when they begin to come back to me, reappearing to memory like letters written in invisible ink when you hold the paper to the fire." The labour must have been very heavy which paralysed memory for so many hours. Miller's acquaintance with English literature was enormous. His faculty of criticism alone, when literary subjects came in his way, would have made him a reputation. He was familiar with the strange, stirring history of the Church whose battles he had come to fight. He understood the Moderates thoroughly. And he understood the people of Scotland. Never had any people a truer representative than they had in him. A future historian will find in the files of the Witness, lights and shadows of the Scottish character which have eluded both Burns and Scott. Although achieving a reputation with such rapidity, Hugh Miller remained as humble as when he wore the leather apron. He was simple and child-like in his ways, a true man, and kept his truth by walking with God. In his family evening prayers, he would often supplicate, "Lord, keep us from all hol\o\y -he^^tedness." No man who has heard the yearning tone of his soft voice, making that petition, will ever forget it. No single influence told more mightily on the Church controversy than the influence of Hugh Miller and the Witiiess. Perhaps it NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. 137 did more than the clerical mind was altogether prompt to admit. Generations of a selfish Moderatism had fatally weakened the con- fidence of the Scottish people in their clergy. The doctrine of atonement by the blood of the Son of God had been in many quarters well-nigh eliminated from the pulpit. "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him," said an old Scottish matron, and the same wail rose in many a heart. During those Moderate generations, the man most keenly alive to the world in the whole parish had too often been the minister. The carelessness with which he went through the routine of service on the Sabbath day, told the congregation all too plainly that his heart was not in his Master's work, but in the acres which he farmed. The consequence was inevitable. The mind of Scotland settled down into a chronic state of cool distrust. It was a tide not easily turned. No doubt confidence was coming. But there cannot be imagined a more happy providence that that which gave one of the people themselves to represent the Evangelical cause in the periodical press. The editor of the Evangelical organ had leaped, almost at a bound, into the foremost rank of Scottish litera- ture. But it was all the better that he had been a quarryman and stone-hewer — that he came from the midst of the people, with nothing clerical about him. Altogether, the brain that lay under that shaggy head was the most powerful reinforcement that ever cheered the struggling party. Postscript. — The obligations of the Free Church to Hugh Miller are in no degree overrated in the tribute here paid to his memory. It may be proper to remind the reader that Mr Mackenzie had a special right to utter his testimony on the subject. He was associated with Hugh Miller in those early days of the Witness, was a constant and welcome guest in his house, and became qualified to speak of him with peculiar knowledge and peculiar love. Among Mr Mackenzie's jottings, I find one which I may here add : — " The printing office of the Witness was in the old Horse Wynd — once the main entrance to Edinburgh from the south, now a region squalid beyond all telling. Cunningham 10 ] 38 NEW CASES AND NEW FORCES. would often step up our dingy stair — not unfrequently would have to spend an hour touching up an article, to make it legible for the printer. He has shared our coffee on publishing nights, when we manufactured it in our gigantic coflfee-pot — Hugh Miller, meanwhile, contriving to toast cheese by the help of the fire-shovel. It was a cheery time, in spite of over- hanging responsibilities." — R. CHAPTER X. STRATHBOGIE. TN the summer and autumn of 1839, the quantity of printed matter ■^ flung abroad by the press shewed how far and wide the agita- tion had spead. The Non-intrusion leaders, half-a-dozen of them, kept up a series of tracts for three months. They were published every Saturday, and were sold in thousands for sixpence a dozen. Chalmers, Dunlop, Candlish, Charles J. Brown, Guthrie, Cunningham, were the writers. Cunningham wrote three of them. John Hamilton, an advocate at the Scottish bar, was a strong " Conservative." He was a calm, reflective man, of a clear judgment, and an earnest heart. He saw how utterly the Conservative party were misunderstanding the Church, and he ventured an attempt to rescue them from a mistake so mischievous. He published a masterly statement of the whole case in the form of a letter to the Duke of Wellington, " under the conviction that happily for the country at the present day, your Grace's judgment in every matter of public importance commands more profound and general respect than that of any other individual." Gray of Perth, whose face and head, so strikingly suggestive of Oliver Goldsmith, were long familiar in our Assemblies, published his " Present Conflict between the Civil and Ecclesiastical Courts Examined, with Historical and Statutory Evidence for the Jurisdic- tion of the Church of Scotland." He had an intellect of singular force and keenness, and his strength in debate was prodigious. Most men who had proved him would say, " Lay thine hand upon 140 STRATHBOGIE. him, remember the battle, do no more." This pamphlet was a marvel of power and clearness. In the course of the autumn, too, appeared the Dean of Faculty's " Letter to the Lord Chancellor, on the Claims of the Church of Scotland in regard to its Jurisdiction, and on the proposed changes in its Polity." It was a huge production of about 300 pages. With laborious minuteness and cumbrous perseverance, he plods through a wilderness of dull details which cast no light on the question in hand. According to him, the lust of power in the clergy was the one cause of the whole imbroglio. Theirs was a scheme to establish an ecclesiastical tyranny, by means as unscrupulous as their motives were unjustifiable. After dealing forth his charges and launching his assertions, he publicly announced in the Edin- burgh newspapers his resolution to read nothing in the shape of a reply. He took means to circulate his pamphlet far beyond any natural demand that there could have been for it, and there is every reason to believe that he preoccupied and prejudiced the minds of Sir Robert Peel, the Earl of Aberdeen, and the Duke of Wellington. Dunloj) published an answer to the big pamphlet, distinguished by his usual high-toned courtesy, his vast range of not merely legal but constitutional knowledge, and his statesmanlike grasp of his subject. Dr Chalmers also answered the Dean, in his grandly rolling style. " I have felt, he says, " in the study of this controversy, as if there were an impregnable wall of separation between the understandings on each side of it. It looks to me as if there were an organic difference in the minds. It is a great deal more than that they reason differently. The difference appears to be as great as if, in virtue of a different physical construction in their eyes, they saw differently." Cunningham, too, came out with an answer, in the shape of a letter, to the Dean. There was everything in the big pamphlet to excite his indignation and scorn — reckless charges, base insinuations, and laboured efforts to raise prejudice. He treats the head of the bar without the least ceremony, and in the most unsparing style STRATHBOGIE. 141 demonstrates under the three divisions, " Ignorance," " Misrepre- sentation," and " Evasion," his incompetency lor the task he had undertaken.* The proof of all the three is very complete certainly ; but of what avail were replies or arguments addressed to a man who had pledged himself not to read them ? THE aiARNOCH CASE. In the winter of 1839, complications thickened fast, and the posi- tion of the Church grew more and more heavily entangled. The Strathbogie complication was now attracting the attention of the whole kingdom. This famous case was one of open mutiny and broad defiance to the authority of the Church. In its origin it closely resembled the cases of Auchterarder and Lethendy. The parish of Marnoch, in the Presbytery of Strathbogie, had fallen vacant, and the patron (or the patron's trustees) had given the presentation to Mr John Edwards, who could not find more than one supporter out of the three thousand inhabitants of the parish. The presbytery, very unwillingly, had to apply the law of the Church, and Mr Edwards was rejected. He there- upon applied to the Court of Session, and obtained a decree holding the presbytery bound to proceed with his settlement. After a couple of years of moving to and fro between presbytery and synod, Court of Session and General Assembly, the case came to this pass, that the Presbytery of Strathbogie formally declared their resolution to obey the Court of Session and to disobey the Church. It was manifestly time for the Church to assert her authority. A presbytery of her own ministers had proclaimed their purpose of committing an act of open rebellion. If they could do that with impunity, there was an end of her government. An extraordinary meeting of the Commission of Assembly was held, to face the crisis * A statement has been made that this pamphlet, being very severe, was sup- pressed by its author. I can produce a certificate under his own hand to the contrary. His deliberate judgment was that the pamphlet was far less severe than the Dean's demerits would have justified. — E,. T 42 STRATHBOGIE. which had arisen. That Commission took a decided step. It suspended the seven ministers who formed the majority of the Presbytery of Strathbogie from the office of the holy ministry, pro- hibited them from the exercise of their functions, and declared all official acts which they might attempt to perform, null and void. Any or all of them might be " reponed," however, on their signing an assurance that they would submit themselves to the Church ; which, as they were already under oath to do it, was surely not a hard condition. The seven, thus placed under arrest, defiantly broke it within four days. They met as a presbytery, and formally resolved to disown the authority of the Church. They applied to the Court of Session to interpose between them and their ecclesiastical superiors. The court interposed accordingly. It interdicted all persons whatsoever from using the churches, churchyards, and parish schoolhouses, in intimating the sentence passed upon the seven. If the court had had the least insight into the Church's principle of rendering unto Csesar all that is Csesar's, but none of what is God's, it must have seen the utter futility of a measure like this. It unquestionably belonged to the civil courts to determine questions of property. They had shut up the churches and the other parochial property, allowing to the seven alone the right of setting foot within them. The Church, of course, obeyed at once. But with her own discipline the civil court had no right to interfere. The sentence must be publicly intimated, and the ministers sent to do it did their duty in the open fields, dead of winter though it was. They published the sentence ; and they did more, they preached the gospel, a new thing in Strathbogie. The Duchess of Gordon lived in the very heart of the district, and for long years she had grieved over the spiritual death that reigned in the parishes around her. " Nobody need tell me about the Moderates, I know them well," she said. " We must pray, pray very hard, that the Lord may send us pastors after His own lieart." This was in 1837. Her desire was granted at last. There was plenty of evangelical preaching in Strathbogie. The Church having STRATHBOGIE. 143 suspended the seven from the office of the ministry, was bound to supply their parishes with the ordinances of the gospel so long as that suspension continued. The flower of the Evangelical preachers from all Scotland were sent to Strathbogie that winter — M'Donald, " the Apostle of the North," Robert M'Chejme of Dundee, Charles J. Brown, Moody Stuart, and many more. It was like the stirring in the valley of dry bones. " The desire which prevails in those parishes for the simple preaching of the gospel can scarce be conceived by one who has not witnessed it. The people will come eight, ten, twelve miles to hear a sermon. No length of service fatigues them." The interdict was " limited •" at first. It only shut the churches, but left the parishes open. After a few weeks it was " extended," and the whole seven parishes were made forbidden ground. None but the seven suspended men, or those authorised by them, might preach there. It is very clear that the Court had allowed itself to become heated, and had thoroughly lost its temper and its prudence. The Lord President Hope, in granting the " extended interdict," poured forth a passionate declamation against the Church. There was one point which the majority of their Lordships seemed quite incapable of understanding. The Church had gone into Court on the case of Auchterarder. When the decision went against her, why did she not submit? they said. So far as the temporalities of the benefice of Auchterarder were concerned, she did submit at once ; and it was in respect of them alone that she had gone into the civil courts. As to her own spiri- tual rights and duties, she " gave place by subjection — no, not for an hour." But this was a distinction which the judges could not understand. The Lord President stigmatised the course pursued by the Church as " absolute profligacy." " It was the old thimble- rigging trick," he said ; " odds I win, evens you lose. If the judg- ment be given in my favour I will obey ; if not, I won't." Another of the judges, with solemn vehemence, charged the majority of the Church with a violation of their oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria ! 144 STRATHBOGIE. Ten days after the " extended interdict " was granted came the regular monthly meeting of the Presbytery of Edinburgh. It is Presbyterian use and wont that notice of every motion to be considered shall be given at a previous meeting. This time Mr Cunningham departed from this practice. He said, " The motion he intended to propose was one of which he had given notice, not in the usual form at the previous meeting of presbytery, but by private notes to each member of the court. Although it was the practice of the court to give notice of a motion, yet, as it was not the law, and as the circumstances of the case were extraordinary, he had no doubt the means he had taken to intimate his intention would be approved of by the presbytery." The motion proposed a memorial to Government, setting forth the anxiety and alarm caused by the doings of the Court of Session in the Strathbogie business, as an infringement on the rights and privileges of the Church, and urging the immediate necessity of legislative interference. It passed unanimously ; for both parties. Moderates as well as Evangelicals, were then at one in thinking that the Court of Session had gone beyond its province. At that time the Presbytery of Edinburgh met in St David Street, in the hall belonging to the Trustees of the Widows' Fund of the Church of Scotland. It was a small place below the level of the street. A diminutive pulpit stood in a corner, into which trembling students mounted to deliver their trial discourses. Por- traits of various bygone worthies hung round the walls. A back door gave entrance from a narrow lane behind. The hall used to be crammed to suffocation, and a crowd blocked the lane around the back door whenever it was understood that Cunningham was to speak. At the meeting now referred to, Cunningham deliberately re- viewed and answered the speeches of the judges with extraordinary power, but not with extraordinary ceremony. One reference to the adverse majority of the Court of Session gave great offence, " We did succeed," he said, " in convincing five of the judges — five of the most eminent men on the bench ; and I venture to say, that if the STRATHBOGIE. 145 votes had been weighed instead of counted, the decision would have been in our favour." Such an antagonism between the judges of the land and a court of the Established Church was truly unfortunate. It was not edify- ing to have judges shewn up as ignorant of the fundamental jirin- ciples. But when the judges attacked the Church, and from the seat that ought to be so passionless and calm charged her with " absolute profligacy " and " thimble-rigging," was it to be thought that men possessing the gift of speech in a transcendant degree, and a platform from which they could speak to all Scotland, should keep silence under charges so atrocious ? For many months relays of ministers went to the interdicted parishes to preach the gospel. Cunningham was sent among the rest. Each was duly met with an interdict on his arrival, and each as duly disregarded it. Many ministers yet alive keep their copy of the interdict as a memorial of a time which had got so strangely out of joint. The violation of an interdict involves pains and penalties so formidable that no man would lightly incur them, especially in this law-revering country. But deliberately and openly as the Strathbogie interdicts were broken, they were broken with perfect impunity. After all, it appeared that the Court of Session was not sufficiently sure of its position to vindicate the authority it had assumed. THE REEL OF BOGIE, At the spring meeting of the Commission in 18-40, a petition came up from the inhabitants of Kemback, a parish in one of the sweetest nooks of Fife, complaining of their presbytery — the Pres- bytery of St Andrews. A son of Dr Cook, the Moderate leader, had been presented to that parish. The people vetoed him, but the presbytery had resolved to disregard their veto, and were going on to his settlement. Against this the people of Kemback sought pro- tection from the Commission. It was impossible to falter, if authority was to be maintained at all, for the case was one of plain insurrection. Were the Presbytery of St Andrews, said Dr 146 STKATHBOGIE. Chalmers, going to join the Presbytery of Strathbogie "in the dance of this mazy and multiform confusion ?" There is an old song which magnifies the reel of Bogie above all saltatory delights. Dr Chalmers, whose humour sometimes broke out in the quaintest drollery, made what he called " a classical allusion " to the peerless reel. " The great and unknown master of the game in Edinburgh, if such there be, will, no doubt, congratulate himself on the success of his tactics in having set these two presbyteries so hopefully agoing ; and more especially if it be in obedience to a signal from him, that so dignified a personage as the Presbytery of St Andrews has come forth as a performer on the stage of public observation to play her part in the reel of Bogie." The same meeting of Commission resolved to present an address to the Queen, and petitions to Parliament, craving protection against the unconstitutional encroachments of the Court of Session. Mr Candlish made the motion, in one of those stirring and eloquent speeches of which he was so amazingly prolific in those days. Dr Chalmers again spoke. There were not two ways, he said, of resolving the question of the Church's spiritual independence. It was a question of principle, a question on which compromise was impossible. They could " give place by subjection, no, not by an hairsbreadth." Some little time after, there appeared one of the best hits in cari- cature which Scotland has ever produced. It was called "The Reel of Bogie, a Clerical Dance," and was published on a large quarto sheet. Four dancers, in gown and bands, appear footing it with tremendous energy. Dr Chalmers and Dr Gordon, Mr Cand- lish and Mr Cunningham. The massive figure of Chalmers waves aloft a flag inscribed, " Retract ! ! ! no ! not a hairsbreadth." Ex- alted upon a hogshead, Dr John Ritchie plays the fiddle, while on the wall behind him hangs a picture of Nero fiddling when Rome was burning. The Lord President of the Court of Session shews his angry face upon the scene from behind a half-open door. His out- stretched hand holds a Ions' sword aloft over the head of Dr Chalmers, while Dr Ritchie smilingly says, " That's right, hit him hard, my Lord ; he's got no friends." The situation of matters as it then » STRATHBOGIE. 147 stood was happily touched off. Tlie Dissenters, represented in the picture by Dr Ritchie, were supposed to be not ill-pleased at the difficulties of the Established Church. The Voluntary Dissenters could hardly be expected to sjonpathise with the party strug- gling for spiritual independence in connection with the State. That connection they considered to be unscriptural and incom- patible with spiritual independence. " Friends " the Church had none. The two great political parties were equally adverse to her claims. If the Court of Session were illegally exceeding its power, it had little chance of being called to account either by the Govern- ment or the Legislature. Dr Gordon, a saintly man, whose weight of character in Edin- burgh and throughout the Church was immense, appears in the " Reel " as unwillingly whirled round in the determined grasp of Cunningham. It was a common idea at the time, that the whole disturbance was due to a few turbulent agitators, aad Cunningham generally got the credit of being the most violent. Dr Gordon was supposed to be a reluctant supporter of the party, and the carica- turist makes him cry, " I have really considerable difficulty in doing it." There never was a greater mistake. This mild and retiring man, so full of Christian gravity and meekness, was of all men the most immovably resolute in maintaining the spiritual independence of the Church. In the end his only difficulty was, not about coming out from the connection with the State, but about remaining in so long. All the portraits were good except Cunningham's. Its expres- sion was that of coarse ferocity, just what the popular notion at that time ascribed to him. People hearing him on the platform could not imagine him as anything else than the resistless and unsparing gladiator. Slowly and gradually it came out that in private he was as different as possible — gentle, affable, quiet to an extraordinary degree. Park, a sculptor of some reputation in those days, was employed to make a bust of him, which is in the possession of his brother-in-law, Mr Dennistoun of Greenock. " Let me tell you, sir," said the sculptor to him, " I modelled that bust four times before I succeeded. Three times I modelled 148 STKATHBOGIE. it under the idea tliat ferocity was the prevailing expression of the face. I was entirely mistaken. The prevailing expression is repose." The sculptor had surrendered himself to the popular idea, and his misconception of the character imposed upon him a misconcep- tion of the face — not all at once corrected. CHAPTER XI. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. npHE celebrated interdict against preaching did very much to open the eyes of the public to the encroachments of the Court of Session. The excitment throughout the country was un- paralleled. The " rebellion " of the non-iutrusionists made a noise as great as if it had had its Prestonpans or Culloden. Meanwhile the non-intrusion party plied every means for a right- eous extrication. The Whig government of the day had virtually been a party to the passing of the Veto Law, out of which the whole entanglement began. Reasonably, therefore, it might be expected that the Whig government would lend some aid to deliver the Church out of her difficulty. A deputation went to London, in the summer of 1839, to meet with political men there. They saw Lord John Russell at the Home Office. But, says Dr Chal- mers, " Such a feckless and fushionless entertainment of the whole matter, I never witnessed in my life. I could not but laugh when we came out, and I looked at the blank faces of all and sundry." Sir Robert Peel was very bland, but cautious and cold in the extreme. Sir James Graham was hearty, outspoken, and cordial. Upon the whole, the deputation came home " more hopeful than ever of matters being brought to a speedy and successful termination." Very early in the ensuing year another deputation went to London. Laboriously and vainly they tried to explain their views to political men. The Whigs were in office, but scarcely in power, and perhaps could not have settled the Scotch Church question even if they had been inclined. But they had no inclination. The deputation who waited on Lord Melbourne were received with 150 NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. blunt and careless good humour — " chaffed," in fact. It was then, as it is still, the favourite scheme of statesmen to bring all churches whatsoever into a state of subjection to the secular power, and to use them as tools for political ends. " The supremacy of the legislature," says Hallam in his "Constitu- tional History," " is like the collar of the watch-dog, the price of food and shelter, and the condition upon which alone a religious society can be endowed and established by a prudent common- wealth." A sickening grossness of idea, which still has its undis- turbed habitat in the political mind. What hope was there that worldly-minded men would listen to the claims of Christ's spiritual kingdom ? Numberless were the interviews granted to the deputations of the Church, but the weak and reluctant Whigs would not shake themselves into motion. " Government felt itself shut up to the conclusion not to move at present in the affair at all." THE ABERDEEN EPISODE. All through the winter and spring of 1840 the movement gathered strength. Not such a movement as restless men can get up by bold agitation, but a movement of a far deeper character, having the silent strength of a growing disposition to cry unto the Lord. Calculators of political forces have little idea of this kind of force, and therefore the force of the Scottish movement was misunderstood and miscalculated to the last. Yet signs of its depth were not wanting, if men could have read them. The Earl of Aberdeen had once or twice indicated a friendly feeling to the reforming parly in the Scottish Church. Any words of a friendly sound were eagerly caught up. A correspondence began between the Earl and the Evangelical leaders. He came to Edinburgh, and had a long interview with the General Assembly's Committee. After much letter- writing and negotiating they ima- gined that they had got him fully to understand their grievances. The encroaching civil courts must be kept within their own pro- vince. The self-government of the Church must be recognised. No minister must be forced on the peoj)le against their will. His NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. 151 Lordship undertook to bring a Bill into Parliament. He looked so friendly, and he wrote so courteously, that the Committee really had hopes, and hope trickled out over the Church. In the beginning of May the Bill was introduced into the House of Lords, and then the soiTy truth came out. It purported to be a "declaratory" bill, and the law which it declared was identical with the law as interpreted by the Court of Session. It legalised the very wrongs of which the Church complained. It laid her open to civil interference at every pore. The people were to have the power of stating objections, of which the Church Courts were to judge. Only if they could persuade their ecclesiastical masters that their objections were valid and weighty, were the people to have any influence in the appointment of their own religious teachers. The fact of conscientious and resolved objection on the part of the people was not to be itself a reason which the Presby- tery could sustain. Such was the Earl of Aberdeen's Bill. Instead of an egg it gave a scorpion. This was that Earl of Aberdeen under whose well- meaning administration the country, at a later period, " drifted into war," — the dismal and bloody war in the Crimea. Men who came close to him said that their chief feeling was one of surprise that a man of his evidently moderate talent could have attained such a position and importance as he certainly had. He could not have intended to deceive the Evanofelical men : there was no object in deceiving them. His confidence that his Bill would please them was perfectly jubilant. When the Bill was brought in, the General Assembly was at hand. "If reason shall maintain its sway in that body," his Lordship said, " I am sanguine as to the results of the approaching meeting." The first sounds of discontent began to be heard from the lesser ecclesiastical spheres. Cunningham delivered one of his shattering speeches in his own Synod, in which the Bill, like the golden calf, was broken to pieces and ground to powder.'''' The Earl deigned to notice it in the * Not that tlie Bill was lightly rejected. The impossibility of accepting it was a bitter disappointment. It was too evident that the failure of this effort destroyed almost all hope. A friend calling on another Church leader, found Dr Cunningham 152 NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. House of Lords in a way wliicli was probably intended to grind the daring Presbytery to powder. He read some confused and garbled extracts from the speech, adding, " My Lords, I believe I said on a former occasion, that I hoped my Bill would receive the sup- port of all rational and moderate people, and I think from the specimen I have given, that I could not have included the reverend gentleman." The Assembly came. Robert M'Cheyne, just returned from his mission of inquiry to the Jews, was there. His youthful face beamed with love, and his soft yearning voice thrilled, as he told the fathers and brethren how his heart burned within him to " communicate the vivid feeling of compassion given to himself by seeing the dry bones in the open valley, very many and very dry. There was an intense life about these old Assemblies, and they were full of character. There was an old powerful j^arty, not comprehending the new time which had come upon them, and taking in hot wrath the operation of dethronement. There was a rising party, confident in their cause, superb in vigour, elate with the wonderful flush of talent in their ranks, scornful of the sorry efforts to restrain them by force from that freedom of Christ's kingdom without which liberty is robbed of its brightest jeweL So crowded and so long continued were the sittings in those days of keen animated debate, that what ■with heat, fatigue, late hours, and bad ventilation, " few Assemblies passed, without the sacrifice, more or less directly, of one or more lives of its members." People began to gather at the doors of the Tron Church as early as eight, and even seven o'clock, in the morning. At ten o'clock the doors were opened, and the sitting which then began continued till the adjournment at five in the afternoon. Before seven the galleries were crammed again, and sometimes morning broke before the House separated. The debate on Lord Aberdeen's Bill occujDied two days. In the end, the and him going over the Bill together. The former was in the deepest anxiety, and again and again returned to the Bill to pore over its clauses, as if he could not make up his mind to the cruel conviction, that it kept carefully short of the essential and indispensable provisions, and that all the consequences of rejecting it must be faced. — E. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. 153 Assembly resolved by an overwhelming majority, to use every effort to prevent its passing into law. Cunningham was not a member of this Assembly ; but a month later, he had an opportunity in his own Presbytery of taking part in the opposition to the Bill, for the Earl seemed haughtily bent on pushing it through. The Presbytery met in their humble hall. Hugh Miller sat in the crush behind the little bar, looking on with his quiet grey eyes. His next paper photographed the speakers in all the vivid beauty of his style. Cunningham's speech impressed him marvellously. " Mr Cunningham opened the debate in a speech of tremendous power. The elements were various, — a clear logic, at once severely nice and popular; an unhesitating readiness of language, select and forcible, and well-fitted to express every minute shade of meaning, but plain and devoid of figure ; above all, an extent of erudition and an acquaintance with Church history that, in every instance in which the arguments turned on a matter of fact, seemed to render opposition hopeless. But what gave peculiar emphasis to the whole, was what we shall venture to term the pro- pelling power of the mind ; that animal energy which seems to act the part of the moving power in the mechanism of intellect, which gives force to action, and depth to the tones of the voice, and impresses the hearer with an idea of immense momentum." A few days after this, the Earl of Aberdeen sullenly gave up his Bill, from which so much had been expected. He published the whole correspondence between himself and the General Assembly's Com- mittee, with all the confidence of integrity. The misunderstanding between him and the Committee was strange. They had laboured to be so plain, and precise as to render misunderstanding impossible. They thought they had succeeded, and that his Lordship was per- fectly at one with them. Yet it came out at last that there was, and had all along been, a gulf between them. The mystery is inexplicable, unless this be the way to it, that worldly men cannot understand spiritual things, and, worse still, think they can. 11 CHAPTER XII. CHURCH PRINCIPLES. T\URING the time that the attention of the Church was occupied -^ with Lord Aberdeen and his abortive Bill, Cunningham had on his hands a laborious task, for which he of all men was most caj^able. It was thrown upon him in this way. The Rev. James Robertson, minister of Ellon, was a notable figure in the Scottish struggle. He was respectable from his talents and from his personal integrity. He had great acuteness and ingenuity, but was given to quibble, without apparently being aware that he Avas quibbling, and would " repose himself on a bit of sophistry as well pleased as if he had discovered the golden fleece." He was an uncouth, powerful man to look at, massive in his build, a Hercules in all but the stature. His voice grated harsh thunder, and when he raised it, it cracked. In the autumn of 1839 he delivered a speech of "five hours and twenty minutes " in his synod against the Veto Law. During the winter he expanded the speech into a bulky pamphlet, which he pubhshed in spring. With the publication of his " Observations on the Veto Law," Robertson at once stepped to the front of his party, their acknowledged ablest man. Charles Lamb was wont to be eloquent on the " virtue of suppression in "VNTiting," — a virtue which Mr Robertson of Ellon had certainly failed to practise. In a month after Robertson's pamphlet appeared, Cunningham came out with the first part of a reply. Not being able, under the pressure of work, to get the second part ready before the meeting of the General Assembly, he published a letter in the Witness, in- dicating his intended line of argument. Robertson's party were CHURCH TRINCirLES. 155 loudly boasting of his performance. It had a show of learning which was imposing and impressive. Cunningham's short note to the Witness ended all that. " Mr Robertson," he said, " had evi- dently taken his quotations from Calvin and Beza, from the speech of one of the Lords of Session on the Auchterarder case. Lord Med- wyn, and not consulted — perhaps never seen — the originals. He faithfully copies Lord Medwyn's blunders, giving us in the first quotation, as he found it in Lord Medwyn, ' octodecim ' for ' octi- duum,' which is the word in the original." Lord Medwyn, a dry, pedantic man, seemed to feel it like a blot on his ermine. He, too, published a letter in the hated Witness, laying the blame upon the printer. Hugh Miller, whose amazing fertility of illustration was one of his most remarkable gifts, took up the affair. A case of murder, he said, had been tried in a criminal court a few years before, and a conviction had been obtained by the circumstance that the iron heel of the murderer's shoe wanted one of the nails. The error pointed out by Mr Cunningham was the missing nail of the shoe. " It proves in Lord Medwyn's speech merely the negli- gence of the printer ; but it proves in Mr Robertson's pamphlet that one of the best informed of the Intrusionists is in reality a very superficial man." Six months after, Cunningham's " Defence of the Rights of the Christian People" appeared, — a volume rather than a pamphlet. The Witness thought it " one of the most learned, intensely argu- mentative, irresistible, and victorious pamphlets that controversy has ever produced." His literary executors have wisely included it in the fourth volume of his Works, published since his death. Its value rises far above the temporary uses of controversy. It is a weighty contribution to ecclesiastical literature. It contains the whole history of opinion upon the influence of the people in the appointment of pastors, from the days of the apostles downwards. The pamphlet was not one fitted for popular reading ; but it told prodigiously on the controversy, and the service done by it was immense. It was a great service to have it proved that the con- sent of Protestant Churches fully sanctions the principle of the popular will in the choice of their pastor. The time for making 156 CHURCH PRINCIPLES. sacrifices -was near ; and it aided miglitily in the preparation of men's minds to have it established in so resistless a demonstration that they were occupying the old ancestral ground of their own Church, and that their way forth was "by the footsteps of the flock." Perhaps no other man, then or now living, could have traversed with so free a mastery the enormous field of ecclesiastical literature into which the controversy led. Kobertson's pamphlet had been loudly vaunted by his party. The Earls of Aberdeen and Dal- housie had quoted it in the House of Lords, amid the cheers of that august assembly. For one abnormal night, the Upper House was brilliant with the glow of learning. Members were dazzled with the cold glitter of Latin quotations, and overawed by the names of Calvin and Beza. Olympus brandished thunderbolts which the Aberdeenshire Yulcan had forged. But the minister of Ellon had ventured into a field where neither he nor any living man was a match for Cunningham. He had posted himself up with laborious care for the undertaking. But these were Cunning- ham's native fields. It was easy for him to convict his opponent of ignorance, mistakes, and misrepresentations. Robertson was smitten hip and thigh, and his laboured argument, of which elated friends had so indiscreetly boasted, collapsed in ruins. THE ASSEMBLY OF 1811. The Assembly of 1841 brought fresh occasion for the advocacy of these princijDles, for once again Dr Cunningham moved a resolution on Patronage, lost this time by only 120 to 109. A still grave and more memorable duty devolved on him, — that of seconding the motion for the deposition of the Strathbogie Seven, the ministers who had persistently defied the authority of the Church courts, and whose case, long and patiently dealt with, required now to be closed. Dr Chalmers made the motion. The speech of Dr Cun- ningham may be best characterised by introducing here a letter addressed to Mrs Cunningham by the Rev. Hugh Martin, late of Greyfriar's Free Church, Edinburgh, It serves the double purpose of vi\idly representing the speaker, and recalling the vivacity of interest on the part of the audiences in those great days ; — CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 157 " You wish mc to record the circumstances in connection with which, unknown to himself, Dr Cunningham, thirty years ago, placed me under great obligation to him, and entirely decided for me, under God, the direction of my whole public life. The circum- stances were these : — "At that time, in the spring namely of 1841, I was a Divinity Student of two years' standing, residing in my native city of Aber- deen. Though brought up under Evangelical influences as regards doctrine, — and I must mention with feelings of deep veneration the name of my minister, the late Dr James Foote, — I was, as concern- ing ecclesiastical policy, a very decided Moderate, The Veto Law I could not contemplate with patience, and the suspension of the seven Strathbogie ministers I regarded as a piece of ecclesiastical despotism. Nevertheless, though I knew that the ' Non-Intrusion- ists ' were carrying it all their own way, I conceived an intense desire to be present at the General Assembly, then soon about to meet. "Chalmers had been round on his Church Extension tour in 1838, and, in the North Church, late on a Saturday evening, — when the old man eloquent, standing in the precentor's desk, with a solitary gas light shining on his great head and grey locks, ' would not let us away, so near was it to the Sabbath of the Lord, without speaking more directly to our eternal interests,' — I had known for the first time what it was to be ' spell-bound,' to jdeld to the resistless iron-clampings going round my arms and my chest and holding me till he chose. And he was to be there. From my old class-fellow also, (now Professor) David Masson, who had been for a year or two in Edinburgh, we had occasional reports of the intense intellectual action going on in the metropolis ; of the anti- cipations, in particular, of how fine an Assembly this would be ; and of how Greek would meet with Greek in chief est tug of war. Altogether the young student nature in me had a great longing to see the Assembly of 1841. " It was far from an easy matter, however, to compass my desire ; and I mention this because of the seriousness of the issues, to meward, which were to be settled. I was immersed in private 158 CHURCH PRINCIPLES. teaching in several different families ; and how to provide for the discharge of these duties during my absence it was hard to see. My excellent college friend (now the Rev.) William Pirie Smith — the father of Professor \V. R. Smith of Aberdeen — though himself engaged during six hours a day in public teaching, most kindly took charge of two hours of my daily work, rather than see my project break doAvn ; and after a series of complicated negotiations and arrangements, I was able to leave home with a light heart, and attend the meetings of that celebrated Assembly. " And the substance of what I have to say in this communication is, that whereas my moderatism sternly stood its ground for eight ' days, and as still a Moderate I listened to the opening sentences of ]\Ir Cunningham's speech in vindicating the motion for the deposi- tion of the seven Strathbogie ministers, I became conclusively and completely a Free Churchman before that speech was done. The demonstration of the righteousness and necessity of the course he counselled was so conclusive, and the exposure of the untenableness of the allegations and arguments on the side of his opponents so complete, that I felt it utterly impossible to remain honest in my own eyes without admitting that I had been absolutely convinced. I need not describe the characteristics of the speech. They were the habitual characteristics of his speaking, in a very fine instance thereof, — intellectual simplicity, directness, and power ; unaffected moral earnestness ; the manly courage which springs from strong dutifulness, combined with perfect self-oblivion ; the clear stating of the question ; the rejection of irrelevancies ; the total absence of all side-thoughts that should retard or perplex ; the adducing of pre- cisely what was requisite, the placing of it in the unmistakable light ; the insistence till this was accomplished, and no more ; and then on in the work of cumulating his materials, until all he pro- mised at the outset was achieved, to the delight of friends, the dismay of foes, and the rectification of at least one listener ; — all this, in sentences of most direct construction and perfect trans- parency of meaning, serving his thinking like mirrors, and bodying forth his facts and arguments like instant incarnations of them : here was demonstration. At college I had learned to like my CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 159 Euclid ; and here again, in wholly another field, and with inevitable difference, was demonstration. I could enjoy the gorgeousness of the eloquence of Chalmers, and answer to his terrific forthcalling of emotion ; and I could appreciate in my measure the brave battling, the subtle reasoning, the able replies, the keen sarcasm, the finished rhetoric of others, and yet refuse to be convinced in the main. Here was demonstration ; and until it was disposed of, either unto rejection or acceptance, as if a circle had been drawn round one on the sand, one had no right to be conscious of a single subordinate thought or feelins: concerning it. It was not a treat ; it was not a display ; nor was it possible uprightly so to deal with it. It w^as a direct, immediate, exclusive business transaction of an intellect with other intellects. And not of pure intellect (often a meaningless phrase). For there is a high morale in the faithful conduct of intellect — God's natural image in man — to which moral law de- ' mands our loyalty ; and it was eminently obvious here, demanding settlement of this high business transaction. I need not say how thankful to God I have been, ever since, that I was mercifully enabled to settle it in truth, and to gain a great victory by owning a total defeat. " To my excellent student friends, Cobban, Philip, and Duncan, — the last of whom, the late Rev. James Duncan of Gartly, is fallen asleep, the others, now the Rev. Alexander Cobban of Inverallochy, and the Rev. John Philip of Fordoun, — it was a great pleasure that ' Martin had come right." We all lodged together, and we were now, more than ever, a very joyous ' quaternion.' We resided in James's Square, with a respectable family who were members of Dr Cunningham's congTegation ; they almost adored their minister, and gave us, very warm-heartedly, an account of a pastoral visit he had lately been paying them. Two of the ' quaternion ' — I give no names — were great mimics ; and the good people must occasionally have been in great danger of coming to the conclusion that the student strangers in the big parlour were enjoying a pastoral visit too, and that the minister had brought several distinguished members of Assembly with him who were taking the opportunity of rehearsing their speeches. 160 CHURCH PKINCIPLES. " We continued to take growing delight in the Assembly till the close, "with a deepening sense of the historical and decisive character of its proceedings. On the afternoon of the second Sabbath we all repaired to St Giles's to hear Dr Cunningham preach before the Lord High Commissioner. The text was, ' Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.' And we agreed that the opening sentences were eminently characteristic. 'You all know who Jesus Christ is ; and you all know what it is to be the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not explanation that the text needs ; it is application.' The sermon was subsequently preached and printed on the occasion of the death of Dr Robert Gordon, under whose ministry Dr Cunningham had sat from the time of his appointment to his professorship in 1843.* " On my translation from Panbride to Greyfriars in 1 858, I was • enabled, through Dr Cunningham's kindness, to attend, very fre- quently, his second course of lectures, and thus had the great benefit and pleasure of hearing about four-fifths of the second volume of the ' HiSTOEiCAL Theology.' His character and powers as a lecturer on theology will be set forth by far abler pens than mine. I men- tion only one impression he produced on my mind, — the impression, namely, of his splendid combination of largeness of views with definiteness of views. He had manifestly a great dislike of narrow- ness, combined with an equal or perhaps still greater contempt of the idea that narrowness can be avoided by indefiniteness. I am persuaded that there are few more important general lessons to be learned from his works than this, and few more imperatively demanding attention at the present day. I mention also one incident of my attendance at his class, as illustrating his great kindliness of disposition. He one day, before pronouncing the blessing, addressed me by name, and requested me to speak with him in his private room. My observation, if not experience, of a professor summoning a student in this manner to a private audience, must have been unfortunate ; for, as I really sat in this class with all the feelings of a student, I was startled for a moment into the * The remainder of Mr Martin's letter refers to later years ; but it seems better to give it here. CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 161 conviction that I must have done something very wrong. I was speedily set at rest, however, by the kindly welcome ; and after the usual courteous greetings, Dr Cunningham said : — ' My more imme- diate object in requesting you to speak with me just now, is to ask if you have read Mr 'shook.' I had, and had liked it very much. * Yes, he had no doubt it was a very able book ; and as he knew I was a personal friend of the author, would I review it for the British and Foreign Evangelical T (of which Dr Cunningham was then the editor). Dr Cunningham and the able author had lately, in some important Church matters, not been, so to speak, ' saying all one way.' And the generous editor was anxious that the review- ing of the book should be in friendly hands. " During the succeeding winter, I repeatedly met Dr Cunningham returning through the Meadow Walk from his class, and always when I could, I tarried or turned with him, to enjoy his conversation. It was usually very memorable ; and sometimes, when it was not completed, in his great geniality he would do me the kindly com- pliment of turning with me at Salisbury Road till it was. I remember one instance specially. The topic was the Cardross case. He had no difficulty about ' .satisfying production,' agreeing, of course, with Gillespie in his 91 st Proposition. But looking to the possi- bility of the future, I was anxious to have his mind as to the limits of what the Church could possibly submit to, and where she must make a final stand. I do not remember the details : but I have a very memorable impression of the beautiful manner in which he led on the thought, and brought it up exactly to the exact border line, and as if pointing across it, with the usual wave of the hand and forefinger reserved to the last, said, ' and that's persecution.' On another occasion the conversation turned on an article of Dr Charles Hodge, on National Observance of the Sabbath, which had been reprinted in the British and Foreign Evangelical, and which I had lately very fully quoted from and commented on in the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh as Convener of the Sabbath Observance Committee. He agreed with me that that article was a vindication of Free Church principle ; and he ended by saying, ' And no Volun- tary will face it.' During the same winter he did me the honour of 162 CHURCH PRINCIPLES. dining witli me in Grange E,oad, to meet my excellent friend, his old friend and first missionary in Edinburgh, the Rev. Thomas Wilson of Friockheim, for whom he had always cherished a warm regard. He was ' great good company/ placed us perfectly at our ease with him, and never seemed to imagine that he was speaking to other than his peers. BTis great power of memory was illustrated by his turning immediately to the desired page or part of the page of a volume of pamphlets on the Moderatorship Controversy, which he had not seen for twenty-five years ; and there was no little hilarity over a Note in wdiich he had told some unfortunate gentleman that he had totally misunderstood the v/hole matter involved, ' not- •\vithstanding that he had done his uttermost to render it level to his capacities.' I shall always regard it as a matter of melancholy pleasure, that the preaching of his last sermon was a personal favour to myself. It was in Free Greyfriars, in the early period of my long and severe illness. Nor was the choice — or rather overruling of the choice — of the text without some signature of that ' preciousness in the sight of the Lord of the death of his saints,' which is often mani- fested in those outward arrangements which the gracious Master makes in bringing the public duties of a faithful servant to a close. .The text was, 'Whom having not seen we love; in whom, though now- we see him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and fidl of glory.' " CUNNINGHAM ON PRESBYTERY. In those days the Hev. James Marshall was minister of the Tolbooth Parish in Edinburgh. He was rather a weak, uncomfort- able man, but jiopular as a preacher, and there was every reason to believe that his labours had been blessed. He was deeply pious, but also somewhat sentimental. Upon this not very robust and healthy mind, the sharp, intense controversies of the time produced an extremely disturbing effect. As the storm grew high, and the frightful cracking of the edifice was heard, the disturbance was greater than he could bear. He looked around ; his eye rested upon the mighty Church of England ; and what is now a deep that CHUKCH PRINCIPLES. 1G3 leviathan maketh to boil as a pot, seemed a bright and smiling sea, in which were many islets of serene repose. A son of his, once a curate in the English Church, but long since drifted into Popery, has published a memoir of his father. Among other extracts from the good man's diary, it contains the fol- lowing : — " In the event of the Church of Scotland breaking up. Episcopacy is the only form of Church government likely to have stability, or to exercise any powerful influence over society in general. Is it not my duty, with the convictions I have, to identify myself with what is likely to become influential, and so far as God may enable, to leaven it with evangelical truth ? " He entered into correspondence with an English clergyman. To him he declared his belief that many of the more educated classes in Scotland " are staggered and confounded with the exhibition Presbyterianism has made. Many of them are halting between two opinions, but know not how to decide." By this time he had nearly made up his mind to join the English Church. He writes to his Church of England friend : " In such circumstances, a step of the kind I am contemplating, is invested with a peculiar degree of responsibility. It will do more harm to Presbyterianism than a similar movement at any past era in the history of this country, not from any importance in the individual who makes the change, but from the state of men's minds and feelings at the period of the transition. And it is this consideration which, I think, makes the question on what terms he will receive a minister of the Church of Scotland, not unworthy of the serious consideration of any English bishop who really attaches importance to the cause of Episcopacy." " Did bishops of the nineteenth century," he adds, "know as well as I do the state of feeling at present in this country, I am convinced they would not be slow to provide Episcopacy for the many who, I am satisfied, are willing to receive it." And now Mr Marshall's mind being made up, he proceeded to action. The Presbytery of Edinburgh, at their meeting in Septem- ber 1841, were surprised by a letter intimating that their brother could no longer remain a minister of the Church of Scotland. They appointed a committee to talk the matter over with him, of 16-t CHUECH PRINCIPLES. which committee Mr Cunningham was one. He appears to have been at great pains, and probably succeeded no worse than he expected. Mr Marshall went over to the Church of England, but went alone. The affair made some noise, but had no result what- ever. No one knowing the ineradicable Presbyterianism of the Scottish j)eople ever supposed that it would. Mr Marshall's old flock continued to have a kindly feeling towards him. When he obtained a living in the Church of England, they were pleased to know it. They were always glad to hear of his welfare, but not one man of them ever thought of following his example. The affair is worth remembering solely on account of a characteristic letter which it drew from Cunningham to Marshall, and which is as follows : — * "October Gth 1841. "My Dear Sir, — I think it exceedingly evident, though, of course, you are not conscious of it, that you have been led to change your views on Church government, not from argument, but from feeling ; not from a full and impartial investigation of the subject, but from an indulgence in feelings which are of a somewhat equi- vocal kind, and, in my opinion, quite as much opposed to the spirit of Christ and his apostles as any which have been manifested by those who have taken a prominent part in recent discussions. Entertaining this opinion, of course, I have no hope of impressing your mind by anything that could be said on the merits of the subject, and I have no intention of attempting it, but still I think it right to lay before you one or two considerations suggested to me by the conference we had with you on Monday. " I cannot but regard your abstinence from full and frank con- sultation with some of your fathers in the ministry, about the conscientious doubts and difficulties which had sprung up in your mind, as scarcely consistent with an impartial search after truth in the matter, and as plainly indicating the operation of some per- verted and perverting feeling, which, without your being conscious * The copy of tliis Letter printed in Mr Marshall's Life by his Son, has some manifest errata. A copy found among Dr Cunningham's Papers has, therefore, been preferred. — K. CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 165 of it, had biassed your judgment on the subject. I fear, also, that your study of the subject has been somewhat meagre and scanty. You may have read other Presbyterian works, as that point was not formally put to you at the conference, but the only works then mentioned as having been read by you on that side were, ' Ander- son's Defence' and the 'Plea for Presbytery,' by ministers of the Synod of Ulster. " Now, these are both excellent works, and, in my opinion, contain matter wdiich no Episcopalian can answer; but they are not suffi- cient for a full investigation of the subject, and they are not the best books that might be recommended, especially to a person of your temperament. They are just controversies with individuals, and though I do not object to the spirit in which they are written, yet there is a degree of severity about them which might perhaps be grating and offensive to a person very squeamish on the subject of controversy. Had you consulted any Presbyterian well acquainted with the subject, you would probably have been told, that it was scarcely decent or becoming in any minister of the Church of Scot- land to leave his own Church and join the Episcopal one, unless he had read and studied ' Calderwood's Altare Damascuum,' the leading work by a minister of our Church, against the constitution of the Church of England ; that some of the books which you ought to read, either on the ground of their intrinsic excellence, or their freedom from personal controversy and bitterness of spirit, were such as 'Baxter's "Works on Non -conformity,' 'Calamy's Defence of Moderate Non-conformity,' ' King on the Primitive Church,' ' The Divine Right of the Gospel Ministry,' by the London ministers, ' The Case of the Accommodation,' in answer to ' Leighton's Proposals,' ' Jamieson's Sum of the Episcopal Controversy,' and ' "Williams's Letters from a Parochial Bishop •' and that, if you really wished to make yourself master of the subject, before taking so serious and important a step as that which you have adopted, you were bound in fairness to have read the works of the most learned men who have written against Episcopacy, such as Cartwright, Beza, Blondel, and Salmasius. "You told us you had thoroughly examined the controversy 166 CHURCH PRINCIPLES. about tlie Epistles of Ignatius, a statement whicli can scarcely be considered well founded, unless you have read Daill^'s work, to which Pearson replied, and Larroque's work in reply to Pearson. " Nothing was said by any of the brethren at the conference, as to what you said in your paper about the Liturgy, and therefore I think it right to remind you, that what you said on that point applied solely to the case of a private person worshipping in the communion of the Episcopal Church, and contained nothing like a defence of what a minister in that Church must do. There is something plausible to be said for Episcopacy, and for the use of a Liturgy. Much allowance is to be made for those who have been born and bred in the Church of England ; but I must say that I regard it as a very extraordinary thing, that a man of your character, who had officiated with so much acceptance and usefulness as a Presbyterian minister, should, on deliberately examining the subject, be able to make up his mind to the prospect of habitually using, as a oninister, the baptismal and burial services in the Book of Common Prayer. " There is only another point to which I mean to advert ; and I confess that it was this that first suggested to me the idea of writing to you at all, viz., the statements contained in your paper about the reformers, and Calvin, and Beza, and Knox. I intended to have adverted to them at the time, but I forgot. You said, in substance, that the reformers laid aside Episcopacy, and introduced Presbytery f^'om necessity. Now, I am aware that almost all Episcopalian controversialists, galled at the fact that almost all the Churches of the Reformation abandoned Episcopacy, have asserted this, but I know also, that they have produced no evidence of its truth, that it is unquestionably false, and that its falsehood has been often demonstrated by Presbyterian wi'iters. If you wish to see a proof of its utter falsehood hy an Episcopalian, you will find it in ' Brett's Divine Eight of Episcopacy,' pp. 123-1 4 i. " You gave a pretended quotation from Calvin and another from Beza, which have often been produced by Episcopalian contro- versialists, and as often j)roved by Presbyterians to have been dishonestly garbled and perverted. Of course, I do not mean to CHURCH PRINCIPLES. 1G7 charge you with dishonesty in the use of them, for I presume you just copied them from some Episcopalian author, but you must allow me to say, that it was not very creditable to you to produce such quotations without having ascertained their accuracy and relevancy, and that you must be very ignorant of the controversy if you did not know tliat Presbyterian writers have often alleged, and, as I think, jDroved, that the use that has so often been made by Episcopalians of these extracts, and of some others of a similar kind from Calvin and Beza, was unwarranted and unfair. If you had been familiar even with the ' Plea for Presbytery,' wliich, I think, you said you had read, you would not have taken Episcopalian extracts from Calvin and Beza upon trust. "Your statement about the superintendents was to this effect, that learned Episcopalians had openly asserted that, in defending Episcopacy, they asked for nothing more than such functionaries as the superintendent. It is true that this statement has been made ; but it is also true, that the man must be very grossly ignorant, either of the Church of Scotland, or of the fundamental principles of Episcopacy, who believes it, as you seem to do. The unques- tionable liability of the superintendents to be censured and deposed by Synods and General Assemblies, is plainly inconsistent with Episcopal notions of the standing and jurisdiction of bishops, as a distinct and higher order of pastors. This is frankly admitted by Sage in his 'Fundamental Charter of Presbytery.' The Episco- palian writers who made the statement you referred to, asserted what they must have known to be false. You adopted it, of course, from ignorance ; but an ignorance which, I must again say, was very gross and very discreditable in one who had resolved to take so important a step. " These statements about the Reformers of the Continent and of our own country, I think you are called upon to retract, and to make your retractation known to those to whom you addressed them, — I mean the members of the Tolbooth Session ; and if this is not done, I shall probably consider it a duty which I owe to the cause of truth to take some opportunity of exposing them. " I have, probably, spoken rather more plainly than may be 168 CHURCH PRINCIPLES. agreeable to you ; but I do not feel that I have said anything inconsistent with the respect and esteem which I really cherish for your character, or anything more than the interests of truth warranted and required. "Nothing would give me more pleasure than to learn, that a more full and impartial study of the subject of Church government had convinced you that it was your duty to remain in that Church in which you have been so long an honoured and useful pastor. With best wishes for your happiness and comfort, I remain, my dear Sir, sincerely yours, " William Cunningham." CHAPTEE XIII. TRAITS OF CHARACTER. T?AIILY in 1842 a meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland was called to take into con- sideration the alarming and critical position of the Church of Scotland ; for our generous-hearted Irish brethren were always full of sympathy with our cause. Dr Buchanan and Mr Cunningham were sent to be present at the meeting of Assembly. Some time before this, the Moderates had transmitted to Government a party manifesto, or " Memorial," as they called it, signed in their name by Dr Cook. They had the assurance to send a copy of this memorial to the Irish Assembly. Several of the Irish brethren alluded in their speeches to this document in terms of unmeasured reprehension. Mr Cunningham also referred to it, perhaps with all the more acerbity that he was suffering from bodily indisposition at the time. At all events, his words were certainly unguarded. " They have the audacity to say in this memorial that this is the first time that these principles of non-intrusion and spiritual independence have been mooted in the Church of Scotland. Every one who has the slightest knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of Scotland must know that this assertion is scandalously untrue. Dr Cook, who signs this memorial, knows the assertion to be untrue, and I could get materials from his own History of the Church to prove this. At the same time, it is but right to mention that it is under- stood that, though Dr Cook signs, he did not write this memorial. It is said to be written by a young advocate in Edinburgh, who has published some other articles on the same subject, especially in 12 170 TRAITS OF CHARACTER. Blackwood's Magazine — articles characterised by the same gross ignorance and reckless mendacity which characterise this memorial. Still, though written by this young gentleman, Dr Cook is respon- sible for its contents, and may perhaps be called upon to account for some of them."* Mr Cunningham had not returned home more than a few days, when he received a lawyer's letter on the part of Dr Cook, inti- mating that legal proceedings would be commenced against him on the ground of his speech. A similar intimation was made on the part of Mr John Inglis, the young advocate alluded to (now Lord President of the Court of Session), who laid his damages at £1000. Mr Cunningham put himself into the hands of a legal friend, Mr Robert Johnstone ; and by his advice published a retractation and apology to Dr Cook, and a retractation and apology to Mr John Inglis. The threatened actions were of course dropped. But though Cunningham had published apologies enough to satisfy the lawyers, his own conscience exacted further satisfaction. About a week afterwards there was a great Anti-Patronage meet- ing held in Edinburgh. The Lord Provost of the city presided, and the foremost orators of the Church were there to take part. Never did Cunningham get a more enthusiastic recej)tion than he did that night. In the course of his speech he said : — " Now, I have another matter to advert to, as connected wath the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. You have all heard before, that to the late meeting of the Irish Assembly our friends of the minority sent a memorial embodying their views. You are pro- bably also aware that on that occasion I adverted to that memo- rial, and to some of the statements which it contained. You are * About this time BlackwoocVs Magazine contained such statements as the following : — " The contest between the fanatical, or non-intrusion party of the Scottish Church, as they style themselves, is the same at bottom with that in which Henry II. was so long engaged with the Church of Rome, and for which Thomas a-Becket was slain on the steps of the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral." "We can see no difference whatever between the measures advocated by the Scotch Non-Intrusionists, and those which were supported by the French Jacobins, and which are now contended for by the Chartists of England." TRAITS OF CHARACTER. 171 aware that on that occasion I specifically and decidedly denied the accuracy of some of tlie historical statements which that memorial contains, and the soundness of the principles which it embodies. I did that, as I was entitled to do. I do it still, and I intend to con- tinue to do it on every occasion when I am called to discuss that memorial. " At the same time, it is right I should say, and I say it with deep humility, that in discussing that memorial, and in controvert- ing, as I was entitled to do, the accuracy of its statements and the soundness of its principles, I am bound to confess, as I do now con- fess, that I was led by the impulse of the moment to give way too much to the spirit of indignation which the memorial had excited in my breast, and to make rash and unwarrantable statements, throwing personal imputations on two individuals. " I did do so. I certainly did not deliberately intend to make personal imputations upon these men ; but on the impulse of the moment I let slip words which bore fairly that construction. I did not mean to assert or to insinuate that the authors of the memorial were guilty of infidelity or falsehood ; but unfortunately, on the impulse of the moment, I allowed words to escape me which I now see fairly bore that construction. It becomes, therefore, my undoubted and imperative duty to retract that statement, and to apologise to these gentlemen. That duty I now discharge. " It becomes me undoubtedly to cherish a deep feeling of humi- lity in confessing this infirmity which I then manifested ; and what is more, to derive from this matter the useful lesson which it is fitted and intended to teach. When a great, and important, and exciting controversy is raging, we are very apt to mix up feelings of carnal anger with the zeal with which we ought to promote the cause of truth ; and in this way we are tempted to make statements which may fairly be held to infringe upon that love which is the fulfilling of the law, and are led to overlook and to disregard the spirit and the import of that injunction of our Lord and Master : ' Judge not, that ye be not judged.' " This apology, at least, was no impulse of the moment ; for in the note-book then in use, and which contains the embryo of so many 172 TRAITS OF CHARACTER. grand and noble orations, the preparation for the apology is still to be seen. The Witness, in reporting the meeting, said : " For Mr Cunningham we cherish a profounder respect than ever." The feeling was one in which, despite the violence of controversy, not a few even of his opponents shared. A portion of the press, indeed, triumphed over him with coarse exultation. A staring caricature, representing him on his knees before Mr Inglis, ruefully beseeching mercy, kept its place in the shop-windows for some weeks. Cun- ningham smiled his quiet smile, and kept his tranquillity. He had the happy temperament, that when he had done all be should, or all he could, the matter, whatever it was, ceased to dwell in his thoughts. All the excitement, anxiety, perplexity, and responsi- bility of the Disruption period never robbed him of an hour's rest. He had quite a Duke of Wellington's faculty of going quietly to sleep when duty was done. For the rest, he always shewed a singular readiness to apologise for words used by him in the heat of controversy, but which were not justified in the severe review of his own conscience. And he was always a solemnly self-judging man. Some time before the affair now narrated, he was in the house of a clerical friend con- nected with the Highlands, and in the course of conversation was led to ask about a northern minister once conspicuous on the Evan- gelical side, but who had now left it. " How do you account for that ?" said Cunningham. " What can be the reason ?" "Vanity," replied the other ; " the lairds got about him, and flattered him." " Yes, I understand," answered he quietly ; " that does account for it." He was then silent for a minute, and seemed to be engaged in prayer, after which he added with great emphasis : " Mr , there is no principle in our nature that we ought more to watch and pray against than vanity. I believe that there is no principle in our nature which, if indulged, will sooner turn a man into a scoundrel." CHAPTER XIV. THE LAST TEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. ASSEIVIBLY OF 1842 — THE CLAIM OF RIGHT EHEML "\fEHEMIAH of old, in his night ride about Jerusalem, saw a dreary sight. Between him and the sky stretched the dim length of the broken wall^ with many a breach wide gaping. The streets were blocked with mounds of ruin. The burnt remnants hanging to shattered arches shewed where gates had been. The Church of Scotland had come to be a dreary sight too. She had implicitly believed in her own freedom and independence. She had trusted in her gates and bars, her protecting wall of civil statutes. But now her gates had been forced, her walls riven with many a breach. Jerusalem was become heaps. Jerusalem which was builded as a city compact together. The invading power had left her scarcely a shred of freedom. The civil court had asserted its power of prohibiting any part of the Church's procedure. "Interdicts" were brought to bear at every point. Without incurring the liability to civil pains and penalties, the Church could carry out neither her government nor her discip- line. Her own ministers, who had sworn at their ordination to obey her in her own department, could not keep their oath without exposing themselves to heavy damages. Her sentences were pro- nounced null and void by the civil court. The preaching of the Gospel was interdicted in a whole district of country. A minister found guilty of theft was protected by interdict. The trial of another minister on a charge of fraud was forbidden by interdict. The very constitution of the Church courts was assailed by interdict, the Court of Session claiming the right to say who might, and who 174 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. might not sit in them. The Chapel ministers, about two hundred in number, had been admitted as members of Church courts by a decision of the Assembly of 1834, but now their admission was declared by the Court of Session to be illegal, and their presence was held to vitiate the acts of the Presbytery, Synod, or Assembly in which they sat. The refonning party presented a firm front to their difl&culties, though now fully alive to the perils which threatened them. They did all their work with formal exactness. Lord Nelson, in the battle of the Baltic, refused a wafer and called for w^ax to seal his letter with due deliberation. Deliberately the Assembly of 1842 went on to exercise discipline on those ministers who had defied its authority. Firmly and calmly they stood to their rights. And they did not abate one jot of their efforts in the mission fields at home and abroad. Things, however, could not go on much longer as they were Cherishing a deep value for their position as an Established Church, they were fully aware that only one thing could now save it. A servant of the State had browbeaten them, but none of the violence which they had suffered had been directly the work of the State itself. They might carry their complaint of the grievous and harassing wrongs done them to the feet of the Legislature, where they might possibly get redress. They stated their whole case in the document known as the Church of Scotland's Claim of Eight, which was drawn up with singular ability by Mr Dunlop, It set forth historically the true position of the Church of Scotland, with the jurisdiction and privileges she had always claimed, which had been ratified by Acts of Parlia- ment, recognised and confirmed by the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England, and which every Sovereign of this country swears to maintain. It described the unconstitutional inroads upon her government and discipline recently made by the Court of Session, and claimed the protection of the Legislature against such encroachments. It re-asserted the principles of spiritual indepen- dence and non-intrusion, as principles which she must maintain at all hazards, and called upon all the members of the Church to stand THE LAST YEiVR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 1 75 by each other in maintaining them. It protested that if, through the refusal of their just demands, they should be compelled to relinquish the secular benefits conferred by the State, they were not to be held as renouncing the riffht to claim these benefits on the terms on which they were originally secured to them ; but it called all Christians throughout the world to witness that they would rather forego the advantages of an Establishment than disown the Headship of Christ, or betray the liberties of His people. The Assembly adopted this solemn appeal to the Legislature by a majority of 241 to 110. PATRONAGE. Within the Church of Scotland there has been from the Reforma- tion downwards, a more or less sustained struggle against Patronage, that system abhorred by every true Presbyterian Scot. From the year 1712 — the year when Patronage was reinforced for the purpose of disgusting the Scottish people with their Church — down to the year 1784, the Assembly annually made it an instruction to its Commission to apply for redress of the grievance of Patronage. The Assembly kept up this annual form long after it had ceased to think Patronage a grievance. The last decided public effort to procure redress was made in 1735, when a deputation was sent to London to renew the application for repeal of the Act. A bill for the purpose was actually framed by the Lord Advocate of the day, Duncan Forbes of Culloden; but meeting with small and cold support, it was withdrawn. In 1784, the Moderates, under the leadership of Dr Hill, dropped the annual instruction to the Commission against Patronage, and thought the matter was settled for ever. A reforming generation arose. The Church retraced every step of her defection in doctrine and practice. One thing only was wanting to complete her testimony as a reforming Church. She had not yet condemned the system of Patronage. The progress of the clerical mind upon that subject was slow. In 1833, the Anti- Patronage men could muster only 33 votes in the General Assembly. 176 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. In 1837, when Cunningham made a great speech, already described, the minority had grown to 96. In 1841 they numbered 133, being only six votes below the majority. The clergy followed reluctantly the national opinion on this subject. Very slowly they came to see that lay Patronage in the Church was the source of all their troubles. But in 1842 this had become very clear. The minority of S3 had grown into a majority of 215, outnumbering their opponents by 69. Cunningham made the Anti-Patronage motion of 1842 : — " That the General Assembly, having considered the overtures and petitions against Patronage, resolve and declare that Patronage is a griev- ance, has been attended with much injury to the cause of true religion in this Church and kingdom, is the main cause of the difficulties in which the Church is at present involved, and that it ought to be abolished." The speech in which he supported this motion was magnificent. Makgill Crichton, in his hearty, out- spoken way, exclaimed, " I cannot help expressing the unmingled delight which I feel. Mr Cunningham, who has all his life been a champion of the principle of the election of pastors by the Christian people, has opened this debate with a power which cannot be surpassed, if it can possibly be equalled, in this house." Stewart of Cromarty, a rare genius, who lived and died in a remote corner of the land, used to say : " Cunningham gives me the idea of one of those mighty steamers on the Clyde, to which all the craft in the river pay homage by getting out of their way." The homage of getting out of his way was very fully paid to him in this debate. The opposition did not venture to do more than move that it was "inexpedient in present circumstances to seek the abolition of Patronage." Their battle was weak. Kobertson of Ellon declared that he " did not think the arguments of Mr Cun- ningham had been answered." His own attempt to answer them was a palpable sophistry. Dr Chalmers stepped over upon Anti- Patronage ground. " We have been shut up to this, that there is no conclusive and comfortable settlement but in the utter extinction of Patronage." Many more had been forced to the same convic- tion, in spite of strong leanings the other way. THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH, ] 77 A mummy, they say, is swathed in linen rolls, hundreds of yards long. Every old abuse is sure to have as intricate a swaddling. Patronage was defended that day as ancient, natural, expedient, safe, beneficial. Cunningham, with his clear insight, went directly to the heart of the matter. The real question before me, he said, is, How ought pastors to be appointed to Christian congregations ? What are pastors ? Pastors are men appointed to the care of souls, and to administer the laws of Christ's visible kingdom. We must seek information as to the mode of their appointment from the same source from which they derive their authority for executing the functions committed to them, that is, from the Scripture, and nowhere else. As they are appointed to conduct and administer the affairs of a free and independent society, their appointment should not be determined or controlled by any foreign authority — by any authority beyond the society itself. Surely it is manifest that an authority which is purely civil, which rests exclusively on human law, and which is based on secular and worldly considerations, must be foreign and alien to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. To these views the Church of Christ everjrwhere must come — is visibly coming — and has made palpable progress since the year 1842. She will perfectly adopt them in that day when she fully understands her own spirituality. The note-book which Cunningham held in his hand in the Anti- Patronage debate is excessively blurred and blotted at this speech, indicative to me — remembering that day — of the enormously crowded house, and the overwhelming heat. The little book, still stained with the sweat of that great battle, is a curious memorial of the Anti-Patronage debate of 1842. THE ELDERSHIP. Another matter on which his heart was greatly set, was settled in that Assembly. He had long laboured in conjunction with Mr Dunlop at the renovation of the elder's office in the Church of Scotland. The Presbyterian eldership is a noble institution, when 178 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. the office is filled by men who fear God. Under Moderatism it had been allowed to fall into uselessness and contempt. Many parishes had no elder, and in many more, the elder was the mere creature and tool of the minister. Cunningham was fully satisfied that the office could not be restored, unless the election to it was put into the hands of Church members. Then, when elders should be elected by their own people among whom they dwelt, it might be hoped that right men would be called to the office. Then the whole ideal of an eldership might be realised. A small num- ber of the gravest and the best in each congregation, associated with the minister as his council — each elder having twenty or thirty families allotted to his care, whom he visits in health, in sickness, or in sorrow, and to whom his relation is almost paternal — an unequalled machinery for the spiritual oversight of a peo- ple. Eight years before, Dunlop and Cunningham had begun to labour in this direction, but it was not till the Assembly of 1842 that they had the pleasure of seeing an Act passed by which election to the eldership was put into the hands of the people. MINISTERIAL COMMUNION. In the most melancholy time of the Church of Scotland, a very few years after the Assembly had declared that they would take no part in the blessed work of spreading the gospel among the heathen, there had been a law passed which isolated the Scottish pulpit from all the world. It prohibited every minister of the Church of Scotland from employing any minister of another church to preach in his pulpit. It was directed mainly against the labours of men who had been eminently blessed of God, such as the Hal- danes, and Simeon of Cambridge ; and the motive of it was nothing else than a hatred to the cause of evangelical truth. The last Assembly of the unbroken Church has the credit of having abolished this narrow and illiberal restriction. Cunningham proposed its repeal. " It would tend indirectly," he said, " but yet speedily and certainl}'^, to a much more thorough and THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 179 complete amalgamation of the various Presbyterian bodies in Scotland." Thus far he looked before him. This way it works, beyond question. Amalgamation is coming — though hindered as yet by an idiosyncrasy peculiar to Scotland. In the receiver of an air-pump, a guinea and a feather weigh alike. In our Scottish minds, all principles are alike weighty. We are not always discriminating in our loyalty. LITERARY LABOURS. The Wodrow Society was a well known undertaking of the literary antiquarian sort. It may be said to have originated in two separate causes. The first was the revival of a spirit of literary antiquarianism, indicated by the institution of the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs. Certain persons who took an interest in the antiquities of our Scottish Church, thought it desirable to have a Society, formed on a similar, but more popular basis, for the pur- pose of publishing historical and ecclesiastical works of our Reformers, which had been preserved in manuscript or concealed in rare publications. The first idea of such a Society was suggested by Dr David Laing of the Signet Library in Edinburgh, — that rare antiquarian, learned, modest, and ever-obliging, who has guided the spades of so many diggers. Along with this, however, a deep and wide-spread interest in the history of the Church, her men, her principles, and her struggles, was awakened by the controversy that had waxed so hot. The frequent references made by the contending parties to the standards and documents of the Scottish Church at this time, inspired many with a curiosity to know something of the original works to which the disputants appealed. Thus, curiously enough, the antiquarian spirit combined with the popular feeling to give birth to an associa- tion embracing persons of all ranks and classes, for the reproduction of works which had lain in obscurity for two or three hundred years. The Society took its name from old Robert Wodrow, whose MS. collections deposited in the Advocates' Library, furnished the quarry from which much of the materials were drawn. 180 THE LAST TEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. The leaders of the reforming party in the Church naturally took a prominent part in forming the Society, and in guiding its operations. The working committee consisted of three: Thomas Maitland (after- wards Lord Dundrennan), the younger M'Crie, and Cunningham. Maitland was an accomplished antiquarian. M'Crie is unsurpassed by any writer of the present day in his knowledge of the facts con- nected with the ecclesiastical history of his own country. And, as was remarked by the Witness at the time, " for a minute and thorough acquaintance with the history of religious opinion as developed in the controversies in which the Churches of Britain and the Continent have been engaged, Mr Cunningham takes precedence of, perhaps, every living Scotsman." In the Committee, Mr Cunningham was specially active and influential. The success of the Society was remarkable. Merchants, artizans, and servant girls were among the subscribers, getting four bulky volumes for their guinea. By and bye, however, they dis- covered that they were getting more books than they could read, or even find accommodation for. Remembering the racy stories which historians had gathered painfully out of the old manuscripts, they seem to have anticipated a perfect feast. The consequence may be imagined. M'Crie expressed to Cunningham one day his fears that the numerous subscribers to the Society would find them- selves disappointed with the books put into their hands. Cunningham quite agreed, but added with a significant smile, "It is a great matter that we have got them priiited at any rate." And so it was. Many valuable works which might have crumbled into oblivion with the mouldering manuscripts from which they were transferred, had been made imperishable, and the rich, quaint literature of the old Church of Scotland made accessible to all. Cunningham edited one of the volumes of the series. The Sermons and Life of Robert Bruce. Bruce was a minister at Edin- burgh in the time of James VI. — a man of majestic presence and powerful speech, possessing such weight in that rude age, that he kept the peace of the kingdom as it had never been kept before, all the time of the king's absence, when he went to bring home his queen from Denmark. During the long reign of James, there was THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 181 one half year of good government, and that was when the king was out of the kingdom. Before setting off, he made Mr Bruce a Privy Councillor, relying, he said, on him above all his nobles for main- taining the peace of the realm ; which was one wise thing that he did, if he never did another. Bruce took a great part, along with the famous Andrew Melville, in the important struggle which the Church of Scotland carried on with James VI. in defence of her rights and liberties. Cimningham did his editorial work on the volume of his Life and Sermons in the autumn and winter of 1842, in such snatches of time as that anxious year allowed. Nothing could have been more appropriate. Bruce was instrumental, more than any other man, in bringing about that Act of Parliament in the year 1592 which has been called the Charter of privileges of the Church of Scotland, and which was so often quoted and discussed in the non-intrusion con- troversy. Bruce's life, for thirty years and more, was little else than one long struggle, with banishments and jeopardies of the axe, against kingly encroachments on the liberty of the pulpit and the freedom of the Church. Once he was sent for by Chancellor Seaton, who conveyed to him the king's express order to preach no more. The Chancellor was friendly, and held out some sort of hope of relaxation, if he would only desist for nine or ten days. Bruce con- sented to this, thinking it but of small moment for so short a time. " But he quickly knew how deep the smallest deviation from his Master's cause and interest might go into the devoted heart; for that night, as he himself afterwards declared, his body was cast into a fever, and he felt such terror of conscience as made him resolve to obey such commands no more." The brave, tender soul ! A king's wrath could not move him, but when he thought that he had obeyed man rather than God, "his body was cast into a fever." Such were the men to whom we owe our liberty. Were the men who in our day drank deep into their spirit, men likely to retract ? As editor of Bruce's Sermons, Cunningham's task was laborious. He bestowed upon them a very great amount of care and pains. They are " curious as specimens of composition in the Scottish 182 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. language, within a few years of the time when it was generally laid aside by our writers." But the original Scottish edition, from which the Wodrow edition is a reprint, is perfectly lawless in the matter of spelling. Cunningham wrought out a spelling reformation with his own hand all through the book. In the autumn of 1842, the College of Princeton conferred on him the degree of Doctor in Divinity. None of our Scotch Col- leges had liberality of mind enough to do themselves that honour. In Lord Cockbum's early days, the Scotch banks were all Tory, and would by no means discount a Whig biU. A Scotch College in Disruption times would have stood aghast at a proposal to grant a degree to a leader of the popular party. Princeton College stepped in and did it. " Distance of space is equal to distance of time" — not quite, but nearly. A man conspicuous to his contemporaries across an ocean, will probably be seen by posterity too. It seems there are 250 degree-granting colleges in the United States, but there is only one Princeton. Dr Cunningham's degree, all things considered, was a thing to be valued as a high and honourable encouragement. Dr James Cannahan was president at Princeton then. A simple letter under his hand conveyed the degree, without the formality of wax and parchment : — " In consideration of your attainments in sacred hterature and theological science, and also of your distin- guished labours in the cause of Truth and Righteousness, the Trustees of the College of New Jersey have conferred on you the Degi-ee of Doctor in Divinity." With his strong liking for academic ways, Cunningham desired to have the old formal diploma. He wrote to Dr Cannahan express- ing that wish, and the diploma duly engrossed on parchment was sent accordingly. The total expenses (fees there were none) came to four and a quarter dollars. This was the only degree that he ever had. THE CONVOCATION. The Queen's first visit to Scotland took place in the summer of 1842, and warmed the loyalty of her northern subjects into a THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 183 paroxysm which overtopped for a time the all-absorbing Church question. When George IV. was in Scotland twenty years before, he attended public worship in the Established Church. Queen Victoria was expected to do the same, but she did not. The nation felt hurt, and the reforming party in the Church understood it to be meant as a public censure upon them, and were indignant at the ministry who had put their sovereign to such a use. Of old, our criminal judges could order culprits to be pressed to death under tons of cold iron. Heavy weights of another kind had been laid on the Church of Scotland. The pressure was fast grow- ing greater than she could bear. One addition more made it beyond bearing. A second Auchterarder case had been running its course through the courts of law, Robert Young, or Robert Young's manipulator, sought to obtain a decree ordaining the Presbytery to examine him as preparatory to his ordination, and sustaining his claim for damages in the event of their refusal. The amount claimed was £10,000. Robert Young gained his suit both in the Court of Session and in the House of Lords. Lyndhurst was the Lord Chan- cellor of the day, and with him were Lords Cottenham, Brougham, and Campbell. " It is a striking and significant fact," says Buchanan in his " Ten Years' Conflict," " that from one end to the other of their judicial opinions, there is not to be found so much as one solitary reference to those laws by which the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church of Scotland is declared and ratified, nor one single precedent adduced from the history of the Church of Scotland, to support the doctrine which this decision laid down." This decision came in August. The important point was now conclusively settled, that the courts of the Church were liable to be coerced by the pains and penalties of law in the performance of their spiritual duties. Judge-made law had made a great stride since the first Auchterarder decision. Our fathers died rather than submit to the civil supremacy in the things of Christ, Was it now to be submitted to ? Between the alternatives of sin and suffering there was not a moment's hesitation. With a kind of solemn 184 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. promptitude, measures were taken to prepare for the inevitable sacrifice. A convocation of ministers was first held, for a full and calm con- ference over the whole matter. The Evangelical party were there to a man — nothing short of physical impossibility hindering. A public contribution met their travelling expenses, and the citizens of Edinburgh threw open their houses to entertain them. The convocation met in a small church in an obscure street in Edinburgh, the church of which Dr James Hamilton was once the pastor. Sweeter light never burned under a bushel. Four hundred and sixty-five ministers met there in the gloom of November, amid mean surroundings, to do a thing which made the mean locality memorable for evermore. The minute-book which records their proceedings still remains, and one handles it reverently, but not without disappointment. No meeting of road trustees ever minuted their proceedings more drily.* Two series of resolutions were adopted by the convocation. The first series set forth, that the recent decisions of the Civil Courts involved on their part a claim of supremacy over the courts of the Established Church in the exercise of their spiritual functions ; a claim which was at once subversive of the constitution of the Church, and repugnant to her principles and to the consciences of her office-bearers. The second series of resolutions declares, that while the Church solemnly protests against the invasion of her jurisdiction by the Civil Court, as contrary to the Word of God, the Confession of Faith, and the constitution of this kingdom, she cannot resist the supreme power of the State otherwise than by remonstrance and warning ; that she recognises the right of the State to decide on its own responsibility on what terms it will continue to her its counte- nance and support, but that if, by refusing to relieve her from the interference of the civil courts, the State shall sanction that inter- ference in matters spiritual as a condition of her establishment, then it must be her duty, " and, consequently, in dependence on the grace of God, it is the determination of the brethren now * A natural remark in the circumstances. But minutes ought to be dry. — R. THE LAST YEAR OF THE UXBROKEX CHURCH. 185 assembled, — if no measure such as they have declared to be indis- pensable be granted, — to tender the resignation of those civil ad- vantages which they can no longer hold in consistency with the free and full exercise of their spiritual functions, and to cast them- selves on such provision as God in his providence may afford." It was agreed to embody these resolutions in a last solemn appeal to the Government, setting forth the peril of the Established Church, the impossibility of longer postponing a settlement of her claims, and the pain with which they contemplated an inevitable separation from the State, should no remedy be provided. The ministers came up to the convocation in heaviness of spirit. But it was remarked that they went home light and jubilant, like men from whom a great load had been lifted. And so it was, for they had come up burdened with doubt as to the course of duty. Now they saw the path of duty clear ; and what does a true man want more to make him glad ? The convocation closed its deliberations on the 24th of November. On the 5th December Dr Cunningham met with his congregation, and addressed them on the position of the Church. With charac- teristic clearness and force of statement he sketched the course which the Church had pursued, and the principles by which she had been guided, in the long conflict now so nearly over. Sweep- ing away the irrelevant matters by which the question had been perplexed and obscured, the conduct of the Church had been simply this : looking at her duty in the settling of ministers in the light of God's Word, and as recognised by the State itself when it ratified the constitution of the Church as part of the law of the land, she felt that she was not at liberty to intrude unacceptable ministers on unwilling congregations. The Court of Session, in seeking by its decrees to compel her to do this, was not only doing what was wrong in itself, but was stepping beyond its own legitimate province. He alluded to the extraordinary and unwarrantable power as- sumed by the Court of Session ; how, by one decree after another, it had asserted an absolute control over the whole judicial powers of the Church in her government and discipline, to the extent 13 186 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBEOKEN CHURCH. even of suspending or cancelling her sentences against the drunken and disorderly. It had thus set itself above all the ecclesiastical courts, and claimed for itself the powers of a court of last resort in ecclesiastical questions. All this being a direct encroachment upon the liberty with which Christ has made his Church free, and involving a virtual denial of his Headship over her, she was bound, from a regard to His honour, to oppose at whatever hazard. It was upon this ground that the convocation of her ministers had resolved, that if the legislature — whose prerogative alone it was to determine the condi- tions upon which the Church was to enjoy a State endowment — should either reject or disregard the apjDeal of the Church on the subject of her inherent rights as a church of Christ, they must renounce their connection with the State, and forfeit the benefits of an Established Church, rather than the character of a church of Christ. The Church was bound to acknowledge the right of the State to determine, in the exercise of its own legitimate power and upon its own responsibility, the conditions uj)on which it would confer upon a church the benefits of a national establishment. The right, after this, to insist upon the civil power to do its duty in the matter, lies with the nation, to whom the legislature stands in a different relation. If the nation was contented to accept of such a Church Establishment as the Court of Session might choose to allow it, there w^as an end of the controversy. In reference to the assertion so often made, that an Established Church must necessarily be fettered with conditions of the State's imposing, he admitted that for the most part churches had been so established. The Church of Scotland, indeed, formed the only exception to this rule. If she were defeated in her present en- deavours to maintain her independent privileges as an Established Church of Christ, the world would present the dismal spectacle of being entirely destitute of a scriptural Establishment. He then alluded to the strong and inveterate hostility which prevailed among many of the higher classes to the principle of a Free State Church, in which the Headship of Jesus Christ should THE LAST YE.VK OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 187 be fully recognised. The propagation of pure and undefiled religion is not altogether dependent upon the establishment of the Church by the State, It would be the duty of the Church, if deprived of State countenance and support, just to go on in the faithful discharge of her duty to her great Head without such aid, encouraged by the assurance that He would still continue to bless her, and to make her an instrument in advancing the cause of truth and godliness in the land. Such was the tenor of his address to his congregation in that season of painful suspense. There were many such addresses. Mr George Henderson of Newholm gives the following account of a day spent with Dr Cunningham when they were endeavouring to prepare the country for the coming event. It will give some idea of the toils of that time. Newholm lies on the banks of the Nith, opposite to the ruins of " sweet Lincluden " : — "In January 1843 a deputation consisting of Dr Cunningham and the Rev. Wm. Chalmers, then of Dailly, visited Dumfries and the parishes in our Presbytery. After the deputation had addressed meetings in the town of Dumfries, arrangements were entered into for holding meetings in all the parishes and villages around. A friend started off with Mr Chalmers in his gig, and it fell to me to accompany Dr Cunningham. " It was a cold, frosty, winter morning, and the ground was covered with snow. When we started, Dr Cunningham was rather downcast. He had just received a letter informing him of a disaster which had befallen Dr Candlish, in the upsetting of a boat in Largo Bay, by which he very narrowly escaped being drowned. I was afterwards told by one who was present when he received this letter, that when reading it, he shed tears like a child. " After travelling three miles, we came to the village of Locher- briggs, where the first meeting for that day was to be held in a barn. We waited in the cottage of a mason till the people gathered. As we sat in the cottage, Dr Cunningham conversed with the family. His gentle frankness put them all at ease. Before leaving, he engaged in prayer, and I remember the impres- sion of that prayer still. Before that day I had seen him only as 188 THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. he could be seen by outsiders, and looked upon bim merely as a great fighting man, to be approached not without fear. I was astonished to find him so humble and so gentle. "The meeting was held, and we then drove off three miles farther to the largest village in Tiuwald parish, where our second meeting was to be held in the parish school. We found the place of meeting quite filled with people. Dr Cunningham delivered another long address here, after which we set out for the place where the third meeting was to be held, in the parish of Kirkmahoe. On the highway, it being now afternoon, we partook of some refreshments, with which my worthy mother had provisioned the gig, knowing that friends in those parishes were then few and far between. " Our third meeting was to be held in the old Cameronian Church in the upper part of the parish. Here there was some delay, for the door of the old church was locked, and an enemy had run off with the key. However, we got a boy, who, with help, crept through a broken pane in one of the windows, and undid a door from within. Admittance was thus obtained, and the meeting held. " There was yet a fourth place to be visited. The village beside the Parish Church. We had considerable difficulty in getting a place for a meeting. The people were unwilling to give accom- modation, lest they should offend their minister, who was of the Moderate school, and a bitter bodie. After trying several places, we at last got leave to hold the meeting in the barn of an adjoiniug farm. Notice was sent round to the people of the village. Mean- while, we called at a small inn, the only one in the parish, and asked the landlady to give us tea. She seemed quite willing. It was dark by this time, and she had not suspected who her customers were. But when we got more within the range of the light, she guessed at once, from Dr Cunningham's clerical dress, I suppose. She at once vehemently declared that she could give us no tea, and that her house was full. Turned out from the inn, we went to the farm-house where the meeting was to be held. The family were absent, and the only accommodation we had was in the THE LAST YEAR OF THE UNBROKEN CHURCH. 189 kitchen. Wc warmed ourselves at a blazing pcat-firc, and Dr Cunningham held a crach with the servants till the people had gathered into the barn. " Dr Cunningham having addressed the meeting, we left, and drove back to Dumfries, where we arrived about eight o'clock. He had been engaged for more than ten hours, and had addressed four meetings. With the exception of the short time in the mason's cottage in the morning, and the short time in the farm-house in the evening, he had been engaged either in addressing meetings, or driving in an open gig throughout the whole day, and had no refreshment of any kind, except what he partook of on the public road, standing on the snow. I heard not a single murmur from his lips against either Moderate ministers, lairds, or farmers. The deputation continued their labours in this district for a fortnight or more, and the result abides to this day." CHAPTER XV. THE DISRUPTION. rpHE day came wliich rent the Church of Scotland in twain, never -^ more to be united as an Establishment. An oak tree split by lightning does not re-unite. The Protest of the Evangelical party was read in the General Assembly. Dr Welsh left the chair, and made his parting reverence to the Royal Commissioner. "Come away now," said Dr Chalmers to the elder sitting next him, — remembered, in that exciting time, as conveying, by its perfectly common-place character, the truth, that nothing more remained to be done or said. The whole "left" streamed out, into the crowded streets, and to the great bare hall prepared for them, — out into a new social position, with relations, responsibilities, dangers — all new. " The manses of Scotland are pleasant houses — always so beauti- fully situated, — now on the brink of the mountain stream singing its wild way through the woods, — now in the centre of rich orchards and fruitful fields, — now on sunny braes overlooking the whole parish prostrate in its loveliness at their feet, — and now surrounded and shadowed by broad old oaks and tall black pine trees." Pleasant houses they are, and leaving them could not be a light trial. But strength was given when the time came. It is a shallow mistake to think that our great sej)aration turned merely upon a question of Church government. However true it be that the Scotch are remarkably intelligent upon the subject of Church polic}^, it is jiist as true that masses of them who left the Establishment knew and cared very little about it. Their disrup- tion was upon religious grounds altogether, and had a deeper reason THE DISRUPTION. 191 than they could have told. The Evangelical ministers whose preaching they loved, and whose doctrine fed their souls went out, and they went with them. " Our instincts are truer than our judgments," says a well-known author. Following their religious instincts, our people came out. Hugh Miller, in his notable letters to Lord Brougham, says: "We have but one Bible and one Confession of Faith in our Scottish Establishment, but we have two religions in it ; and these, though they bear exactly the same name and speak nearly the same language, are yet fundamentally and vitally different." One might look long enough on the surface without discovering this, but for all that it is a profound truth. The Disruption was the separation of the two religions. Isaac Taylor, who had studied well the phenomena of Scottish Moderatism, says of it, " The anti-Christianity of Scotland and its non-Christianity was not mere worldliness. It was a distinctly- pronounced scheme, framed for the express purpose of shutting out the Gospel." The religious people of Scotland had found this out as well as the acute Englishman. The number of the clergy who left the Establishment went far beyond what unfriendly men had ever believed probable. A dozen or two of the most prominent and the most deeply committed might come out, they thought, but the majority would come to their senses when the critical moment arrived. One gentlemanly Mode- rate known to me and still alive, declared from the pulpit in the public service on a Sabbath day in a populous burgh town, that he would eat all the ministers who would come out. The view of the Disruption now given is not the less true, though it is also true that there were bad people who came out, as well as good people who stayed in. Some of the ministers who came out were bad men, afterwards proved to be so. What the motives w^ere we need not conjecture. The rush of a great movement always carries mixed material with it. But the character of the movement was definite and clear. One of the " religions " came out and the other stayed in. The simple patience and cheerfulness with which the out-going 1 92 THE DISRUPTION, ministers bore the hard alteration of their condition was a fine thing to behold. Their uji-putting was often poor enough. Country villages seldom have a house to let, and the homeless minister was too glad to get a roof of any kind over his head. But there was sunshine in their poor abodes, and to this day they look back upon that year as the happiest of their lives. " It's a blessing to be shaken out of your selfishness," said one ; and a man shaken out of his selfishness is pretty sure to be light of heart. Dr Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, the originator of Savings' Banks, left a manse which his taste, during forty years, had made a paradise. He took uj) his abode in a labourer's cottage on the side of the turnpike road from Dumfries to Carlisle. It contained a room, a kitchen, and a bed-closet. Behind it lay a great old quarry with unsightly rubbish mounds and deep pools of water. I saw the fine old gentleman in his roadside cottage about the year 1846. He entertained his company — a few ministers of the neigh- bourhood— with the polished courtesy of. the old school. Dinner over, he said, "Will you go to the drawing-room, gentlemen?" His guests, puzzled where the drawing-room could be, rose and followed him. Opening the back-door of the cottage, " My drawing-room is the great drawing-room of nature," he said. He stepped out, and there was the deserted quarry, its rubbish mounds all planted with spruce and larch, winding paths led among them, a rustic bridge made by his own hands, spanning a strait between two great pools, and the whole huge deformity transformed into beauty by the cleverest landscape gardening. But the same contented cheerful- ness dwelt in the poor abode of every Disruption minister. Some time after the Disruption, a book called "The Wheat and the Chaff" was published by James M'Cosh, editor of the Dundee Warder, and a man of keen, vigorous, and shrewd intellect. It is a book dreadful in its severity, though it is simply a classified list of the clergy of the Church of Scotland at the time, calm as the pages of a ledger. The names of the retiring clergy are given without note of any kind. The old Moderates are given in the same way. Both had been consistent to their principles, and there was nothing to say of them. The third class comprises the names of all who had THE DISRUPTION. 193 professed Evangelical principles, but had preferred their places. With them a severe thing is done. They are mercilessly confronted with their own antecedents. Some had preached and printed on behalf of their principles, but could not suffer for them. They had been flaming professors as long as it was quite safe, but gradually hedged when matters became serious. Some had signed the Con- vocation resolutions, but had not found courage to keep their pledge. One or two came out, and then in an agony of iiTesolution, went back again to be the derision of their colleagues and the pity of their parishes. It is a miserable picture of poor human nature. Things were at a white heat in Scotland that summer, and it would have been small wonder if the popular excitement had effervesced in acts of violence. But of violence there was scarcely the shadow. There was indeed some trifling rioting in the Ross- shire Highlands. The people of Logie and Resolis, Free Church almost to a man, were refused a site whereon to build a place of worship for themselves. The narrow-minded proprietor of the soil sternly forbade the people of Resolis to meet for worship in the open air on a piece of waste ground where the gipsies were wont to encamp. The simple-minded people took up the idea that if they were to keep the lairds and their friends out of the Parish Church, the lairds would be glad to give them ground for a Free Church. Accordingly, when the Presbytery of the Established Church met to induct a successor to the outgoing minister, they found a mob lying in leaguer around the Parish Church. A mob always goes further than it intended. The mob at Resolis kirk, after a dis- charge of stones, drove the Presbytery and their concurrents down the hill with a rush. But the victors lost one of their number, taken prisoner. A woman, guilty of " cheering on the mob," was captured, and carried to Cromarty in a gig, and there lodged in jail. That evening a party of Resolis men entered the town of Cromarty, marched through the streets, and halted in front of the jail. They had come, they said, to bail out the woman. They remained for two full hoars urging on the authorities to accept their bail, and release the woman. Finding that their bail was not to be accepted, they rushed upon the prison, broke in the doors, set 194? THE DISRUPTION. the woman free, and bore lier back in triumph to Resolis. A detachment of them, in investing the jail, had to make their way through the flower garden of a lady in the neighbourhood. She was looking at them with extreme anxiety, well aware of the mischief into which they were running themselves ; but mistaking the cause of her anxiety, they imagined that she was merely alarmed for her flowers. " Ah lady," they said, as they carefully threaded the narrow walks, " dinna be feart for the floors ; we winna tramp ane o' them " ; and they kept their word. Such were the Ross-shire rioters. Surely never were more gentle-hearted men forced into collision with tlie law. The patient endurance manifested throughout Scotland was as remarkable as the unflinching stedfastness of the people. Looking back now, it seems incredible how " the screw " was put on at the Disruption. Dismissing servants, turning out cottars, grinding tenants, ejecting schoolmasters, refusing sites for manses or churches, and a thousand other pitiful things, were common. There is a certain southern parish where the Free Church people gathered from great distances in a thinly-peopled district for public worship. The summer of 1843 was warm and dry, and that congregation found untold comfort in a fine spring of cool, delicious water which issued from a bank by the road side near their place of meeting. This was observed. The proprietor of the soil had a draiu dug, and cut off the spring. Such things are remembered still. Some- times the people retaliated so far as to perpetrate some gentle jokes at the expense of the renegade ministers. One of these near Edinburgh, big-talking, had publicly declared that for his principles he would lay his head on the block as calmly as ever he laid it on his pillow. But when the Free Church ministers left their houses, he sat still in his. Local waggery took its joke. On a summer morning, as the minister stepped out to take his delight in his garden, just before his door there stood an axe and a block. "VMiat thoughts he had at sight of the grim pair, he did not divulge. The headquarters of the famous regiment of Scots Greys were at Ipswich at the time of the Disruption of the Scottish Church. THE DISRUPTION. 1 95 Before that time the men had been marched to the Parish Church, without asking them whether they had a mind in the matter. The news which they heard from Scotland, however, set many of them a-thinking. They had a mind in the matter, and they re- solved to call their souls their own. Soldiers get their daily ration of bread in small round loaves, a loaf to every two men. If the two are on good terms they eat their loaf amicably together. If not on good terms, they divide the loaf, and each consumes his half apart. In barrack dialect, they " split the bun." As a portion of the Greys were determined to attend a place of worship more according to their liking than that to which they were wont to be marched, while the rest did not care, they determined to " split the bun." One Sabbath day a number of them refused to go to the Parish Church, The commanding officer storaied, but the men were firm. They would enter the Parish Church neither on that day nor any other day. The thing Avent to the highest military authorities in the land, and dragged through difficulties enough. But in the end, the Greys were found to be in the right, and the soldiers' freedom of conscience was acknowledged. It had civil consequences too, for the chaplain's allowance was transferred to the Independent minister whom the Greys chose for their pastor. Had there been a statesman wise enough to concede to the people of Scotland the privilege successfully asserted by the Greys, there would have been no disruption. " LOSING HOLD." No people in the world give a deejDer deference to their local aristocracy than the Scotch do. If the aristocrat has reason or sense at all, he can " win them and have them at his will." Both the best and the worst parts of the Scottish character — lofty de- votedness and mean servility — come out under the great man's shadow. The great Lord of Buccleuch is held in most worshipful reverence over a wide region of the south of Scotland. In the romantic Border district of Eskdale, the head of that princely house reigns supreme. Dr Cunningham visited this district in November of the Disruption year. The Kev. Mr Hope of Warn- 196 THE DISRUPTION. phray, an Eskdale man himself, intimately acquainted with the feelings of the dalesmen, saw much of him during that visit. " The celebrated Canobie interdict had just been launched/' Mr Hope writes, " and had driven the Free Church congregation from the moss and lands of the Duke of Buccleuch ;" in other words, from the whole surface of the parish except the public road. When this extreme step was taken by the proprietor, the " Acting Committee" in Edinburgh requested Dr Cunningham and the venerable Dr Clason to visit the district, and do what they could to encourage the congregation. They preached on the public road on two successive Sabbaths, and in the intervening week held evening meetings, one at Langholm and another in the parish of Half Morton, at one or other of which the Canobie people might attend. " I have a very vivid recollection of Dr Cunningham's speech at the Langholm meeting," Mr Hope writes. " After explaining the principles of the Free Church, he referred to the refusal of sites. Having mentioned a case, or series of cases, of site refusing in the north, which then attracted much attention, he proceeded very nearly in the following words : ' But we need not go so far as Sutherland for an instance of this form of oppression. Your neigh- bours in Canobie have been subjected to the same treatment. They too have been refused standing-room on the soil of their native parish for the worship of God. The proprietor of the soil expects that he will thus put down the Free Church cause. But it won't do. The Free Church of Scotland is strong enough to fight the Duke of Buccleuch. We bid him defiance.' " I shall never forget the effect of these words upon the audience, spoken as they were with a deliberate distinctness which shewed that he weighed every word he uttered, and meant everything he said, and with all the emphasis which Cunningham could give to them. Who could give such emphasis as he ? Some held down their heads in fear. Others looked at the speaker with amazement. They had never heard ' the Duke' so handled before. They had never supposed it possible that any mortal man would dare so to handle him, especially in Eskdale. The scene has often reminded me of the incident in the life of the Apostle Paul, when the people THE DISRUPTIOX. I97 of Melita thought 'that he would have fallen down dead/ but when they saw no harm come to him, ' they changed their minds, and said that he was a god,' When Cunningham was denouncino- the conduct of site-refusers, and in his own fearless way, named the great man of the district as a culprit, and when, drawino- himself up to his full height, and speaking slowly and delibe- rately, he bade him defiance, many present held their breath with astonishment, and seemed half to expect that such unheard of audacity could scarcely fail to bring some judgment on the bold declaimer. But when they saw him continue scatheless and unmoved, they changed their mind, and began to cherish thouo-hts which they had never dared to think before. Then for the first time was lodged in the minds of the people of Canobie the idea that they might possibly make good their position even against ' the Duke,' that the struggle was not hopeless, and the great lord of the soil not omnipotent. I have always looked upon that speech as being in reality the turning-point of the conflict in that district. It might seem, indeed, to be but the commencement of it, but it fixed the resolution of the people to persevere, and in doino- so, it virtually determined the issue. " It would have surprised many, who at certain portions of his speech had listened to him with astonishment, and almost alarm, to have seen him at the fireside in the evening so easy and gentle and full of hilarity." The Scottish aristocracy, " howbeit they meant not so, neither did their heart think so," surely did a great deal to educate the Scottish people to independence of thought and action. They lost then what they "svill not soon have to lose again. Reminiscences like these might be multiplied to any extent. Every locality preserves its own. They may recall to older, and represent to younger, men the social physiognomy of Scotland in those days. The key to aU the stir and all the excitement lay simply in the fact, that a great sacrifice for truth had been made, — a great tribute to the supremacy of conscience had been rendered. Men responded to the impulse thus supplied according to their 198 THE DISRUPTION. several dispositions. While all who valued the principles of the Free Church exulted in the moral position which their cause assumed, and others, hitherto cautious or incredulous, were now attracted to the principles by the manifest sincerity of the men, the influence extended far beyond those classes. Thoughtful men, who had not been led to agree with Free Church views, felt, not- withstanding, that religion was strengthened in the whole com- munity, by the proof of integrity on the part of Christian ministers which the Disruption supplied. On the other hand, men of no church and of no religion were manifestly both enraged and appalled. It could be seen even in their faces. It was to them a very unwelcome assertion of the reality of Divine truth, and the obligation to adhere to it at all costs. Few will doubt now that, if the hopes had been fulfilled which were cherished in various quarters, that the Evangelical party would, in the end, sacrifice their professed principles in order to retain their stipends, the effect would have been an almost irretrievable blow to religion in Scotland. In what spirit and with what convictions the men of the Disruption looked back on the course by which they had been led, and forward to the work before them, may be illustrated by two statements which Dr Cunningham made about this time. In the Disruption Assembly of the Free Church, a motion was made by the Kev. Dr Macfarlane of Greenock, that a deed of separation be prepared and signed, renouncing all rights to the benefices held by the ministers who adhered to the Free Church. Dr Cunningham addressed the Assembly. In the course of that address he said — " There is one circumstance ■which, though certainly very much accidental, has given me some little claim to occupy a portion of your time before the final disruption of the Church is effected ; and it is a circumstance to which I cannot refer vrithout feelings of profound humiliation and self-abasement, viz. : that it pleased the Lord, in his sovereignty, to give me, unworthy as I am of any such honour, the honour of taking the first step, and striking the first blow in this battle. " The first overt act taken in reference to this great controversy was when I had the honour of moving, in the Presbytery of Edinburgh, an overture, after the decision of the Court of Session in the Auchterarder case, to the Assembly, to THE DISRUPTION". 1 99 adopt a declaration of those principles held by the Church, and which was adopted in the month of May following, on the motion of my friend Dr Buchanan of Glasgow. On that occasion, in the first speech made on this controversy, I stated those great principles for which we have been contending, as to the right of Christ to reign in His own house, as to taking His holy Word as the only rule of ecclesiastical aifairs, and as to the exclusive jurisdiction of Christ's office- bearers in the regulation of the afiairs of his house. " Ever since, we have been contending for these great principles, and for none other. "We distinctly understood at the time what our principles were, — we have never lost sight of them, — and we have never had much difficulty in the application of them, having a good confidence that they are not only embodied in our standards, but founded on the Word of God, and are the same principles for which our fathers endured so much. We have been enabled, by God's grace, to apply them to the varied circumstances in which we were placed. So full and comprehensive have been our principles, and so easy the application of them, that in the whole controversy I have always felt that we needed, not so much wisdom to decide what ought to be done, as courage and faithfulness in doing it. These were the qualities we most needed ; and now, when God has been pleased to make trial of our faith, though we have to lament many exceptions and short- comings, through the weakness of human nature, on account of which we should be humbled before him, we see also much cause to thank God and take courage, rejoicing that he has been pleased to put us in a position where we have been called to contend for such great truths, founded on his own blessed Word. "It is impossible," he added, "not to feel that this controversy has borne plain traces of being a controversy for divine truth, carried on with the enmity of the world. This must be felt by all who know what scriptural truth is. There can be no reasonable doubt that the Church has produced the enmity which has been raised against her, just because she began to feel that she was a Church of Christ, and was determined to act in that character. . . . We have now no alternative but to abandon our emoluments as ministers of the Established Church. This is a clear matter of principle about which there is no room to doubt ; and perhaps there should be less of anxiety and lamentation on the one hand, and of boasting on the other, than we might be inclined sometimes to exhibit. We have been placed in circumstances in which God has been pleased to call us to the discharge of this duty, and we should endeavour to recognise the voice of God, — on the one hand without any boasting, and on the other, without any anxiety, — and just take the course which God has so plainly pointed out to us." On the 14tli of June 1843, Dr Cunningham addressed a great meeting in the City Hall, Glasgow. Here his address took a more prospective character. In the course of it he said : — 200 THE DISRUPTION. " We have left that Establishment, — we do not regret having left it,— and now, though we may require occasionally to refer to such occurrences as these, we feel that it is a more pleasant occupation to direct our thoughts to the position in which God has placed us, and to the obligations under which we lie. It is true that in a certain sense we have been beaten in this controversy . neither have our opponents gained their leading object." Each side, in fact, had partly succeeded and partly failed. The Moderates, of whose influence in Scotland he gave a withering description, had gained the ascendancy they desired in the Estab- lishment, but failed to gain this in the way of burying and suppres- sing, in the country generally, the principles they opposed. Their opponents, whose desire had been to secure a " full, vigorous, and efficient Church of Christ, — enjoying the favour of the State if possible, but, if not, without," — they too had "... failed in getting our principles maintained in connection with the State ; but then, we have already substantially succeeded in establishing a Church in accordance with the Word of God, based on the great truths revealed in the Scriptures, holding forth the word of truth with regard to the true char- acter and claims of the Lord Jesus, and, therefore, a Church on which we have every reason to expect the divine blessing, — a Church likely to be extensively honoured throughout the length and breadth of the land. God has given us this already. Bright prospects of usefulness are opening up to us ; and is this not in substance really all that any man who truly loves the Lord Jesus Christ, and who is concernedfor the salvation of souls, ought to have most concern about, — that there is now a Church in this land, unconnected with the State, and deprived of many external advantages, but possessed of many opportunities of diffusing the knowledge of Christ over the land, — a Church on which we can ask, and confi- dently expect, that blessing which maketh rich, and addeth no sorrow ? " In these circumstances, our sole object should be to realise that position, — to set our faces to the duties that lie before us. Our first duty, in some sense, is to assert and maintain the principles for which we have been contending, and from a regard to which we have sacrificed our connection with the Establish- ment. These principles are peculiarly committed to our care. They have been the peculiar deposit of the Church of Scotland in every age ; and it is a marvel- lous token of His kindness and compassion, that again, in those latter days, He has honoured the Church of Scotland to contend, as before, for the sole Head- ship and for the sole and exclusive right of Christ to reign in His own kingdom. These principles we must still hold forth, contending earnestly for them, taking care never to renounce or abjure them, or place ourselves in circumstances that, THE DISRUPTION. 201 on fair and honest construction, would imply that we had renounced them, and taking care to embrace every opportunity to press these principles on the consi- deration of all with whom we may come into contact. " But of course our great and fundamental duty is to embrace the position God has placed us in, and the opportunities He is now affording us, for diffusing sound views of Christian truth and duty over the length and breadth of the land. There is much that leads us to cherish the expectation that great things will be done in this way, — that it is God's purpose to bless our Zion in prosecuting His work, — and that the time to favour her is indeed come. We are set free from the trammels and entanglements we experienced in connection with the Estab- lishment ; we can now go over the length and breadth of the land without let or hindrance ; and we have reason to think that many will be more disposed than they ever were to listen to the preaching of Christ's truth. I may safely say, and without hesitation or exaggeration, that during the two last Lord's days, a larger number of immortal beings heard the pi'eaching of the gospel than on any two Lord's days before in Scotland. I believe that this, in some measure at least, is likely, more or less, to continue. Here there is a field of labour opened up to us, in which we are called to embark, with a full sense of the mag- nitude of the crisis, and the magnitude of the responsibility we undertake. There is surely room to expect that God has a great work to work by our hands. " In the proceedings of the Free Assembly, there was much to strengthen us in the conviction that Christ had gone with us, and that he was guiding and directing us in our councils ; and much that has occurred since has led us to the conviction that we are enjoying his countenance and blessing. And it becomes us, in these circumstances, to feel that it requires much wisdom, and zeal, and exertions of no ordinary character, to go forth to the duty before us. Be encouraged by the conviction, that by ardent zeal, and wisdom, and cordial co-operation, and united exertion, by making sacrifices of your own ease, and comfort, and enjoyment, you may secure, in a short period, a larger, fuller, and more affectionate dispensation of the means of grace, and the ordinances of God's appointment, throughout the length and breadth of the land, than ever we have enjoyed before ; and that over the whole extent of Scotland something may yet be seen and realised similar to that described in the language of Scripture, that a ' nation was born in a day.' " The quotation is a long one : but one only regrets tlie inability to make larger extracts. In those old newspaper files and "blue books/' there lie hid many characteristic passages, bearing the stamp of a time in which it may, without overboldness, be said, " great grace was upon them all." 14 CHAPTER XVI. AMERICA. /^NE of the earliest cares of the Free Church was to provide for ^ the education of a rising ministry. They set a Committee over the whole department of education. When the idea of a new theo- logical seminary was first seriously entertained, men turned their eyes at once to Dr Cunningham as one of its professors. The Edu- cation Committee, within a few weeks of the Disruption, appointed Dr Cimningham to the office of professor in the New College already projected. Dr Chalmers in the Presbytery of Edinburgh expressed the universal mind of the Church in regard to the appoint- ment : — " I have been particularly satisfied and delighted with the appointment of Dr Cunningham as a Professor of Theology ; he being an individual in whom, as you all know, is exemplified a very rare combination of qualities which seldom meet together in one and the same individual. He has a mighty and overwhelming power of argument, combined with a rich and varied theological erudition; indeed, I know no man so versed in the lore of eccle- siastical antiquity and of all ecclesiastical literature." The Education Committee took another step quite in keeping mth the healthy force which inspired the whole proceedings of the Free Church in those days. " Deeply impressed with the great importance of having the theological instruction in the New College conducted according to the best principles, and after the most approved models, and assured that for accomplishing this, great benefit would be derived from a personal investigation by an indivi- dual so qualified for the important duty as Dr Cunningham, into AMERICA. 203 the constitution and working of some of the most eminent of the American Theological Institutions, the Committee unanimousl}'^ resolved that he should proceed for this purpose to America." Dr Cunningham accepted this commission at once. It was quite after his own heart. With the investigation into the state of theological instruction in America, another object was combined. There were many in America who felt the keenest sympathy with the cause of the Free Church. Eight hundred churches were to be built in Scotland, and it was reported that America would help in that work. It was resolved that Dr Cunningham should address meetings and gather in the fruits of American liberality. An associate to accompany him in this mission was required. The Free Church was signally fortunate in her agents. There was a marked felicity in the adaptation of every man to his work. The deputy chosen to go with Dr Cunningham to the United States was Mr Henry Ferguson, a merchant in Dundee, and an elder, — as remark- able a man as ever chose to live a retired and quiet life. In the " Forty Years' Familiar Letters " which form the unique Autobiography of Dr J. W. Alexander of New York, he tells the impression which the Scotch elder produced upon him. Apparently he had not seen in him the outward marks of eloquence, neither was his name knoT\Ti in Free Church debates, Dr Alexander con- fesses surprise at his having been sent as deputy, " especially when I found that Chalmers had picked him out. But my wonder ceased when I heard him on the evening of the 18th. He spoke an hour and three quarters by the watch ; I wish it had been twice as long. In the first half of his speech he erred by causing too much laughter. His vis comica is amazing. In the latter part he arose to a height of passion such as I have seldom witnessed. A critic would have condemned everything in the elocution, but the eloquence was penetrating and transporting. I found Addison (his brother) affected precisely as I was. In a word it is utterly vain for me to give you any idea of the. degree of his power. As he rose his diction became elegant and sublime ; and yet he is only a merchant of Dundee." Such was the companion witli whom Dr Cunningham was to 204 AMERICA. co-operate. But before lie could set out he was to see his first gTeat sorrow. His family now consisted of five children. Hooping- cough came into the house in the fall of the year and, of course, went round. Some anxiety was felt about the oldest girl, but none at all about any of the others. Willie, a beautiful boy of four, with bright golden hair, seemed at first not particularly ill. By and bye things looked rather more serious. One day during the doctor's vrisit — Abercromby himself, along with Dr Begbie — without any special warning symptom, the child died. It was a crushing blow — an agony which only parents who have buried children can understand. Friends speak still, at the distance of nearly thirty years, of the greatness of Cunningham's grief. " He was my first propine and hansel to heaven," as James Melville says over his dead boy ; and the father " marvelled that his heart was so wi'ung." Willie died in October, and Dr Cunningham left for America in the beginning of December. The outward voyage was favourable, but all sea-voyaging was misery to him. He was in America from the 18th of December to the 1st of May. Almost every Sabbath he preached three times, and he addressed nearly forty public meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Richmond, Balti- more and many other places. The old and new school Presby- terians received him with open arms. Methodists, Independents, and Baptists, all were kind. Mr Fergaison, who w^as with him all through his tour, thinks that he never rose to his full height in any of the orations he delivered in America. On American soil he never equalled himself. When the distracting influences of travel are considered, its fatigues, and the thousand interests which engage a man's attention in a new country, this was perhaps inevitable. And the want of present adversaries must count for something. There was one topic on which he was instantly called to give explanations. The Americans were generally opposed to State Churches, and wished to know what position the Free Church was likely to occupy in future in that respect, before deciding on the measure of sympathy and help which they ought to extend to her. Dr Cunningham's statement on that point was given without delay, and was accepted as perfectly satisfactory. It will be found in the AMERICA. 205 Appendix.* Ho very soon found his way to Princeton, and more than once returned to it. Within a few days of his arrival in America he writes to Mrs Cunningham : — "As I have not much public business till next week, I have come out to spend a few days in Princeton. I have had great pleasure in the society of the theological professors here, who are all men eminent for their talents and learning, and are known in Britain by their writings. I am staying with Dr Hodge — a very admirable and estimable man, whose wife is a great grand-daughter of Dr Franklin. There is another thing which makes this place very interesting. It is the place where Jonathan Edwards and Witherspot>n, who were both presidents of the college, lived and laboured. I have visited the place where they lived and died, and the place where they were buried." Dr J. W. Alexander, in the Autobiography already cited, gives us a glimpse of him as he appeared to American eyes : — " Dr Cunningham has been here (Princeton) for several days, but this is not his main visit. He is altogether the most satis- factory foreigner I have seen. By the Scotch papers I perceive he ranks amoncr the first four or five in the Free Church. Height about six feet, and large in proportion, a stout but finely-formed man ; very handsomely dressed, and in an eminent degree the gentleman, in everj^thing but excess of snuff. Age, I reckon about forty-one; I spectacles. A stock of thick curly hair. He has no airs of patronage. Powerful reasoning and sound judgment seem to be his characteristics; and he is a walking treasury of facts, dates, and ecclesiastical law. I heard him for an hour on Friday in a speech to the students. Indescribable Scotch intonation, but little idiom and convulsion of body, but flowing, elegant language, and amazing power in presenting argument. ... I wonder if he will wake up the Philadelphians much. He is a powerful fellow, and a noble instance of what may be done without any pathos or any decoration. . . . Did you observe how distinctly he said juty for duty?" Dr Hodge, writing after Dr Cunningham's death, records his impressions and recollections of their intercourse : — * See App. B. + In reality, tMrty-eight. 206 AMERICA. "He was twice at Princeton, and on both occasions made my house his home. He was a man whom you knew well as soon as you knew him at all. He revealed himself at once, and secured at once the confidence and love of those in whom he felt confidence. I do not recollect of ever having met any one to whom I was so much drawn, and for whom I entertained so high a respect and so warm a regard as I did for him, on such a short acquaintance. His strength of intellect and force of character were manifest at first sight. With this strength was combined a winning gentleness of spirit and manner in private social intercourse. It was, however, seen to be the gentleness of the lion in repose. His visit was one of those sunny spots on which, whenever I look back on my life, my eyes rest with delight." Dr J. A. Alexander was present at Dr Cunningham's first meeting with Dr Hodge, and thus describes it : — " You know brother Hodge is one of the most reserved of men, nor is a first acquaintance with him generally very assuring or attractive to strangers. But I remarked with what warmth and cordiality he met Dr Cunningham, as if he had met an old friend from whom he had been long separated. And it was so with Cun- ningham too. The two greatest theologians of the age were at once friends and brothers. They seemed at once to read and know each the other's great and noble mind." Many of the acquaintanceships formed at this time grew into life-long friendships; but the acquaintance with Dr Hodge was friendship at first sight. Dr Cunningham's letters from America are undeniably dry. They are clearly written as mere pegs on which to hang more ample narrative when he should come home. Besides the neces- sary information about travels and doings, they mainly express great enjoyment, and a cordial sense of American kindness and hospitality. His three weeks' stay at Philadelphia is distinguished, perhaps, by emphatic and grateful appreciation. I glean a few items. The first will interest Disruption ministers, recalling old memories by its allusion to the res angusta domi of days when AMERICA. 207 men were so uncertain what their income was to be. He says, addressing Mrs Cunningham, — " I am much gratified by your kindness in thinking of my books, and allowing me some money to purchase them. I rather suspect, however, that in spite of our poverty, I would have ventured to spend a few pounds on books, even though you had not offered me some portion of your money," Quite a just suspicion. Another home matter turns up. In those days when " schemes " had not yet had their " marches redd," and funds had not been multiplied, Professors were paid out of the Susten- tation Fund, i. e., their salaries came out of that fund, and they had their fees besides. The scale of payment had to be settled, and it had been thought, it seems, that looking to wdiat large town congTegations were able and willing to pay their ministers. Professors ought not to be paid less ; therefore, it was proposed to make up their income, in- cluding their fees, to £500 each. Dr Cunningham objects as follows: — " I think the salaries which they propose to give to the professors are too large in the present state of the Church, and when many country brethren are suffering so much. With from «.-r-> V.